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Peter Smith :No Cigar for the Treasurer

Posted By on May 6th, 2016

You must have heard of the “the rich”, the people who pay nearly all income taxes flowing into government coffers and yet are pilloried for doing so. Never mind Labor and the Greens, the safe politics of shaking down the rich is thriving in Coalition ranks.
Budgets are getting terribly tedious. I think this because the scope for action is narrowing, as every initiative is loudly bagged these days by somebody or other. Joe Hockey took a walk on the wild side and that served him badly – which he deserved, to be fair — because he was monumentally inept.

“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” So the Prime Minister of Luxemburg, Jean-Claude Juncker, recently said. But do politicians at large really know what to do? I don’t think they do.

Hockey was a poster child for political incompetence. Why do we think a bunch of self-promoters who are good at getting people to vote for them will be competent at running government? Sir Humphrey had it right: politicians can’t be trusted to run governments. What then is the answer? There isn’t one.

Imagine yourself as Treasurer and it is your first budget. You try to cut the deficit by screwing pensioners, denying young people unemployment pay, and charging poor people for doctors’ visits in order to underwrite gee-wiz medical research. You couldn’t write home about such ineptness. This is not an example of a politician knowing what to do and bearing the electoral pain. It is an example of a typically blundering politician who has not the least idea of what to do.

Budget deficits can only be reduced sustainably by cutting the growth in future expenditure below aspirational levels. Of course, even this can’t be done without incurring the wrath of special interests. But it possibly can be done without losing too many votes. Actually cutting expenditure is largely impossible; except for relatively minor amounts in insensitive areas.

Raising taxes doesn’t work because governments can’t resist spending the revenue. To them, an extra dollar of tax revenue is an extra dollar to splurge. That is why they are fond of trumpeting — incurable spendthrifts and debtors that they are — that additional spending has been fully funded; perish the thought that the funds might have been used to pay down debt.

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Italy, Germany Oppose Austrian Border Controls Austria Proposes New Controls at Brenner Pass Crossing to Italy By Liam Moloney and Giada Zampano

Posted By on May 6th, 2016

ROME—Italy and Germany expressed their opposition to border-control measures within the European Union on Thursday, saying such restrictions may lead to the loss of the free movement that has helped turn the 28-country bloc into a success.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a joint press conference in Rome criticized an Austrian plan to construct a 250-meter (820-foot) long checkpoint at the Brenner Pass, which connects Italy and Austria.

Border-control measures could contravene the Schengen accord, which governs passport-free travel between member states.

“I am strongly against any closure” of the Brenner Pass, said Mrs. Merkel at the joint news conference, stressing that Europe needs to find common responses to migration issues. “We can’t abandon whoever defends our borders. We need to remain loyal to each other,” she added.

Thousands of migrants that have reached Italy use the Brenner Pass to head to countries such as Germany and Sweden, where welfare benefits are more generous. Some migrants also aim to settle in Austria and this has alarmed Vienna.

Free movement of people and goods could be put at stake as the EU faces its biggest migration challenge since the end of World War II, the German chancellor warned.

“We either defend our [EU] external borders or we will return to nationalism and lose our freedom of movement of businesses and people,” Mrs. Merkel said.

On Thursday, Mr. Renzi said that about 26,000 migrants had reached Italy via sea so far this year, about 1,000 more than in the same period in 2015.

The Italian premier reiterated Rome’s strong opposition to the Austrian border-control plans.

“We have expressed our clear disagreement with the Austrian positions on the Brenner Pass. They are wrong and anachronistic,” Mr. Renzi said. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Israeli Forces, Hamas Militants Clash Exchanges of fire between the two sides are the first since their 2014 war…By Rory Jones see note please

Posted By on May 6th, 2016

Love the headline….now Hamas terrorists are just militants??? Here is article 15 from the Hamas Charter: “The day the enemies conquer some part of the Muslim land, jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim. In the face of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, it is necessary to raise the banner of jihad. This requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally [in Palestine], in the Arab world and in the Islamic world. It is necessary to instill the spirit of jihad in the nation, engage the enemies and join the ranks of the jihad fighters.” rsk

TEL AVIV—Israeli forces and Hamas fighters traded direct fire for the first time since the two sides went to war in 2014, Israel’s military said Thursday, as tensions escalated along Israel’s border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Israeli jet fighters carried out airstrikes against Hamas targets Thursday morning in response to 10 exchanges of fire with Israeli soldiers in the past three days, said Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner.

Hamas continued to fire mortar shells at Israeli forces until late afternoon, the military said. But no further exchanges were reported in the evening.

The tensions were compounded by what Israel said was its discovery earlier Thursday of a Hamas tunnel extending into Israeli territory from Gaza.

Hamas began firing in response to Israel’s efforts to locate the tunnel on the Gaza border, Col. Lerner said, and a search for other tunnels was continuing.

“Tunnels that have been built on the border between Gaza and Israel are for infiltration,” he said. “We aren’t willing to have tunnels leading into Israel.”

Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior leader of the Islamist movement, blamed Israel for the latest outbreak of violence, saying Hamas fighters had fired on Israeli soldiers only after Israel made moves to reduce the width of an unofficial buffer zone that divides Gaza from Israel.

Palestinian media reported that Israeli airstrikes largely hit open, unpopulated areas. A Palestinian women was hit by shrapnel from an airstrike and died from her injuries, Hamas’s semiofficial Safa news agency reported.

Mr. Marzouk said Egyptian officials were mediating between Israel and Hamas to try to restore the open-ended cease-fire that ended the nearly seven weeks of fighting in 2014.

The Israeli military spokesman denied Egypt was undertaking mediation efforts. He said Israel had no desire for full-scale fighting with Hamas. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Hillary Gets Guccifered If an unemployed taxi driver from Romania knew about Hillary’s server, so did China. By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on May 6th, 2016

Maybe it should be a verb: To be Guccifered. Though maybe, in Hillary Clinton’s case, it would be better phrased as a crime. As in: “They got her on a Guccifer.”

Guccifer is the nom de Internet of the Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar. Few people realize it, but the Eastern European anti-hero is why the world knows that Hillary Clinton maintained a private email server while secretary of state. This week he may have made Mrs. Clinton’s road to the White House a lot rougher.

It’s a case study in why governments have rules about online security. Guccifer’s specialty was hacking top officials and their relatives—with an eye toward mayhem and humiliation. He hacked the account of Dorothy Bush Koch and circulated photos of her father, former President George H.W. Bush, in the hospital. He hacked years of Colin Powell’s correspondence, including personal financial information. He went after FBI and Secret Service agents, senators and the wealthy.

In March of 2013, Guccifer released hacked AOL email correspondence of Clinton crony Sidney Blumenthal, revealing numerous memos he’d sent to Hillary while she was the nation’s top diplomat. Mr. Blumenthal had sent these notes to Mrs. Clinton at a private, nongovernmental email address. Security experts tut-tutted about the risks, though the assumption was that Mrs. Clinton used the private account for the occasional interaction with friends or political operatives. It wasn’t until early 2015 that the nation found out Hillary was using the home-brew server to conduct every bit of her state business.

But that timing is by the by. What matters is that Guccifer knew, at least by March of 2013, that the third-highest official in the executive branch of the most powerful nation of the world was using a private server. Does anyone think a man devoted to hacking politicians and Federal Reserve bankers would ignore that opportunity?

In interviews from his federal jail cell this week (he was arrested in 2014 and extradited to the U.S. earlier this year), Guccifer claimed to have easily and repeatedly hacked Mrs. Clinton’s server. “It was like an open orchid on the Internet,” he told NBC News. “There were hundreds of folders.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Trump’s Israel Adviser: ‘Not in a Million Years Would Donald Have Berated Netanyahu the Way Hillary Did’ Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 5th, 2016

Though Donald Trump has wondered aloud why most Jews voted for President Barack Obama – and why they are likely to cast ballots for presumed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton – he is more “puzzled than furious,” his executive vice president and chief legal officer said on Wednesday, in the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal from the GOP race of remaining rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich.

Jason Greenblatt, an Orthodox Jewish real estate lawyer from Teaneck, New Jersey — who has been working for “The Donald” for the past two decades – made this comment during an hour-long interview with The Algemeiner at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan.

Making it clear at the outset that the views he was expressing were his own and assessments of his employer’s, Greenblatt – whom Trump “appointed” as his Israel adviser during a press conference last month with members of the Jewish media — gave The Algemeiner an overview of what the United States, American Jews and Israel can expect if his boss wins the White House in November.

The Algemeiner: Pro-Israel conservatives are worried that Trump’s “America First” pronouncements indicate a tendency toward isolationism. Are they right to be concerned?

Greenblatt: I don’t think he’s an isolationist. His concept of putting America first is more in keeping with his whole slogan, “Make America Great.”

He needs to create more jobs here; he needs to secure our borders; he needs to prevent terrorism at home. But at the same time, though he views America’s role in the world as a very important one, he does not want to shoulder the burden himself – meaning that the US has been paying for the defense of so many countries that are not supporting their share of the cost. So it’s not as though he’s saying he’s going to put a wall around the whole country; he’s just saying that others have to pay their share.

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HIS SAY: SENATOR BEN SASSE IN HIS OWN WORDS

Posted By on May 5th, 2016

WHY I RAN FOR SENATE

***No, I’m not a career politician. (I had never run for anything until being elected to the U.S. Senate fifteen months ago, and I ran precisely because I actually want to make America great again.)
***No, I’m not a lawyer who has never created a job. (I was a business guy before becoming a college president in my hometown.)
***No, I’m not part of the Establishment. (Sheesh, I had attack ads by the lobbyist class run against me while I was on a bus tour doing 16 months of townhalls across Nebraska. Why? Precisely because I was not the preferred candidate of Washington.)
***No, I’m not concerned about political job security. (The very first thing I did upon being sworn in in January 2015 was to introduce a constitutional amendment for term limits – this didn’t exactly endear me to my new colleagues.)
***No, I’m not for open borders. (The very first official trip I took in the Senate was to observe and condemn how laughably porous the Texas/Mexican border is. See 70 tweets from @bensasse in February 2015.)
***No, I’m not a “squishy,” feel-good, grow-government moderate. (I have the 4th most-conservative voting record in the Senate: https://www.conservativereview.com/members/benjamin-sasse/ http://www.heritageactionscorecard.com/membe…/member/S001197 )

In my very first speech to the Senate, I told my colleagues that “The people despise us all.” This institution needs to get to work, not on the lobbyists’ priorities, but on the people’s: https://youtu.be/zQMoB4aUn04?t=3m8s

Now, to the question at hand: Will I pledge to vote for just any “Republican” nominee over Hillary Clinton?

Let’s begin by rejecting naïve purists: Politics has no angels. Politics is not about creating heaven on earth. Politics is simply about preserving a framework for ordered liberty – so that free people can find meaning and happiness not in politics but in their families, their neighborhoods, their work.

POLITICAL PARTIES

Now, let’s talk about political parties: parties are just tools to enact the things that we believe. Political parties are not families; they are not religions; they are not nations – they are often not even on the level of sports loyalties. They are just tools. I was not born Republican. I chose this party, for as long as it is useful.

If our Party is no longer working for the things we believe in – like defending the sanctity of life, stopping ObamaCare, protecting the Second Amendment, etc. – then people of good conscience should stop supporting that party until it is reformed.

VOTING

Now, let’s talk about voting: Voting is usually just about choosing the lesser evil of the most viable candidates.

“Usually…” But not always. Certain moments are larger. They cause us to explicitly ask: Who are we as a people? What does the way we vote here say about our shared identity? What is actually the president’s job?

THE PRESIDENT’S CORE CALLING

The president’s job is not about just mindlessly shouting the word “strong” – as if Vladimir Putin, who has been strongly bombing civilian populations in Syria the last month, is somehow a model for the American presidency. No, the president’s core calling is to “Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Constitution.”

Before we ever get into any technical policy fights – about pipelines, or marginal tax rates, or term limits, or Medicare reimbursement codes – America is first and fundamentally about a shared Constitutional creed. America is exceptional, because she is at her heart a big, bold truth claim about human dignity, natural rights, and self-control – and therefore necessarily about limited rather than limitless government.

THE MEANING OF AMERICA

America is the most exceptional nation in the history of the world because our Constitution is the best political document that’s ever been written. It said something different than almost any other government had said before: Most governments before said that might makes right, that government decides what our rights are and that the people are just dependent subjects. Our Founders said that God gives us rights by nature, and that government is not the author or source of our rights. Government is just our shared project to secure those rights.

Government exists only because the world is fallen, and some people want to take your property, your liberty, and your life. Government is tasked with securing a framework for ordered liberty where “we the people” can in our communities voluntarily build something great together for our kids and grandkids. That’s America. Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of speech – the First Amendment is the heartbeat of the American Constitution, of the American idea itself.

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MY SAY: THE ELECTION OF OUR DISCONTENT

Posted By on May 5th, 2016

I had a terse conversation with a Brahman from Boston who started the conversation with:….”You could not possibly vote for Trump….” Now, I am no fan of Trump….in fact, I despise him, but I find it amusing that the woman voted for Ted Kennedy- a plagiarist, a liar, a criminal, a philanderer, and a serial harasser of women. Remember the Kennedy-Dodd “sandwich?” Ted and his pal Chris Dodd, while they were Senators once kept a waitress in a diner pinned between them and fondled her until they were separated by force and threats to call the police. And both of those distinguished legislators actually tried to run for president.

She ended the conversation by warning: ” You and the GOP and your conservatives are finished.” Now there’s an overstatement. The old GOP is the Gone Old Party-but I have great faith in the talent of many Republican legislators, and in the next few months I hope to highlight them. One of my favorites is Senator Benjamin Eric “Ben” Sasse Of Nebraska…. a college professor, an intellectual, and a true conservative.

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David Singer: Trump Targets Obama and Clinton Betrayal of Israel

Posted By on May 5th, 2016

Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech has created expectations that he will match Marco Rubio’s pledge to stand by the commitments made by President Bush to Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Bush’s letter dated 14 April 2004.

Rubio made his unequivocal pledge on 3 December 2015 at the Republican Jewish Coalition Presidential Forum during his unsuccessful race to secure the Republican Party’s endorsement as its Presidential nominee:

“I will revive the common-sense understandings reached in the 2004 Bush-Sharon letter and build on them to help ensure Israel has defensible borders”

President Obama and his then former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did everything in their power to wriggle out of those Bush commitments – despite their having been overwhelmingly endorsed by the Senate 95:3 on 23 June 2004 and by the House of Representatives 407:9 on 24 June 2004.

Trump clearly had Obama and Clinton’s betrayal of Israel in his sights – when stating:

“… your friends need to know that you will stick by the agreements that you have with them. You’ve made that agreement, you have to stand by it and the world will be a better place.”

The Bush-Congress endorsed commitments made in that 2004 letter undoubtedly represent such an agreement.

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Can Trump Beat Hillary? Why the presumptive Republican presidential nominee may defy the conventional wisdom once again. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 5th, 2016

After the departure of Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Donald Trump is now the Republican candidate for president. For many in the party, this will be the “Trumpacolypse,” as a Twitter hashtag has it. His unfavorable ratings are at 65%––70% with women, and up to 80% with blacks and Hispanics. With those numbers, a Clinton victory is assured, according to three-quarters of Republican “political insiders” polled by Politico.

Such hysteria six months out from the general election is premature. Much of it reflects the Republican political class’s distaste for the New York real estate developer, reality television star, and braggadocios conspicuous consumer. Trump has violated every canon of presidential campaigning, and scorned all the received wisdom that pundits and prognosticators reflexively dispense. He says what “you can’t say,” and says it in a brutal manner ––“lyin’ Ted” and “crooked Hillary”––that gives many “political insiders” the vapors. In their darker moods, they brood over the possibility of fascism coming to America, or a return of Joseph McCarthy. His biggest offense, though, is that he wins without their help.

They may be right about Trump losing the general. But such a prediction at this point is a guess. Polls record the transient impressions of the people who are polled. Then there’s the “shy Tory” phenomenon, the reticence of people to state their true preference even to an anonymous pollster, leading to a mismatch between the poll numbers and the actual votes. In the last six primaries before Indiana, Trump’s percentage of the vote averaged eight-and-a-half points higher than the polls, according to the New York Times. Of course, if Trump’s favorability numbers are still as dismal on in Octoberr, his defeat will be more certain.

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Migrant Rape Epidemic Reaches Austria by Soeren Kern

Posted By on May 5th, 2016

A 20-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq confessed to raping a 10-year-old boy at a public swimming pool in Vienna. The Iraqi said the rape was a “sexual emergency” resulting from “excess sexual energy.”

Those who dare to link spiraling crime to Muslim mass migration are being silenced by the guardians of Austrian multiculturalism.

According to data compiled by the Austrian Interior Ministry, nearly one out of three asylum seekers in Vienna was accused of committing crimes in 2015. North African gangs fighting for control over drug trafficking were responsible for roughly half of the 15,828 violent crimes — rapes, robberies, stabbings and assaults — reported in the city during 2015.

Austria received 90,000 asylum requests in 2015, the second-highest number in the EU on a per capita basis, but this pales in comparison to what may lie ahead. Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka warned last month that up to one million migrants are poised to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Europe.

The brutal gang rape of a woman by three Afghan asylum seekers in central Vienna on April 22 has shocked the Austrian public and drawn attention to a spike in migrant-related rapes, sexual assaults and other crimes across the country.

The migrant crime wave comes as the anti-immigrant Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) has surged in opinion polls. The party’s candidate, Norbert Hofer, won the first round of Austria’s presidential elections on April 24, and is on track to win the presidency in the second round, run-off election scheduled for May 22.