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Ruth King

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Trump’s Strong Start on Policy A first-year report card By Ramesh Ponnuru

By on December 26th, 2017

Gorsuch confirmed, ISIS defeated, taxes cut: The Trump administration has compiled a solid record of accomplishment in its first year, one that compares well with the records of many of its predecessors.

Two of the biggest accomplishments came late in the year. The prime minister of Iraq declared victory over ISIS on December 9. Republicans reached a deal that seemed to secure passage of a tax bill on December 15. Until then, it appeared possible that 2017 would end without an all-Republican government enacting any major legislation.

Now the Republicans’ policy record looks better, at least as most conservatives see it. The tax bill advances several longstanding conservative objectives. It cuts tax rates for most Americans, slashes the corporate-tax rate for the first time in decades, expands the tax credit for children, limits the reach of the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax, and scales back the tax break for expensive homes. By scaling back the deduction for state and local taxes, it may encourage a more conservative fiscal politics in the states. And it allows drilling to proceed in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The tax bill also partly makes up for the failure of Republican efforts earlier in 2017 to repeal Obamacare. The health-care law imposes fines on people who go without insurance. The tax bill sets the fines at zero. The least popular feature of Obamacare is thus effectively nullified.

Some conservatives would have considered voting for Trump in November 2016 worth it just for Justice Neil Gorsuch. His appointment to the Supreme Court means that Justice Scalia’s seat will remain filled by an originalist for the next few decades. If one of the Democratic appointees or Justice Anthony Kennedy leaves the Court while Republicans hold the Senate, Trump will have the opportunity to create the first conservative majority in modern constitutional history. Trump has also nominated many well-qualified conservative jurists to the appeals courts. (The quality of his district-court nominees appears to be significantly lower.)

The administration has begun to rein in regulation. It has withdrawn and modified several of the Obama administration’s regulations, often in concert with Congress. It has stopped or slowed the progress of many others that were barreling down the tracks. The Environmental Protection Agency, now run by Trump appointee Scott Pruitt, has also taken steps to end the practice of “sue and settle,” in which activist groups get the agency to adopt new policies through lawsuits.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Is Academic Rigor Racist? The latest casualty of the Left’s Academic-Industrial-Complex. Jack Kerwick

By on December 26th, 2017

If you’re a parent who is giving consideration to refinancing your home for the sake of sending your child off to a university, you may want to reconsider.

Most parents, doubtless, regard college as nothing more or less than a means to the end of a lucrative profession for their children. Still, even some of these may be of one mind with those parents who expect that, while pursuing their degrees, their children will and should receive a decent education.

Unfortunately, however, the view of Donna Riley, a professor of engineering education at Purdue University, is representative of a growing number of academics from around the country. In “Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit,” an article featured in the most recent edition of the journal Engineering Studies, Riley writes that rigor—“the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality”—actually “accomplishes dirty deeds” in the fields of “engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research [.]”

To repeat: Academic rigor serves dirty deeds.

These “dirty deeds” are “disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege.”

Riley trades in the Newspeak that we’ve come to expect from contemporary leftist academics. This lends to her prose an aura of Gnosticism, the semblance of esotericism. Ultimately, though, Riley’s thesis is hardly original. In fact, it is but another expression of the dogmatic, Politically Correct status quo of her peers. It goes something like this:

Traditional academic standards, being the legacy of straight white men, are not unlike any other legacy of straight white men insofar as they “privilege” straight white men.

In other words, academic standards like that of rigor are “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “classist,” and so forth and so on.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Guatemala follows U.S. to Jerusalem By Monica Showalter Please see note

By on December 26th, 2017

In 1948 Guatemala’s ambassador to the United States, Jorge Garcia Granados (who was a friend of my father’s) lobbied for recognition of Israel. rsk

Apparently, there was nothing fake or merely symbolic about Guatemala’s support for the U.S. moving its embassy to Jerusalem in its United Nations vote last week. Guatemala is moving its own embassy to Jerusalem, too.

According to the New York Post:

GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemala’s president announced on Christmas Eve that the Central American country will move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, becoming the first nation to follow the lead of U.S. President Donald Trump in ordering the change.

Guatemala was one of nine nations that voted with the United States and Israel on Thursday when the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a non-binding resolution denouncing Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

It’s enough to turn heads about the tiny Central American nation and give it our salute.

Because it’s rather courageous to be the first to follow the U.S. in places such as the United Nations. Guatemala’s act suggests it wasn’t just looking for goodies from the U.S. when it cast that vote, it really wanted to acknowledge the reality that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

Its president, Jimmy Morales, said as much, in his Christmas eve announcement of the event:

“Guatemala is historically pro-Israeli,” he said in Guatemala City. “In 70 years of relations, Israel has been our ally. We have a Christian way of thinking that, as well as the politics of it, has us believing that Israel is our ally and we must ­support it.

“Despite us only being nine in the world (in the UN vote), we have the total certainty and conviction that this is the right path.”

It’s true Guatemala would probably like some development help from Israel but just the fact that they are reaching out for it and not whining about something or other speaks well for them. A willingness to learn from Israel means a nation passes the Israel Test, as the brilliant George Gilder wrote of in his excellent book. Guatemala passes. Another reason too take a second look at Guatemala.
Apparently, there was nothing fake or merely symbolic about Guatemala’s support for the U.S. moving its embassy to Jerusalem in its United Nations vote last week. Guatemala is moving its own embassy to Jerusalem, too.

According to the New York Post:

GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemala’s president announced on Christmas Eve that the Central American country will move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, becoming the first nation to follow the lead of U.S. President Donald Trump in ordering the change.

Guatemala was one of nine nations that voted with the United States and Israel on Thursday when the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a non-binding resolution denouncing Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

It’s enough to turn heads about the tiny Central American nation and give it our salute.

Because it’s rather courageous to be the first to follow the U.S. in places such as the United Nations. Guatemala’s act suggests it wasn’t just looking for goodies from the U.S. when it cast that vote, it really wanted to acknowledge the reality that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

Its president, Jimmy Morales, said as much, in his Christmas eve announcement of the event:

“Guatemala is historically pro-Israeli,” he said in Guatemala City. “In 70 years of relations, Israel has been our ally. We have a Christian way of thinking that, as well as the politics of it, has us believing that Israel is our ally and we must ­support it.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Case against Mahmoud Abbas By Dan Calic

By on December 26th, 2017

There’s been plenty of rancor since President Trump declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. Some are saying his remarks have brought the peace process to a halt.

To such accusations I say, “what peace process?”

I submit that if anyone is guilty of why there is no peace process, it is none other than Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Unless you are spelling it p-i-e-c-e. The record shows that rather than p-e-a-c-e with Israel, he wants to take it apart piece by piece until it doesn’t exist anymore. In order to present the case, I will lay out the evidence to the court of public opinion.

Exhibit 1- Munich Olympics

Who will ever forget the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre where 11 Israeli athletes were held hostage by Arab terrorists and lost their lives. The financier of the operation was Mahmoud Abbas.

Exhibit 2- Holocaust Denial

In 1982, he wrote his PhD thesis entitled: “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.” The topic was denial of the Holocaust. Such views are associated with anti-Semitism. Aside from Israel, 21 countries have made Holocaust denial a crime. The United States does not criminalize it.

In January 2005, he was elected to a four-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority. Here’s a short list of what’s taken place during his never-ending four-year term:

Exhibit 3- Rejects Recognition of Jewish State

While several Israeli prime ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu have acknowledged acceptance of a ‘Palestinian’ state, Abbas has repeatedly said he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Demanding recognition of a Palestinian state while rejecting Israel’s right to exist proves he is not serious about peace. Moreover, he has no business talking about a “just solution. Most recently Abbas challenged Israel’s right to be recognized as a state by the international community saying it is “invalid.”

Exhibit 4- Right of Return

Abbas demands the “right of return,” for so-called “refugees” from the 1948 and 1967 wars, along with their descendants. Their numbers vary, but suffice to say this would eliminate the Jewish majority in Israel. Thus the only homeland the Jewish people have would cease to exist as such, and become the Middle East’s 23rd Muslim Arab-dominated country while the Jews would have none.

Exhibit 5- No Jews Allowed in Future Palestinian State

There are well over 1 million Arabs who live in Israel with full benefits of citizenship. They vote, own businesses, own property, are doctors, lawyers, professors, etc. They are elected to the Knesset and have even been members of the Supreme Court. They also have complete freedom of worship. There are mosques throughout Israel. Yet Abbas says not one Israeli [Jew], civilian or soldier will be tolerated in any future Palestinian state. Ironically, he’s accused Israel of being an ‘apartheid state.’

Exhibit 6- Fatah Constitution

He is head of the Fatah Party. Their constitution calls for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The United Nation Continues To Be A Moral Cesspool Shoshana Bryen

By on December 26th, 2017

The vote in the United Nations General Assembly concerning Jerusalem on Thursday wasn’t really about Jerusalem — or even so much about Israel.https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2017/12/24/united-nation-continues-moral-cesspool/

It was about the self-presumed moral superiority of countries sitting in the U.N. General Assembly, defying the reality of 3,000 years of Jerusalem as the spiritual capital of the Jewish people and the seat of government of three Jewish Commonwealths, but never the seat of government for any other country or people. It was also about defying the reality that only under Jewish sovereignty is Jerusalem an open, tolerant city for people of all faiths, or no faith. They know that. But they thought it was a free shot at Israel, Jews and the president of the United States.

It is true that the latest U.N. vote will have little practical impact; United Nations General Assembly resolutions don’t come with financial or other penalties. Israel remains in Jerusalem and the Palestinians are no closer to — and, in fact, are much further from — finding themselves a legitimate place in the family of actual countries.

So, on the one hand, votes were just a cheap “up yours” from a lot of countries that expect still to work with Israel in NATO (the Europeans), invest in Israel’s high tech (Europeans, Asians and others), take advantage of Israel’s shared energy, water, agricultural prowess (Africans), and have Israel as an ally in the fight against Iran (Sunni Arab states) as if the vote hadn’t happened.

On the other hand, the United States had drawn a line in the sand. A presumed free kick at President Trump was a “gimme” for a lot of governments that simply detest the president (Europeans), and expect still to receive the benefits of American foreign aid and/or security assistance that keep them in power (Asians, Africans South Americans — let’s face it, just about everyone). And countries who know perfectly well that it is under American rules that international trade and freedom of the seas and skies are protected. Not one outside perhaps North Korea would trade our security blanket for Russian or Chinese rules.

This constitutes moral mud; whether it was free remains to be seen.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Great Rules Rollback Reining in regulation is a major success of Trump’s first year.

By on December 26th, 2017

Amid the debate over tweets and tax reform, perhaps the most significant change brought by the first year of the Trump Presidency has been overlooked: reining in and rolling back the regulatory state at a pace faster than even Ronald Reagan. This is a major reason for the acceleration of animal spirits and faster economic growth in the past year.

A rules rollback is harder than it sounds because the inertial tendency of bureaucracies is to expand, and the modern administrative state has expanded almost inexorably under presidents of both parties. New rules are published in the Federal Register, and Barack Obama presided over six of the seven highest annual page counts ever. In 2016 his regulators left town with a record-breaking binge of 95,894 new pages, according to Wayne Crews, who tracks the administrative state for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

George W. Bush wasn’t much better. His Administration added 79,435 pages in 2008, its most expansive regulatory year. By contrast in the first year of the Trump Presidency through Sept. 30, 45,678 pages were added to the Federal Register. Many were required to follow-up on legislation and rules from the Obama era, so the Trump trend is even better.
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Ten days after his inauguration, Mr. Trump issued an executive order directing his departments to scour the books for rules they could rescind or repeal without damaging the law. He also directed that for each single regulation issued, agencies should identify at least two for elimination. In one his best appointments, he named Neomi Rao to run the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs that must clear new rules.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

How to Defund the U.N. A few of its agencies do useful work. American taxpayers shouldn’t pay for the many that don’t By John Bolton

By on December 26th, 2017

As an assistant secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration, I worked vigorously to repeal a hateful United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. Foreign diplomats frequently told me the effort was unnecessary. My Soviet counterpart, for example, said Resolution 3379 was only a piece of paper gathering dust on a shelf. Why stir up old controversies years after its 1975 adoption?

We ignored the foreign objections and persisted because that abominable resolution cast a stain of illegitimacy and anti-Semitism on the U.N. It paid off. On Dec. 16, 1991, the General Assembly rescinded the offensive language.

Now, a quarter-century later, the U.N. has come close to repeating Resolution 3379’s original sin. Last week the U.N. showed its true colors with a 128-9 vote condemning President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

This seemingly lopsided outcome obscured a significant victory and major opportunity for the president. Thirty-five countries abstained, and 21 didn’t vote at all. Days earlier the Security Council had endorsed similar language, 14-1, defeated only by the U.S. veto. The margin narrowed significantly once Mr. Trump threatened to penalize countries that voted against the U.S. This demonstrated once again that America is heard much more clearly at the U.N. when it puts its money where its mouth is. (In related news, Guatemala announced Sunday it will move its embassy to Jerusalem, a good example for others.)

While imposing financial repercussions on individual governments is entirely legitimate, the White House should also reconsider how Washington funds the U.N. more broadly. Should the U.S. forthrightly withdraw from some U.N. bodies (as we have from UNESCO and as Israel announced its intention to do on Friday)? Should others be partially or totally defunded? What should the government do with surplus money if it does withhold funds?

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Let Us Sing of Greater Things ‘Messiah’ is a Christian masterpiece known by everyone. By Rich Lowry

By on December 25th, 2017

It is surely possible to be somewhere in the United States in the Christmas season without ready access to a performance of Handel’s “Messiah,” perhaps in the middle of Denali National Park or the Mojave Desert.

The work is ubiquitous and deserves every bit of its popularity. It is a Christian masterpiece known by everyone, a soaring work of genius that never loses its ability to astonish and inspire, whether at a performance of the New York Philharmonic or at a local church singalong.

After hearing it performed on Christmas Day in 1843, Ralph Waldo Emerson described a common reaction, “I walked in the bright paths of sound, and liked it best when the long continuance of a chorus had made the ear insensible to music, made it as if there was none; then I was quite solitary and at ease in the melodious uproar.”

In his new book, Messiah: The Composition and Afterlife of Handel’s Masterpiece, Jonathan Keates traces the history of the work.

A native German who lived in London, G.F. Handel was extraordinarily prolific, composing roughly 40 operas and 30 oratorios. His towering status isn’t in question. Beethoven, born nearly a hundred years later, deemed him “the master of us all.”

Although the “Messiah” is invariably called “Handel’s Messiah,” it was a collaboration. The librettist Charles Jennens, a devout Christian, provided the composer with a “scriptural collection,” the Biblical quotations that make up the text.

Jennens wrote a friend that he hoped Handel “will lay out his whole genius and skill upon it, that the composition may excel all his former compositions, as the subject excels every other subject. The subject is Messiah.”

He needn’t have worried. Handel completed a draft score in three weeks in the summer of 1741. The legend says that while composing the famous “Hallelujah” chorus, he had a vision of “the great God himself.” There is no doubt that artist and subject matter came together in one of the most inspired episodes in the history of Western creativity.

An oratorio shares some characteristics of opera, but there is no acting. Handel was an innovator, writing English-language oratorios and giving the chorus a bigger role. Typically, leading characters anchored a dramatic plot. The drama in “Messiah” was the Christian story itself, the birth, passion, and resurrection of Christ told in scripture.

The work premiered in Dublin, at a performance so crowded that the ladies were urged to come without hoops in their skirts. A correspondent rendered a verdict that has stood up: “The Sublime, the Grand and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestic and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France’s Macron Submits to the Arab World A Gentle Christmas Day Word of Caution by Giulio Meotti

By on December 25th, 2017

“This month alone, France voted twice in the United Nations to support Arab-sponsored resolutions against the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. ”

The tragic dead end of French fake “secularism” is that it allows public expressions of the Islamic religion in France, but prohibits the Christian ones.

Far from defending the Judeo-Christian values ​​on which France, the West and Europe itself was founded — such as individual liberties, freedom of expression, separation of the church from the state and the judiciary, and equal justice under the law — President Macron recently launched an apology for Islam before Arab-Muslim dignitaries.

The balance of Macron’s recent frenetic trips to the Arab world: lavish contracts, apologetic words to Islamists, repentance of the French colonial past and silence on anti-Semitism and radical Islam. Meanwhile, in France, authorities were busy dismantling its Judeo-Christian heritage.

Macron’s special envoy for heritage, Stéphane Bern, proposed charging a fee to enter French cathedrals and churches — as if they were museums.

In Abu Dhabi, members of the victorious Israeli judo team were recently made to mount the winners’ podium without their own anthem and flag. A few days later, French President Emmanuel Macron landed in Abu Dhabi, where he denounced as liars those who say that “that Islam is built by destroying the other monotheisms”. Macron did not raise an eyebrow about the anti-Semitism and racism displayed by the Emirati authorities. Macron merely praised Islam in a country that punishes with death those Muslims who convert to Christianity or profess atheism.

At the French naval base in Abu Dhabi on November 8-9, addressing some businessmen, Macron insisted on the importance of the alliance with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as an “essential partner with whom we share the same vision of the region and obvious common interests”. Such effusion seems more than the usual language of diplomacy. Macron is now showing a strategic empathy and commitment to the Arab-Islamic world. Is this statement a prelude to submission?

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Paul Collits Position Vacant: Australia’s Trump

By on December 25th, 2017

The US President tapped a body of sentiment that repulses the mainstream political class, and that opportunity also exists here. If you want to shop safe from imported Muslim hell drivers, miss affordable electricity and think little kids should master sums before sodomy, all you lack is the right candidate.

One of my American conservative heroes, William F. Buckley, attempted over the decades to deliver the great right wing project, “fusionism”. This was the building of a right of centre coalition of the willing. Libertarians and conservatives together. His early political project was Barry Goldwater. His later project was Ronald Reagan. Bill was indefatigable, and lieutenants, such as Frank Meyer, set out to herd the cats of the right into something of a competitive political and philosophical force that would stand athwart history and yell “stop”. They would attain power and deliver broad conservative policy outcomes. And they would build this on the back of a philosophical synthesis.

Listening to Mark Steyn speaking recently at the Restoration Weekend organised by the great and courageous David Horowitz – that rare lefty who realised before it was too late he had been an idiot – and hearing the repeated boos at Mark’s every mention of Bill “Never Trump” Kristol, one was shaken to realise that the American right is now hopelessly fractured. The fracture is the result of Trump’s ascendancy and the growing, sullen realisation by his critics that he can actually run a productive, can-do government that is delivering real benefits to great swathes of the American people.

You won’t read that in the Guardian, the mentally enfeebled Fairfax Press or that endless spigot for inner-city received opinion, the ABC, but the fact that such agents of New Establishment orthodoxy all share that view demonstrates its truth. Is there one issue – wind turbines, the benefits of industry-killing electricity costs, the literary worth of all who get invitations to their mates’ writers festivals – on which the Left gets it right? Trump hatred is but more of the same.

The Clinton kleptocracy and its fellow travellers predictably are aghast at what they see in Trump. But this Clintonian regret is driven by self-interest, essentially. The Clintons are toast now; no longer useful, as Hillary will never be president, they have no influence to peddle and must now slouch towards their grim, shared sunset. The left-of-centre political class which they exemplify is being consumed by its own corruption, and, as we have seen recently, its lust.

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