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How the State Department is Undermining Trump’s Agenda By The Editors

Posted By on October 22nd, 2017

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has isolated himself from his own department and allowed subordinates to fill a handful of top positions with people who actively opposed Donald Trump’s election, according to current and former State Department officials and national security experts with specific knowledge of the situation.

News reports often depict a White House “in chaos.” But the real chaos, according to three State Department employees who spoke with American Greatness on the condition of anonymity, is at Foggy Bottom.

Rumors have circulated for months that Tillerson either plans to resign or is waiting for the president to fire him. The staffers describe an amateur secretary of state who has “checked out” and effectively removed himself from major decision making.

Hundreds of Empty Desks
About 200 State Department jobs require Senate confirmation. But the Senate cannot confirm nominees it does not have. More than nine months into the new administration, most of the senior State Department positions—assistant and deputy assistant secretary posts—remain unfilled.

What’s more, the United States currently has no ambassador to the European Union, or to key allies such as France, Germany, Australia, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Meantime, Obama Administration holdovers remain ensconced in the department and stationed at embassies in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East.

The leadership vacuum has been filled by a small group opposed to the president’s “America First” agenda.

At the heart of the problem, these officials say, are the two people closest to Tillerson: chief of staff Margaret Peterlin and senior policy advisor Brian Hook, who runs the State Department’s in-house think tank.

Peterlin and Hook are longtime personal friends who current staffers say are running the department like a private fiefdom for their benefit and in opposition to the president and his stated policies.

‘Boxing Out’ Trump Supporters
The lack of staffing gives the duo unprecedented power over State Department policy. Since joining Tillerson’s team, Peterlin and Hook have created a tight bottleneck, separating the 75,000 State Department staffers—true experts in international relations—from the secretary. As the New York Times reported in August, “all decisions, no matter how trivial, must be sent to Mr. Tillerson or his top aides: Margaret Peterlin, his chief of staff, and Brian Hook, the director of policy planning.” In practice, however, that has meant Peterlin and Hook make the decisions.

More important, sources who spoke with American Greatness say, Peterlin and Hook have stymied every effort by pro-Trump policy officials to get jobs at the State Department.
Margaret Peterlin

Margaret Peterlin

“Peterlin is literally sitting on stacks of résumés,” one national security expert told American Greatness. Together, Peterlin and Hook are “boxing out anyone who supports Trump’s foreign policy agenda,” he added.

Peterlin, an attorney and former Commerce Department official in the George W. Bush Administration, was hired to help guide political appointments through the vetting and confirmation process. She reportedly bonded with Tillerson during his confirmation hearings, and he hired her as his chief of staff.
Brian Hook

Brian Hook

Peterlin then brought in Hook, who co-founded the John Hay Initiative, a group of former Mitt Romney foreign-policy advisors who publicly refused to support Trump because he would “act in ways that make America less safe.” In a May 2016 profile of NeverTrump Republicans, Hook told Politico, “Even if you say you support him as the nominee, you go down the list of his positions and you see you disagree on every one.”

Hook now directs the department’s Office of Policy Planning, responsible for churning out policy briefs and helping to shape the nation’s long-term strategic agenda.

NeverTrumpers on Parade

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Czechs Dump the Political Establishment in Favor of a Magnate Andrej Babis now faces the tricky task of assembling a coalition from a fractured Parliament By Drew Hinshaw and Philip J. Heijmans See note

Posted By on October 22nd, 2017

The Czechs have had two distinguished and eminently decent Presidents….Vaclav Havel and Milos Zeman…..Is Babis their Donald Trump? Stay tuned….rsk

PRAGUE—The Czech Republic’s second-richest citizen, who has pledged to upend the country’s constitutional order and boost executive authority, won a legislative election on Saturday, as a breakdown in political consensus sent a record number of parties to parliament

With 99% of ballots counted, the Ano party led by Andrej Babis —a 63-year-old agricultural tycoon who has promised to abolish the Czech senate and a rewrite the country’s election laws—had 30% of the vote. The ruling Social Democratic Party took just 7%, while support surged for a series of minor parties.

As he voted, Mr. Babis—who has also called for a ban on Muslim immigrants, friendlier ties with Russia and a more defiant attitude toward the European Union—called his victory a triumph over the establishment.

“We want to defeat this clientelistic-corruption system,” he said.

Mr. Babis now faces the challenge of assembling a coalition from the most fractured Parliament in Czech history. Nine parties, the most ever, won seats, including the Pirate Party, which believes in internet-based direct democracy and was roughly tied for second at 11% with the center-right Civic Democratic Party.

One of the few points of broad consensus in the legislature is that Mr. Babis shouldn’t be prime minister.

Last month, Parliament voted almost unanimously to strip Mr. Babis of his judicial immunity as a fellow member, clearing the way for courts to prosecute him for charges of fraud he denies.

Some members worry about the unprecedented power that voters have given a magnate who already owns several of the country’s top media outlets.

“I cannot imagine [the country’s center-right Civic Democratic Party] will be in government with Ano, with or without Babis as the prime minister,” said the party’s shadow speaker for EU affairs, Adela Kadlecova. “I am also of the opinion, that a criminally charged politician should not become a prime minister.”

Both the Pirate Party and the fiscal-conservative TOP party, upstart parties that boosted support in the election, ruled out joining a coalition with Mr. Babis.

“We will absolutely try to make a coalition of democratic parties against all populists, extremists and oligarchs,” said TOP’s deputy chairman, Marketa Adamova. “I wish to be able to make a democratic coalition against all those parties.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Spain Moves to Seize Control of Catalan Government, Call Regional Elections Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy seeks to use measures to quell Catalonia’s push for independence By Jeannette Neumann and Giovanni Legorano

Posted By on October 22nd, 2017

BARCELONA—Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy asked lawmakers to grant him unprecedented power to remove the leaders of Catalonia and temporarily control the region from Madrid, a forceful move aimed at bringing the separatist movement to heel.
Mr. Puigdemont and members of his cabinet appeared several hours later at a pro-independence rally in Barcelona that became a mass protest against the central government’s move.

Afterward, Mr. Puigdemont said in a televised address that he would ask Catalonia’s parliament to convene in the coming week to map out a response to the central government’s proposed measures. “The Catalan institutions and the people of Catalonia can’t accept this attack,” Mr. Puigdemont said. “The government of Mariano Rajoy wants to appoint a board to control the life of Catalonia remotely from Madrid.”

One of the targets of Mr. Rajoy’s proposed measures is Catalonia’s police force, a prized symbol of regional power. The 17,000-strong regional police force, known as the Mossos D’Esquadra, resisted Madrid’s orders to halt the referendum on independence earlier this month. A judge seized the passport of the Mossos chief earlier this week amid a sedition probe. The regional force has said the investigation is based on false accusations.

The central government is also seeking to administer Catalonia’s finances. Madrid already seized control of most of the regional government’s spending power in the run-up to the referendum to prevent Catalan officials from dedicating public funds to the independence vote.

“This is a real coup d’état,” Arnau Casadevall, a 27-year-old school receptionist, said at Saturday’s demonstration, which Barcelona police estimated was attended by 450,000 protesters. “I have no intention to stop fighting until Catalonia is free.”

The measures Mr. Rajoy announced were hammered out in recent days with leaders from two of the main oppositions parties, said the premier, a sign of the widespread political support for his bid to halt the Catalan independence drive. Spain’s Senate, where Mr. Rajoy’s center-right Popular Party has a majority, is likely to approve the measures in a vote on Friday. CONTINUE AT SITE

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John Kelly shames the shameless media by Eddie Scarry

Posted By on October 22nd, 2017

As badly as White House chief of staff John Kelly roasted Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., his statements about her unseemly politicization of the president’s call to a Gold Star widow were at the same time a rebuke to how the media reflexively aided Wilson’s narrative.

Kelly said at the press briefing Thursday that he was “stunned” and “brokenhearted” when he saw Wilson in TV interviews and quoted in news reports divulging details about a personal call from Trump to Myeisha Johnson, whose husband died in an enemy ambush earlier this month in Niger.

In front of a room of uncharacteristically hushed reporters, Kelly said he was dismayed to see Wilson politicize one of the few sacred things left: The mourning of a fallen soldier. In this case, Sgt. La David T. Johnson.

Wilson told reporters earlier in the week that she was there for the on-speaker call between President Trump and Myeisha Johnson. She said Trump was “insensitive” because, according to Wilson, Trump told Johnson, “Well, I guess he knew what he signed up for, but I guess it still hurts.”

Wilson told the story to a Miami NBC affiliate and it was passed around by journalists on social media.

Jill Filipovic, a liberal contributor to the New York Times, said on Twitter, “What kind of awful soulless human says this? How does anyone still support this man?”

CNN national security analyst Michael Weiss said the quote relayed by Wilson would be comparable to Trump saying, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay outta the kitchen.”

Wilson went on CNN Tuesday night to recount the story and then did it again Wednesday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

There is no recording of the conversation to corroborate Wilson’s quote or even her ungenerous interpretation of the phone call. Assuming the quote is accurate, Kelly said he had told Trump to say something along those same lines, because it was what most comforted Kelly after his own son died serving in Afghanistan.

But MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who spends three hours each weekday giving his best daring look into a TV camera, helped Wilson’s tale move along.

When Wilson said at the end of the interview that she’s “not trying to politicize” the call, Scarborough sympathetically replied, “No, we completely understand. We completely understand.”

Trump said Thursday night on Twitter that Wilson’s version of the call was a “total lie,” which CNN’s Chris Cillizza, the Golden Corral of political commentary, said was an example of the president taking “the low road.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Saving the American Dream It’s not just about the people at the top Amy L. Wax

Posted By on October 22nd, 2017

Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution has written a flawed but important book about inequality and opportunity in present-day America. According to Reeves’s Dream Hoarders, ours is no longer a mobile society that gives people from all walks of life a fair shot at the American Dream. Although much has been written about the rising fortunes of the top 1 percent over past decades, Reeves’s focus is the highest quintile of the population, the top 20 percent by income and wealth. In his account, people in this tier unfairly “hoard” their privileges. Too many born into affluence remain well-off, and too few from modest backgrounds end up bettering their lot.https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/saving-american-dream/

Reeves is on firm ground in describing the charmed life lived by the upper fifth of society. People in this echelon have pulled away from the rest, with their earnings and wealth steadily increasing in recent decades relative to the larger population. Compared with those lower down on the income scale, those at the top enjoy stable marriages, good health, longevity, safe neighborhoods, superior schools, and steady employment. But according to Reeves, these upper-middle-class Americans have become “dream hoarders.” They have figured out how to preserve their status and pass it on to their offspring. Thanks in no small part to their parents’ advantages, as well as a host of social practices and public policies, the children born to this class are more likely than their peers to graduate from college, especially a selective or prestigious one; attain good jobs; and earn top-quintile incomes themselves. Meanwhile, children born lower on the economic scale struggle to rise, with most never making it into the top 20 percent. To Reeves, this fact alone is deeply unfair and represents a failure of the American Dream.

Dream Hoarders is not just a j’accuse, but a call to action. Something must be done to clear the channels of opportunity, and Reeves recommends that key aspects of private conduct and public policy be structured in service of that goal. But his desire to speed the path upward runs into some serious impediments.
Theorists have long acknowledged, and Reeves agrees, that the main obstacle to social mobility, and indeed to the very existence of a level playing field, is that powerful machine of social reproduction, the family. Compared with those who have less income and education, affluent parents are blessed with a host of advantages, many of which they secure through their choices about how to live their lives. As Charles Murray has noted in his magisterial Coming Apart (to which Reeves only alludes), people in the top tiers are more likely to be well-educated, get and stay married, be dedicated and attentive parents, work hard at their jobs, obey the law, and invest in their communities. They live healthier, more orderly, and longer lives. By contrast, the habits, behaviors, and communities of those lower down on the American totem pole are fast deteriorating, and these trends tell on their children.

Reeves recognizes that these developments are hard to arrest. And he concedes he must meet the challenge of deciding what counts as a legitimate versus an illegitimate advantage, and thus what changes he is willing to recommend to give the less well-off a leg up and make good on his conception of fair opportunity.

He is of two minds about the habits and practices of the upper middle class. He praises affluent parents for their devotion and diligence and the personal attention they lavish on their children, but is concerned that these very virtues tilt the playing field. He doesn’t specify precisely which of their efforts he would leave undisturbed, but they can be surmised from the reforms he proposes. Seeking out safe and pleasant neighborhoods, engaging in enriching activities (including paying for tutoring, lessons, and private schools), helping with homework and college applications, and throwing cash in children’s direction for college, summer support, and even subsidies beyond graduation, would appear to be allowed. But other now-commonplace parental interventions—such as pulling strings to procure jobs—would not.

Reeves also devotes considerable attention to policies and practices that assist well-off families in securing their perch. His main targets are exclusionary zoning, legacy admissions, and unpaid internships. He also provides a familiar laundry list of other proposals, including supplying low-cost, long-term contraception, funding free SAT preparation, eliminating tax credits and savings plans used primarily by higher-income families, and improving lower-income schools by paying teachers more or luring them into less affluent communities.

But is there any reason to believe that these measures will make much difference, especially against the untouchable benefits that privileged parents personally provide? Assessing effects requires taking a harder look at the problem Reeves is purporting to solve.

Reeves claims that the prospects for upward mobility are dismal and deteriorating, at least compared with his benchmark ideal of random sorting, which would have only a fifth of children from each quintile staying where they are. Based on that, he cites data showing that our society has both a “glass ceiling” and a “glass floor”—with more than 20 percent of children born at the top staying there, and significantly fewer in the lower tiers managing to rise. He is also concerned with differences in educational prospects that correspond to income. As befits a member of the elite knowledge class, he has a college fixation and is especially obsessed with children’s unequal chances of ending up at a “selective” college. But the data he cites on educational opportunity and income mobility tell a mixed and equivocal story—one less consistent with “privilege hoarding” than he claims.

Reeves himself admits that mobility rates have never been completely random, and he notes that “scholars are divided on whether relative mobility rates have worsened” since the middle of the 20th century, when the GI Bill sent unprecedented numbers of Americans on to higher education. Moreover, a look at Reeves’s charts reveals that income mobility across quintiles is still substantial, with 20 percent of children born into the bottom fifth rising out of that tier, those born in the middle quintiles as likely to move up as down, and only a minority born into the top tier managing to stay there. Inheritance of educational status is somewhat stickier, but not rigidly so. About 40 percent of those born to parents in the top educational quintile maintain that status, while most in the bottom quintile obtain more years of education than their fathers did.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Somali Who Executed Canadian Terror Attack Entered U.S. Via Mexico see note pleas

Posted By on October 22nd, 2017

Janet Levy wrote about the porous border for narco terrorists in February 2017: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/02/narcoterrorism_on_the_usmexico_border.html

Somali Who Executed Canadian Terror Attack Entered U.S. Via Mexico

The Somali terrorist who stabbed a Canadian police officer and ran over four pedestrians a few weeks ago entered the United States through the Mexican border and was released by Obama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), allowing him to continue his journey north. The ISIS operative, Abdulahi Hasan Sharif, was ordered deported, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokeswoman told various media outlets recently, but was released on an “order of supervision” and the feds never saw him again.

Sharif entered the U.S. in 2011 through the San Ysidro port of entry in California without documentation and was briefly held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, a local newspaper reported. A year later he crossed the border into Canada and settled in Edmonton after being granted refugee status. On September 30 he slammed into an Edmonton police officer with his car then got out of the vehicle and repeatedly stabbed the cop with a knife. After fleeing the scene, Sharif stole a truck and deliberately mowed down four pedestrians. Canadian authorities found an ISIS flag in his car and have charged him with multiple counts of attempted murder, criminal flight causing bodily harm and possession of a weapon. Two years ago, Canadian authorities investigated the 30-year-old terrorist for espousing extremist views. It’s disturbing that Sharif’s northbound trek took him through the U.S.-Mexico border.

As part of an ongoing investigation into cartels, corruption and terrorism, Judicial Watch has for years reported that Islamic extremists are entering the country through Mexico and that ISIS is operating in border towns just miles from American cities. Judicial Watch launched the project in 2014 by exposing a sophisticated narco-terror ring with strong ties to ISIS and connections running from El Paso to Chicago to New York City. Two of the FBI’s most wanted were embroiled in the operation that also had deep ties to Mexico. Less than a year later, Judicial Watch reported that ISIS is operating in a Mexican border town just eight miles from El Paso, the result of Islamic terrorists joining forces with drug cartels and human smugglers knowns as “coyotes.”

When Judicial Watch reported that Mexican cartels were smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town, federal authorities publicly denied the story was true. Never the less, high-level sources on both sides of the border confirmed to Judicial Watch that foreigners, classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA), were being transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. Once in the U.S., the SIAs waited for pick-up in the area’s sand hills just across Highway 20. At the time a Texas Department of Public Safety report leaked by the media had already confirmed that for years members of known Islamist terrorist organizations had been apprehended crossing the southern border.

Last year a high-ranking DHS official told Judicial Watch that Mexican drug traffickers help Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the United States to explore targets for future attacks. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and has lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to information provided by Judicial Watch’s government source. Now Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez, the intelligence gathered by Judicial Watch’s source reveals. Staking out U.S. targets is not difficult and Khabir actually bragged in an Italian newspaper article that the border region is so open that he “could get in with a handful of men, and kill thousands of people in Texas or in Arizona in the space of a few hours.” In the same article Mexico’s top diplomat, Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz, said “this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States.”

While much of the American mainstream media ignores that Sharif made it to Canada via the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s hardly surprising considering Islamic extremists have been infiltrating the country through the famously unprotected region for years. Referring to the recent Canadian attack, a think-tank dedicated to investigating the operations, funding, activities and front groups of Islamic extremists worldwide writes: “Fears about a terrorist using the U.S.-Mexican border as a gateway for an attack have been realized.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

BRAVO, TONY ABBOTT, FOR CALLING OUT GREEN FAKERY MELANIE PHILLIPS

Posted By on October 21st, 2017

The Australian politician Tony Abbott has delivered a really terrific speech on the AGW scam to the Global Warming Foundation. What was so good was that he placed the fake science of anthropogenic global warming theory squarely in its correct and all-important context – the suicidal attack by the west upon its own civilisation and the principles underpinning it, including the pursuit of rationality and evidence-based inquiry. Here are some extracts:

“In Britain and Australia, scarcely 50 per cent describe themselves as Christian, down from 90 per cent a generation back. For decades, we’ve been losing our religious faith but we’re fast losing our religious knowledge too. We’re less a post-Christian society than a non-Christian, or even an anti-Christian one. It hasn’t left us less susceptible to dogma, though, because we still need things to believe in and causes to fight for; it’s just that believers can now be found for almost anything and everything.

“Climate change is by no means the sole or even the most significant symptom of the changing interests and values of the West. Still, only societies with high levels of cultural amnesia – that have forgotten the scriptures about man created “in the image and likeness of God” and charged with “subduing the earth and all its creatures” – could have made such a religion out of it.

“There’s no certain way to regain cultural self-confidence. The heart of any recovery, though, has to be an honest facing of facts and an insistence upon intellectual rigour…

“There are laws of physics; there are objective facts; there are moral and ethical truths. But there is almost nothing important where no further enquiry is needed. What the “science is settled” brigade want is to close down investigation by equating questioning with superstition. It’s an aspect of the wider weakening of the Western mind which poses such dangers to the world’s future.

“Physics suggests, all other things being equal, that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would indeed warm the planet. Even so, the atmosphere is an almost infinitely complex mechanism that’s far from fully understood.

“Palaeontology indicates that over millions of years there have been warmer periods and cooler periods that don’t correlate with carbon dioxide concentrations…

“The growing evidence that records have been adjusted, that the impact of urban heat islands has been downplayed, and that data sets have been slanted in order to fit the theory of dangerous anthropogenic global warming does not make it false; but it should produce much caution about basing drastic action upon it.”

Do read it all.

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WHY ARE FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS BUYING GUNS AND AMMO? $158 MILLION SPENT BY NON-MILITARY FEDERAL AGENCIES By Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on October 21st, 2017

We live in a dangerous world. For the 70,000 officers at Homeland Security and the 40,000 officers within the Department of Justice, proper training and equipment are vital to their daily law enforcement duties. Over a nearly two-year period – the last years of the Obama administration (FY2015 – FY2016), these law enforcement agencies spent $138 million on new guns and ammunition. That seems reasonable.

What’s curious, however, is that traditionally administrative agencies spent more than $20 million. Four notable examples:

1) The 2,300 Special Agents at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are allowed to carry AR-15’s, P90 tactical rifles, and other heavy weaponry. Recently, the IRS armed up with $1.2 million in new ammunition. This was in addition to the $11 million procurement of guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment procured between 2006-2014.

2) The Small Business Administration (SBA) spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to load its gun locker with Glocks last year. The SBA wasn’t alone – the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service modified their Glocks with silencers.

3) The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a relatively new police force. In 1996, the VA had zero employees with arrest and firearm authority. Today, the VA has 3,700 officers, armed with millions of dollars’ worth of guns and ammunition including AR-15’s, Sig Sauer handguns, and semi-automatic pistols.

4) Meanwhile, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agents carry the same sophisticated weapons platforms used by our Special Forces military warriors. The HHS gun locker is housed in a new “National Training Operations Center” – a facility at an undisclosed location within the DC beltway.

Last year, we released our OpenTheBooks.com Oversight Report: The Militarization of America in an editorial published with former-U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn at The Wall Street Journal. Our report quantified the $1.48 billion spent by 67 non-military federal agencies on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment from 2006-2014.

This week, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com updated our data to include gun and ammo purchases over fiscal year 2015 and a partial FY2016. Spending on guns and ammo at 58 non-military federal agencies – including 40 regulatory, administrative agencies – amounted to $158 million.

The continued growth of the federal arsenal begs the question: Just whom are the feds planning to battle?

More examples of agencies amassing firepower over the last two years:

Loading the Gun Locker – Federal agencies spent $44 million on guns, including an “urgent” order for 20 M-16 Rifles with extra magazines at the Department of Energy ($49,559); shotguns and Glock pistols at the General Services Administration ($16,568); and a bulk order of pistols, sights, and accessories by the Bureau of Reclamation whose main job is to build dams, power plants, and canals ($697,182).

Buying Bullets in Bulk – The government spent $114 million on ammunition, including bulk purchases by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ($66,927); the Smithsonian ($42,687); and the Railroad Retirement Board ($6,941). The Social Security Administration spent $61,129 on bullets including 50,000 rounds of ammunition plus 12-gauge buckshot and slug ammo.

The EPA special agents purchased ammunition for their .357 and 9mm revolvers and buckshot for their shotguns. While Bernie Sanders claimed that the biggest adversary to the United States was climate change, the EPA stood ready to fight in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

Hollow-Point Bullets – Despite being outlawed by the Geneva Convention, federal agencies spent $426,268 on hollow-point bullets, including orders from the Forest Service, National Park Service, Office of Inspector General, Bureau of Fiscal Service, as well as Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Scott Pruitt Ends an Obama Administration Abuse of Power The EPA administrator has announced he will end the ‘sue and settle’ scheme implemented by his predecessors. By Rob Gordon & Hans A. von Spakovsky

Posted By on October 21st, 2017

There’s a new day dawning at the Environmental Protection Agency. On October 16, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced that he is pulling the plug on the “sue and settle” strategy his predecessors used to impose new regulations and funnel large amounts of cash to their allies in the environmental movement.

Under President Obama, the sue-and-settle gambit was raised to an art form. The administration would invite special-interest groups to sue the EPA over a regulation that it wanted to change but couldn’t, at least not expeditiously. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the EPA would then almost immediately surrender, agreeing to settle. Inevitably, the settlement entailed consenting to whatever outrageous demands were being made by the agency’s handpicked “adversary.”

As Pruitt noted, this tactic allowed the Obama administration to “circumvent the regulatory process set by Congress,” avoiding the requirements of public notice that are supposed to give citizens and industry a chance to comment on changes in existing regulations or proposed new ones. Under the settlements that resulted, the EPA would often commit to imposing changes that went far beyond what the law required, short-circuiting statutory deadlines and timetables along the way. And even though the EPA settled the friendly suits in record time, it still paid tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to cover the plaintiffs’ legal bills. Between 2009 and 2012, the EPA chose not to defend itself in 60 such lawsuits. In each case, the agency agreed to settle on terms favorable to the advocacy groups, according to a 2013 report of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. These “sue and settle” lawsuits resulted in more than 100 new federal rules estimated to impose $100 million in annual regulatory-compliance costs.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one of the laws that proved especially ripe for friendly lawsuit abuse. It attracted many so-called “deadline” lawsuits, in which plaintiffs sue the government for failing to meet a deadline — like responding to a petition to add a species to the endangered list.

For example, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to re-declare a bird found on the Pacific island of Tinian as endangered. A 90-day clock started ticking as soon as the petition was filed. This particular bird had already been placed on the endangered-species list once, when the USFWS officials misinterpreted a reported sighting of 40–50 Tinian monarchs as being a population estimate for the entire island. In fact, the island teemed with tens of thousands of the birds. Eventually, the agency recognized its blunder; it disingenuously proclaimed the bird “recovered” and removed it from the endangered list.

Among the reasons the CBD cited in arguing that the bird should be put back on the list is that its small range — Tinian is roughly 40 square miles in size — makes it susceptible to “stochastic” — a fancy word for “random” — events that could supposedly wipe it out. But the Tinian monarch population has proved plenty tough. During World War II, the birds survived 43 days of naval bombardment in advance of the U.S. amphibious landing on the island. In the day before the marines hit the beach, Navy battleships shelled the island with hundreds of rounds from 14- and 16-inch guns; the Army hit it with more than 7,000 artillery rounds, and American warplanes dropped over 100 tons of ordinance — including napalm. Somehow, the Tinian monarchs survived not only all this but also the subsequent ground battle, a typhoon, and the introduction of a prolific shrub that took over 40 percent of the island’s forested areas. The bird was reported to be “abundant” shortly after the war.

Nevertheless, in September 2015, USFWS determined that CBD’s petition to re-add the bird to the endangered list “may be warranted” and ordered a status review for the species. This started another clock ticking.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Quo Vadis? The Philosophical, Spiritual Floundering of Europe in 2017 Where Christianity and cultural identity are declining in tandem By Garland Tucker

Posted By on October 21st, 2017

During my recent vacation to Scotland, the National Centre for Social Research released a major new survey, which documented the continuing decline of Christianity in the U.K. The headline read: “Non-believers outnumber the faithful by widest margin yet.” This fall has been driven primarily by young people. Of those between 18 and 24 years old, 62 percent have no religion. The figures for the Church of England were devastating: The proportion of the population describing themselves as Anglican has dropped from 30 percent in 2000 to 15 percent today — with just 3 percent of 18- to-24-year-olds. In Scotland, church attendance has fallen by over half in the past 30 years.

As the import of this survey was sinking in, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, weighed in with a sadly telling reaction. Noting the alarming decline in young believers, he blasted the inequities of Britain’s capitalistic system, which he perceives as “failing our children.” If warmed-over socialism is all the church can offer young people, it’s no wonder they are saying “no thanks” in record numbers. How sadly ironic that the ideas of Adam Smith are criticized by someone who should fully understand capitalism’s unmatched contributions to the improvement of mankind. No economic system in the history of man has done more to lift humans, all over the globe, from poverty.

Welby should also know that it was capitalism, born of competitive innovation and consumer choice, that rebuilt Europe after World War II. The freedom to pursue personal opportunity gave life to a European rebirth. And it should be acknowledged that the sacrifice of young Americans and European allies helped make it possible. The evil of Nazi Germany, and the false ideas it stood for, were defeated because good people were willing to give their lives defending freedom on foreign soil. Why did they fight? Because the Allies shared a common view of the world — a common culture, if you will. It is important to establish that “culture” is not defined by race or country of origin; it is defined by the foundational ideas shared by each individual in a society. Europe’s cultural identity is now in question.

In Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe, the author offers a sobering assessment of modern Europe and raises unsettling questions about the future. “At any time the loss of all unifying stories about our past or ideas about what to do with our present and our future would be a serious conundrum,” Murray writes. “But during a time of momentous societal change and upheaval the results are proving fatal. The world is coming into Europe at precisely the moment that Europe has lost sight of what it is.” Most significantly, Murray questions whether Europe is still Christian. He cites the absence of any mention of Christianity in the European Union’s new constitution, written in 2000, despite the efforts of Pope John Paul II and his successor. The EU instead wraps itself in high-flown rhetoric about “human rights” without any acknowledgment of their source.

Murray traces this crisis of identity back to the late 19th century, to two seminal events. First, the textual criticism of the Bible, originating in Germany and spreading throughout the West, undermined the Biblical foundation of Western Christianity. The second seismic blow occurred simultaneously, with the development of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Whereas it had been a foundational belief that a divine, awe-inspiring plan was behind all of civilization, it suddenly was widely held that science — not faith — held all the answers.

It is not difficult to see the manifestations. In Scotland, the landscape is littered with beautiful old churches that have fallen into disrepair or been recycled into some secular service. I had barely set foot on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh before being confronted with a magnificent stone church which now serves as the “Visitor Information Center.” Farther down the road were several equally handsome churches offered for sale and several serving as retail establishments. Only St. Giles Cathedral remained — but as a sort of museum to the rich Scottish religious history, a history that contributed to the development of the revolutionary ideas of modern democracy and free-market capitalism. Sadly, the world-changing ideas born of the Scottish Enlightenment are barely recognized in their own country.