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March 2017

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Revealing Budget So much political drama over such a small part of the federal fisc.

By on March 17th, 2017

President Trump’s initial budget for fiscal 2018 is a public service, if not exactly in the way he intends. Its main virtue lies in showing voters the painful trade-offs to come if the U.S. doesn’t do something to control entitlement spending.

The “skinny” budget—so-called because a new Administration needs time to offer more details—is being denounced far and wide for cuts to domestic non-entitlement programs. In broad outline the White House wants to add $54 billion in budget authority for defense offset by $54 billion in cuts to every domestic department save Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.

Critics are portraying these domestic cuts as shocking while Mr. Trump is advertising his defense increases as the largest in history. They’re both wrong. The annual federal budget is now more than $4 trillion, so the White House is proposing to shift a mere 1.35% of that to defense from other priorities. That’s it.

The proposal does represent a sharp change in priorities after the past eight years when President Obama squeezed defense in favor of domestic accounts. Defense spending has fallen to about 3% of the economy from 4.7% in 2010. Domestic discretionary spending boomed until the GOP Congress began to rein it in after fiscal 2011. The number of full-time equivalent federal employees increased even with the GOP limits to an estimated 2.137 million this year from 1.978 million in 2009.

The notion that this is a wholesale, much less cruel, restructuring of the federal government is a fantasy that only Washington would attempt to promote. Take the defense increase, which is welcome but not even close to Ronald Reagan’s buildup.

The proposal is a 10% increase over the 2018 budget cap set by the Budget Control Act. But it is only about 3% above what Barack Obama proposed in his final budget as he tried to neutralize the defense issue during the presidential campaign. Most of this money will meet urgent needs in operations and maintenance to keep planes flying and troops trained and moving. A serious defense budget that begins to meet Mr. Trump’s pledge to build a 350 ship Navy will have to start with the fiscal 2019 budget expected in May.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Michael Galak: Bill Leak- Australia’s First Free-Speech Martyr

By on March 17th, 2017

I can’t imagine how Bill Leak coped as bravely and for as long as he did, not with the authorities and Muslim fanatics each determined to put his head on a pole. This is Australia’s disgrace: a relentless, speech-enforcing bureaucracy making common cause with head-loppers.
I do not ask, how he died, for medical opinion tells us it was a heart attack. I do ask why he had to die as he did, weary and stressed after months of unconscionable official harassment. Bill Leak, cartoonist extraordinaire is lost to us. No more of that sardonic wit. Gone forever the sharpshooting sniper whose targets were the pompous and the self-righteous and the lies they tell each other and will use any means at their disposal to make the rest of us bow before them too.

And if we don’t, if we refuse to genuflect before their lies? They’ll persecute us and make us pay, in Bill’s case with his life.

The Inquisition hated to spill blood, it preferred that heretics be racked and broken then quietly expire. Bill’s heart exploded, that is what the death certificate says. Yet still he died as countless heretics have died — those who dared to think differently, who dared to speak their heretic thoughts aloud. They died lest they contaminate others with their heresies. What did they accuse you of, Bill, what was your crime? Of telling the truth as you saw it? Of ruffling feathers by whipping idiots into lathers of froth and turmoil?

My hands are trembling as I write. My eyes are full of tears. My heart is heavy with foreboding. When an artist, a writer, a poet, a satirist is persecuted, the country that lets it happen slides toward totalitarianism. No, that’s wrong. A country that funds a spiteful bureaucracy to punish those of whose words it disapproves is already there. It’s just a question of degree. To tolerate that is worse than simply being stripped of the freedom millions died to win and defend. Rather, it is to throw away freedom and liberty like so much worthless rubbish. Today they pick off a cartoonist and a laughing, joyful mob dips its hankies in the blood for souvenirs. Tomorrow? It could be any door — your door, my door, any door — on which the enforcer’s fist bangs in the darkness.

I state it plainly, people, in the USSR, where I lived and grew up. Like Bill Leak, I was hauled in front of the unsmiling, self-righteous, angry, shouting komsomoltsy of the Young Communist League for my desire to emigrate to the West. My wife and I, two thought-criminals together. We were denounced as Western spies and Zionist traitors, criminals who deserved to be shot. We did not know at the time if we would have to find someone prepared to care for our four-year old daughter if we were taken away. In the USSR that was the fate of those who declined to submit to their tormentors. I saw people being accused in front of many of anti-Communist thoughts or deeds or words. I knew people, like Bill, who were taken to hospital with heart attacks. Their friends stayed silent or publicly turned against them. I saw all this and worse.

I lived it and survived it. I escaped it. Or so I thought.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The State Department – a systematic blunderer: Amb. (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on March 17th, 2017

1. In 2011, the Department of State welcomed the Arab Tsunami, which has displaced millions of people and murdered hundreds of thousands – and keeps raging – as an Arab Spring, youth revolution, Facebook revolution and a transition towards democracy.

2. In 2011, the State Department recommended the toppling of Gaddafi in Libya, in spite of Gaddafi’s transfer of Libya’s nuclear infrastructure to the US in 2003, and irrespective of his fierce battle against Islamic terrorism. The toppling of the ruthless Gaddafi transformed Libya into the largest, lawless platform of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, spilling over into Africa, Europe and the rest of the world, severely undermining the US national and homeland security.

3. The State Department has severely misperceived the Palestinian issue as if it were a core cause of Middle East turbulence, but none of the volcanic events from Iran to Mauritania are related to the Palestinian issue. The State Department considers the Palestinian issue a crown-jewel of Arab policy-making, but most Arab policy-makers shower Palestinians with talk, but not walk, considering the Palestinian leadership a role-model of treachery, back-stabbing, intra-Arab terrorism and corruption. Palestinian leaders are welcome in Western capitals by red carpets, but in Arab capitals by shabby rugs. In 1991, Kuwait expelled almost 300,000 Palestinians due to their collaboration with Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

4. In 1993, the State Department endorsed Arafat as a Nobel Laureate, embracing him as a messenger of peace, in defiance of Arafat’s 40-year-old trail of terrorism against Jews and mostly Arabs in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait, and regardless of Arafat’s status – from the 1970s – as a role model of anti-Western international terrorism.

5. In 2016 the Department of State embraces Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as a messenger of peace, in defiance of his track record: a graduate of KGB training, who coordinated PLO ties with the Soviet Bloc; expelled from Egypt (1955), Syria (1966) and Jordan (1970) for subversion; co-planned the murder of eleven Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games; collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which triggered the First Gulf War; a 70-year-trail of terrorism against Jews and mostly Arabs; a repressive and corrupt rule of the Palestinian Authority, exacerbated by the establishment of an anti-Israel, anti-US and anti-Semitic Palestinian hate-education, which is the most effective production-line of terrorists.

6. During the 1980s, the State Department considered Saddam Hussein an ally in the confrontation against Iran, ignoring the fact that the enemy of my enemy could also be my enemy. Until the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq received from the US dual-use commercial and defense technologies, $5BN loan guarantees and vital intelligence, assuming that a well-fed Saddam would be less of a threat.

7. On July 19, 1990, on the eve of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the US ambassador to Baghdad, April Gillespie, told Saddam Hussein: “an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would be considered, by Washington, an inter-Arab issue,” providing a green light for the invasion of Kuwait, and planting the seeds of the first and second Iraq Wars and their devastating ripple effects.

8. In 1981, the US Administration punished Israel for the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Ten years later, then Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, thanked Israel publicly “for eradicating the Iraqi reactor in 1981, which spared the US a calamitous nuclear confrontation in 1991.”

9. During the late 1970s, the State Department was actively pursuing the downfall of the pro-US Shah of Iran, supporting Ayatollah Khomeini, who was perceived as a human-rights warrior in defiance of an oppressive ruler. Thus, the Department of State facilitated the transformation of Iran from “the US policeman of the Gulf” to the worst enemy of the US, terrorizing pro-US Arab regimes, sponsoring global Islamic terrorism, collaborating with North Korea in the pursuit of nuclear and ballistic capabilities, supporting anti-US countries in Latin America, and brainwashing Iranian youth to fight “the modern-day arrogant crusader, the Big American Satan.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

ANDREW HARROD: AMIR HUSSAIN’S UNCONVINCING BOOK

By on March 17th, 2017

“Muslims have helped us to be more American, to be better Americans,” writes Loyola Marymount University theology professor Amir Hussain in his new book Muslims and the Making of America. Yet his volume offers little support for this multicultural, politically correct thesis.

“There has never been an America without Muslims,” Hussain states while noting Muslims among America’s African slaves both before and after the United States’ founding. Historians estimate their numbers at between ten and 20 percent of all slaves brought in bondage to America. He analyzes the subsequent “impact of Islamic practices on African American worship and music,” although, as other studies have noted, slave-master repression ultimately extinguished Islamic belief among American slaves.

Similarly examining the American founding, Hussain also concludes that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson’s “owning a copy of the Qur’an and reading it is crucial to my argument that Islam is part of the history of America.” He “began learning Arabic in the 1770s, after he purchased a translation of the Qur’an in 1765,” namely the 1734 English translation of the Quranic Arabic by English Orientalist George Sale. “It was this Qur’an that Keith Ellison used when he was sworn in as the first Muslim member of Congress in 2007,” Hussain enthuses.

“To be clear, Jefferson was no fan of Islam,” Hussain writes, and Sale’s Quran offers reasons why. Sale’s introductory essay describes Islam as “so manifest a forgery” that has motivated “calamities brought on so many nations by the conquests of the Arabians.” Hussain also notes President Jefferson’s campaigns against North Africa’s Muslim Barbary pirates; thus the “founding of the modern American Navy is connected to the Muslim world.”

The worlds of entertainment and sports loom large in Hussain’s assessment of Islam in America. Therefore he dedicates his book to Ahmet Ertegun “and to Muhammad Ali, perhaps the two American Muslims with the greatest global influence.” While Ali dominated the boxing ring, Ertegun was “president and cofounder of Atlantic Records and the chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a man who shaped the music of the twentieth century.”

A strange Muslim role model, Ertegun’s biographies say almost nothing about piety, but note his elite background as a diplomat’s son who came to America when his father was Turkey’s ambassador. Using a truly broad definition of “Muslim,” Hussain concedes that Ertegun “wasn’t a ‘good’ Muslim. He lived the high life, was a bon vivant, drank, partied to excess, and had numerous affairs.” Ertegun himself noted in a 2005 interview that he “used to drink a bottle of vodka a day, every day, for about 40 years.”

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