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Ruth King

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

By on December 10th, 2016

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.

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In Reports on Parole and Prison Discipline, the Gray Lady Does Disparate Impact BY AndrewC. McCarthy

By on December 10th, 2016

Despite investing weeks of time in the production of this week’s lengthy reports decrying racism in the state of New York’s prison administration and parolesystem, the New York Times is unable to demonstrate that racism was the reason for the result in any specific case. You needn’t take my word for it. As the Times’ own investigative team puts it, “[I]t is not possible to know whether race is a factor in any particular parole decision.” That’s after scrutinizing thousands of them.

Nevertheless, in agitprop that barely pretends to be straight news reporting, the Gray Lady flatly accuses the state of systematically using race as the factor that determines which prisoners are detained and which are sprung from confinement. The endemic racism is apparently a secret even to the racists themselves. Drawing on vignettes that are comical in their revelations of incompetence and disinterest on the part of parole commissioners, the Times suggests that the commissioners barely know the race, or much else, about the inmates whose cases they decide. But why let that spoil a good narrative?

In this instance, the narrative is built on the social justice warrior’s favorite artifice: the “disparate impact” theory of discrimination. The idea, of course, is that even though it cannot be proved that racism occurred in any particular case, we can infer that race – and only race – is the dispositive factor if the aggregated outcomes are worse for one race than another. In the disparate impact scheme, two rules are observed at all times: (1) ignore the fact that racial discrimination is an abomination precisely because it is a conscious act, an operation of the mind that does not happen inadvertently; and (2) take as a given that our society is pervasively racist, such that it is irrelevant whether any single one of us harbors racial animus – especially those of us whose allegedly racist decision-making is being analyzed.

Since those are the operating assumptions, is it any wonder that the reader must wade through a full 23 paragraphs before finding the most salient bit of information in the Times’s parole story:

The Times did not have access to the full range of information the [parole] board took into account. This includes inmates’ time in county jail, full arrest histories, complete prison disciplinary records and whether required prison programs were completed.

That’s right. Common sense would suggest that, to find the explanation for any disparities in parole determinations involving felons whose offenses appear similar, one should look first at the factors well known to influence parole decisions heavily: Is one guy’s rap sheet worse than the other’s? Has one guy behaved himself better while in custody and thus shown himself less likely to recidivate if released? But the Times, we learn (after 23 paragraphs), does not have this rudimentary information.

For most people, lack of access to the essential data would be cause to refrain from writing or publishing a high-profile news report – after all, any conclusion would necessarily be unreliable. For social justice warriors and their paper of record, though, it’s an opportunity to scream, “Racism!” Who could pass that up?

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VICTOR SHARPE: A BLIGHT ON THE CITY OF ROSES

By on December 10th, 2016

The city that hosted anti-Trump demos after the election has a record of blatant anti-Zionism, which is a crude mask for its twin, anti-Semitism.

The late November sky was gray and murky over Portland, Oregon when hundreds of Israel haters descended upon City Hall with the sole purpose of driving yet another nail into the reputation, honor and survival of the one Jewish state in the world: Israel.

The meeting was held in the city known for its renowned and beautiful rose test gardens, yet for supporters and defenders of Israel very little was coming up roses.

According to a Jewish Federation of Greater Portland survey taken some years ago, the Jewish population numbers some 47,500. Yet from this surprisingly high number of Jewish residents in this Pacific Northwest city barely a handful came to City Hall to defend and support the Jewish state.

In stark contrast, the City Commissioners were assailed with a tsunami of anti-Israel falsehoods so ugly and groundless that they could only have been manufactured in the fevered minds of those consumed by a corrosive and anti-Semitic hatred.

There is now a great danger to the integrity of the Portland City Council if it succumbs to the mendacious anti-Israel hate fest launched upon it by the notorious BDS movement in collusion with far left church groups and the renegade and morally confused organization calling itself Jewish Voice for Peace: All masquerading as human rights organizations.

Among the many falsehoods leveled against the embattled Jewish state – and the grotesque demonization of it – was the regurgitated myth of Rachel Corrie as a valiant peace activist. She was anything but.

Before the City Commissioners was the demand that Portland, Oregon divest from its investment pool all those companies that have business with the Jewish state, such as Caterpillar.

Among the many falsehoods leveled against the embattled Jewish state – and the grotesque demonization of it – was the regurgitated myth of Rachel Corrie as a valiant peace activist. She was anything but.

At best she was a foolish and indoctrinated useful idiot for Hamas. At worst she was a hater of America and Israel, but that did not stop her relatives from being present and poisoning the meeting with the pernicious myths they have helped weave around her.

In his article titled, Rachel Corrie Was No Peace Activist, Jonathan S. Tobin wrote a scathing expose of the Rachel Corrie myth, which has so effectively been exploited by BDS, ISM and others to disfigure Israel’s image and delegitimize it.

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Trump’s EPA offensive will be the scientific cat fight of our time By Joseph Smith

By on December 10th, 2016

After eight years of torment at the hands of President Obama and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the electoral shoe is now on the other foot, with Republican President-Elect Donald Trump preparing to take the helm in January.

The real battle to come may be fought on the ground of climate change, the sacred cow of the left. A pair of articles posted at Real Clear Politics on the nomination of Oklahoma attorney general and EPA nemesis Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) highlight the challenge for Republicans and the distress for Democrats.

The Hill recounts the “Supreme Court’s landmark 2007 climate change ruling” and the Obama EPA’s subsequent 2009 “Endangerment Finding” that carbon dioxide “threatens both public health and welfare.”

The result of the Endangerment Finding was to “pave the way for EPA to finalize the proposed greenhouse gas emission standards for light-duty vehicles,” among other actions.

Since Congress has been unwilling to intervene in the EPA’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act, the task at hand for the incoming EPA administrator, according to The Hill, is to reverse the Endangerment Finding:

As long as the Endangerment Finding stands, any EPA, including one headed by Pruitt, will be in court defending against any subsidiary attempt to halt or reverse any regulation of carbon dioxide[.] … So the Endangerment Finding must be reversed.

The Hill predicts “the scientific cat fight of our time”:

The academy is going to howl, and Washington’s science lobbies … are going to go berserk.

… In nominating Pruitt, the administration is signaling that it is clearly up to such a fight – and not just over climate change.

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Pruitt to Dismantle EPA Climate Agenda By Daniel John Sobieski

By on December 10th, 2016

Personnel is policy, as they say, and despite his meeting with the High Priest of Climatology, Al Gore, president-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to be the new head at EPA, shows Trump is serious about pulling back the curtain to expose climate fraud, leaving climate zealots as unsettled as the alleged “science” they trumpet.

Pruitt has already fought the various unconstitutional power grabs that essentially established it as the fourth and unelected branch of government. As Tom Borelli notes in Conservative Review:

Pruitt’s concerns of EPA overreach also includes the agency’s controversial, “Waters of the U.S.” rule that significantly expanded the federal government’s regulatory reach to include ditches on private land. During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to address the regulation that he called one of the “most intrusive rules” and Pruitt could execute the new president’s goal to neuter its impact.

Every puddle in America, every creek running through a farm or ranch would become subject to regulation by the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA. Pruitt has set dead aim on this and other EPA abuses.

In an article in National Review, coauthored with fellow attorney general of Alabama, Luther Strange, Pruitt opined that climate science isn’t settled and should be subject to a vigorous debate. He argued that EPA dictates are no different than the tyranny America rebelled against in its founding, and that EPA has no justification to bypass the will of the people as expressed through its elected representatives:

The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product…..

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Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin By Janet Levy

By on December 10th, 2016

According to a recently published Heritage Foundation report, the 2017 Index of U.S. Military Strength, Russia poses a “formidable” and “aggressive” threat to the vital interests of the United States. The report states, “Russia seeks to maximize its strategic position in the world at the expense of the United States. It also seeks to undermine U.S. influence and moral standing, harasses U.S. and NATO forces, and is working to sabotage U.S. and Western policy in Syria.”

The international machinations of the current Russian government are not all that different from domestic strategies pursued within Russia, according to David Satter, former Moscow correspondent for the London Financial Times and longtime observer of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Author of three previous books on Russia and the Soviet Union and an advisor to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, Satter has written a new, eye-opening account of recent internal, Russian intrigues in his book, The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin (Yale University Press, 2016, pp. 240, $20.07)

He begins with the disturbing revelation that Yeltsin, a man who came to power through peaceful means and popular support, murdered hundreds of his own people to hold onto power. Satter asserts that the so-called “rebirth” of post-Soviet Russia, interpreted as the death of Communism, was a sham with a phony window-dressing of perestroika and a fake overhaul of the Soviet economic and political system.

With the advent of perestroika, Russia ostensibly changed its interactions with the West from confrontation to “cooperation.” Yet, the so-called transformation was actually a massive disinformation campaign that included government manufactured and deployed “controlled political opposition,” Satter says. The country appeared transformed, but retained its former Communist Party, centralized government policies, as well as the clandestine role of the KGB remade as the FSB (federal security service).

The trappings of a modern democracy and free enterprise system were seemingly in place for the world to see. However, beneath the surface, the nomenklaturatook advantage of financial investments and the transfer of economic skills and technology from the West, while the Communist Party retained control of state financial resources, as well as billions of dollars in property and investments. The much-touted policy to restructure the Soviet economic and political system and permit private ownership of businesses and property failed to meet the stated objective of placing state assets into private hands, Satter writes. Instead of ushering in the end of central planning with a free market system, Russia, under Yeltsin, continued as an essentially Communist regime.

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DONALD TRUMP’S MESSAGE ON PEARL HARBOR DAY

By on December 9th, 2016

We pause today to remember the 2,403 American heroes who selflessly gave their lives at Pearl Harbor 75 years ago, on a date that will forever live in infamy. We also honor the 1,178 Americans who were wounded, and the countless others who instinctively did their duty, rushing to their posts in the midst of the chaos.

Their shared sacrifice reminds us of the great costs paid by those who came before us to secure the liberties we enjoy, and inspires us to rise to meet the new challenges that stand before us today.

America’s enemies have changed over the past 75 years. But the fact remains, as President Reagan said when first proclaiming National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, ‘there can be no substitute for victory’ in the pursuit of peace. Today we are the bearers of the torch of freedom these brave Americans passed on to us.

In honor of their faithfulness, and for the sake of generations to come, we will never allow that flame to be extinguished.

Donald J. Trump

President-Elect of the United States

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Repealing Obamacare: Let’s Get This Done A repeal bill must address all of Obamacare’s shortcomings and replace them with market-based solutions. By Mike Lee & Mark Walker

By on December 9th, 2016

Since 2010 everyone in the Republican party has agreed that Obamacare must be repealed. Most Republican members of Congress — ourselves included — were elected, and reelected, on the promise that we would take any opportunity possible to end this partisan, ham-handed, and unconstitutional law.

When Republicans attained control of both the House and Senate in 2015, we saw an opportunity to lay the foundation for full repeal under a possible future Republican president. To that end, we penned an article in National Review calling for Congress to send President Obama a bill repealing Obamacare. “It is more important than ever for Republicans in Congress to honor the promises we have made to the American people,” we wrote. “We can do this, before the end of the year, through a procedure known as ‘budget reconciliation.’”

House and Senate Republicans followed through on this promise. We sent a bill to President Obama’s desk that would have repealed much of the law, and was promptly — and unsurprisingly — vetoed. But this exercise was not, by any measure, a fruitless effort.

That bill, H.R. 3762, established the minimum standards against which any future Obamacare repeal bills would be measured. It zeroed out Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates, scrapped the taxes, revived health savings accounts, and rolled back the Medicaid expansion and subsidies. Majorities in the House and Senate are on record voting for all of these items. We can do it again.

But there is no denying that any new reconciliation repeal bill in the next Congress will have a different outcome. This time, when the House and Senate send such a bill to the White House, the incoming president has said he will sign it. That is why it is so important that we get this repeal bill right.

And the bare minimum simply is not enough this time.

A minimum effort could end up hurting many Americans. Specifically, the law’s many insurance mandates drive up health costs and force individuals to violate their deeply held religious convictions. When government bureaucrats and politicians decide that every insurance policy must cover free doctor visits and abortifacients and keep their children on their health-insurance plan through the age 26, Americans who don’t need those options end up paying more for products they don’t want. That’s great for the insurance companies, but not for taxpayers or consumers.

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Merkel Backtracks Amidst Refugee Crisis A too little, too late response to the consequences of a reckless open door immigration policy. Joseph Klein

By on December 9th, 2016

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other like-minded Western European leaders have allowed an unprecedented number of “refugees” into their countries from the most terrorist-prone countries in the world, such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. To save their own necks, these reckless leaders are finally beginning to listen, at least half-heartedly, to their own citizens, who are recoiling from the disastrous consequences of the prevalent European Union open door “refugee” policy. The leaders have only themselves to blame for the crisis they have created for their people.

Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, in that order, are at the top of the list of origins of people applying for asylum in the European Union. All three of these countries are also among the top 5 on the 2015 Global Terrorism Index prepared by the Institute of Economics and Peace. It should not have been a surprise that, over the last two years, as the number of asylum-seekers originally from terrorist-prone Muslim-majority countries has risen dramatically, acts of terrorism committed by jihadists in Western Europe have risen dramatically as well. Yet Chancellor Merkel and her European Union pals either could not connect the dots or willfully turned a blind eye.

Crimes against females have also risen in Western Europe as carriers of Islamic cultural norms denigrating women and girls have entered Western Europe in large numbers. Afghanistan is at the top of the list of the most dangerous countries to be a woman.

Germany has been the most welcoming of Western European countries to asylum-seekers from Afghanistan and other terrorist-prone, Muslim-majority countries. Afghanistan, which was second on both the refugee origin and terrorist country lists, was the country of origin of an Afghan teenage “refugee” last July who carried out an attack in Germany that resulted in several serious injuries. The Islamic State claimed responsibility. Afghanistan was also the origin country of the so-called “unaccompanied underage refugee” who allegedly raped and murdered the daughter of a high level European Union official in October. The victim was a 19 year old medical student, whom had also worked as a volunteer in one of the local refugee shelters. The 17 year old alleged murderer, who entered Germany illegally in 2015, had applied for asylum as an unaccompanied minor and was living with a German family.

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The Coming Sanctuary Cities Crackdown Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel begs President-elect Trump for leniency. Matthew Vadum

By on December 9th, 2016

Chicago is one of the best places to live in America if you’re one of the millions of illegal aliens present in the country — and free-spending, lawbreaking Mayor Rahm Emanuel is trying his best to keep it that way.

Emanuel (D), who used to be a congressman and then President Obama’s chief of staff, dropped by Trump Tower in New York on Wednesday to urge President-elect Donald Trump to abandon his campaign promise to crack down on sanctuary cities.

“I also spoke out strongly about what it means to be a sanctuary city who will support and secure the people who are here, like my grandfather who came to the city of Chicago as a 13-year old 100 years ago,” said Emanuel who actually has no real bargaining power in the equation because he’s on the wrong side of the law.

“Chicago was a sanctuary city for my grandfather. His grandson today is the mayor of this city, which is a testament to the strength of the values and ideals of America.”

Emanuel, of course, is leaving out the values that make Americans inclined to support the rule of law and therefore oppose illegal entry and visa-overstaying by foreigners.

Emanuel is a strident, in-your-face supporter of the sanctuary city movement that gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans. Cheered on by the Left, sanctuary cities hinder immigration enforcement and shield illegal aliens from federal officials as a matter of policy. They ignore immigration detainer forms which ask them to retain illegals in their custody after they would otherwise release them so Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can take custody of them.

These sanctuary cities really ought to be called traitor cities because they are in open rebellion against the United States. Cities are creatures of the states in which they reside and under the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution the U.S. government is required to make sure that states maintain a “Republican Form of Government.” (The same clause also requires the U.S. to “protect each of them [i.e. the states] against Invasion[.]” Perhaps Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions could have his staff look into invoking the “Invasion” portion of the clause.)

These sanctuary cities may as well be flying the Confederate battle flag at city hall in their modern-day campaign of massive resistance against federal immigration law.

Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Confederates who resisted federal authority and declared war on the United States 155 years ago, or the neo-Confederates in Southern states who resisted federal authority during the civil rights era, Democratic lawmakers and left-wing activists have been working together for decades to create large pockets of immigration anarchy in the United States where the law cannot easily be enforced.

The three criteria for a republican form of government as described in the Guarantee Clause are popular rule, absence of a monarch, and the rule of law. Immigration is a federal responsibility and sanctuary city policies undermine legitimate federal authority and are contrary to the rule of law.

Moreover, actively interfering with immigration enforcement could constitute obstruction of justice and could violate the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act which contains provisions making it unlawful to “harbor” an illegal alien.

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