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December 2016

Trump’s Transition: So Far, So Good Conservatives should be encouraged by the way the new administration is taking shape. By Andrew McCarthy

Conservatives have to be delighted by the administration Donald Trump is building. There is, as one would expect, a showman’s flair to the exercise. But what do I care about Trump’s meeting with Al Gore to shoot the warming breeze if two days later he gives me Scott Pruitt to make actual environmental policy — or, better, to gut EPA’s oppressive, unconstitutional policy?

And after eight years of “workplace violence” and “man-caused disasters” in which the administration’s knee-jerk response to jihadist terror was to suppress mention of jihadist terror while anguishing over phantom “blowback” against Muslims, I’ll take a president — okay, a president-elect — who prefers to console the Ohio State victims and celebrate the heroism of the cop who took out the jihadist.

This is good. I don’t like everything Trump has done so far, but I like an awful lot of it. And saying so is only fair.

I was never in the immovably #NeverTrump camp, but I’ve been a critic. Despite my reservations, I tried to help the campaign craft national-security and immigration policies. (I am, for example, the principal author of the immigration memo Josh Rogin reported on in the Washington Post this week). I voted for Trump because, unlike some colleagues whose opinions carry a lot of weight with me, I was never persuaded against the reality that the election was a binary choice between him and Hillary Clinton. Since I was immovably #NeverHillary, the choice was easier than I thought it would be once I closed the voting-booth curtain.

All that said, though, I did repeatedly argue that Trump’s history was that of a New York limousine-liberal spouting all the hidebound pieties while digging into his wallet for Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Andrew Cuomo, Harry Reid, and the rest of the gang. I was hopeful, more because of the advisers he’d surrounded himself with than because of his campaign rhetoric, that Trump would be marginally better than Clinton — a low bar he could surmount with just one good Supreme Court pick (and had arguably surmounted even before Election Day by picking Mike Pence as his running mate). But I stressed that, if he won, we’d have to be skeptical that he’d govern much differently than Hillary would have until he proved otherwise, given his gushing admiration for the Clintons over the years.

Well, if there had been a second Clinton administration, do you think we’d have gotten Pruitt? How about Jeff Sessions at Justice, or General James Mattis at Defense? Or Trump’s promised upgrade in immigration enforcement to be carried out by General John Kelly, the clear-eyed So-Com commander who has warned about radical Islam’s inroads in Central and South America (and a Gold Star dad whose son laid down his life in Afghanistan, fighting our jihadist enemies)? Do you figure Hillary would have tapped teachers-union scourge Betsy DeVos for the Education Department? Or a staunch Obamacare critic such as congressman (and doctor) Tom Price to run HHS?

Michael Copeman :A New World If We Want It

Donald Trump’s victory signifies much more than a slap to the elites so certain he didn’t have a chance. More than the satisfaction of seeing the chattering classes confounded, it is an assault on political correctness and the anti-growth nostrums it peddles.
When Sir Tim Rice penned “A whole new world” for Disney’s Aladdin back in 1992, the world was indee a very different place. A Clinton, Bill, was running for the White House. The Middle East, devastated by war, remained on knife edge, with a murderous dictator, Saddam, allowed to stay in power when Bush the Elder called off the drive to Baghdad. In Finland, an exciting new (2G) mobile telephone network had just been installed. In Australia, almost everyone was humming along to “Weather with you” by Crowded House.

Twenty-five years later, Rice’s magic lamp may finally be starting to shine. Castro is dead. Britain is leaving Europe, or at least getting ready to unhitch her moorings. The US has a new leader unlikely to bow to the King of Saudi Arabia, as Obama infamously did. And some of the political millstone-round-the-neck issues of the last two decades — infantile political correctness in the media, intent to destroy the enormous benefits of the global industrial economy in a vain attempt to reverse non-existent global warming, and obeisance to primitive cultures in place of civilization – look set to be rejected at last.

As Julie Andrews sang in Oscar and Hammerstein’s Sound of Music, “somewhere in (our) wicked miserable past, (we) must have had a moment of truth”. A majority of the US Electoral College is poise to confirm Donald Trump, a dis-inhibited braggart and billionaire, age 70, as the popular choice of voters in the states that matter as the more likely of the two contenders likely to propel America back to greatness. When America gets over a cold, the rest of the world recovers from influenza, malaria, dysentery and the Zika virus combined.

Post-communist Russia is now led by an ex-KGB agent — plus ca change! — while China’s still-Communist leader is married to a baby boomer pop star. Britain’s leader, for the third time since Boadicea, is “a bloody difficult woman”, as veteran Tory Ken Clarke was heard to opine when he thought the microphone had been turned off. And Japan, of recent years one of the most peaceful countries, is led by the grandson of a member of General Tojo’s WW2 cabinet.

We are told the 21st century belongs to the “agile and innovative” citizens of Asia upon whose coat-tails we hang in the quarry Down Under, otherwise known as Australia. If China ever stops buying our iron, coal, wheat, beef, lamb, wool, wine and milk it will be time to call the national taxidermist. Our former heavy manufacturing centres in Victoria and South Australia are already stuffed, so no hope of alternate sustenance there.

Critics of Islam on Trial in Europe: Wilders Convicted by Giulio Meotti

On December 9, for the first time in Dutch history, a court criminalized freedom of expression: The truly heroic Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders, was found guilty of the “crime” of “hate speech.”

The death sentence against Salman Rushdie in 1989 by Iran’s supreme leader looked unreal. The West did not take it seriously. Since then, however, this fatwa has been assimilated to such an extent that today’s threats to free speech come from ourselves. It is now the West that put on trial writers and journalists.

The Red Brigades, the Communist terror group which devastated Italy in the 1970s, coined a slogan: “Strike one to educate one hundred.” If you target one, you get collective intimidation. This is exactly the effect of these political trials about Islam.

“Hate speech” has become a political weapon to dispatch whoever may not agree with you. It is not the right of a democracy to quibble about the content of articles or cartoons. In the West, we paid a high price for the freedom to write them and and read them it. It is not up to those who govern to grant the right of thought and speech.

In Europe now, the same iron curtain as in the Soviet era is descending.

After the Second World War and the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, a central tenet of Western democracies has been that you can put people on trial, but not ideas and opinions. Europe is now allowing dangerous “human rights” groups and Islamists to use tribunals to restrict the borders of our freedom of expression, exactly as in Soviet show trials. “Militant anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century,” the prominent French philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut has predicted.

A year ago, Christoph Biró, a respected columnist and editor of the largest Austrian newspaper, Kronen Zeitung, wrote an article blaming “young men, testosterone-fuelled Syrians, who carry out extremely aggressive sexual attacks” (even before mass the sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Hamburg and other cities). The article sparked much controversy, and it received a large number of complaints and protests. Biró needed four weeks off work because of these attacks and later (under pressure) admitted that he had “lost a sense of proportion”. Prosecutors in Graz recently charged Biró with “hate speech” after a complaint by a so-called human rights organization, SOS Mitmensch. The case will be decided in court.

Reaction of Geert Wilders to His Conviction by Geert Wilders

Dear friends, I still cannot believe it, but I have just been convicted. Because I asked a question about Moroccans. While the day before yesterday, scores of Moroccan asylum-seekers terrorized buses in Emmen and did not even had to pay a fine, a politician who asks a question about fewer Moroccans is sentenced.

The Netherlands have become a sick country. And I have a message for the judges who convicted me: You have restricted the freedom of speech of millions of Dutch and hence convicted everyone. No one trusts you anymore. But fortunately, truth and liberty are stronger than you. And so am I.

I will never be silent. You will not be able to stop me. And you are wrong, too. Moroccans are not a race, and people who criticize Moroccans are not racists. I am not a racist and neither are my voters. This sentence proves that you judges are completely out of touch.

And I have also a message for Prime Minister Rutte and the rest of the multicultural elite: You will not succeed in silencing me and defeating the PVV. Support for the Party for Freedom is stronger than ever, and keeps growing every day. The Dutch want their country back and cherish their freedom. It will not be possible to put the genie of positive change back in the bottle.

And to people at home I say: Freedom of speech is our pride. And this will remain so. For centuries, we Dutch have been speaking the unvarnished truth. Free speech is our most important possession. We will never let them take away our freedom of speech. Because the flame of freedom burns within us and cannot be extinguished.

Millions of Dutch are sick and tired of political correctness. Sick and tired of the elite which only cares about itself and ignores the ordinary Dutchman. And sells out our country. People no longer feel represented by all these disconnected politicians, judges and journalists, who have been harming our people for so long, and make our country weaker instead of stronger.

But I will keep fighting for you, and I tell all of you: thank you so much. Thank you so much for all your support. It is really overwhelming; I am immensely grateful to you. Thanks to your massive and heartfelt support, I know that I am not alone. That you back me, and are with me, and unwaveringly stand for freedom of expression.

Today, I was convicted in a political trial, which, shortly before the elections, attempts to neutralize the leader of the largest and most popular opposition party. But they will not succeed. Not even with this verdict. Because I speak on behalf of millions of Dutch. And the Netherlands are entitled to politicians who speak the truth, and honestly address the problems with Moroccans. Politicians who will not let themselves be silenced. Not even by the judges. And you can count on it: I will never be silent.

And this conviction only makes me stronger. This is a shameful sentence, which, of course, I will appeal. But I can tell you, I am now more vigorous than ever. And I know: together, we aim for victory.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, we are strong enough to change the Netherlands.

To allow our children to grow up in a country they can be proud of.
In a Netherlands where we are allowed to say again what we think.
Where everybody can safely walk the streets again.
Where we are in charge of our own country again.

And that is what we stand for. For freedom and for our beautiful Netherlands.

Geert Wilders is a member of the Dutch Parliament and leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV).

‘The Band’s Visit’ Review: Nothing Lost in Translation An Egyptian orchestra’s fumbles in Israel propel this big-hearted, small-scale musicalBy Terry Teachout

…….the Atlantic Theater Company’s off-Broadway premiere of “The Band’s Visit,” a huge-hearted small-scale musical directed by David Cromer that has warmth and charm to burn.

Adapted for the stage by Itamar Moses (“Nobody Loves You”) and David Yazbek (“The Full Monty”) from Eran Kolirin’s 2007 Israeli film, “The Band’s Visit” is a tender comedy of international manners that is cleverly disguised as a farce. The protagonists are the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, who have come to Israel from their home in Egypt to perform at the opening of a new Arab cultural center in the city of Petah Tikva. But there is no “p” in Arabic, and most Egyptians therefore unconsciously replace that consonant with “b” when speaking English. As a result, the musicians, unable to pronounce the name of their destination in a way that is fully intelligible to Israelis, instead end up in Beit Hatikva, a tiny town somewhere in the middle of the Negev Desert. It’s the Middle Eastern counterpart of…well, perhaps we might emulate the Egyptian musicians and call it “Bodunk.”

If you think that sounds like a sitcom plot, you’re right. But here as in the film, the underlying comic situation serves as a pretext for a subtle exercise in group storytelling in which we watch the members of the orchestra interact with the citizens of Beit Hatikva. To be sure, plenty of preposterous things happen along the way, many of which arise from the fact that the characters speak English, not Arabic or Hebrew, to one another. Some speak it better than others, but none is quite fluent, thus leading to all kinds of comic complications. I especially liked the jazz-loving trumpeter (Ari’el Stachel) whose standard pickup line is to ask women whether they like the music of “Shit Baker,” after which he sings them a few bars of (what else?) “My Funny Valentine.” But it also makes for complications that are more touching than funny, above all when Tewfiq (Tony Shalhoub), the stiffly inhibited widower who leads the band, and Dina (Katrina Lenk), the lonely café owner who offers to put the hapless musicians up for the night, realize that they are attracted to one another.
As this plot twist indicates, “The Band’s Visit” is an “of course” show: Of course Tewfiq and Dina fall in love (though there is nothing at all obvious about what happens next). Of course there is a brief moment of tension when an overzealous Israeli soldier regards the Egyptian musicians with glowering suspicion. Of course the moment passes without incident, and everybody ends up getting along so well that you can all but hear Ernest Hemingway muttering “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” in the distance. But even if “The Band’s Visit” is a fairy tale, it is one so unabashedly open-hearted that you won’t hesitate to buy into it.

James Delingpole: Trump’s EPA Pick Proves He’s Serious About Slaying the Green Monster

Anyone who doubts that President-elect Donald Trump means business on slaying the “Green Blob” really needs to look at the guy he has just appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is a friend of the fossil fuel industry and an outspoken critic of the EPA’s activist agenda.

Though his academic degrees are in political science and law, Pruitt has been a vocal public denier of the overwhelming consensus of the world’s climate scientists that the Earth is warming and that man-made carbon emissions are to blame. In an opinion article published earlier this year by National Review, Pruitt suggested that the debate over global warming “is far from settled” and claimed “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”
Does Pruitt sound to you like the pick of a president-elect who is having second thoughts on his aggressive stance towards the environmental lobby?
Yet still some people are worried — for understandable reasons.
First, there were reports that Trump had softened his position on global warming: “Trump now believes that climate change is real,” claimed Mother Jones.
Next came the shocking news that Trump — encouraged by his eco-friendly daughter Ivanka — had sat down for a meeting with Al Gore, who claimed afterwards that they’d had an “extremely interesting conversation.”
Then Trump met with yet another green advocate, Leonardo DiCaprio, apparently to discuss “how to create millions of secure, American jobs in the construction and operation of commercial and residential clean, renewable energy generation.”

So what exactly is going on here?
In two words: fake news.

Turkey’s Autocratic Turn Erdogan’s iron-fisted rule is pulling his country away from the West and into the troubles of the Middle East By Yaroslav Trofimov

In 1910, during a war against rebels in remote Yemen, a young officer of the Ottoman Empire liked to entertain his soldiers with music: French and Italian operas that he played every night on a gramophone in the desert.

The youthful musical preferences of Ismet Inonu—who would become president of Turkey some three decades later—were no mere personal quirk. Ever since the mid-19th century, when a series of reforms brought elections, civil rights and modern government institutions to the decaying Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s ruling elites had looked to the West as the standard of enlightenment and civilization.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the secularist army officer who founded modern Turkey in 1923, sought to sever his land’s ancient bonds to the Middle East. A revolutionary determined to transform everyday life, Atatürk introduced Latin letters and the Swiss Civil Code to replace Arabic script and Islamic Shariah law. This longstanding orientation to the West has made Turkey a rare example of a major Muslim country that is also a prosperous, stable democracy (and, since 1952, a member of NATO).

Today that tradition is under attack as never before. Nearly a century after the Ottoman Empire gave way to today’s Turkish republic, a tectonic shift is under way. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s iron-fisted rule, Turkey is drifting away from its historic Western allies in perhaps one of the most significant geopolitical realignments of our age.

Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey has come to look increasingly like just another troubled corner of the Middle East. And, many Turks and Westerners fear, the country is becoming infected with the same sicknesses—intolerance, autocracy, repression—that have poisoned the region for decades.

Early on, Mr. Erdogan—who has held de facto power since 2002—was widely hailed as a principled democrat. In recent years, however, he has grown aggressively averse to dissent, and in the wake of a failed coup attempt in July, he has unleashed an unprecedented crackdown. He is now demanding constitutional changes that would give him near-absolute authority and let him remain at the helm of this country of 80 million people until 2029.

“Erdogan’s real aim is to take Turkey out of the Western bloc, out of the civilized world, and to turn Turkey into a Middle Eastern country where he can continue to rule without any obstacles,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of Turkey’s biggest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP. “He wants to turn Turkey into a country where there is no secularism and where people are divided along their ethnic identity and their beliefs. It is becoming a nation that faces internal conflict, just as we have seen in Iraq, Syria or Libya.”

Turkish officials retort that the West is abandoning their country, not the other way around. Mr. Erdogan recently blasted the European Union for its “meaningless hostility” as decadeslong talks on Turkish membership in the bloc neared collapse. “Neither the European Union nor the European countries that are on the brink of falling into the clutches of racism can exclude Turkey from Europe,” said Mr. Erdogan. “We are not a guest but a host in Europe.”

Members of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, often point out that, as the July coup unfolded, Russian President Vladimir Putin made the first call to express support for Mr. Erdogan, hours before President Barack Obama weighed in. That night, many other Western politicians kept silent or even cheered for the putschists.

“It’s not Turkey that is distancing itself from Europe. It’s Europe that is distancing itself from the axis of democracy. For them, democracy is when we don’t elect Erdogan, and dictatorship is when we elect him,” said Mehmet Metiner, a prominent AKP lawmaker. “Turkish democracy is better than Western democracy.”

Such statements cause many Western officials to shake their heads in despair while pointing to Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian record. Some 150 journalists critical of the government are currently behind bars in Turkey, which jails more journalists than any other country in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders, a media-freedom group. Tens of thousands of Turks suspected of opposition or disloyalty—from teachers to bureaucrats to police officers—lost their jobs in purges that followed the July coup attempt. And last month, Mr. Erdogan’s government detained the co-heads of one of the country’s three main opposition parties.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s yearlong campaign against a renewed insurgency by restive Kurds has ravaged the country’s southeast. Dozens of towns and neighborhoods have been flattened in bloody urban warfare between government forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which both Ankara and Washington consider a terrorist organization. A separate bombing spree by Islamic State has hit major Turkish cities.

A month after the July coup attempt, Mr. Erdogan also unleashed a war abroad: Turkish troops invaded northern Syria, where they are fighting alongside Sunni Arab rebels against both Islamic State and a Kurdish militia linked to the PKK. Mr. Erdogan has also threatened military intervention in Iraq, and Turkish troops are already deployed near Mosul, most of which remains in the clutches of Islamic State. CONTINUE AT SITE

Free Speech on the Quad The First Amendment makes a comeback, but watch out for the bias reporting team.

It’s slow going, but the campaign to highlight censorship on campus may be getting somewhere. That’s the message of a new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire), which tracks the speech bullies in academia.

Fire’s 10th annual report surveyed speech policies at 345 four-year public colleges and 104 private schools. The good news is that the share of colleges with “red-light” speech codes that substantially bar constitutionally protected speech has declined to 39.6%, a nearly 10% drop in the last year and the lowest share since 2008. Over the last nine years the number of institutions that don’t seriously threaten speech has tripled to 27. Several colleges including the University of Wisconsin have adopted policies that affirm (at least in theory) their commitment to free speech.

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte deserves some credit for this free-speech breakthrough. Last August he sent letters to the presidents of public schools with red-light codes inquiring about their unconstitutional policies. While public universities are bound by the First Amendment, private colleges can legally restrict speech, ironically thanks to their First Amendment right to freedom of association. Nearly twice as many private universities (58.7%) maintain restrictive speech codes as public colleges (33.9%).

As Fire notes, “although acceptance of federal funding does confer some obligations upon private colleges (such as compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws), compliance with the First Amendment is not one of them.” Private schools can therefore discriminate against faculty and students based on their political expression, but not gender or race.

The Obama Administration has used Title IX, which bans sexual discrimination, to threaten schools over their handling of sexual misconduct and assault claims. And its expansive definition of sexual harassment, which encompasses all “unwelcome” conduct of a sexual nature, infringes on speech. Colleges have adopted the Education Department’s “guidance” in responding to sexual harassment claims to avoid sanctions. In June 2015 a tenured Louisiana State University professor was fired for alleged sexual harassment because she used off-color humor. Fire is litigating the case.

Even as some colleges drop speech codes to avoid legal challenges, many have established “bias” reporting systems that solicit complaints about offensive speech. As Fire explains, these systems encourage “students to report on one another—and on faculty members—whenever they subjectively perceive that someone’s speech or expression is biased.”

The Senate’s Shutdown Follies No one knows more about ‘fake news’ than Harry Reid.

This has been a disappointing political year for Democrats, and those with Senate seats decided to end it with a final blaze of ineptitude. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and colleagues were threatening a partial government shutdown ahead of a midnight deadline, only to fold shortly before we went to press on Friday.

On Thursday the House passed a continuing resolution funding the government through April; the 326-96 vote included a majority of both parties. The House has now left town for the year, but all 46 Senate Democrats deemed the measure inadequate. They dropped their objections with the vote looming, but there are more than a few ironies folded into their obstruction.

One is that liberals used to say that holding up a budget (at least when Republicans take the hostage) would hurt the economy and lead to anarchy, if not an extinction-level crisis. The truth is that American life goes on when federal functions not deemed “essential” are interrupted for a couple days until Washington resolves its differences. Usually shutdowns also provide an education in how few functions really are essential.

Now Democrats have rediscovered the power of the purse, just in time for a Trump Administration. We opposed the various Republican brinksmanship strategies over the years not because they were illegitimate but because they were politically inept and likely to fail on the merits. This Democratic stand was dumb and illegitimate.

Mr. Manchin’s complaint is that health benefits for 16,300 retired coal miners expire on Dec. 31. But the continuing resolution has a stopgap preserving these benefits through April while the debate continues. If Democrats had blocked the CR, the miners would lose their benefits on Dec. 31.

Mr. Manchin and the likes of Sherrod Brown of Ohio were also demanding that Congress bail out the coal miners union pension fund. This is the kind of request that typically requires legislation and in any case the fund is solvent for a couple more years, but this Democratic stand on the alleged behalf of the working man is a little rich.

President Obama has been a four-star general in the war against coal. Then there’s Hillary Clinton’s campaign platform, which she herself managed to describe in May as “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” The unions would have more money to pay for pensions and health care if Democrats didn’t do so much to bankrupt the industry.

Meanwhile, Minority Leader Harry Reid gave his farewell address on Thursday, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the place, because everybody is so happy he’s leaving the Senate. The Nevadan used the occasion to denounce the scourge of “fake news.” “Separating real from fake has never been more important,” said the man who once told a completely fabricated story about Mitt Romney’s taxes.

Indefensible: The Plan for a Pan-European Military Force is a Mistake EDAP could unravel NATO :Dr. Herbert London

Dr. Herbert I. London is the President of the London Center for Policy Research

While the Euro declines in value reaching parity with the dollar, with debt overwhelming the underbelly of European states and with serious questions arising about the viability of the Union itself, the EU at the Bratislava Summit in September 2016 concluded that the time has come for its own military force.

The report EDAP (European Defense Action Plan) indicated that the 27 Member States “need the EU not only to guarantee peace and democracy, but also the security of our people.” Presumably a coherent EU response is called for.

So what could only be considered an ironic touch, participants at the conference contended that a strong EU force and a strong NATO are mutually reinforcing. However, it was not revealed how this might occur. With limited resources, the more likely scenario is a reduction in allocations to NATO in return for the generation of an independent European force, one that does not include the United States.

Moreover, the EU position has broadened priorities to include space, border and maritime surveillance and cyber defense. EDAP maintains that this defense arrangement will lead to cooperation as a common practice rather than the exception.

Reference is made in the report to a reliance on U.S. funding for the defense of Europe, noting EU Member States have decreased defense spending since 2015 by 12 percent. By contrast, in the last decade China increased its defense spending by 150 percent. This decrease in spending has not been accompanied by European cooperation. Since Member States act independently, there is duplication, a lack of interoperability and technological gaps at an annual cost of between 25 and 100 billion euros.

Should the EU force be adopted, there isn’t enough European capital to sustain billions for a new entity and the billions Trump will request for NATO. Something has got to give.