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François Fillon’s French Revolution by Emmanuel Navon

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

Political pollsters and pundits who were confounded by Brexit and by Trump’s win must now face yet another challenge to conventional wisdom: the stunning victory of François Fillon in France’s conservative primaries for the 2017 presidential election. Fillon embodies all that France’s socialist, secular, and moralist elite reviles: He is a Thatcherite, a devout Catholic, and a political realist. The fact that he won the primaries by a two-third majority is but another confirmation of the gap between elitist narratives and popular feelings.

A partially secularized Catholic country with mercantilist traditions and a reverence for the state (État is always spelled with a capital “e”), France has a cultural hostility toward Anglo-Saxon capitalism. As Margaret Thatcher was rescuing the British economy in the 1980s, France elected in 1981 the socialist François Mitterrand who increased taxes, government spending, and state ownership. As Germany’s (socialist) chancellor Gerhard Schröder cut taxes and slashed unemployment benefits in 2003, France made it illegal (in 2002) to work for more than 35 hours a week. When Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president in 2007, he promised to catch-up with Germany and with Britain. Sarkozy did increase the retirement age from 62 to 65, but he turned out to be erratic and inconsistent, and the 2008 financial crisis deflated his reformist zeal.

The consequences are for all to see. Unemployment rates are 10.5% in France, 4.8% in Britain, and 4.2% in Germany. France’s GDP growth of 1.3% lies behind Britain and Germany’s 1.9%. While Germany has a budget surplus of 0.6% of GDP, France has a budget deficit of 3.3% of GDP. The French government overtaxes and overspends: government spending is 57.3% of GDP in France, 44.1% in Germany, and 43.8% in Britain.

François Fillon has been warning that France will be bankrupt and doomed if it does not get its acts together. His says he will curb public spending (he has committed to cut 500,000 government/civil service jobs), repeal the 35-hour limit on the working week, and trim a 3,000-page long labor code that discourages employment and repels foreign investors. The French left is up-in-arms against what it calls “ultra-liberalism” (whatever that means), but French voters seem to finally be willing to take their medicine and reverse their country’s decline.

Fillon’s economic platform was decried as too harsh (“ultra-liberal,” bien sûr) by his run-off contender in the conservative primaries, Alain Juppé. As for Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National, her economic ideology is hardly distinguishable from that of the far left: she reviles globalization and free-trade, wants to pull-out from the Euro, and would enroll the French state to subdue the market. François Fillon’s Thatcherite economics, therefore, makes him an outsider in France’s political landscape.

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A Dangerous Moment in Korea Pyongyang could misjudge scandal in Seoul and transition in the U.S.

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

The Korean peninsula is always dangerous, but the next few months are especially so. An erratic, nuclear-armed North still covets prosperous South Korea, which is enduring a presidential impeachment crisis even as the U.S. is in a political transition. This is a moment for some supportive bipartisan U.S. diplomacy.

Prosecutors have accused a personal confidant of South Korean President Park Geun-hye of shaking down Korea’s giant chaebol conglomerates for $70 million with the help of government officials. The case could lead to much-needed reforms to curb the power of firms that behave more like feudal fiefdoms than modern corporations—an act of democratic hygiene.

But the scandal means that Ms. Park, who has taken a hard line against the North, will be preoccupied with political survival for the 15 months remaining in her term. Her approval rating is down to 4%, and hundreds of thousands are rallying each weekend in Seoul to demand her resignation. Impeachment votes may come soon, and members of her own party have said they’ll support her ouster.

The danger is that this could be a moment when the North’s regime thinks it can take advantage. Dictator Kim Jong Un is unpredictable at the best of times. But he and his military could misinterpret the noise of democratic debate and accountability in the South as a sign of weakness. Perhaps he might use the next round of U.S.-South Korean joint military exercises scheduled for February as an excuse for an attack or land grab.

The isolated North may also mistake the U.S. political transition as an opening. In glib campaign moments this year, Donald Trump suggested that South Korea and Japan ought to be able to defend themselves and U.S. forces might come home. The President-elect has since walked that back, and in a postelection phone call with Ms. Park he confirmed that the U.S. will fulfill its treaty obligations to defend the South.

A public statement from the presidential transition, perhaps in league with the Obama Administration, is in order. The U.S. also needs to convey to China that any attempt to exploit the current moment would mean the end of the regime in the North and unification to the Chinese border. Beijing needs to convey that message to its clients in Pyongyang.

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The Racist Smear Against Jeff Sessions Trump’s pick for attorney general spent a decade trying to fix disparities in drug sentencing. By Quin Hillyer

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

No sooner did President-elect Donald Trump name his pick for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, than allegations of racism began to fly. A writer at the website Slate lamented the Alabama senator’s “long history of racist words and bigoted deeds.” A headline at Salon called Messrs. Trump and Sessions “two peas in a racist pod.” Nonsense. The charge that Mr. Sessions is a latent racist is belied by a long trail of evidence, strewn with cocaine, through the country of Colombia.

The accusations stem from Mr. Sessions’s unsuccessful nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted down that nomination after hearing testimony about remarks Mr. Sessions had purportedly made in the early 1980s that were deemed racially insensitive. Throughout three intervening decades of public life, Mr. Sessions hasn’t evinced an iota of racial animus. Yet Democrats are clucking that the now-ancient incidents—disputed even then as taken wholly out of context—should disqualify Mr. Sessions from being attorney general.

What should be far more relevant is a conversation Mr. Sessions had, and a legislative course he pursued, after being elected to the Senate in 1996. My small part of that story begins two years later on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

In 1998 I arrived in Mobile, Ala., to write editorials for the daily Register newspaper—and I held my own private doubts about Sen. Sessions. As a self-styled “Jack Kemp Republican” determined to expel vestigial racism from the conservative movement, I had been a founding board member of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism. That was a group formed in 1989 to end the then-ascendant political career of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. I was thus naturally wary of Sen. Sessions, who supposedly had told a joke making light of the Klan’s evils.

On my first reporting trip for the Register to Washington, D.C., I requested interviews with both of Alabama’s senators. The timing was bad—lawmakers were in session—but Mr. Sessions’s press aide said the senator was eager to talk. I was instructed to meet him, between votes, on the Capitol steps.

Long story short, Sen. Sessions was on a mission. He wanted somebody, anybody, to write about the importance of American policy toward Colombia. That U.S. ally was at risk of being toppled by the narco-financed, communist guerrillas known by the acronym FARC.

It was a subject far from my interests. But Mr. Sessions put the stakes in memorable context. The senator can be a discursive speaker, but he kept returning to a central contention: FARC-allied drug lords were responsible for much of the cocaine that polluted the American streets. As a former federal prosecutor, he was concerned about the violent crime accompanying the cocaine scourge.

He spoke about addicts and criminals not with vilification, but with compassion. “You’ve got these poor guys in the inner city,” I remember him saying. “Nobody provided them much of an education; they can’t find a job; and somebody tells them they can get high for relatively cheap by smoking these crack rocks. They get addicted and they do something terrible and end up in jail and their lives get ruined. We’ve gotta help our Colombian allies defeat these drug lords at the source, where they grow this stuff. It’s just ruining all these lives.”

It was this same train of thought—compassion for the users of crack cocaine—that led Sen. Sessions to introduce the Drug Sentencing Reform Act in 2001. The law at the time punished crack cocaine 100 times more harshly than powdered cocaine. Mr. Sessions specifically argued that this created unfair racial disparities, since crack was the drug of poor inner cities, while powder was favored by white Wall Streeters. Such compassion for black addicts is far from a hallmark of someone motivated by racial animus. CONTINUE AT SITE

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RUTHIE BLUM: WHAT REACTIONS TO CASTRO’S DEATH REVEAL

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

Not known for mincing words, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump responded to the news of Fidel Castro’s death on Saturday by calling Cuba’s former leader “a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades,” whose legacy is one of “firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.”

He then extended a hand to the monster’s victims.

“Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty,” he said.

It was a perfect statement, both in content and in tone, sharply contrasting the public expressions of mourning — even adulation — voiced by prominent left-wing and Islamist figures around the world, including in North America.

Take Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “deeply sorrowful” reaction, for instance. Calling Castro “a larger-than-life leader” and a “legendary revolutionary and orator,” Trudeau lauded him for making “significant improvements to the education and health care of his island nation,” and said Castro’s supporters and detractors alike “recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people.”

Though the Cuban people are being forced by governmental decree to mourn their oppressor for nine days, it is doubtful that they remember “El Comandante” fondly. After all, their high literacy rates cannot make up for their abject poverty or lack of freedom to read what they choose. If anything, they envy those of their countrymen who escaped to the U.S., where they are flourishing financially and allowed to live their lives as they please.

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A Troubling Pick for Democratic Jews By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

After taking white working-class voters for granted in November, the Democratic Party seems poised to do the same for Jews – and that could have important implications for the already troubled U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who lead the party’s progressive wing, are backing Rep. Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim with a long history of anti-Semitic leanings and anti-Israeli positions, as the party’s next chairman. So too is the incoming Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, who is considered one of Israel’s strongest Democratic backers.

Ellison’s bid and high-level backing reflect the party’s increasing leftward drift on Israel-related issues, in which one-sided views about the Jewish state – particularly related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – are far more acceptable as mainstream Democratic positions than a decade ago.That raises two major questions for the U.S.-Israeli relationship:

First, will a future Democratic president and Congress provide the party’s traditional support for Israel that dates to President Harry Truman’s recognition of the Jewish state just 11 minutes after it was created – support that now includes America’s generous military aid, its intelligence sharing and its protection from anti-Israel resolutions at the morally challenged United Nations?

Second, will U.S. support for Israel remain a bipartisan issue, or will it increasingly fall victim to partisan politics – with Republicans aligning themselves forcefully with Jerusalem while Democrats take a balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and broader Arab-Israeli relations?

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MY SAY: LEAVE THE UN!

Posted By on November 29th, 2016

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/leave-the-united-nations-ruth-king.htmlThe story of Taiwan’s expulsion from the UN is a cautionary tale for Israel. In 1971, after Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger implemented a rapprochement with the despots of Communist China, pro-American Taiwan was expelled by the United Nations to accommodate Peking (now Beijing).

In 1979 the American embassy in Taipei was downgraded to a consulate, the embassy to China relocated to Beijing.

Although Taiwan gave up all claims to the mainland, it didn’t help at the UN which systematically reduced Taiwan’s role, banning it not only from the Security Council but from the General Assembly. It has hung on to a peripheral place on a few subcommittees, where it is routinely harassed by other members. Taiwan continues to apply for UN membership but its applications have been denied, shamefully with American support for the continuing ban. Nonetheless Taiwan remains a thriving democracy now governed by a woman, Tsai Ing-wen.

The American embassy today is in Tel-Aviv not in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital. The United Nations edges closer and closer to recognition of a “Palestinian” state. Israel can meet the fate of Taiwan should a “Greater Arab Palestine” be formally endorsed by the representatives of the “HateIsraelstans”– those post-colonial nations that won independence in the 1950s, increasing the number of UN member states to 193, most of them oppressive tyrannies.

The United Nations and its sub agencies bash, libel and condemn Israel in an unending barrage of hostile resolutions, while ignoring the depredations of the most oppressive regimes in the world.

In response Israel has adopted two opposing policies.

One–the less appealing–is making concessions, even though all previous concessions have had disastrous results. Israel then airbrushes the inevitable violent Arab/Moslem response.

The second–and more appealing—policy is one through which Israel garners respect for strength, determination and indifference to the howling of antagonists.

The incredible lightning victory of 1967 brought an outpouring of Western support. So did the epic rescue of hostages at Entebbe in 1976. So did the raid of 1981, launched from an air base in the Sinai, which destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak.

Initially the last produced howls from the left. To its discredit, the United States abstained on a vote for UN resolution 487 which condemned Israel’s attack on an IAEA-approved nuclear site, entitled Iraq to sue for compensation, and urged Israel to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards.

However, much of the international press and public admired Israel’s pluck. For a brief period Israel basked in approval before turning to “peace processing” away its sovereignty.

So here is my proposal for a daring act by Israel. Leave the United Nations. Pack up, close the Permanent Mission to the United Nations and find real jobs for all the bureaucrats, pseudo diplomats and ancillary staff.

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Peter O’Brien :The AGW Scam Runs Cold

Posted By on November 29th, 2016

It is one thing to persuade gullible boy and girl reporters that climate change is sending the planet on a one-way trip to catastrophe, but average citizens are smarter than that. They notice this year’s other-than-predicted cold and their faith dies, one stupendous electricity bill at a time’
One thing that CAGW sceptics and alarmists seem to agree on is that, as both sides say, ‘weather is not climate’. Each camp trots out that line whenever the other cites a particularly hot or cold spell to support its position. And whilst the aphorism is true in general, its power in the hands of alarmists is waning — a case study in the law of diminishing. I’ll return to this point later.

At about this time last year and the year before, Gavin Schmidt, the soon to-be-redundant, number-crunching head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a catastropharian nonpareil, revealed his agency’s very elastic global surface temperature record. This is always accompanied by the gleefully morose warning ‘this year is likely to be the hottest ever recorded’. Under his watchful eye and, it must be said, his hand (or is it merely a thumb on the scale?), so it proven to be.

Here’s how it played out in 2014. On January 16, 2015, NASA GISS issued a statement jointly with NOAA NCDC announcing that 2014 was the ‘warmest year in the modern record’. As there is no shortage of scientifically semi-illiterate and terminally credulous reporters, this was trumpeted by the global media as yet further “proof” the planet was speeding toward its sweaty death throes. However, on closer examination, it turned out that 2014 beat the previous record (2010) by a mere 0.02C, well within the margin of error of 0.10C. Schmidt later conceded that they were only 38% certain that 2014 was, after all, a record. You can read all about this from a number of sources, but why not use the one least likely to call out any irregularities on the part of true ‘climate scientists’? That would be the ABC, in other words. the ABC.

Gavin must have learned his lesson because 2015 presented a different story. Here’s how this one was reported by Climate Central, benignly described described by Wikipedia as a “non-profit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate science” but, as the casual visitor to its website will discern at a glance, a bottomless pit of warmist alarmism.

2015 Shatters Hottest Year Mark; 2016 Hot on its Heels?

It’s official: 2015 was the hottest year on record, beating out 2014 by the widest margin in 136 years of record keeping, U.S. government agencies announced Wednesday.

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Muslim Refugee Brings Jihad Terror at Ohio State And the Left uses it to call for…gun control. Robert Spencer

Posted By on November 29th, 2016

Ohio State University student Abdul Razak Ali Artan on Monday morning set off a fire alarm on campus, the drove his car into the crowd of students evacuating the building. Then he jumped out of his car and began stabbing people with a butcher knife. In a departure from the usual denial and obfuscation, Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs was refreshingly honest, saying: “I think we have to consider that it is” a terror attack. Leftists took advantage of the occasion to call for gun control, which might have been a cogent argument were it not for one inconvenient detail: Artan didn’t have a gun. But above all, Artan was a “refugee”: the attack vindicates President-elect Trump on Muslim immigration.

Artan was no poster boy for gun control, but he may have been one for the Islamic State, which issued this call in September 2014:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….

Intriguingly, before his jihad attack, Artan demonstrated that he knew well how to play the victim card. He appeared in Ohio State University’s The Lantern, in a feature entitled “Humans of Ohio State.” In it, he spoke about being “scared” about performing his Islamic prayers in public:

I just transferred from Columbus State. We had prayer rooms, like actual rooms where we could go to pray because we Muslims have to pray five times a day. There’s Fajr, which is early in the morning, at dawn. Then Zuhr during the daytime, then Asr in the evening, like right about now. And then Maghrib, which is like right at sunset and then Isha at night. I wanted to pray Asr. I mean, I’m new here. This is my first day. This place is huge, and I don’t even know where to pray. I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be. If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But, I don’t blame them, it’s the media that put that picture in their heads so they’re just going to have it and it, it’s going to make them feel uncomfortable. I was kind of scared right now. But I just did it. I relied on God. I went over to the corner and just prayed.

Abdul Razak Artan, “third-year in logistic management,” is dead now, so The Lantern can’t go back to him and ask him if he understands better now why people might be nervous about Muslims praying, and why it isn’t just the fault of “the media.”

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A Party of Teeth-Gnashers The broken record of racism/sexism/homophobia plays on and on and on. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 29th, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442535/print

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After the Democratic equality-of-opportunity agenda was largely realized (Social Security, Medicare, overtime, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, civil rights, etc.), the next-generation equality-of-result effort has largely failed.

What is left of Democratic ideology is identity politics and assorted dead-end green movements as conservation has become radical environmentalism and fairness under the law is now unapologetic redistributionism. The 2016 campaign and the frenzied reaction to the result are reminders that the Left is no longer serious about formulating and advancing a practical agenda. In sum, for now it is reduced to a party of gatecrashers.

The Podesta archive, when coupled with the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, summed up the liberal ideology: progressive platitudes as cover for an elite’s pursuit of power and influence. Examine a coastal Democratic establishmentarian, and there is little discernable difference in his lifestyle, income, or material tastes from those conservatives (usually poorer) whom he accuses of all sorts of politically incorrect behaviors. Self-righteous outrage is a Democratic selling point and a wise career move for journalists, academics, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Without an ideology that even remotely matched the life she led, Hillary Clinton could only run a campaign without consistent positions. She flipped on the Keystone pipeline and trade agreements. She refuted the entire 1990s Clinton economic and social agenda. Indeed, her positions of 2008 — anti–gay marriage, border enforcement, and rural populism — were the very positions that she smeared others for embracing in 2016. In 2008, Clinton damned Obama for his “clingers” speech; in 2016, she trumped him with her deplorables and irredeemables.

She both derided Wall Street and was enriched by it. Her 2008 brief flirtation with the white working classes as a modern Annie Oakley came full circle in 2016, with exultant promises to put coal miners out of work. In the end, Hillary had no ideology other than getting even richer by leveraging the office of secretary of state and pandering to identity politics in hopes that record numbers of women and minorities would vote for a 68-year-old white multimillionaire, much as they had voted for Barack Obama. The more she talked of the LGBT or Latino communities, apparently the more we were to think that the Clintons had subverted their offices and reputations to grift a $150 million personal fortune for the underprivileged.

One of the reasons Trump won without commensurate money, organization, ground game, big-name endorsements, establishment unity, conservative media encouragement, and despite a campaign of gaffes and opposition-planted IEDS, was that half the country felt it would not have survived four more years of the cynicism of left-wing politics. In other words, voters got tired of being accused of thought crimes from a party led by wealthy people who made them poorer while adding insult to injury.

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Report: Trump Picks Rep. Tom Price as HHS Secretary By Debra Heine

Posted By on November 29th, 2016

Dr. Price, a fierce ObamaCare opponent, has his own plan to replace it ….
According to the Washington Post, President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a former orthopedic surgeon and staunch ObamaCare opponent to serve as the secretary of health and human services in his administration.

An insider from within the transition team told the Post that the public announcement of Trump’s selection of Price, could come as early as Tuesday.

As HHS secretary, Price would become the Trump administration’s point person on dismantling and replacing the Affordable Care Act, one of Trump’s major campaign promises.

Price, 62, who represents a suburban Atlanta district, has played a leading role in the Republican opposition to the law known as Obamacare and has helped draft several comprehensive bills to replace it.

During the campaign, Trump railed against the Affordable Care Act and vowed to repeal and replace it. But after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office shortly following the election, he was convinced to perhaps keep some of the more popular elements of the law intact and amend the law rather than repeal it.

Trump has said he would favor keeping the provision preventing insurers from refusing coverage for preexisting conditions as well as the one permitting children to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.

Price is a six-term congressman who chairs the House Budget Committee and is said to be close to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).