BOOKS Comments turned off

How Bureaucracy Wars Against Americans’ Control Of Their Own Government By Ben Weingarten

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/05/bureaucracy-wars-americans-control-government/
Expansion of federal agencies’ power over the last century has culminated in the rise of the Deep State, which is seeking to undermine presidential power.

Of all the domestic challenges America faces in government, the administrative state stands preeminent, not only in its size and scope, but in the threat it poses to liberty as such a formidable, fundamentally tyrannical institution. James Madison might as well have been describing the administrative state in Federalist 47, when he wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

A new book, “Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century,” by professors John Marini and Ken Masugi, explores the sprawling federal bureaucracy’s philosophical origins, chronicles its evolution, and provides a compelling argument that the Trump administration is attempting to curtail it. (Disclosure: The authors consulted with me for this book project and I received payment for my work.)

Marini and Masugi have played an outsized but underappreciated role in American political thought, focusing on the theory and practice of the mammoth, ever-ballooning, arguably unconstitutional––and certainly anti-constitutional––bureaucratic morass of which “Unmasking the Administrative State” serves an essential part.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Kavanaughing of Neomi Rao By Jeremy Carl

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-kavanaughing-of-neomi-rao/

Rao is an outstanding nominee who, like many other conservatives, is not being attacked for her faults, but for her virtues.

If you were to design a perfect judge for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a laboratory, that judge would look like Neomi Rao. The D.C. Circuit, the nation’s second most important court, is the leading court in which administrative-law decisions are made and one that has exclusive jurisdiction over many federal regulatory agencies. As it happens, Rao currently serves as an extraordinarily effective head of the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), from which she spearheads the Trump administration’s approach to regulatory policy.

Rao came to OIRA with deep expertise in regulatory policy, having founded the Center for the Study for the Administrative State at George Mason. A graduate of Yale and the University of Chicago Law School, she clerked for Justice Thomas and the highly respected appeals-court judge J. Harvie Wilkinson.

Rao can view legal issues not just from the perspective of her current perch, but also as a former counsel to Senator Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) on the Senate Judiciary committee and as a counselor to former president George W. Bush. Furthermore, she has valuable experience in private practice both domestically and internationally.

POLITICS Comments turned off

One Cheer for Tulsi By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/tulsi-gabbard-peace-campaign/

Perpetual war requires perpetual peace candidates

What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? Elvis Costello’s bitter song by that name was on my mind while I listened to Tulsi Gabbard’s maiden campaign speech for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party over the weekend. The social-democratic space on the left side of the Democratic field has been filling up with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And so it seemed prudent for Gabbard to distinguish herself as the peace candidate, the one woman of the anti-imperialist left. She promised to “end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.” My first thought: good luck to her.

Close listeners of NR’s Editors podcast will note a developing running joke where Rich Lowry teases me for support of Gabbard. And in fact, I find I do have some reasons to cheer her candidacy.

First, she’s at least interesting. The rest of the Democrats will be accusing each other of deviationism over trivialities. Gabbard’s been accused of being a toady of Bashar al-Assad and a Hindu-nationalist fifth columnist. She also grew up in a socially conservative household and, as a very young woman, she participated in her activist father’s campaigns against the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships as marriage. You can imagine how that’s going over among Democrats. But she’s also young and attractive. She’s a veteran of the Iraq war, and still serves in the Hawaii Army National Guard. And unlike Barack Obama, who basically appropriated his wife’s South-Side Chicago identity, Gabbard fully embraces her Hawaiian roots. If one made a word cloud of her first campaign speech, “Aloha” would outrank “love,” “sacrifice,” and even “neocon.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Mexico deploys militarized police to block 2,000 migrants from entering Texas by Anna Giaritelli

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mexico-deploys-militarized-police-to-block-2-000-migrants-from-entering-texas?utm_source=

Hundreds of militarized Mexican police officers were standing guard Tuesday at the border between Piedras Negras, Coahuila, and Eagle Pass, Texas, to prevent nearly 2,000 Central American migrants from illegally crossing into the U.S.

Buses dropped off the migrants in Piedras Negras, a city of around 250,000 residents, late Monday. By Tuesday morning, federal police in full military gear were lined up in two long parallel rows outside of the facility to keep them from leaving the country, according to tweets from Mexican officials.

The Rio Grande separates both countries in that area, and due to the landscape, portions of the border do not have a physical barrier, making it easier for people to try to enter the U.S.

Starting Tuesday, the state’s governor, Miguel Riquelme, plans to begin deporting migrants who illegally entered Mexico on their way to America.

Coahuila officials will ask those staying at the temporary shelter to show humanitarian visas they would have received if they tried to travel through the country legally from Guatemala. Those who do not have the documents will be removed as soon as Tuesday.

Meanwhile, American, Mexican, and Central American officials are in talks about how to handle this new caravan, one of a handful in the past year. Officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Border Patrol, the Guatemalan consulate in South Texas, the Mexican consulate in South Texas, Mexican government, Coahuila state government, and others met again Monday to talk about how to care for and process the group.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senate: Confirm Neomi Rao for D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Roger Klein

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2019/02/05/senate_confirm_neomi_rao_for_dc_circuit_court_of_appeals_111028.html

Among the many victories President Trump has given conservatives, his success in reforming the federal judiciary through judicial appointments will be among the most meaningful and lasting elements of his legacy. One of the President’s top judicial picks, former law professor Neomi Rao, is now awaiting confirmation to replace Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. She should be quickly confirmed.

Ms. Rao was born in Detroit, a child of Indian immigrants. She completed her undergraduate education at Yale, graduating cum laude. After a brief stint as a reporter with the Weekly Standard, Ms. Rao attended University of Chicago Law School, where she was an Editor of the Law Review and graduated in 1999 with high honors and as a member of the Order of the Coif, a legal honor society.

Following law school, Ms. Rao was awarded prestigious clerkships at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit with prominent Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III and at the United States Supreme Court with Justice Clarence Thomas. She later served as Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and from 2005 to 2006 as Associate Counsel and Special Assistant to President George W. Bush.

In 2006 Ms. Rao joined the faculty at the George Mason University Law School, where she distinguished herself as a legal scholar with a focus on administrative law. She founded and was the first director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State and was a driving force behind George Mason’s 2016 decision to name its law school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Administration Threads the Needle in Venezuela By Charles Lipson

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/05/trump_administration_threads_the_needle_in_venezuela_139363.html

The Trump administration has clear goals in Venezuela and is determined to achieve them with limited means. Those goals are straightforward:

–Out with the fraudulently elected regime of Nicolás Maduro, its Chávez-style socialism, and its strong ties to Cuba, Russia, Iran, and China;

–In with the duly elected moderate Juan Guaidó.

To do that without sending U.S. troops means squeezing Maduro with harsh economic pressure, recognizing Guaidó as the legitimate leader, and naming an experienced point man, Elliott Abrams. It also entails, and this would be a departure for President Trump, building a supportive coalition of Latin American nations and major economic powers.

The coalition helps in two ways. First, it blunts Maduro’s knee-jerk claim that any effort to replace him is simply Yankee imperialism. His claim sounds ludicrous when there are massive protests inside Venezuela itself and after nearly every country in South America (Bolivia and Uruguay are the exceptions) recognized Guaidó as the country’s legitimate leader.

Within the region, Maduro’s support comes mainly from Cuba, an ideological fellow traveler with few resources to help. Outside the region, his support comes from Russia, Iran, and China, the triumvirate that now challenges the U.S. around the globe. They would hate to lose their foothold in Latin America.

Of the two coalitions, America’s is obviously much larger and richer, much more capable of exerting economic leverage. Sanctions are key. The heaviest blow was Washington’s decision to place Venezuela’s oil revenues in escrow. With a stroke of the pen, the U.S. Department of the Treasury cut off Maduro’s primary source of foreign exchange, his only way to pay the army. When he desperately tried to move his country’s gold reserves out of Britain, the Bank of England refused. The European Union is likely to impose additional sanctions this week.

These restrictions won’t add much more pain for Venezuela’s ordinary citizens, who already face grim conditions. The economy is in free fall, food is scarce, and inflation tops 1 million percent, according to Reuters. When currency becomes worthless, as Venezuela’s has, the economy is reduced to barter. What will the sanctions do, then? They will make it very hard—nearly impossible—for Maduro to buy food and essential supplies for his soldiers. If they defect, the regime dies.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Howard and Ralph A pair of leftist white guys find themselves victims of the political By Scott McKay culture they helped create.

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

https://spectator.org/howard

Last week was a delicious one for observers of the Ragnarok that the politics of the Left has become, particularly as it signaled the difficulties confronting some of the purveyors of the “smart set” PC culture as they attempt to cash in on their contributions to our national status quo.

Starting with Howard Schultz, the billionaire former Starbucks CEO who, having positioned his company as a leftist cultural icon by such actions as publicly backing gay marriage and imploring customers not to carry firearms in Starbucks stores (though stopping short of banning them), announced on 60 Minutes a week ago that he’ll run for president as a centrist independent.

Why an independent? After all, Schultz was a thoroughly reliable Democrat moneybag throughout his professional life. The answer, as he somewhat furtively explained, was that he knows he could never win his party’s nomination.

“It concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left,” he lamented. “If I ran as a Democrat, I would have to say things in my heart I do not believe.”

Schultz went even further in a CNBC Squawk Box interview back in June of 2018 when he was first beginning to think of himself as a potential presidential hopeful, sounding far saner than the typical candidate within the chaotic Democrat field.

“It concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left. I say to myself, ‘How are we going to pay for these things,’ in terms of things like single payer (and) people espousing the fact that the government is going to give everyone a job.”

“I don’t think that’s realistic,” he said. Then he added: “I think we got to get away from these falsehoods and start talking about the truth and not false promises.”

His bid, which apparently includes having hired former Obama political guru Bill Burton and former John McCain consultant Steve Schmidt, fell flat immediately. So much so that by the middle of the week Michael Moore, the supersized Leni Riefenstahl of today’s Democrat Party, was calling for a boycott of Starbucks until Schultz demurred from running.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

RUTHIE BLUM: PRIMARY CONCERNS

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/primary-concerns/

(February 5, 2019 / JNS) It’s not a hot news flash that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the nemesis of the local left-wing media. Nor is it novel that the feeling is mutual. But ahead of Tuesday’s primaries in Likud, the party Netanyahu chairs, an amusing twist was added to the mix.

Unlike the vast majority of Israeli parties, Likud determines its Knesset list democratically through internal elections in which all dues-paying members are eligible to vote. This means that Netanyahu needs to campaign for the candidates of his choice, rather than simply appointing them at will, the way other party leaders do. Naturally, he has loyalists and rivals within his party. Obviously, he favors the former.

No scandal there. Unless, of course, you’re an Israeli journalist who needs to create one as part of your proverbial putsch attempt.

Whatever else can be said of Netanyahu, he is no dummy, as even his enemies acknowledge. To circumvent the incessant negative coverage aimed at ousting him through ludicrous criminal charges—ironically involving moves on his part to be given a fair shake by the press—Netanyahu launched an Internet channel, Likud TV, for the purpose of broadcasting his message and garnering public support ahead of the April 9 elections. To mock the endeavor, the Israeli media called it a “copycat” version of U.S. President Donald Trump’s weekly “Real News Update.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

EU: Going Full Orwell by Judith Bergman

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13532/eu-full-orwell

The problem is that this professedly noble initiative comes from an organization that has already for several years been censoring free speech in Europe.

The handbook guidelines state that journalists should “Take care not to further stigmatize terms such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islam’ by associating them with particular acts… Don’t allow extremists’ claims about acting ‘in the name of Islam’ to stand unchallenged. Highlight… the diversity of Muslim communities… where it is necessary and newsworthy to report hateful comments against Muslims, mediate the information.” In other words, the guidelines ask journalists to disinform the public.

This is the same European Commission that most recently expressed its disapproval of the withdrawal of Austria from the UN’s “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.” The Compact stipulates that media outlets that do not support the UN’s migration agenda will not be eligible for public funding. How is that for “fully respecting Europe’s fundamental principles of freedom of expression, a free press and pluralism”?

The EU has launched a comprehensive Action Plan against Disinformation. Its purpose, according to a recent press release from the European Commission, is apparently to “protect its democratic systems and public debates and in view of the 2019 European elections as well as a number of national and local elections that will be held in Member States by 2020”.

In June 2018, leaders of EU member states had met in the European Council and invited the European Commission “to present… an action plan by December 2018 with specific proposals for a coordinated EU response to the challenge of disinformation…” It is this action plan that the Commission presented to the public on December 5.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Liberals Don’t Call Out Democrat Hate By Karin McQuillan

Posted By on February 5th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/04/why

Last month’s attack on the Covington Catholic High School boys should be one of those electrifying moments of correction, as when Senator Joseph McCarthy was asked, “have you no shame?”

Instead, it is electrifying only in its illumination: the Democrats have no shame.

Liberals watch their politicians, celebrities, and media leaders attack individuals, even children, and our precious civil liberties. Instead of recoiling, they immediately parrot the vicious talking point of the day. The few exceptions of public protest, the exemplary Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, and last week, Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), makes the ominous acquiescence of other Democrats all the more noticeable.

The mobbing of the Covington boys, and the feeble excuse-apologies—and continued attacks—that followed, join what is now a long series of hate-filled words and acts by leftists that cause regular Democrats no shame, no dark night of the soul, no revulsion towards what they are becoming as people and as a party.

Everything America has ever stood for must go. Being colorblind is attacked as racist. Equality before the law is attacked as sexist. The list of Democrat doublespeak becomes a tedious rant, and what’s the point? Democrats are not listening and if forced to listen, plug their ears and scream at the top of the lungs that it is Trump, Trump, Trump who is ruining everything.

Meanwhile, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom to bear arms, freedom to organize politically (for conservatives), the right to life for a baby about to be born—have all been redefined as violence against blacks, women or gays. A religious teenager standing still in a MAGA hat is an attempt to “erase” minorities that justifies violence to wipe the smile off his face.