Conservative Chronicle for March 23 2016 by Mid-America Publishing Corporation

At Issue this week... March 23, 2016 2016 Election Barone (16, 24) Greenberg (18) Morris (18) Sowell (15) Tyrrell (17) Will (17) Abortion Bozell (26) AEI Buchanan (21) American Jews Krauthammer (27) American Principles Jeffrey (23) BART Saunders (29) Border Security Jeffrey (28) CDC McCaughey (30) Celebrity Saunders (3) Clinton, Hillary Napolitano (10) Dear Mark Levy (19) GOP Race Limbaugh (11, 25) Health Care Malkin (24) Moore (13) Illegal Immigration Saunders (9) Leftist Mobs Buchanan (3) Prager (1) Leslie’s Trivia Bits Elman (14) Madison, James Williams (5) Media Erickson (23) Missile Defense Bay (31) MSNBC Bozell (29) National Debt Farah (30) Obama, Barack Murchison (2) Poverty Thomas (21) Reagan, Nancy Chavez (10) Elder (9) Thomas (14) Religious Liberty Hollis (4) Republican Establishment Charen (8) Massie (22) Trade Harsanyi (5) Lambro (12, 20) Schlafly (13) Trump, Donald Coulter (7) Greenberg (26) Kudlow (6) Lowry (6) Towery (15) Wallace, George Lowry (27)

Leftist Mobs by Dennis Prager

The left may well get Trump nominated

his past Friday, a left-wing mob shut down a Donald Trump rally in Chicago. Most Americans viewing what happened saw it for what it was — another left-wing assault on the speech of those with whom they differ and on traditional American civility. Not surprisingly, the media reporting has concentrated overwhelmingly on Trump for incendiary and inexcusable comments he has made at some of his other rallies that were disrupted by protesters. For example, he offered to pay any legal bills incurred by a man in the audience who sucker-punched a protester as he was being led out of a Trump rally.

Harvard, Lewis & Clark College, Temple University and many others. Conservative speakers have either been disinvited or shouted down at Brandeis University, Brown University, the University of Michigan and myriad other campuses. And leftists shout down virtually every pro-Israel speaker, including the Israeli ambassador to the United States, at every university to which they are invited to speak.

MANY HAVE also noted the alleged assault by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was accused of trying to grab Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields’ arm. (I say “alleged” because I have watched the video of the alleged incident four times but could not ascertain what actually took place.) For the record, I have been relentless in my criticisms of Donald Trump, both in print and on my radio show, preferring any other Republican candidate. Based on his past, I have not had any reason to trust him as a conservative or as a Republican, and he has exhibited serious character flaws. Nevertheless, truth must trump opposition to Trump. And the truth is that the left-wing attack on Trump’s Chicago rally had little, if anything, to do with what the incendiary comments Donald Trump has made about attacking protestors at his events. Leftist mobs attack and shut down events with which they differ as a matter of course. They do so regularly on American college campuses, where conservative speakers — on the rare occasion they are invited — are routinely shouted down by left-wing students (and sometimes faculty) or simply disinvited as a result of leftist pressure on the college administration. A couple of weeks ago conservative writer and speaker Ben Shapiro was disinvited from California State University, Los Angeles. When he nevertheless showed up, 150 leftwing demonstrators blocked the entrance to the theater in which he was speaking, and sounded a fire alarm to further disrupt his speech. In just the last year, left-wing students have violently taken over presidents’ or deans’ offices at Princeton, Virginia Commonwealth University, Dartmouth, Providence College,

YET THE mainstream media simply ignore this left-wing thuggery — while reporting that the shutting down of a pro-Trump rally is all Trump’s fault for his comments encouraging roughing up protestors at his events. That the left shuts down people with whom it differs is a rule in every leftist society. The left — not classical liberals, I hasten to note — is totalitarian by nature. In the 20th century, the century of totalitarianism, virtually every totalitarian regime in the world was a leftist regime. And the contemporary American university — run entirely by the left — is becoming a totalitarian state, where only left-wing ideas are tolerated. Tens of millions of Americans look at what the left is doing to universities, and

Dennis

what it has done to the news and entertainment media, and see its contempt for the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. They see Donald Trump attacked by this left, and immediately assume that only Trump will take on, in the title words of Jonah Goldberg’s modern classic, Liberal Fascism. And if these millions had any doubt that Trump alone will confront left-wing fascism, Trump’s opponents seemed to provide proof. Like the mainstream media, the three remaining Republican candidates for president — John Kasich, the most and Marco Rubio the least — blamed Trump for the left-wing hooligans more than they blamed the left. It is possible that in doing so Senators Cruz and Rubio and Governor Kasich effectively ended their campaigns and ensured the nomination of Trump as the Republican candidate for president. The combination of left-wing violence and the use of it by the other GOP candidates to wound Trump rather than label the left as the mortal threat to liberty that it is may clinch Trump’s nomination. AND IF THE left continues to violently disrupt Trump rallies, they — along with the total absence of condemnation by the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate — may well ensure that Donald Trump is elected president. Between the play-Fascism of Trump and the real Fascism of the left, most Americans will know which one to fear most. March 15, 2016

Conservative Chronicle

BARACK OBAMA: March 15, 2016

‘Imperfect?’ Who, me? Our moralist in chief

merica’s moralist in chief as promised originally, when a new and dropped by Dallas the other fearless leader pledged to seek “unity of day to tsk-tsk at the tumult purpose over conflict and discord.” and shouting that have come to mark the Whereupon the great unifier, the 2016 presidential campaign. great builder of national Barack Obama bridges: professed dismay — Rammed a at the “insults health care plan and schoolyard down the national taunts” and the throat, eschewing (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate “manufacturing compromise with (of) facts” marshalled by Republicans opponents, relying on Democratic votes questioning his stewardship. alone to do the deed, railing critics as obstructionists. WHY, THERE’S “divisiveness” — Made, in the process, promises along racial and religious lines, the that proved, shall we say, evanescent president said. Children are getting the (such as the promise that you could wrong idea about their country. “They keep your plan and your doctor if you watch the way we conduct ourselves. liked them). They learn from us.” Their instructors, — Threw nearly a billion dollars at it would seem, have been flunking their the economic crisis without lasting efown tests. fects on economic growth and prosperThe president’s remarks in Dallas ity, so that the economy slogs along at had been tailored to take into account substandard growth rates, with workthe disruption in Chicago the previous force participation continuing to shrink. night of a Donald Trump rally: Left— Attempted, via executive order, wing protestors had come to shout, to exempt from deportation as many as rather than listen to provocations they five million foreigners here illegally. could have rejected more easily from a (Federal courts are weighing the constibarstool. tutionality of the Obama gambit.) Tsk-tsk. Isn’t it plain, as the president —Hinted that much of the opposition said, “America is pretty darn great?” to his plans has a racial foundation. What’s the problem? Shouldn’t we per— Repudiated his original position haps be strewing roses in his path? opposing same-sex marriage; thereafPerhaps we should be — if the bene- ter turned himself into an advocate of fices we enjoyed under Obamaism were LGBT rights, which are to be asserted in

William

Murchison

the face of federal contractors less persuaded than himself that ancient as well as religious understandings of malefemale relationships don’t have the old zing. — Etc., etc., etc. BARACK OBAMA, in fine, may have turned himself from unifier into the most divisive president since Franklin Roosevelt — a comparison he might admire in view of his philosophical congruence with FDR and, maybe especially, with the social justice warrior who was FDR’s wife, Eleanor. That’s not the point. We elect presidents, most of the time, on account of their viewpoints. Obama is manifestly entitled to his opinions. When those opinions nevertheless diverge sharply from those of substantial numbers of Americans, or call into question his own commitment to the rule of law rather than the rule of the pen and the phone — there begins the trouble.

The worst of it, at that, may be Obama’s tendency to lecture his countrymen in high professorial mode — as at the Dallas rally. Reasonable people believe as I do! Unreasonable people resist me — never, or rarely, people with conscientious doubts. Obstructionists, that’s what I’m up against: professional sticks in the mud, people who wouldn’t like me if I gave ‘em a CD of my speeches. Such is the World of Obama: You’re with me or there’s something wrong with you. I’m your duly elected president, and I’ve come to deliver your marching orders. You see, don’t you? Ah, maybe not. The growing public anger to which the president directs our attention has as much to do with Barack Obama as with Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Incessant moralizing doesn’t go down well in a democracy, nor does the habit of reminding others at regular intervals how much more you know than they do. IT IS NOT the kind of point that will likely occur to our moralist in chief, who, fortunately for us all, rarely, if ever, puts a foot wrong. Just ask him.

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March 23, 2016 LEFTIST MOBS: March 15, 2016

Brownshirts and Republican wimps

riday evening’s Donald Trump rally in Chicago was broken up by a foul-mouthed mob that infiltrated the hall and forced the cancelation of the event to prevent violence and bloodshed. Brownshirt tactics worked. The mob, triumphant, rejoiced. And the reaction of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich? All three Republican rivals blamed — Donald Trump. WITH HIS “dangerous style of leadership,” Trump stokes this anger, mewed Rubio, “This is what happens when a leading presidential candidate goes around feeding into a narrative of bitterness and anger and frustration.” Rubio implies that if Trump doesn’t tone down his remarks to pacify the rabble, he will be responsible for the violence visited upon him. Kasich echoed Rubio: “Donald Trump has created a toxic environment (that) has allowed his supporters and those who sometimes seek confrontation to come together in violence.” But were the thousands of Trump supporters who came out to cheer him that night really looking for a fight?

Or were they exercising their right of organizations and thousands of people peaceful assembly? to pull off. Great work.” Cruz charged Trump with “creating Now, Sanders did not order this asan environment that only encourages sault on the civil rights of Trump supthis sort of nasty discord,” thus offer- porters. But MoveOn.org has ing absolution to endorsed him and the mob. “Bernie” signs and Friday night T-shirts were evcried out for erywhere among moral clarity. the disrupters. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate What we got from Hence, he has a Trump’s rivals duty to disavow was moral mush that called to mind this conduct and those who engaged in JFK’s favorite quote from Dante: The it. hottest places in Hell are reserved for If Sanders refuses, he condones it, those who in time of moral crisis main- and is morally complicit. tain their neutrality. Can one imagine how the media As news outlets have reported, Fri- would pile on Trump if working-class day’s disruption at the University of white males in Trump T-shirts invadIllinois-Chicago auditorium was a pre- ed a Hillary Clinton rally and shut it planned assault. down? Behind it were the George SorosCan one imagine how the networks funded MoveOn.org, Black Lives Mat- and cable TV channels that host town ter, Occupy Wall Street, Hispanics halls with the candidates would react if hoisting Mexican flags and cop-haters hell-raisers snuck into their audiences carrying filthy signs to show their con- and shouted obscenities during discustempt for police. sions? The keening over the First AmendPEOPLE FOR Bernie, a pro-Sand- ment would not cease for weeks. ers outfit, tweeted, “[This] wasn’t just Some of us have been here before, luck. It took organizers from dozens of and know how this ends.

Pat

Buchanan

CELEBRITY: March 15, 2016

O.J. and Trump: Celebrity victims

atching FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story brings me back to the one day I spent in 1995 at Simpson’s murder trial. I play that day over and over in my head. The prosecution had spent an inordinate amount of time asking the coroner about an indentation in Nicole Simpson’s back caused, if I recall correctly, from the hook in her bra strap. I thought prosecutors were wrong to burn hours on minutiae instead of presenting a simple but devastating three-week case. No, reporters who had followed the trial from the start assured me, prosecutors had to establish the indentation’s cause rather than hand an opening to Simpson’s legal “Dream Team.” I SHOULD have realized that the trial’s press corps had gotten sucked in to the public relations spin; in heeding them, I was, too. The Dream Team had done such a fine job wooing the media that prosecutors started playing to the cameras, not the jury. Distorted by media saturation, I believe the “Trial of the Century” ended with O.J. Simpson’s getting away with killing his ex-wife and waiter Ronald Goldman. How fitting that the miniseries, based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Run of His

Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, is airing as 2016 GOP presidential primary front-runner Donald Trump is looking for new ways to play the victim and dominate the news cycle. The Dream Team convinced jurors that Los Angeles police had it out for Simpson because he was black, when to the contrary, Toobin notes,

Debra J.

cops had been too easy on Simpson when he beat his wife because Simpson was a celebrity. In like fashion, the billionaire Trump has supporters thinking that he is an outsider when, to the contrary, he is an insider and that he is an underdog when he is a rich bully. THE TRUMP Show’s latest plot twist started when left-leaning activists fell under the mistaken impression that they have the right to suppress Trump’s free speech rights. Wrong. They have a right to protest outside a Trump rally, but if they try to interrupt the candidate inside a campaign event, Team Trump has the right to evict them. Things went south last week when a 78-year-old fa-

natic punched a protester as he was escorted outside. It is fair to assign some of the blame to Trump, as The Donald at a recent rally harked back to the good old days when pesky protesters would be carried out in stretchers. He also said he would pay the legal bills of supporters who punch protesters. Trump’s true believers see a system stacked against them, even though, according to media watchdog Andrew Tindall, Trump garnered 32 percent of the three major networks’ nightly news coverage of the presidential campaign in 2015 — more than 2.5 times the time for the second-most covered candidate, Hillary Clinton. Sen. Marco Rubio should be so aggrieved. SATURATION MEDIA coverage distorts reality. Toobin writes that 95 million Americans watched some of the Bronco chase that followed Simpson’s failure to turn himself in to authorities; it exceeded the number who watched the Super Bowl that year by five million. Usually when a suspect tries to run from police, the act itself is considered a sign of guilt. Yet during the Bronco chase, Angelenos cheered. Likewise, when Trump bashes the media, fans applaud. They hate the media, but they love Trump because he is on TV.

When the urban riots broke out in the ‘60s, Hubert Humphrey declared that, if he lived in a ghetto, “I could lead a pretty good riot myself.” At his 1968 convention in Chicago, radicals baited and provoked the cops in the front of the Conrad Hilton, and as this writer watched, their patience exhausted after days of abuse, Chicago’s finest tore into the mob and delivered some street justice. “Richard Nixon,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson, “is living in the White House today because of what happened that night in Chicago.” Hunter got that one right. That fall, Humphrey was daily assailed by the kinds of haters now disrupting Trump rallies. Everywhere he went, they chanted, “Dump the Hump!” At times, Humphrey came close to tears. That fall, Humphrey realized the monster he helped nurture. My tormentors, he said, are “not just hecklers, but highly disciplined, wellorganized agitators ... some of them are anarchists, and some of these groups are destroying the Democratic Party and destroying this country.” In 1970, when President Nixon sent U.S. troops into Cambodia to clean out Viet Cong sanctuaries, and students rioted, Ronald Reagan called them “cowardly fascists,” and declared, “If there’s going to be a bloodbath, let it begin here.” Not much Cruz-Rubio-Kasich equivocating there. When radicals stomped down Wall Street desecrating Old Glory, construction workers came down from the building sites they were working and whaled on them. Union president Peter J. Brennan was soon in the Oval Office — and in Nixon’s Cabinet. “Secretary Bunker,” we called him. Prediction. Given their “victory” in Chicago, MoveOn.org and its allied nasties will try to replicate it, again and again. And as Americans came to despise the ‘60s radicals, they will come to despise them. And, as in the 1960s, the country will take a turn — to the right. America has changed from the land we grew up in. But she is not yet ready to allow ugly mobs screaming obscenities at Trump and his folks inside and outside that hall in Chicago, or their paragons like socialist senator Bernie Sanders, to take over the country. Those raising hell in the street in Chicago and that convention hall are unfit to be citizens of this democratic republic. FOR AS Edmund Burke reminded us, “Men of intemperate minds can never be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Conservative Chronicle

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY: March 10, 2016

Pro-choice majority affects more than abortion’s legality

n the political right, the en- any of the most important abortion tirety of commentary seems cases were decided), the Department devoted to Donald Trump’s of Health and Human Services’ perniransacking of the Republican Party cious regulations pursuant to the ACA, and the corresponding abandonment and other attacks on personal and reliof conservative principles. (For the re- gious liberties across the country. As many readers will remember, cord, the GOP abandoned conservative principles years ago, and now conser- the Green family, which owns Hobby successfully sued to vative voters have abandoned the GOP. L o b b y , restrain the fedPretty simple.) eral government Some of Cafrom forcing them tholicism’s leadto provide four ing lights are specific types of insisting that no (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate contraception believing Catholic can support Donald Trump. A num- required by the HHS mandate. The ber of Republicans are publicly saying Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision (in that they will vote for Hillary Clinton if which now-deceased Justice Antonin Scalia joined), held that the Green famTrump is the Republican nominee. ily did not lose their religious rights unOBSCURED BY the widespread der the Religious Freedom Restoration indignation (the righteousness of Act, simply by choosing to do business which is a subject for another column), in a corporate form. Hobby Lobby is not the only plainare the implications for personal liberty if a victorious Hillary Clinton were tiff. Dozens of cases have been filed to appoint another pro-abortion justice by individuals and organizations obto the United States Supreme Court. jecting to the HHS contraceptive manWhich, as president, she most certainly date. Most recently, the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious order of would do. Pro-abortion activists love to yell nuns, have had their case taken by the about the perilous state of women’s Supreme Court, which will hear oral right to abortion. They always profess arguments in two weeks. But the fight over contraception in to be terrified that women who want abortions will not be able to obtain the Hobby Lobby, Little Sisters of the them. For those who don’t care, there- Poor and other cases is just the tip of the fore, or who don’t want to have abor- spear. The coming battle will be over tions themselves, the consequences of abortion as covered health care within a pro-abortion Supreme Court seem the meaning of the Affordable Care limited to the largely uninteresting Act. It is reasonable to expect that, just possibility that abortion will remain le- as they did with contraception, activists will soon argue that access to aborgal. *Yawn* But the confluence of a number tion (and physician-assisted suicide, by of trends makes clear that what’s at the way) is health care which is guarstake is far more insidious than sim- anteed by the Affordable Care Act. As ply the ongoing legality of abortion. was the case with contraception, this A pro-abortion Supreme Court must will become leverage to argue that all be viewed in light of the Affordable hospitals — even religiously affiliated Care Act (which was not in place when hospitals — as well as clinics and pro-

Laura

Hollis

fessional physicians’ practices provide abortions, the religious beliefs of their employees or owners notwithstanding. This is not far-fetched. Comparable arguments have been made in other contexts, and those can serve as precedent. In Washington and Oregon, respectively, florist Barronelle Stutzman and bakers Melissa and Aaron Klein have had their businesses shuttered for refusing on religious grounds to provide flowers or cakes for gay weddings. State tribunals have held that religious beliefs could not justify “discrimination.” In California, pro-life pregnancy centers are being forced by state law to promote abortion clinics at their own facilities — and over their religious objections. Even though information about abortion services is everywhere in California, pro-abortion activists argue that women are “entitled” to that information, and that pro-life centers are somehow therefore “obligated” to provide it. IT CAN AND will be argued that women have a right to an abortion, that it ought to be covered health care within the meaning of the Affordable Care Act, and that any physician, clinic or hospital providing obstetric or gynecological services should be obligated to provide abortion as one among many services that they, as a business, make available to their patients. Those who find this scenario implausible will no doubt point to the fact that abortion is already excluded from the ACA, and there are dozens of federal and state laws that purport to provide “conscience protections” on the basis of religious liberties. True. But regulations can be rewritten. And even laws on the books must be interpreted and enforced, as a recent case in New Jersey demonstrated, when 12 nurses sued to avoid being forced to participate in abortions in violation of their religious beliefs. The nurses settled with the hospital. But a spokesperson for the ACLU called the nurses’ efforts to protect their rights “discrimination,” saying, “No woman should have to fear that medical staff will place ideology over duty or deny her care.” That’s the future, right there. Any regulation requiring abortion to be provided by doctors, clinics or

hospitals would certainly make its way up to the United States Supreme Court, where nine people would decide whether the right to abortion supersedes religious liberties. But if the Hobby Lobby case is any indication, religious liberties would face an uphill battle in a Court dominated by Obama and Clinton (Bill and Hillary) appointees. One of the biggest hurdles facing anyone opposed to performing or providing abortions will be their status as a commercial enterprise. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg dissented vehemently in the Hobby Lobby case, arguing that religious beliefs were individual only, and could not extend to a business, even when that business was a closelyheld (privately owned) corporation. Ginsberg opened her dissent this way: “In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.” Nor were individual liberties sacrosanct in her view; Ginsberg further argued that neither the First Amendment, nor the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects sincerely-held religious beliefs when they “significantly impinge on the interests of third parties.” A hospital is a commercial enterprise. Most medical clinics are commercial enterprises. A physician’s practice is a commercial enterprise. It is no leap at all to anticipate the argument that these commercial enterprises have no protection for religious beliefs, and that those of their owners and employees can be overridden, because they significantly impinge on the rights of women to obtain abortions. GINSBERG WAS joined in her dissent by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. One more justice, and that group enjoys a majority. If you think that someone’s religious freedom not to provide abortions could not be overruled by a group of five pro-abortion justices, think again. And think of that, disgruntled Republicans, when you consider a vote for Hillary Clinton.

March 23, 2016 TRADE: March 11, 2016

A vote for Trump is a vote against American consumers

s I was listening to Donald Trump’s performance art/ news conference the other night, I wondered whether it was even worth writing another column about the assorted lies and myths he peddles on trade. I don’t think so.

TRUMP PROMISES to bring Third World jobs back to an advanced economy, and millions of voters — left and right — find this emotionally satisfying and politically reasonable. Many of these people just want to find work, so it’s understandable. And when the economy is stagnant, you’re not going to allay working-class anxiety by pointing out that capital account surpluses matter more than trade deficits or that productivity, not foreigners, is realigning the workforce — even if it’s all true. People just don’t care. I do wonder, though, why there

All you people with Samsung phones hasn’t been more political emphasis on Trump’s promise to make the products (Samsung is the nation’s top seller, with average Americans buy every day more 22.5 percent of U.S. market share) could expensive. That might matter to voters look forward to similar costs embedded who are on the fence or haven’t been into your plans — unless, for some reason, South Korea would be granted impaying close attention. Do you like those affordable elec- munity from Trump’s protectionism. tronic goods — you know, those giant TRUMP MIGHT be used to goldTVs, high-tech laptops and super pocket computers you’re walking around with? plated phones on his private Boeing The prices of tech products and ser- 757, but average Americans can’t afpay double their cellvices have fallen over the past decade ford to phone bill. because of many These price hikes policies Trump extend to food and rails against. So transportation — though a lot of and anything else Americans might (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate you can think of. like the sound of Take Wal-Mart, for instance, which is forcing Apple to assemble phones right here in the United States, how would not only America’s largest employer but they feel about paying $100 more (or also one that sells affordable goods to whatever it would be) every time they vast numbers of working-class people. And the majority of the merchandise renew a cellphone plan?

David

Harsanyi

JAMES MADISON: March 16, 2016

Our forgotten statesman

eorge Washington, our first president, is probably our greatest and most decent statesman. We celebrate Washington’s Birthday each February. But March 16th marks the birthday of probably the second-most important and decent American, James Madison. Madison became our fourth president, but his presidency is not the chief source of his greatness. There would have been an entirely different America without Madison’s enormous input and foresight at the contentious 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. There were 55 delegates to the convention. Like Madison, some had a formal college education, while others did not. From Madison’s notes about the quality of the debates and discourse, one could not tell who was college-educated and who was not. Their ages ranged from 26 (Jonathan Dayton) to 81 (Benjamin Franklin), with the average age being 42. Alexander Hamilton was a key figure at the convention. He called for a president for life with total veto power over the legislature. Most other delegates, led by Madison along with John Adams, wanted a republic; none wanted a democracy. Madison, who would become known as the “Father of the Constitution,” argued that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.” Delegate Edmund Randolph agreed, saying, “In tracing these evils to their origin, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” Adams added:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Eleven years earlier, Madison had helped to develop the Virginia Constitution, and it was his Virginia Plan that served as the basis for debate in the development of the U.S. Constitution. Madison, along with Hamilton, argued for a strong but limited central government that could unify the country.

Walter

DURING THE Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made that would have allowed the federal government to suppress a seceding state. Madison rejected it by saying, as summarized by the transcript: “A union of the states containing such an ingredient (would seem) to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a state would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.” This vision of a state’s independence and right to secede was expressed at Virginia’s ratification convention, which held, “The powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or op-

pression.” Rhode Island’s and New York’s ratification documents made similar statements. By the way, Rhode Island anti-federalist resistance against the Constitution was so strong that civil war almost broke out July 4, 1788. Madison’s political genius is mostly seen in his contribution to The Federalist Papers, which were co-authored with Hamilton and John Jay. The papers were written to persuade the citizens of New York — and secondarily other states — to ratify the Constitution. Ratification was no easy task. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended our war with Great Britain, held that each state was a sovereign nation. As such, each feared giving up its rights to a powerful central government. Anti-federalists wanted some sort of guarantee that states would remain sovereign and that the power of the federal government would be limited and it would be recognized as a creation of, an agent of and a servant of the states. They said their votes to ratify could only be obtained if the Constitution contained a bill of rights guaranteeing the rights of the people and their states. The most notable and influential anti-federalists were Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, George Mason and Richard Henry Lee. THESE FEW words here do little justice to James Madison’s greatness as one of our Founding Fathers, but a day honoring his birth would help us learn more about his contribution and, as well, learn how much we have betrayed his vision of what constitutes a free people.

Wal-Mart sells, despite its recent nationalistic sales pitch, is manufactured (in part or fully) abroad. If Trump is going to start trade wars and raise tariffs (American consumers, not the Mexican or Chinese government or its oligarchs, will pay for every cent), he should explain how his supercalifragilistic deals will both punish these countries and make goods cheaper for American consumers. Elect Trump if you want Wal-Mart to double the price of your grocery bill. Or take a look at any list of the most sought-after affordable cars in the United States. You will notice that it is dominated by Japanese (and other foreign) manufacturers. Have you also noticed that Trump’s grievances are always aimed at Mexico, China — guilty of the greatest theft in the history of the world, according to Trump — and Japan but not Germany or Sweden? The other day, Trump said this about Japan, a country that he’s really started focusing on lately: “When Japan thinks you mean it that we’re not going to let them sell the cars like that because they’re killing us — you know what we sell to Japan? Practically nothing. They have cars coming in by the millions, and we sell practically nothing.” Not going to let them sell cars? Has Trump told American workers who build Japanese-brand cars — nearly four million cars in the United States in 2015 — in Ohio, Ind., Ala., Ga. and 10 other states? In February 2016, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler accounted for about 47 percent of automakers’ U.S. market share. Japanese companies such as Toyota, Honda and Nissan made up about 33 percent. And unlike Trumpbranded merchandise, a big percentage of those cars are manufactured here in the U.S. I’m sure laying heavy tariffs on Japan — or whatever “evening the playing field” is supposed to mean — would not only kill jobs in Ohio but almost certainly make the price of affordable foreign cars rise. On the bright side, Trumpism would create more government-guaranteed union jobs, which also would be bound to make those cars more expensive. Maybe this is what people want. THE BACKLASH against globalization is ongoing, but in the end, it’s foot-stomping. Thankfully, nothing can really be done to stop it unless there is a sea change in politics. Do I believe that attacks on the consumer side of protectionism would make a big difference in the election? No. This isn’t a movement dictated by reason. But rather than argue abstract truths (and I’ve been guilty of this), maybe it’s time to concentrate on the pain American consumers would feel if Trump got his way.

Conservative Chronicle

DONALD TRUMP: March 11, 2016

Response to claim of my ‘Pauline conversion’ on Trump

y friend Jonah Goldberg has written a column entitled “Conservative Purists Are Capitulating with Support of Trump.” In this piece, Jonah goes after me and Stephen Moore for allegedly giving up our free-market principles for what he calls “purely consequentialist reasons.” I am not sure of the full meaning of this phrase, but it sounds like it means we’ve changed our beliefs because Donald Trump is the leading candidate in the GOP presidential race. JONAH IS an old and valued friend, and I respect and admire him enormously. In fact, I wish I could write as well as he does — even when he comes after me. But I want to set the record straight on a number of points where I think Jonah gets it wrong. First, Steve Moore and I continue to oppose Donald Trump’s trade policies. Even if his 45 percent tariff threat on China is simply a negotiating card, as Trump told me in recent interviews, we still think that’s the wrong way to go. Speaking for myself, I believe China is a major trade violator. The Chinese break all the rules. They counterfeit our goods, steal our international property rights and cyber-hack our industries and government. Something must be done about it. But a 45 percent tariff would be a major tax on American consumers and businesses. It would probably do more damage to the U.S. economy than to China’s. Now, I think we need a very strong U.S. president to enforce current trading laws between the U.S., China and the World Trade Organization. And perhaps some targeted economic sanctions on Chinese companies could work. For example, the U.S. has decided to sanction Chinese telecom giant ZTE for trade violations with Iran. This is a more precise response to trade violations than a 45 percent tax. Trump may well have the presidential leadership skills to solve the China problem without resorting to economy-wrecking tariffs. But at the moment Steve Moore and I disagree with him on this topic. Second, Jonah argues that I have moved markedly in Trump’s direction on immigration. Here are the facts: I wrote a piece in mid-December where I announced a much tougher position on immigration — a big change in my thinking. But this had nothing to do with Trump. It was all about the war against ISIS. The full title: “I’ve Changed. This Is War. Seal the Borders. Stop the Visas.” I argued for a wartime moratorium on new visas and new immigrants because of the substantial danger of ISIS terrorists infiltrating our system. The

piece was written just after the horrific business investment. I think it’s an exattacks in Paris and San Bernardino. I cellent plan that would substantially argued that until FBI Director James grow the American economy and bring Comey gives a green light to new vi- trillions of dollars in overseas capital sas, and until we completely reform back to the U.S., which in turn would the vetting process for new foreign foster millions of new jobs and faster visitors, the borders should be sealed. growth. What’s more, a War brought me to this position. My number of think only mention of tanks believe the Trump was when biggest beneficiaI disagreed with ries of a signifihim for singling cant corporate tax out Muslims. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate cut would be lowMy proposal was er-middleand based not on religion but on the threat of ISIS infiltra- middle-income wage earners. They, tion into the United States. There was by the way, have not had a raise since 2000, which is probably why they’re nothing “consequentialist” about it. opposed to trade deals and illegal imFINALLY, I have for many months migrants, too. In the Michigan Republican priendorsed Trump’s tax-cut plan. In particular, I like his business-tax-cut mary exit poll, 33 percent said trade strategy, which includes a 15 percent expansion would create more U.S. rate for large C-corps and small S- jobs while 54 percent said it would corps along with easier repatriation take away U.S. jobs. But I prefer an and cash-expensing write-offs for new economic-growth solution to this mid-

Larry

Kudlow

dle-class angst, not a protectionist program. And I think Trump’s businesstax-cut package would lessen trade fears by providing wage earners with a significant pay boost. Thus, yes, I have endorsed Trump’s tax-cut plan. On the other hand, I have not endorsed any GOP candidate. As a commentator on this race, I think it would be inappropriate to do so at this time. So, in answer to my friend Jonah Goldberg, I believe I am sticking to my pro-growth, supply-side strategies of lower tax rates and free-trade. Regarding immigration, where I have changed my view, that’s all about the war against ISIS. I WANT TO assure my friend Jonah that I have not experienced any “Pauline conversions on the road to a Trump presidency.”

DONALD TRUMP: March 10, 2016

The Billy Mays of the GOP

he presidency has been occupied by lawyers, ex-generals, a former actor and even a peanut farmer, but never before by a pitchman. Donald Trump seeks to become the first. He is the Billy Mays of the GOP, doing what the late, ubiquitous celebrity pitchman never could dream of: making the sale to a major political party and, he hopes, to the nation. Trump fashions himself a builder, but he is really a marketer and, more than that, a salesman, with methods that have their roots in infomercials and before that on boardwalks and at carnivals.

MAYS BECAME a very wealthy man pitching everything from OxiClean to Mighty Putty to — who can forget? — Zorbeez. A Mays pitch was high-energy (“Hi, Billy Mays here for ...”). It was simple and easy to understand. It was full of superlatives. The Quick Chop, to take one example, was the fastest, easiest and safest way to chop anything — and, of course, the best deal on TV. And his pitches included offers of free stuff: in the case of the Quick Chop, a Quick Grater thrown in at no cost (as well as a second Quick Chop, if you paid separate process and handling). A Fortune magazine article on Mays noted how his sales secrets date back to the old carnival days. Trump instinctively understands the art. The candidate knows how to “bally the tip,” or create a spectacle to draw a crowd, and how

to “nod them in,” or say things to get a crowd of potential customers to nod along (e.g., we are going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it). An admirer of Mays writes that he “learned on the Atlantic City Boardwalk that buyers want to be led,” and that he makes “sure you understand he’s talking to YOU, that he understands the problems you have and, most importantly, he has the perfect solution.” Sound familiar?

Rich

What is most disturbing about Trump’s eponymous scammy business ventures — like Trump University, or the Trump Network, a failed multilevel marketing venture — is that they bear an unmistakable resemblance to his campaign. IN TRUMP’S pitch for Trump University, you hear the same grandiose promises: “Success. It’s going to happen to you.” The same meaninglessly vague statements: “Trump University is about knowledge about a lot of different things.” The same assurances that Trump will hire the best and the brightest: “We are going to have professors and adjunct professors that are absolutely terrific, terrific people, terrific brains, successful. We are going

to have the best of the best.” The same incredible claims: “These are all people [the so-called professors] that are handpicked by me.” It was Trump the pitchman who felt compelled to devote his latest primarynight news conference to defending his sundry Trump products — whether they still exist or not — after Mitt Romney mocked them. It was an odd spectacle, but what do you think Mays would do if someone questioned whether Kaboom was really the best tile cleaner? At least Mays is said to have believed in his products. Trump’s insistence on the vitality of his defunct ventures led to instant debunking. Not that he cares. The Trump method is to spread a thick lather of bravado over a foundation of mendacity. There is, of course, overlap between the work of a pitchman and a politician, but Trump makes the two indistinguishable. He isn’t a rejection of politics so much as a grotesque parody of it. He’s like any other politician, only more dishonest, insincere and unscrupulous, and less principled, informed and civil. He is a way for angry people to send a message to the political class: We have such low regard for you, we think you are no better or different than Donald Trump. THE SENTIMENT is understandable. But if you think it will end well, I have an Awesome Auger or an EZ Crunch Bowl to sell you, provided you order without delay.

March 23, 2016 DONALD TRUMP: March 9, 2016

Springtime for pundits — ‘Trump anxiety’ Consider the following: If you’re into self-dramatization, — Adolf Hitler held gigantic rallies, Donald Trump’s candidacy is perfect where he inspired millions with rousing for you. Half of the Washington political class speeches. Donald Trump holds gigantic is vowing to vote for Hillary — even rallies, where he inspires millions with Stalin! — over Trump; psychologists rousing speeches. — Adolf Hitler talked about mak(and massage therapists) report they are country great again. treating patients for “Trump anxiety;” ing his Donald Trump talks lengthy thoughtabout making his pieces on Trump country great again. have no room to — Adolf Hitler mention his sigpromised military nature issue, im(c) 2016, Ann Coulter victories. Donald migration, but get Trump promises prolix on George Wallace, Mussolini and Hitler. (Never military victories. — Adolf Hitler had a loyal and overMao, Stalin or Lenin, curiously.) weight henchman, Hermann Goering. YOU’RE GOING to have to act Donald Trump has a loyal and overquickly if you hope to be among the first weight henchman, Chris Christie. — Adolf Hitler blamed a specific 200 princesses to feel the pea under 15 group of immigrants for all the nation’s layers of mattresses. To save you time, I will provide the problems (Ed: Jews weren’t immigrants prototype. Do not be surprised if the fol- — Close enough!). Donald Trump lowing turns up, word for word, under blames a specific group of immigrants the byline of David Brooks, Stephen for all the nation’s problems. — Adolf Hitler vowed to build a wall Hayes, Cokie Roberts, every single writer for Salon, Gawker, National Re- (Ed: Wait a minute — when did Hitler view, Commentary and The Huffington talk about a wall? Shhhh! Nevermind!) Post. And then, of course, Fareed Za- Donald Trump vows to build a wall. — Adolf Hitler was a teetotaler. Donkaria will steal it. ald Trump is a teetotaler. “J’accuse Donald Trump” — Adolf Hitler had a hobby that he Watching the candidacy of Donald Trump, I am continually struck by his enjoyed very much (painting). Donald resemblance to a man who came to Trump has a hobby that he enjoys very power in a far-off land nearly 85 years much (golf). — Adolf Hitler had an opulent home ago, a historical epic that I had naively in the city as well as a country home, hoped was well buried in the past.

Ann

Coulter

“The Berghof” in Berchtesgaden. Donald Trump has an opulent home in the city as well as a country home, “Mar-aLago” in Palm Beach. — Adolf Hitler was involved with a woman from Central Europe, Eva Braun. Donald Trump is married to a woman from Central Europe, Melania Knauss. — Adolf Hitler had a pact with the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941; Donald Trump said nice things about Russian president Vladimir Putin. — Adolf Hitler required all non-Jewish, German civilians to greet one another with a rigid right-arm salute, while exclaiming “Heil!” or “Heil Hitler!” Donald Trump has asked audiences to promise to vote for him by raising their hands, which is the PRECISELY same thing. — Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian; Donald Trump has never smoked. — Adolf Hitler forcibly annexed Czechoslovakia. Donald Trump tried to merge two casinos in Atlantic City. — Adolf Hitler invested hundreds of millions of dollars on German aviation

to upgrade the Luftwaffe. Donald Trump has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in private jets. — Adolf Hitler never had any children, but if he had, they would probably have been blond. Both of Donald Trump’s daughters are blond. — Adolf Hitler’s favorite food was liver dumplings, a dish very similar to meatloaf. (Ed.: They’re not remotely similar. No one knows that.) Donald Trump’s favorite food is meatloaf. — Adolf Hitler had light hair and a moustache. Donald Trump has light hair and a moustache. (This has not been definitively established, but some who knew Trump in the 1970s recall that he had a moustache, albeit a fuller, longer one.) — One of Adolf Hitler’s idols was World War I fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen, also known as “the Red Baron.” Donald Trump’s son is named Barron. (It’s spelled differently, but sounds the same.) — Adolf Hitler liked Eva Braun because she was very attractive; Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, is very attractive. — Adolf Hitler vowed to exterminate entire races; Donald Trump has vowed to exterminate ALL Mexicans and Central Americans. (Mr. Trump has yet to call for this, but if he had, it would be an amazing parallel and speak very ill of his character.) — One of Adolf Hitler’s favorite desserts, not his No. 1 favorite, but one he enjoyed several times a year, was chocolate ice cream. Donald Trump has talked about formerly liking Oreos. (Recently, he vowed never to eat Oreos again because Nabisco moved its factories to Mexico. This does not negate his previous position on the cookie.) — Adolf Hitler was known for erecting concentration camps — surrounded by walls to keep people out, particularly Mexicans. (Ed: That’s not true.) Donald Trump wants to build a wall. — Allowing Adolf Hitler to come to power was a horrible mistake for an entire nation; allowing Donald Trump to come to power will be a horrible mistake for an entire nation. IN CONCLUSION (dramatic music plays), I have covered American politics for 30 years. For the first time in my life I am afraid for my country. Very afraid. Very, very afraid. Very, very, very afraid.

Conservative Chronicle

REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT: March 11, 2016

For the establishment — faux conservatives “Burn it down.” That’s the slogan of miring dictators, encouraging mob viofaux conservatives who now rejoice that lence, fomenting racial and ethnic strife the Republican Party is being smashed — with Sandersesque leftism on entitleby a slick, howlingly transparent grifter. ments, abortion and 9/11-truther foreign The urge to destroy has a kind of por- policy. And what sin has brought down this nographic appeal to a certain personality — but it’s a shock to find it so wide- despoiler upon the Republican Party? W h y are so many selfspread. styled conservaThe Repubtives complacent lican Party is about his success? choosing an odd Was it the failure to time to commit stop Obamacare? suicide. Obama’s (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate Please. That was two victories were painful setbacks, but in the Obama era never possible with Obama in office. the Democrats lost 13 U.S. Senate seats, It would have been possible, in fact it 69 House seats, 913 legislative seats, 11 was probable, that it would have been governorships and 30 legislative cham- replaced if Republicans held majorities bers. All that stood between Republi- in Congress and got an agreeable execucans and real reform at the federal level tive. But now? No. Failure to get control was the White House — and the Demo- of the border? Illegal immigration from crats were sleepwalking toward nomi- Mexico has slowed to a trickle and, in nating the least popular major player in fact, more Mexicans are now leaving than coming. Failure to defund the ExAmerican politics. port-Import Bank? Yes, crony capitalREPUBLICANS HAVE managed ism is disgraceful, but the irony of those to find someone who is even less ac- who are offended by such things sidling ceptable. One-third to 40 percent of up to Trump — who boasts of buying Republican primary participants are influence — is rich. As Edmund Burke observed about embracing a figure who not only will certainly lose the general election but the extremists of his day: “He that sets also introduces an element of fascism to his house on fire because his fingers are American politics, and thus demoralizes frostbitten can never be a fit instructor in the Republican majority while delegiti- the method of providing our habitations mizing the party in the eyes of others. It with a cheerful and salutary warmth.” Here are a few words of praise for the is Trump’s unique contribution to wed authoritarianism — threatening the First Republicans. The Republican Party has Amendment, promising war crimes, ad- become more reform-minded and more

Mona

Charen

conservative over the past 30 years. The Arlen Specters and Bob Packwoods are pretty much gone. In their places are dynamic, smart, articulate leaders such as Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, Cory Gardner, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, Susana Martinez and Marco Rubio. The party has become more conservative and more ethnically diverse.

“public option” in Obamacare and card check. Republicans declined to give President Obama universal pre-K, the “Paycheck Fairness Act,” expanded unemployment benefits, a higher federal minimum wage, varieties of gun control, mandatory paid sick leave, a tax on multinational corporations, higher taxes on individuals and more. They passed bills authorizing the Keystone pipeline (which was vetoed) and trade promotion BETWEEN 2008 and 2014, when authority (the one issue Obama is not Republicans were the minority in the wrong about). They endorsed entitleSenate, they blocked cap and trade, the ment reform. The American system is slow and balky by design. It requires maturity and patience to achieve your political goals. Democrats have been remarkably strategic, returning again and again to cherished objectives, whereas Republicans have told themselves that leadership treachery rather than Madisonian architecture accounts for their frustration. Those who encouraged the “burn it down” mania and who popularized the narrative that a malign Republican “establishment” was responsible for the state of the nation may be many things but they are not conservative. Conservatives respect institutions and traditions. They understand that process is ultimately more important than policy outcomes because it guarantees legitimacy and political stability. Laws can be repealed. That is why Obama’s worst offenses were not Dodd-Frank, the stimulus bill or Obamacare, as bad as those were. His worst offenses were against constitutional constraints. He governed by executive fiat and got away with it, thus undermining the rule of law. A PLURALITY of Republicans seems to have accepted and adopted contempt for the Constitution. They will reap the whirlwind and look back longingly at the Republican “establishment.”

March 23, 2016 NANCY REAGAN: March 10, 2016

Nancy Reagan: ‘Do you really think people will say that?’

he following conversation took place at the Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California, Friday, Feb. 6, 2004: Larry Elder: Let me tell you what an honor this is. This is like meeting royalty. Nancy Reagan: Thank you very much. Thank you. Elder: Tell me what you consider your greatest accomplishment. Reagan: My greatest accomplishment. Well, I think raising the awareness of the drug problem, traveling around and promoting that, and I think we did do some good. Elder: The best part of being first lady?

REAGAN: Oh, my. Well, the best part of being first lady is having the chance to travel to all the countries I never would have gone to, and meeting all the people I never would have met, and being a part of history was wonderful.

Elder: Mrs. Reagan, you were first things that I admire. There are lots of lady for eight years. In eight years, lots things that I admire about him. That’s of things happened. Tell me the most one of them. Elder: Tell us what some of the othmemorable moment you had in the ers are, his qualities. White House. Reagan: Oh, his kindness, his abilReagan: Well, that has to be March a great communicator, 30, 1981 — Ronnie was shot. That’s ity to be to communicate with the most memopeople — all kinds rable. of people, all differElder: And ent ages, it didn’t your husband’s make any differlegacy. Twenty(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate ence. He just confive years from nected with them. now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, He was a very romantic man, as those what do you think people will say letters he wrote show. A wise man. I could go on and on. How long have we about him? Reagan: Well, I think his legacy was got? (Laughter) Elder: The thing that people most making the country feel good about itself again, making people feel good. misunderstand about Ron Reagan. There was a whole optimism that he REAGAN: WELL, I don’t think exuded. Elder: And is that the quality about it’s true any more, since they’ve pubRon Reagan that you most admire — lished the speeches that he wrote, the letters that he wrote, but it used to be his optimism? Reagan: Well, that’s one of the that people thought, well, he didn’t

Larry

Elder

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: March 13, 2016

Clinton/Sanders migrate on immigration

learned a new word at Wednesday night’s Univision Democratic debate — “Hispandering.” Univision’s Maria Elena Salinas asked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton whether she was flip-flopping on her erstwhile opposition to “illegal immigrants.” (It’s interesting Salinas did not say “undocumented.” She said “illegal” immigrants.) Or was Clinton “Hispandering?” Salinas explained that the term means “pandering to Latinos.”

I CAN ONLY hope that Clinton is Hispandering. Her positions certainly have evolved. In 2008, for example, Clinton opposed states granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. Now she supports driver’s licenses for immigrants in the country illegally. When thousands of young children from Central America were crossing the Texan border, Clinton advocated sending unaccompanied minors back to their homes. “We have to send a clear message: Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay,” she said in 2014. “We don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.” I praised her for talking sense at the time. In January, Univision’s Jorge Ramos asked Clinton whether she would promise not to deport adults who don’t have a criminal record, as well as children. “I would give every person, but particu-

larly children, due process to have their story told. And a lot of children will, of course, have very legitimate stories under our law to be able to stay,” she answered. Two months later, her position has shifted. As he moderated the Thursday night debate, Ramos again asked Clinton whether she would refuse to deport children. This time, Clinton answered, “I will not deport children.” Next Ramos asked Clinton

Debra J.

to say she would not deport immigrants who don’t have a criminal record. She responded, “That’s what I’m telling you.” IT WAS A classic Clinton chameleon maneuver executed in the service of political expediency. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont took the same two pledges. If either Democrat were to win in November, then imagine the rush of children eager to cross the border before the new president realizes he or she has to yank that dubious campaign pledge. It would be like migrants flocking to Germany. As Clinton warned before the campaign season heated up, some children will die during the dangerous trek to Texas. Expect more adults to do likewise,

because Clinton and Sanders effectively have promised to do away with any enforcement of federal immigration law. The Democrats’ answers promised an era in which noncitizens have a right to live in the United States illegally — as long as they don’t rob a bank or kill someone. Here’s something Ramos left out when he asked the candidates whether they would pledge not to deport undocumented adults who don’t have a criminal record: Advocates aren’t content to allow Democrats to deport undocumented ex-cons. They don’t want misdemeanors to count. Many sanctuary city and state laws only allow for the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed recent serious felonies. In San Francisco, undocumented residents can kill someone and still expect sanctuary if the killing occurred more than seven years ago.

DEMOCRATIC operatives may think their national committee was sly in agreeing to a limited number of political debates — none of them on Fox News Channel. Clever Dems, they constructed a debate schedule that would isolate presidential hopefuls from general election voters and steer the candidates further and further left. Neither Sanders nor Clinton offers up an immigration law provision he or she would deign to support — and in these primary debates and town halls, no one asks them to.

know anything — they just handed him things — but he didn’t know anything. Now, with the publication of all the speeches that he wrote, I mean, it shows that way, way back, he had his philosophy firmly in place. He knew what he was doing. Elder: And, Mrs. Reagan, about you. Tell us a little bit about you growing up, any stories you want to tell us. Reagan: Well, I was brought up in Chicago, and my father was a neurosurgeon. He was the first neurosurgeon in Chicago. And I was a nurse’s aide, and I used to watch my father operate, which takes people a little aback when I say that. I graduated from school there, and then I went east to college, went to Smith College. Anything more than that? (Laughter) Elder: Ron Reagan ... as you know, at one point was a Democrat, (and he later) became a Republican. I sense, however, that you’ve always been a Republican, have always been conservative. Am I wrong? Reagan: You know, I really wasn’t anything, until I married Ronnie. I wasn’t registered to vote. I knew nothing about politics, really nothing. So I can’t claim to being really anything, or certainly having any influence over him. That I didn’t. Elder: Well, you were a quick study. (Laughter.) Let’s talk a little bit about the Ronald Reagan Library. Why is it so important? Reagan: Well, it’s so important because, on the West Coast, or the whole West area — usually all these things are in the East, you know — there’s nothing in the West. So here it is, for all the children to take advantage of, and they can learn so much from it. They can learn, I mean, there’s everything here: Ronnie’s letters, everything about his life and my life. Elder: And finally, Mrs. Reagan, a similar question to one of the ones I asked you earlier about your husband: Twenty-five years from now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now — what do you want people to say about Nancy Reagan? Reagan: I don’t know. Gosh, I’ve never thought about that. I don’t know. I hope they say something nice. (Laughter) Elder: Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. WHEN THE audio stopped rolling, I made a suggestion about her legacy — that she loved her husband unconditionally, that she gave him confidence and the courage of his convictions, and that she maintained his spirit. She smiled and said, “Do you really think people will say that?”

Conservative Chronicle

HILLARY CLINTON: March 10, 2016

What if the FBI is onto Hillary Clinton?

hat if Hillary Clinton is in legal hot water and she knows it but won’t admit it? What if she has decided to go on the offensive and make her case that she did nothing unlawful with her emails that contained state secrets? What if the essence of her defense is that other secretaries of state used non-secure email devices and thus it was lawful for her to do so, as well as the point that none of her emails was “marked classified” at the time she sent or received them? What if these defenses do not hold up to even cursory examination?

WHAT IF the other secretaries of state to whom she refers are Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice? What if neither of them diverted all of their emails to a private server? What if neither of them sent or received state secrets — secrets that under the law of the land are marked “confidential,” “secret” or “top secret,” not “classified” — using a non-secure email account? What if neither of them hired an information technology expert and paid him to divert both a standard State Department email stream and a secret State Department email stream to a private server in one of their homes? What if neither Powell nor Rice is currently running for president? What if neither Powell nor Rice has had his or her behavior as secretary of state referred to the FBI for a criminal investigation by the inspector general of the State Department? What if the law of the land is that a document or email contains state secrets by virtue of the information or data in the document or email and not by virtue of any warning label? What if the legal definition of a “state secret” in the U.S. is “information the revelation of which could cause harm to the security of the United States?” What if it is the law of the land that people in the government to whom state secrets are entrusted are required to recognize the secrets when they see them and protect them from intentional or inadvertent revelation? What if it is the law of the land that everyone in the government to whom state secrets are entrusted receives a multi-hour tutorial from the FBI on how to protect state secrets? What if the successful completion of that tutorial is a legal prerequisite to the receipt of a national security clearance and thus the receipt of state secrets? What if that tutorial reminds the people to whom secrets are being reposed that it is their legal obligation to recognize and accept and understand the law before they can receive any state secrets? What if, in order to confirm that understanding, all people who

receive the tutorial are required to sign by a person who doesn’t care if she an oath at the end of the tutorial rec- exposes state secrets? What if the FBI ognizing, accepting and understanding explained to Clinton in her first day as the law and agreeing to be bound by secretary of state that the grossly negit? What if Clinton signed just such an ligent exposure of state secrets constitutes espionage? oath? What if before Clinton was secreWhat if Clinton had no intention of state, she was a U.S. complying with the oath she signed tary of senator from New at the time she York for eight signed it? What years? What if durif we know that ing that time, she because we know was a member of she hired the in(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate the Senate Armed formation technologist to divert her emails the same Services Committee? What if during week she received the FBI tutorial? her time in the Senate, she was exposed What if she never told the FBI that she to hundreds of military-related state seplanned to divert all her emails — in- crets? What if Clinton is smart enough cluding those that would contain state secrets — to a private non-secure email and shrewd enough and experienced enough to recognize a state secret server in her home? when she sees one? What if the FBI has seen emails in WHAT IF it is the law of the land that the failure to secure state secrets which Clinton ordered subordinates is a felony, known as espionage? What deliberately to avoid State Departif it is the law of the land that espio- ment secure channels of communicanage can be committed by a person tions and to send state secrets to her who intends to expose state secrets or through channels she knew were not

Andrew

Napolitano

secure? What if Clinton passed on state secrets to others who had no security clearances? What if she did so knowing she was sending state secrets from her non-secure server to other non-secure servers? What if Clinton sent or received more than 2,000 emails that contained state secrets? What if she authored more than 100 of them herself? What if some of the 2,000 emails were so secret that the FBI agents investigating her lack the security clearances to view those emails? WHAT IF Clinton did all this so that she could keep her behavior as secretary of state secret and away from all officials in the State Department outside her inner circle, away from the president and away from the American people? What if she orchestrated and carried out a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act? What if the FBI is onto her? What if the Democrats are not?

NANCY REAGAN: March 11, 2016

Mrs. Nancy Reagan’s legacy

ancy Reagan’s death marks the final chapter in what was one of the greatest love stories of all time. The role of political spouse is not an easy one, but Mrs. Reagan managed her role brilliantly. She had her critics — most notably former White House chief of staff Donald Regan, who accused her, unfairly in my view, of meddling and using astrology to try to steer the president’s course — but her only priority was protecting the president. I served on the senior staff of the White House in Ronald Reagan’s second term as director of public liaison, at the time the highest job held by a woman. My interaction with Mrs. Reagan was minimal — a few social occasions — but I was close enough to witness the bond that existed between them.

PRESIDENT REAGAN always seemed to me a very private man, despite his outward ease with people. As his published love letters to Nancy made clear, she was the one person whom he trusted completely. She was his rock. “There would be no life without you nor would I want any,” the president once wrote her. When you saw them side by side, you could feel their connection. It wasn’t just the way she looked at him, a gaze that drew much snide ridicule from their detractors. If you looked at the president with Mrs. Reagan next to

him, you felt as if she was his guardian angel. There was an invisible wall around them that kept everyone else at bay. The only time I glimpsed them in a private moment was during a Christmas party for the White House staff. It was late in the evening, and I had slipped out into the grand hallway on the second floor of the White House. The Reagans were known to retire early, and sure enough, as I looked down the

Linda

long red carpet, I spied Mrs. Reagan, a glass of wine in her hand, gently kicking up her high heels in rhythm to the music emanating from the next room, the president at her side. Their backs were to me, but I imagined her smiling, maybe humming along, when the president gently took her elbow and steered her toward the elevator to their private residence on the third floor. She seemed to be having such a grand time, and he seemed to be her steady hand. LIFE IN A fishbowl is not easy, but as the pictures of their private rooms in the White House show, Mrs. Reagan tried to create a home for her husband. They ate their meals on TV trays in the

residence, the kind of relaxed California style in which they had lived their lives before the presidency. It was their cocoon, where the president could retreat from the burdens and worries that everyone who occupies that office must bear on his shoulders every day. I doubt they talked politics. His politics were deeply rooted in a political philosophy acquired through reading and experience. He needed no one to guide him in those quarters. But you can imagine him unburdening himself to her about the tough decisions he had to make, the best way to deal with troublesome adversaries or convince skeptical allies of the right path. Most of all, however, you can imagine that she lifted his spirits when they were down, convinced him that no matter how difficult the task seemed, he was up to it. NO MARRIAGE is perfect, but theirs seemed as close to perfection as one can imagine. We don’t often think of the importance of the role of first lady in terms of what she does to keep the president on an even keel. History is replete with examples of presidents whose wives were a source of distraction and sorrow for their husbands. In almost undefinable ways, however, Nancy Reagan made Ronald Reagan’s legacy possible. And that is something for which the country, indeed the world, owes her a debt of gratitude.

March 23, 2016 GOP RACE: March 15, 2016

Sorry, WSJ, but the GOP field must narrow

The editors apparently don’t see the t is disheartening that the Wall Street Journal editorial board, downside of a chaotic brokered convenfor whom I had such respect for tion. They clearly don’t respect the legitiyears, is discouraging a narrowing of the macy of anti-establishment angst among GOP field if either John Kasich or Marco GOP voters and are oblivious to the damage that would occur to the party and the Rubio wins his home state Tuesday. vative movement if It’s bad enough for the editors to en- c o n s e restablishment types courage Rubio to were to hijack the stay in if he wins convention for an Florida, but to inestablishment canvite Kasich to stay didate. in is just madness. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate Cruz underTheir underlystands this, which ing assumptions are wrong. They strongly imply that if is why he is so determined to win the Trump wins both Ohio and Florida on majority — or at least a plurality — of Tuesday, he’ll be the inevitable nominee. the delegates prior to the convention. They are encouraging a mainstream me- If that occurs, no one, including Trump dia narrative that is guaranteed to form supporters, will be able to argue that the Wednesday morning if Trump wins both voice of the people would be suppressed if Cruz were to become the nominee. states (and some of the others). The editors argue that if Trump fails IN FACT, truth be told, I’d wager that to win both Ohio and Florida, “RepubliTed Cruz’s team is hoping, grudgingly, can voters should then welcome a longer that Trump does win those two states, primary fight all the way to the convenbecause Cruz and company know, para- tion.” They say that if Rubio were to lose doxically, that this is their best chance Florida and Kasich were to win Ohio, to win the nomination outright, with the “Kasich would have renewed life after magic number of 1,237 delegates — or denying Mr. Trump Ohio’s 66 delegates. at least more delegates than Trump going Mr. Kasich would be inclined to stay in the race, and he could help the Republiinto the convention. The Cruz folks are not being fantas- can Party if he did.” “Renewed life?” He never had life to tical. They have run the numbers. They know that in closed-primary states, begin with. And please don’t pussyfoot which most of the remaining states are, around and say the self-absorbed Kasich Cruz has done far better. They know that would merely “be inclined to stay in the as the field narrows, Cruz’s odds of win- race.” “Inclined?” He’d be salivating. ning states increase dramatically. Indeed, For all we know, he’d be “inclined” to Cruz is already winning with greater stay in the race even if he were to lose margins in many closed states now than Ohio. But how would Kasich’s staying in he’ll need to average in the remaining “help the Republican Party?” How could states. This is very doable.

David

Limbaugh

a brokered convention be in the party’s best interests? How could the persistence of a pro-amnesty spoiler candidate be good for the Republican Party? Why on earth should Republican voters welcome the nightmare of “a longer primary fight all the way to the convention?” It would magnify the chances of a divisive, destructive disaster. KASICH, BY the way, has recently doubled down on his pro-amnesty position. The editors’ objectivity is obscured because of their own relentless advocacy of amnesty. They embarrassingly tie themselves into a pretzel trying to argue that Kasich might have a better chance against Trump in the remaining primaries than Cruz, even considering his current delegate deficit. You want to talk about fantasies?

The editors’ argument that a threeman race would increase the chances of reducing Trump’s final delegate count reeks of tone-deafness. The delegate leader, with either an outright majority or a plurality, going into the convention will be the nominee, or there will be heck to pay. But the editors’ line that most grates on me is, “But the winner-take-all states include the likes of California, where Mr. Trump might do better than Mr. Cruz, who has spent two years telling millions of Republicans that he doesn’t need their votes because they aren’t authentic conservatives.” Excuse me? Are they not aware of Cruz’s strong performance in California polling? And was it not establishment darling Jeb Bush who implied he would win the primaries and the general without the base of the party? Cruz has never said he doesn’t need or care about each and every Republican voter. His beef has never been with the people; it’s been with the GOP leadership and establishment, which have ignored the express wishes of the people and defied their own mandate to effectively resist President Obama’s oppressive policies and actions. Cruz doesn’t say he’s more authentically conservative than the grassroots. To the contrary, he wants to be their advocate and stand up to Beltway arrogance and corruption and the relentless march of leftism in this nation. DESPITE THE misinformation disseminated in some circles, Ted Cruz does not have an exclusivist message. Constitutional conservatism, by definition, is not extreme but mainstream. Properly and unapologetically articulated, it will resonate infectiously with people across society because it is an uplifting, positive message of equal opportunity, less government, robust liberty, maximizing prosperity, rebuilding our military, securing our borders and defeating our terrorist enemies. Who can argue with that?

Conservative Chronicle

TRADE: March 10, 2016

Trump’s proposed tariffs would hurt, not help, consumers

But things have not been so good for oliticians by their very nature tend to make things up, playing our trading partners, either. Europe has fast and loose with statistics in been in a recession, and still is, so they’re an effort to con Americans into voting not buying as much. And the same is true in the world’s export behemoth, China, for them. In other words, they lie, knowing that whose economy has been slowing down cally. most voters won’t know whether their dramatiWe’ve been runclaims are true ning trade deficits, or false. Or they too, but U.S. exleave out critical ports have been information that rising since the would raise doubts (c) 2016, United Media Services Great Recession: about their own up 16.6 percent in policy proposals. Consider Donald Trump’s anti-free 2010, 14.5 percent in 2011, 4.4 percent trade crusade, which he knows will ap- in 2012 and a tiny 2.8 percent in 2013, peal to union members, who tend to vote for example. Year over year, our U.S. goods and Democratic, and left-wing labor bosses, who have been flogging this issue for de- services deficit rose by a tame $2.1 billion, or 4.5 percent, by January 2015, cades. according to figures reported by the U.S. IN SPEECHES and debates, Trump Chamber of Commerce last year. But the rise and fall of our trade scores charges that China, Mexico, Japan and other countries have been robbing us is due to the state of the global economy blind, taking billions from Americans, at any given time. We still produce a lot, because of the trade agreements we’ve and we sell a lot all over the world. The deficits are not necessarily bad in negotiated with them. He doesn’t define these multibillion-dollar losses that he and of themselves. In the last 100 years, tosses around, and he leaves out critical America’s economy has grown to be ingredients that would weaken his case. the largest on the planet, and so have its He is talking, of course, about the export sales in a rapidly growing global trade deficit, which our government economy. In the 1980s, when America came tracks and makes public in timely reports. It is a moving figure that goes up roaring out of a deep recession, it was in or down, depending on many economic large part due to a burst of global trade deals led by President Reagan’s North and monetary factors. But at its essence, it totals how much American Free Trade Agreement with America buys in imports and sells in ex- Canada, our biggest trade partner. Reagan envisioned expanding that ports. In the last decade, coming out of a severe recession, Americans tightened pact to Mexico, our third-largest trading partner, and NAFTA’s expansion their belts and bought less.

Donald

Lambro

by President Clinton has benefited both countries. But it isn’t a zero sum game, as Trump wants voters to believe as he argues that the Mexicans are “ripping us off.” On the contrary, they get to expand their economy with increased manufacturing, and U.S. consumers benefit from less expensive products. He’s not the only one bashing U.S. trade expansion with our biggest trading partners. Socialist Bernie Sanders is attacking Hillary Clinton for supporting “virtually every one of the disastrous trade agreements written by corporate America.” But his anti-trade hysteria is a litany of bogus numbers, like the rest of his campaign, as he claims that NAFTA has resulted in 800,000 U.S. job losses. NOT TRUE, says the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. “In reality, NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by its critics,” a CRS analysis concluded last year. Many other factors are operating here in the sweeping transformation of the American economy, including the fastgrowing high tech industry, increased

productivity and the rise in automation that require fewer workers. If the free trade critics want to boost the U.S. economy and strengthen our industrial might, they merely need to lower the U.S. corporate tax, which is the highest in the industrialized world. Trump and Sanders talk ceaselessly about “bringing back jobs” that have moved to other countries, but they say nothing about how many states are luring our trading partners with low tax rates to move their factories to the U.S. It is not a well-kept secret in the business world. Yet Trump never mentions that Toyota operates nearly a dozen manufacturing plants here, along with many other global car companies like Honda, BMW and Nissan, and lots of other foreign firms have adopted their strategy. Instead, after shamefully selling himself as a very smart businessman, he proposes to slap massive tariff taxes on our largest trade partners. How massive? He throws out a variety of constantly changing percentages. “I would tax China or its products coming in,” Trump told the New York Times earlier this year. “The tax should be 45 percent.” In 2011 he told the Wall Street Journal the tariff on Chinese imports should be 25 percent. As for Mexico, “Every car and every truck and every part manufactured in their plants that come across their border, we’re going to charge you a 35 percent tax,” he has said. What Trump doesn’t tell you is that the American people will end up paying these taxes, which, as with any levies, are embedded in the price of the product. Think of all the products you buy at Wal-mart because they are less expensive than in other stores, even those made in China, that under Trump’s tariffs will cost more at the checkout register. BUT TRUMP’S tariffs, to “make America great again,” won’t end there. They would ignite a trade war with our trading partners, who would raise their tariffs on anything we would buy from them. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs that Herbert Hoover signed into law in 1930 triggered a global trade war as our economy was slipping into the Great Depression. That’s what Trump threatens to do to us again.

March 23, 2016 TRADE: March 15, 2016

The candidates turn against trade deals

he first question asked of the presidential candidates at the most recent Republican debate, hosted by CNN in Miami on March 10, was “whether trade deals have been good for the American workers.” Moderator Jake Tapper observed that one of Donald Trump’s “signature issues” has been his criticism of “disastrous trade deals” that have destroyed many good middle-class jobs that existed a generation ago.

THE OTHER three GOP candidates have supported trade deals in the past and still support them in principle, even while acknowledging the voters’ concerns about the harmful effects of such agreements. Two of the candidates even advocate the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Obama wants Congress to ratify before he leaves office. Ohio Governor John Kasich likes to remind everyone that he “grew up in a

blue collar family,” but votes he cast in the world” despite 20 years of trade during his 18 years in Congress helped deficits proving otherwise. to decimate the manufacturing base of his home state. Kasich voted for the SENATOR TED CRUZ once voted North American Free Trade Agreement in favor of presidential trade authority bein 1994, and in 2000 he voted to grant fore reversing himself on the subsequent the “normal” trading privileges, which vote last year. Cruz now says he opallowed China to enter the World Trade poses the TPP, but Congress Organization. has never rejected Florida Senaa trade deal after tor Marco Rubio giving the president twice voted in the authority to nefavor of giving gotiate it. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate President Obama “I am different the authority to nein one primary regotiate trade agreements, including the spect, and that’s trade,” Trump insisted Trans-Pacific Partnership. He insisted in the debate, explaining that “trade deals that trade deals provide “access to for- are absolutely killing our country.” He eign markets” (even though most of the has proposed tariffs to offset abusive world’s people can’t afford to buy any- practices such as currency devaluation by thing made in America) and he offered “certain countries that are taking advansentimental happy-talk that American tage of the United States and laughing at workers “can compete against anyone our stupidity.”

Phyllis

Schlafly

HEALTH CARE: March 15, 2016

There has to be a better way

ate last year, while playing tennis, I reached up to serve and felt a painful pop in my shoulder. The inflammation got worse over the next few months. Now anytime I try to put my arm above my head, pain shoots up my arm. I often wake up at night with an agonizing throb in my shoulder. So I finally and reluctantly went to the orthopedic surgeon; he said that I had a rotator cuff tear and I would probably need surgery. Ugh! He scheduled me for an MRI, but the day I was set to go, the hospital called to tell me my insurance company declined to pay for the scans. The insurance company, Cigna, tersely sent me a note: “You will need to complete six weeks of conservative treatment, such as physical therapy and anti-inflammatory medication. Once that has been completed and you have been re-evaluated, we can try to have the MRI re-authorized.” Gee, thanks. You guys are the best. I’VE BEEN doing therapy for many months already, with not much improvement. The doctor explained that the insurance companies want to make sure that physicians aren’t padding bills with unnecessary procedures. Incidentally, I’ve paid for health insurance for 30 years and have almost never used the medical care system. I calculate the insurers have made well over $100,000 off of me. But I am lost inside the bureaucratic maze. They don’t want to pay for the MRI because they don’t want to have to reimburse for rotator cuff surgery.

So their hope is that I will just go away. Studies show these delay tactics and bureaucratic runarounds work to reduce insurance payouts. Everyone has horror stories of insurance companies denying coverage for valid procedures. As an analysis in the Baltimore Sun recently put it: “Among insurance professionals, it is common knowledge that health insurers are denying claims for coverage with increasing frequency.” This is what the health industry calls “cost control.”

Stephen

LOOK, I GET it; the insurance companies are trying to root out fraud and abuse of excessive procedures, which drive up costs for everyone. But the insurance companies are becoming barriers to care even for legitimate and necessary procedures. What’s the root of the problem here? First, the excess of health insurance actually drives up cost. The more insurance for a procedure, the more expensive it is. Health inflation and premiums has been rising by nearly double the consumer price index for at least the last decade. This is also why there are so many frivolous procedures performed. Patients have been removed from the decision-making process. Second, Obamacare has increased demand for health care and is driving up costs, so insurers appear to be cutting

their expenses by denying claims more often. By the way, the insurance lobby should take note that this sleazy practice only plays into the hands of Bernie Sanders and others who want a singlepayer government system to take over health insurance. That will make medical care worse -- and more expensive. Studies on Medicaid patients find little or no improvement in health outcomes compared to the uninsured population -- because the level of care is so lousy. Government health care will be Medicaid-type coverage for all. It will be “fair” because we will all get equally subpar medical care -- and I would never get my shoulder surgery under that system. The health insurance scandal in America today argues not for a vast expansion of government-run health care; instead, it suggests the wisdom of the medical savings account approach, where people put money, tax-free, into an IRA account and draw it down to pay for their first few thousand dollars of coverage. That way it isn’t an insurance company who makes the call as to whether I should get an MRI. I make the call with my own money. Is the pain in my shoulder so bad that I want to shell out $1,200 to have a scan? Right now, Cigna says I don’t get to make that choice. So it’s “free” but I can’t get it. Wonderful. THE ONLY people who know whether I need surgery are not the faceless, bean-counting claims adjusters living in Toledo, Ohio, but my doctor and me.

In response to Trump’s suggestion that we threaten to tax imports from countries that do not trade fairly with us, Ted Cruz warned that Americans would be forced to pay higher prices for Chinese-made goods at Walmart. “Honestly, it’s just the opposite,” Trump retorted, because “we will start building those factories and those plants,” and “people will buy products from here, rather than buying it through China where we’re being ripped off.” A new study by the non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research provides support for Trump’s criticism of free trade with China. This new report, entitled “The China Shock,” shows how trade with China has resulted in higher unemployment and lower wages in communities across our country. Last year, imports from China rose to a new record high of $481.9 billion, while the Chinese purchased less than a quarter of that amount from the United States. The nearly $500 billion we sent to China last year could have supported millions of good jobs for Americans, but instead, some of it ends up financing the Chinese military to point its missiles at California. According to the 200-year-old theory of free trade, workers who lose manufacturing jobs to China should be able to find new jobs in other industries that benefit from a trade surplus, such as the pharmaceutical industry, or in non-tradable industries such as medicine and legal services. But millions of these workers, many of whom are men struggling to support their families, have not found adequate replacement jobs. Some settle for lower-paying jobs, while others give up entirely, creating a social issue as well as an economic one. The percentage of men between 25 and 54 years old who are not employed has tripled in the last half century, and many who had been working at $40 per hour manufacturing jobs are now receiving only $10 per hour jobs at Walmart or fastfood joints. Michigan, where the original “Reagan Democrats” were identified as a voter group, shattered its 40-year record for turnout in a presidential primary this year, and some precincts even ran out of ballots. Trump walked away with a doubledigit victory over his nearest Republican rival, while Hillary Clinton was humiliated by an upset defeat by Senator Bernie Sanders, a critic of free trade. IN THE GENERAL election in November, there will be millions of voters ready to cast their ballots for a candidate who stands up for American workers rather than catering to lobbyists who seek free-trade deals. CNN documented 45 times that Clinton pushed for the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the leading Republican candidate opposes.

Conservative Chronicle

NANCY REAGAN: March 15, 2016

Mrs. Reagan: Nancy with the laughing face Why does it take death to bring us to- await all of us? Would we be kinder to those who might speak at our service? gether? Why not life? Watching Nancy Reagan’s funeral on What would we want them to think and us? If it is nice things, television, the front-row tableau was a say about we doing now to impicture of unity, in form, if not in sub- what are prove the chances stance. There was that their remarks Gov. Jerry Brown and thoughts will of California, a be pleasant? Democrat, Mi(c) 2016, Tribune Media Services chelle Obama (D), IN ONE OF former President George Bush (R), Laura Bush (R), Hill- Frank Sinatra’s most famous songs, the ary Clinton (D), Rosalyn Carter (D) and lyric could have been written by “RonCaroline Kennedy (D). Democrats and nie” to his “Nancy:” “If I don’t see her each day, I miss her Republicans sat together in common purGee what a thrill, each time I kiss her pose, if not on common ground. Believe me, I’ve got a case On Nancy with the laughing face. FORMER ABC News anchor DiShe takes the winter and makes it ane Sawyer observed this about Mrs. Reagan: “She didn’t harden differences summer Summer could take some lessons into definitions.” What a contrast to what passes for political dialogue today, which from her Picture a tomboy in lace is too often crass, injurious and mean. And defining. And hardening. LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: March 14, 2016 If we look on the beauty of such moments — and we should as on a glorious spring day — why can’t we have political discourse that is — to borrow a phrase from Ronald Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush — kinder and gentler? uincy Jones holds the record 1632. Other legacies from Montserrat’s Largely it is because the quest for for the most Grammy award Irish sugar plantation owners include power and influence over others is born nominations for a single in- places called Kinsale, Cork Hill and St. of lust and lust rarely leads to much that dividual with 79. He’s won 27 of them Patrick’s, and a coat of arms that depicts is good, more often it leads to self-de- — as a producer, arranger and perform- Eriu — the green-clad goddess who symstruction. ing artist. His first win was for his 1963 bolizes Ireland — holding an Irish harp. Former Canadian Prime Minister arrangement of “I Can’t Stop Loving Brian Mulroney read a letter President You.” His most recent was as a performALTHOUGH SITUATING a city Reagan wrote to Nancy on their first er for the spoken word recording of “Q: near a river was usually a good idea, Christmas in the White House in 1981. It The Autobiography of Quincy Jones” in sometimes city planners decided later is so full of love that probably no man on 2001. that a local waterway was Earth could live up to its standard. Look an impediment to progress it up if you didn’t hear Mulroney read it. ROLLER CANARIES (also known Former Reagan Chief of Staff James as German Rollers or Hartz/Harz MounBaker said Nancy kept all of her hus- tain Rollers) have the unique distinction band’s many love letters in a paper bag of singing with their beaks closed. This in a closet. He kept her in his heart wher- produces a lower, less shrill pitch that’s (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate ever he was and whatever he was doing. more pleasing to the ear, which is why rollers are considered the finest sing- (or, more likely, polluted and fetid). So, AT FUNERALS we forget all of the ers in the canary world. Males typically they’d bury it — redirecting the water mean things some of us say about each sing more proficiently than females, and underground. Thus, the River Fleet still other. “Don’t speak ill of the dead” is they’re all skilled mimics. They learn to flows beneath the streets of London; the one familiar admonition. How about sing by imitating other birds, sometimes Park River runs beneath the State Capinot speaking ill of the living, or at least singing along with recorded canary tol in Hartford, Connecticut; and Minetta refrain from questioning motives, char- songs to perfect their technique. Brook and an unnamed spring run beacter and patriotism? We can and should How is it that wars can break out all neath New York City’s Greenwich Vildebate the wisdom of policies, but not over the world between different com- lage near Minetta Lane and Spring Street. the love any of us have for America. batants, over different issues, but all at Annie, inspired by Walter Gray’s What would our politics look like if we the same time? Alexander Chizhevsky “Little Orphan Annie,” is the bestadopted such an attitude not just at funer- (1897-1964) believed it was down to he- known stage musical based on a comic als, but throughout life? liobiology — the sun’s electromagnetic strip. The “Peanuts”-flavored musical Yes, I know, it’s too much to expect. radiation affecting human activity. He You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and It wasn’t long before many of those at found, for example, that escalated com- Li’l Abner, based on Al Capp’s strip, the funeral who are still politically active bat during World War I occurred during are Tony-winners too. Less familiar is were back at it and at each other. But for heavy sunspot activity. Chizhevsky’s Doonesbury, a 1980s musical with book one brief, shining moment, we saw what theories weren’t “spot” on, but they had and lyrics by cartoonist Garry Trudeau. America looks like when we speak and some validity. Garfield: The Musical with Cattitude act well of one another. Visitors to the Caribbean island of premiered regionally last year; a new It is something beautiful, something Montserrat receive a shamrock-shaped musical based on Ted Key’s Hazel will good. passport stamp, a nod to the island’s open soon in Chicago; and rumors of a I wonder how we might behave if long, if not always happy, connection Broom-Hilda musical have been flying we thought of our own funerals, which to the Irish settlers that arrived there in around for years.

Cal

Thomas

Leslie’s Trivia Bits

Leslie

Elman

That’s Nancy with the laughing face.”

TRIVIA 1. Quincy Jones composed the theme for the TV series Ironside, about a man in what profession? A) Attorney B) Doctor C) Police detective D) Teacher 2. The Bay City Rollers hit No. 1 in the U.S. charts with what spelling song? A) “Gloria” B) “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” C) “Saturday Night” D) “U.N.I.T.Y.” 3. Helium is named for the god of the sun. Which element is named for the goddess of the moon? A) Argon B) Calcium C) Nitrogen D) Selenium 4. In 1995, what caused most of the population of Montserrat to leave the island? A) Chikungunya virus B) Civil war C) Drought D) Volcanic eruption 5. The Platte River takes its name from the French word meaning what? A) Deep B) Flat C) Silver D) Snake 6. In the Marvel universe, what is billionaire Tony Stark’s alternate identity? A) Captain America B) Iron Man C) Spider-Man D) Wolverine (answers on page 19)

March 23, 2016 DONALD TRUMP: March 10, 2016

The caddyshack collapse of the establishment

es, I’m into my 15th month of writing that, like it or not, Donald Trump has the best chance to be the GOP nominee for president. That has left me and my analysis on the island of misfit toys! And during all of this, I’ve watched and chronicled about candidates who I know are well qualified, like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, but who have fallen by the wayside.

THIS PAST week, Mitt Romney and his many friends embarked on a plan that not only failed to stop Trump in Tuesday’s primaries in Michigan and Mississippi, but actually appear to have boosted his cause. Here in Florida, Romney’s recorded phone messages on behalf of Marco Rubio are going over

like a lead balloon. The polling num- a high-stakes grudge golf match with bers in the Sunshine State prior to the the club’s president. Of course, Rodney’s character preThursday debate show Trump’s lead vails only after the groundskeeper, accelerating. I completely understand that to played by Bill Murray, blows up much entire golf course, Romney and a vast majority of long- of the thereby pushing time GOP pundits, Dangerfield’s golf consultants and partner’s ball into elected officials, the cup for a lastTrump seems like minute victory. the Rodney Dan(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate In the instance gerfield of poliof Romney — tics. They likely picture Trump as the late-comedian’s spokesman for the army of GOP powiconic character Al Czervik in the 1980 erbrokers who want to stop Trump — it comedy Caddyshack. In the movie, is hard to choose which of the movie’s Dangerfield plays a successful new- characters he would play in a remake. to-wealth real estate developer who He certainly would be well-suited to slings insults at snooty members of an portray the image-obsessed club presiexclusive country club, and ends up in dent, who drives his Rolls Royce onto

Matt

Towery

2016 ELECTION: March 15, 2016

Voting at a crossroads

t is seldom that the fate of a nation can be traced to what happened on one particular day. But that may be what happens in the United States of America on Tuesday, March 15, 2016. That is because the front-runners in both political parties are not merely inadequate but appalling — and the vote in this Tuesday’s primaries may be the last chance for the voters to unite behind someone else.

THE TRENDS that brought us to this crucial day go back for years. But whatever the paths that led to this crossroads, we are in fact at a crossroads and our future, and our children’s futures, depend on whether we can come up with some presidential candidate better than either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. In other times and in other conditions, one bad president could not ruin a great nation. We survived Jimmy Carter and we may survive Barack Obama, but there is no guarantee that we can survive an unlimited amount of reckless decisions in a dangerous world. The dangers are both internal and external. Two of our bitterest enemies — Iran and North Korea — are openly declaring their desire to destroy us. And both are developing intercontinental missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. These and other mortal dangers are a product of the feckless foreign policies carried out by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as the Obama administration weakened our military forces while our adversaries around the world have been rapidly strengthening theirs. We will be lucky to survive the damage that has been done already. A third

consecutive term of such policies, with Hillary Clinton in the White House, can be suicidal. Internally, Hillary Clinton’s whole political career has been based on polarizing the American population by race, sex, class and any other way that will serve her political interests. This kind of cynical political exploitation can take the “United” out of the United States, and Balkanize us into an internal war of each against all. That is a war in which we can all lose. As for the Republicans’ front-runner, what is there left to say about Donald Trump? Almost daily he demonstrates that he lacks the maturity, the depth and the character required to lead a nation facing a complex range of dangers.

Thomas

IT IS NOT A question of his having flaws, which we all have. But what kind of warped character does someone have at his core who can mock a prisoner of war who was tortured for years by our enemies, mock someone else with a physical defect, reply to questions with gutter-level insults, and offer childish boasts about what he is going to do, instead of specifics about how? These are not subtle nuances. They are blatant revelations about something fundamentally wrong. Too many people missed similar revelations about Barack Obama. For that we have already paid a price, and we will continue to pay a price, even after he is gone. So will generations yet unborn.

There is a reason why polls repeatedly show Donald Trump producing the highest negative reactions of any candidate of either party. Yet the small hard core of Trump supporters seem oblivious to his antics, his recklessness and his all-consuming ego. Some of these supporters may simply not be paying careful attention. But there have also been some very knowledgeable and intellectually talented people who have backed Trump. Sometimes it takes a high IQ to evade the obvious. What does Trump offer his supporters that makes them so willing to overlook so much? He boldly articulates the resentment and anger they feel at having been betrayed by smug elites in general and the Republican establishment in particular. Charismatic leaders who articulated the just grievances of the people have often risen to power on the basis of that talent alone. And those who put them in power have often paid a catastrophic price afterwards. That story was repeated in countries around the world in the 20th century. Will that story be repeated in America in the 21st century? The vote on March 15, 2016 may give us a clue. THE ONLY candidate who has any real chance to stop Donald Trump at the ballot box is Ted Cruz. But the Republican elite, who have never liked Senator Cruz, may prefer to stop Trump with chicanery at the convention. That can cost Republicans the votes of Trump’s followers, putting Hillary Clinton in the White House — and the country on the ruinous road to a point of no return.

the club grounds and then admonishes the staff. But after Tuesday it might be better to cast Romney in Murray’s spot as “exploder-in-chief.” I HAVE TO believe the usually levelheaded and non-confrontational Romney was lured into this role. But the plan displayed a total lack of understanding of Trump, his campaign and the voters. First and foremost, Trump has created an entirely new style of politics that connects a reality TV world of voters with a reality TV superstar — the critical word being reality. Trump’s style, as sometimes crude or blunt as it might be, defies the image of politicians such as Romney, who parse their every word as they enlighten voters with their brilliant thoughts and woo them with their lofty promises. To Romney and his establishment allies, most voters are part of the great unwashed masses. Obviously they can’t decide matters for themselves. It takes Mitt Romney to tell them that they either were naive and ignorant in having voted for Trump in contests ranging from Romney’s home state of Massachusetts to southern states such as South Carolina; or that they will be duped in states like Florida. In Florida, his comments and involvement are viewed by many as condescending. That comes not just from the polls but anecdotally from my neighbors here, who weren’t for Trump but are livid over Romney’s action. Romney and the Stop Trump army should have also recognized that Trump is not the unsophisticated person they perceive him to be. He is a master at marketing and when hit, he punches back immediately and usually harder. No, he does not speak like a policy wonk. In fact, he hardly speaks of policy specifics at all. But when he describes “the lines” that prevent true competition among heath care insurers across state boundaries, the average voter understands what he is saying. His simple answers might not meet the expectations of the pundits and policymakers, but they resonate with a significant number of voters. As I write this column, a debate awaits Trump in Florida. It might be the last one in which the establishment and media can try to unload on Trump and derail a likely win here. And postFlorida, the race may come down to a Trump-versus-Ted Cruz two-man battle, or still include John Kasich as well. UNLIKE ROMNEY et al, Cruz and Kasich are in touch with reality and could give Trump a true battle. But for the moment, odds favor a “Caddyshack” finish for Donald Trump.

March 23, 2016

Will politics of nostalgia trump politics of the future?

he likely presidential nominee a trade war, which, as Cruz explained, of the Republican Party and the will mean much higher prices for diacertain (barring indictments) pers and kids’ school clothes at Walnominee of the Democratic Party have Mart. Trump promises that all those something in common, something more auto assembly jobs lost 25 and 35 years than residences in New York: campaign ago will somehow reappear. That ain’t going to happen. In conappeals based on nostalgia. his rivals’ proposals Consider Donald Trump’s official t r a s t , for vocational educampaign slogan, cation could help “Make America non-college men Great Again.” His qualify for highreference point is skill manufacturnot the Founding (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate ing jobs likely to Fathers, whom Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz frequently open up in the future. On Social Security, Trump echoes invoke. It’s also not the New Deal, the civil rights revolution or post-World Democratic politicians who, despite War II European socialism, which Hill- clear demographic projections, say the ary Clinton and Bernie Sanders some- program can continue as is. No higher times celebrate. No, Trump is invoking retirement age, no limiting increases to Ronald Reagan and the America of a inflation, no downward adjustment of high-earners’ benefits, as Rubio proposgeneration or so ago. es and Cruz partially endorses. Trump’s position is a shining exBUT HIS policies are plainly incapable of restoring that imagined past. ample of baby boomer selfishness. He He talks of expelling (temporarily?) 11 was born in 1946, generally considered million illegal immigrants and building the first year of the baby boom generaa fence, eight years after net immigration, as were Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But Clinton at least toyed with tion from Mexico fell to zero. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, in con- seeking needed changes in entitlements trast, advocate enforcement measures and Bush expended political capital in (such as e-Verify and visa tracking) that doing so. would incentivize illegals to leave. And TRUMP SAYS that things will be looking to future needs, Rubio and Cruz support changing policy to favor high- fine for the next 22 years, when he will skill immigration rather than the low- turn 92. It’s the same mentality as that skilled immigration and family reunifi- of public employee unions and (mostly Democratic) public officials who have cation that current law allows. On trade Trump threatens to use burdened states like Illinois and Califorcurrent presidential authority to start nia with pension burdens that threaten

Michael

Barone

to gobble up the rest of government: Hey, it’s not my problem. Boomer selfishness and solipsism is apparent also in Hillary Clinton, who turns 69 this year, and Bernie Sanders, who turns 75. For some people, it’s always time for Woodstock. Back then, in 1969, most liberals — Daniel Patrick Moynihan a prominent exception — thought there was nothing that government couldn’t do. Sanders’ promises of free health care, free college tuition and free Ben & Jerry’s (just kidding about that last one) ignore the copious evidence that government is getting worse, not better, at delivering on its promises. Even a brief look at Britain’s National Health Services shows that it holds

down cost by denying care. The Scandinavian nations whose example Sanders cites have been cutting back on welfare benefits and cutting taxes to encourage economic growth. Also, Sweden and Britain have been providing school choice. Clinton, like Sanders, wants to lock downscale children in failing public schools; teacher unions come first. They apparently haven’t noticed the dismal selfishness of Veterans Affairs bureaucrats or the incompetence of Environmental Protection Agency personnel who let loose tons of pollutant in Colorado rivers and failed to protect against lead in the water in Flint. Back in 1969 it was assumed that economic growth could be taken for granted; regulation and higher taxes seemed cost-free. So Sanders wants to altogether ban fracking — one of the few vibrant sources of growth in the Obama years — and Clinton promises to pretty much shut it down. Those acquainted with the longer run of history know that free enterprise operating under the rule of law has enormously improved life for billions of people — producing “the great escape” from poverty described in Nobel economist Angus Deaton’s recent book. Nostalgic politicians, such as central planners Clinton and Sanders and billionaire dealmaker Trump, promise to effortlessly reproduce supposed glorious pasts. Free market politicians, such as Rubio and Cruz, have the harder task of promising a better future they cannot exactly describe, because markets always produce surprises planners can’t anticipate. RUBIO MAY be stopped in Florida, and Cruz may not hold Trump below the 1,237-delegate majority. But give them credit for thinking seriously about the future. March 15,2016

This Week’s Conservative Focus

2016 Election

Donald Trump’s ‘peak’ might be coming

requently predicted but never reached, “peak oil” — maximum possible production — has been postponed yet again, this time because of fracking. “Peak Sanders” was prematurely announced because of persistent underestimations of how underwhelming Hillary Clinton is as a candidate. The Vermont senator’s peak might not arrive soon because his fundraising prowess will allow him to continue campaigning to outlaw fracking.

“PEAK TRUMP” — the apogee before the dwindling — might be approaching for the perhaps bogus billionaire (would a real one bother with fleecing those who matriculate at Trump University?) who purports to prove his business wizardry, colossal wealth and stupendous generosity not by releasing his tax returns but by displaying a pile of steaks. The eventual end of our long national embarrassment might be

foreshadowed by Donald Trump’s pat- thoughts. A steady diet of his self-adutern of doing better among early voters lation can be cloying; even an entertainthan among “late deciders:” He firmly ing boor can become a bore. Mitt Romney’s denunciations and has those he entranced early; others are ridicules, reciprocating Trump’s, are not more elusive. to dissuade Trump If Trump does become acquainted designed voters. It is axiomwith gravity — no, atic that you cannot not intellectual reason a person out sobriety; nature’s of a position that downward tug the person has — it will be for (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group not been reasoned two reasons: The into. The adhesive Republican Party, which together with the Democratic that binds Trumpkins to their messiah Party has framed the nation’s political can be dissolved by neither facts nor debate since first running a presidential eloquence. Romney and other defendcandidate 160 years ago, is not a flimsy ers of Republican traditions are trydinghy to be effortlessly commandeered ing to prevent a stampede to Trump of by pirates hostile to its purposes. And “Vichy Republicans,” collaborationists the lavish media exposure that has fer- coming to terms with the occupation of tilized the growth of the weed of Trump- their party. ism in the garden of conservatism might IF TRUMP, who thinks the most restill stunt its growth by causing his supporters to have second, or perhaps first, cent Republican president should have

George

Will

The action is not all in Washington

s the race for the presidential nomination enters the pandemonium stage, I take solace in the soothing wisdom of my friend the British historian, Paul Johnson. He writes: “America is a big country, with vast regions and endless opportunities for polycentrism.” Another way of putting it is that America is a federalist system with endless opportunities for variation. It is always a mistake to focus too intensely on Washington or New York. What about Indianapolis, or Wichita, or Raleigh, North Carolina?

TODAY THE campaign for the Democratic nomination is entering an eerie stage. The campaign for the Republican nomination is entering a terminal stage. Yet out there in America things are taking place that should be reassuring. Over the weekend here in the Washington area, the Conservative Political Action Conference held its yearly meeting. It was as big as ever. One would think that every conservative who is anyone would have showed up, but that is not the case. In America today there is a huge population of conservatives. They are, at any one time, gathering in dozens of different places, to discuss issues closer to home and to act. In the Midwest, the West, the South, even the Northeast — each area of the country has its own distinct government atrocity to put down. And ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the conservatives have been organizing often with the aid of the public-spirited Koch

brothers or the Heritage Foundation. So late last week, I ventured to Raleigh to test the waters. There the estimable Civitas Institute brought together some 650 concerned citizens to strategize about government atrocities, public education atrocities, public health care atrocities, and more ... atrocities. They had hammered out alternatives to the statist panaceas, and they had cooked up a few new solutions of their own. Heidi Cruz, wife of candidate Cruz, was there to state her husband’s

R. Emmett

case; so was David Limbaugh; and to talk of his own tribulations at the hands of the government, Dinesh D’Souza. It almost felt like I had never left Washington, and it is inspiring to think that such conferences are held nationwide. An organization like Civitas exists in most states. There is a lot of energy in America, and it is being expended all across the country. AT THE PRESENT moment the news from Washington is that the Republicans are intent on mass suicide. Millions of dollars are being raised to cut down Donald Trump. Then Marco Rubio will cut down Ted Cruz, finally John Kasich will poison Rubio’s souffle, or maybe not. Perhaps some other variant will befall the Republicans en route to their national convention. Then

perhaps they can again nominate Robert Dole or the ever-ready Mitt Romney. Actually, I expect something quite different to take place. The Republican Convention will nominate one of the remaining candidates, and he will triumph in the fall. Because over in the Democratic race there are only two candidates, one with a hippie past and a very timid present. And the other with a luridly variegated and wild past that is about to catch up with her. I think things will look very different in the Democratic race by the summer.

LAST WEEK, Clinton’s former aide Bryan Pagliano was granted immunity by the Justice Department. I have been predicting this for weeks. Pagliano was in charge of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal server. Now we know that the Washington Post was wrong on March 3 when it said that no grand jury has been at work. A grand jury has been at work, and Pagliano is no longer hiding behind the Fifth Amendment. Prosecutors would not allow immunity for no reason. This will not be a replay of Webb Hubbell’s uneventful appearance before a grand jury back in the 1990s. As Jed Babbin wrote the other day in the American Spectator, “Pagliano’s immunity agreement is a strong indication that several people, almost certainly including Clinton, will be indicted.” That is what makes the present stage of the Democrats’ nominating process eerie. March 10, 2016

been impeached, is the 2016 nominee, the party’s most recent nominee will not support him. But this through-thelooking-glass scenario need not happen. Ohio’s John Kasich has demonstrated an appeal to people susceptible to the Trump temptation — blue-collar voters in an important manufacturing (and swing) state buffeted by globalization. Ted Cruz offers what many Trumpkins say they want — conservatism with a serrated edge. Trump, however, is all edge and no conservatism, although his shambolic syntax disguises his vacuity. Trump, who fancies himself the bluecollar billionaire, promises a 45 percent increase in the price of the imports from China that help draw more than 100 million weekly shoppers to Wal-Mart, America’s largest private-sector employer. Sanders, another aspiring savior of the proletariat, promises “socialism,” which he defines as a “revolution” that resembles the status quo — meddlesome economic regulation by a federal government whose budget is 66 percent income redistribution through transfer payments. Sanders is conducting a self-refuting campaign, the premise of which is that “the billionaire class” of (according to Forbes) 536 people buys elections. In February, Sanders raised $42.7 million, Hillary Clinton raised $30 million, and the most prolific Republican fundraiser of this presidential cycle (Jeb Bush, $157.6 million) went home. In last week’s Fox News town hall, when asked about Michael Bloomberg, an actual billionaire, deciding not to run for president, Sanders said: Bloomberg is a billionaire and it is “a bad idea” that “the only people who feel in many ways that they can run for president are people who have so much money.” Which is why Citizens United must be overturned “so all people can run for office, not just people who have a lot of money.” Well. Sanders does not even understand his white whale, the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. It ended prohibitions against independent (not coordinated with candidates) political advocacy by corporations and unions. It had nothing to do with what Bloomberg could have done, spend his own money on himself. POLITICIANS HAVE been doing this since at least 1757, when George Washington supplied voters with 144 gallons of whiskey and other drink, enough to amply lubricate each of the 307 voters he persuaded in winning a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates. This year, campaign spending on whiskey for voters would be welcomed by them as an anesthetic. March 13, 2016

Conservative Chronicle

2016 ELECTION: March 9, 2016

First impressions of a not-so-super Super Tuesday

efore the dust had settled, even are going to send a message that the party before the earliest returns were of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidencomplete, a close friend wrote: cy of the United States will never be held “The morning after last week’s not-so- hostage by a con artist....” But what difTuesday super Super Tuesday, the old eyes were ference will super-duper current trends constill burning from watching the tiny, ev- make if tinue onward and er-changing vote downward, as they totals on the little show every sign of screen that domidoing? nates our lives like No, this isn’t a any other would(c) 2016, Tribune Media Services completely disasbe Latin America caudillo. Or were those tears gathering trous election year. Like, say, 1832, when Andrew Jackson was pursuing his war for my country?” against the Second Bank of the United THE QUESTION keeps resounding States and the American economy in in my mind even now: Why? Why? Why? general. Or — talk about catastrophe — Has all reason fled to brutish beasts? Or is 1860, when the Union itself would begin this just another of fate’s whimsical jokes? to come apart at its unsteady seams. But If so, the joke’s on all of us, including it doesn’t look like a good year, either. those who suppose themselves winners, For if the country hasn’t gone completely at least for now. For they too lost, little as nuts, it’s showing what let’s call its eccenthey may know it just yet. For when the tricity. country loses, we all do. It’s a sad sight, watching a country self-destruct. 2016 ELECTION: March 16, 2016 Yes, it’s happened before, here and abroad. Think of the Weimar Republic between the wars. The Great Wars, as they were known at the time. But at least the Germans had an excuse, or rather lots of them, during the ever more ominous ne thing is abundantly clear: 1930s: They were a defeated people, Neither political party will humbled first by the war and then by the emerge from the 2016 nomipeace imposed on them. No wonder they nation battle looking anything like they joined the fascist tide sweeping Europe, if did when they began the marathon. Funnot the world. Oh, yes, and their economy damental changes are now inevitable in was being ravaged by super-inflation at both political parties. And they will be the time. Disaster atop disaster. irreversible. But what excuse do we Americans These changes will not be so much in have in the Year of Our Lord 2016? how the ethnic or geographic constituCalmer heads and keener judges of cur- encies divide themselves between the rent events like Warren Buffett may know parties as in the policies, programs and that these are really good times, whatever priorities of each party. ambitious, short-sighted politicians may Whether Donald Trump or Ted Cruz be saying to stir up the rest of us. But if win, the Republican Party will not be the country isn’t going nuts, it’s, well, the same. The party of Jeb Bush, John showing its eccentric streak. For whom Kasich, Chris Christie, John Boehner the gods would destroy, they first drive and Mitch McConnell has been vanmad. Even the healthiest instinct of a quished. stable democracy — stick with the twoparty system — is being questioned. EVEN IF Bernie Sanders loses to Hillary Clinton, his ability to galvanize THE ONLY bright spots on the ra- a new movement and to win young peodar screen showed up down the ticket. ple — of all races — in the Northeast Here in Arkansas, Her (Unsavory) Honor and Midwest presages a new DemocratCourtney Goodson lost her bid to become ic Party. chief justice of the state Supreme Court, To understand what is happening, so let us be grateful for Providence’s fa- look back to the ‘60s. vors, however small. It’s not just her quesBefore Barry Goldwater won the tionable behavior off the bench that has nomination in 1964, the Republican raised eyebrows for some time now but Party was but a paler imitation of the the quality of her legal opinions — like liberal Democrats. Largely centered in her arbitrary decision to void the state’s New York and the northeast, it was Revoter ID law. publican governor Nelson Rockefeller As for those Republican presidential who first legalized abortion and Repubcandidates still trying to stem the rising lican jurist, Harry Blackmun, who wrote Trumpian tide, spare some pity for them. the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. For example, Mario Rubio, whose brave But 1964 changed the GOP irretalk had the sound of somebody whistling vocably. Its power base shifted to the (Dixie) as he strolls past a graveyard at Sunbelt and its dominant constituency midnight: “Two weeks from tonight, we became small-business and religious

Paul

Greenberg

YOURS IN HOPE, always, but it’s getting harder and harder to hold onto it,

Your old friend, Dutiful but Unhappy Observer

2016: A repeat of the 1960s

voters. The party of Thomas Dewey and Rockefeller died in 1964. Before 1968, the Democratic Party was more hawkish than the GOP. Its largely internationalist positioning was in contrast to the isolationism of Republicans. It opposed civil rights and catered to its southern base. But it embraced fiscal orthodoxy and rejected social change.

Dick

After 1968, it became the anti-war party and embraced civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights, rights for the disabled and a host of social causes. 2016 will be a year of changes of similar magnitude in each party. THE DEMOCRATS will jolt permanently to the left. Socialized medicine, much higher taxes on the wealthy, opposition to fracking, a fanatical fight against climate change, harsh anti-Wall Street measures and ever more radical social change will be its hallmarks. Prison reform and a fundamental change in the criminal justice system will move to center stage. These changes will leave the likes of the Clintons and even President Obama far behind. The Republicans will harden their anti-immigration position, will turn away from their historic commitment to free trade, will join the Democratic left

in regulating Wall Street and cracking down on the Federal Reserve. They will embrace privacy policies and impose them on the NSA and the intelligence community. The Bushes and Mitt Romney will be left far behind. We cannot even begin to predict where these changes will lead, anymore than we could have known that gay rights would rise in the Democratic agenda or abortion opposition in the Republican. Neither issue was on the radar in the ‘60s. These changes, in each party, reflect massive outrage at the irrelevance of our government and its politics. In the ‘60s, the gap between Eisenhower’s Republicans and Kennedy’s Democrats was minuscule. The Goldwater and McCarthy-McGovern-RFK candidacies drove the parties further apart. Real choices emerged. Fundamental assumptions became debatable. A genuine left and right came to be. So, now we are going to widen the ideological divide still further. The Donald Trump/Ted Cruz Republicans will clash with the increasingly Bernie Sanders-esque Democrats, and more topics and fundamental questions will come into play. DEMOCRACY WILL no longer be about minor differences on how to cut the deficit or incremental approaches to waging war abroad. Huge fissures will open and everything will be in play. The people will have taken back their parties and insisted that they become vehicles for big changes in a system that all agree is failing.

March 23, 2016 DEAR MARK: March 11, 2016

GOP crackup, white privilege, Hillary conspiracy

DEAR MARK: I wish Barack Obama would mind his own business. His saying the Republicans are cracking up because Trump is leading OUR primaries is rich coming from the leader of the Democrat party. Has he watched any of the Hillary and Bernie show to see who’s really cracking up? — Alfred E. Neuman Dear Alfred: It’s hilarious to listen to President Obama judge the parties based on which one might be “cracking up.” It’s also funny to hear the president once again deflect blame for the tone he helped set in Washington. Here’s what he said during a press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “What I’m not going to do is to validate some notion that the Republican crackup that’s been taking place is a consequence of actions that I’ve taken,” Has he forgotten that under his “leadership” he has given Republicans larger majorities in the House and the Senate not to mention all of the state offices? Granted he may be correct in that results of the 2016 GOP primaries are aimed at the GOP establishment but let’s don’t lose sight of the fact that it was the establishment GOP’s failure to sufficiently stand up to Democrat policies that has led to the rise of Trump and Cruz. As you have alluded, it’s the Democrats who are cracking up. It’s pretty bold of the president to discuss a GOP “crackup” when an avowed socialist is winning Democrat primaries. Wait, I must apologize for my flawed analysis. Pushing Democrats towards socialism is not cracking up in President Obama’s

eyes; it is the attainment of a lifelong liberal dream.

DEAR MARK: Judicial Watch was able to obtain documents showing that members of the United States Army were subjected to a “white privilege” Power Point briefing. Why in the world is this necessary? — Retired Sky Soldier Dear Sky Soldier: As a retired colonel friend of mine sadly pointed out, the Pentagon has numerous career boot lickers bucking for promotions. They’re even willing to play the liberal political correctness game if it means a few more bars or stars. As far as I’m concerned the

Mark

only “white privilege” the Army needs to train its soldiers on is when it’s referring to the red, white and blue or not shooting until you see the “whites of their eyes.” During my lifetime our military has been one of the best racial melting pots in our country’s history. The only reason for this ridiculous policy is using our military as a social science experiment. DEAR MARK: I had a horrible thought and I figured I’d get your take on it. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump may possibly be indicted for crimes they are accused of. If either should win the presidency having been indicted or worse convicted, could our amoral current president re-

fuse to vacate the office? Since Obama would not have been elected for a third term, and he regularly poops on the constitution, could he make it stick, 22nd amendment be damned? — Oh heck No in Pittsburgh. Dear Heck No: Of course the 22nd amendment limits the president to no more than two terms in office but as we’ve witnessed previously Barack Obama treats the United States constitution as more of a nuisance than a cast in stone governing document. However I believe that even the liberals on the Supreme Court would have trouble supporting the notion of a third Obama term as constitutional. Although President Obama did announce that he will stay in the D..C area until his daughters graduate high school. Hmmm, cue the Doctor Evil conspiratorial music. As to your theory, I’m not sure if Donald Trump is truly facing any criminal charges that could follow him into the presidency but on the Democrat side there is a high probability that Hillary will face an actual federal indictment. I have my own horrible thought that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC completely understand Hillary is damaged goods. With that in mind they are still hoping she wins the election regardless so that even if she is indicted a Democrat vice president can take over. I picture a Hillary Clinton/Elizabeth Warren ticket thus electing a woman and Bernie Sanders at the same time. E-mail your questions to marklevy92@aol.com. Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkPLevy

CONTACT INFORMATION Individual Contact Information Greenberg - pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com Krauthammer - letters@charleskrauthammer.com Levy - marklevy92@aol.com Lowry - comments.lowry@nationalreview.com Malkin - malkinblog@gmail.com Massie - mychalmassie@gmail.com Napolitano - freedomwatch@foxbusiness.com Saunders - dsaunders@sfchronicle.com Schlafly - phyllis@eagleforum.org Thomas - tmseditors@tribune.com Will - georgewill@washpost.com Contact through Creators Syndicate Michael Barone, Austin Bay, Brent Bozell, Pat Buchanan, Mona Charen, Linda Chavez, Jackie Gingrich Cushman, Larry Elder, Leslie Elman, Erick Erickson, Joseph Farah, David Harsanyi, Laura Hollis, Terry Jeffrey, Larry Kudlow, David Limbaugh, Dick Morris, William Murchison, Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell, Matt Towery Contact - info@creators.com Contact through Universal Press Ann Coulter or Donald Lambro Contact by mail : c/o Universal Press Syndicate 1130 Walnut Street Kansas City, MO 64106 Answers from page 14

TRIVIA ANSWERS T rivia B I T S

ANSWERS 1) Ironside starring Raymond Burr was about a police detective. 2) The Bay City Rollers hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1976 with S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night. 3) Selenium is named for Selene, Greek goddess of the moon. 4) In 1995, Montserrat’s Soufriere Hills volcano erupted, forcing most of the population to leave the island. 5) The Platter River takes its name from the French word for flat. 6) Billionaire Tony Stark is Iron Man.

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Conservative Chronicle

TRADE: March 15, 2016

Trump avoids damage for hypocritical stance on trade

onald Trump has made glob- involved in the overseas manufacturing al trade a major issue in his discussions and confirmed what Danzer presidential campaign, acsaid. “I can tell you that in none of the cusing U.S. companies of hurting our meetings did it come up,” he said. economy by moving jobs abroad to benSending jobs overseas apparently efit from cheap labor. runs in the Trump family and has signifBut it turns out that Trump, who has i c a n t l y added to their wealth. called some of his The real estate bilopponents hypolionaire’s daughter, crites, is an even Ivanka, a vice presibigger hypocrite dent of the Trump on this issue. firm, sells her own (c) 2016, United Media Services After he negoline of jewelry tiated a lucrative and women’s clothmerchandise-licensing deal with clothing, much of it manufactured in China. ing manufacturer Phillips-Van Heusen Meantime, while he’s been making to make a line of Trump clothing and himself richer with Third World labor, accessories, it was learned that his prod- he’s has been mercilessly flogging any ucts were made in low-wage countries and every U.S. company that is doing such as China, Bangladesh and Hondu- the same thing. He has attacked the Ford ras. Motor Co. for opening up factories in Mexico and Nabisco for moving some PEOPLE WITH an intimate knowl- of its cookie production there as well. edge of the deal said that while Trump After the Carrier air conditioner was deeply involved in negotiating the manufacturer announced it was movterms, he expressed no interest in where ing its plant from Indiana to Monterrey, the Trump Collection of shirts, suits and Mexico, Trump said, “We cannot allow other apparel were to be manufactured, this to keep happening. It will not hapaccording to a report Monday in the pen under my watch.” Washington Post. While he has no problem making “Finding the biggest company with Trump shirts and suits in China, he is the best practices is what was important exploiting the issue that he knows will to him,” said Jeff Danzer, who was vice make him popular among organized lapresident of the company that Trump bor and its workers. And he seems to be hired to broker the deal. “Finding a getting away with it. company that made in America was Last year he told CNN that China’s never something that was specified.” workers were “paid a lot less and the Another person who participated in standards are worse when it comes to the negotiations, who did not wish to be the environment and health care and identified, said Trump was very much worker safety.”

Donald

Lambro

His rivals for the Republican presidential nomination have attacked him for his double standard, but they have failed to make a dent in Trump’s working-class support. In a GOP presidential debate earlier this month, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio challenged Trump to say that “all the Donald Trump clothing will no longer be made in China and in Mexico, but will be made here in the United States.” TRUMP WEAKLY claimed that his apparel brands couldn’t be made here at home, blaming China’s manipulation of its currency. But the truth is that he couldn’t make and sell them as inexpensively as he can under China’s lowwage scales. While he has threatened to impose very high tariffs on imported goods, he doesn’t say how much that would add to the prices paid by American consumers. Robert Lawrence, a professor of trade and investment policies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has studied the impact Trump’s tariffs would have on the cost of imports, and it’s not a pretty picture.

He estimates that a $250 Trump suit made in China would see its price jump to $350 under his import tax proposals. “The impact would be staggering and widespread,” he told the Post. America’s trade policies have been demagogued for decades by labor union bosses, arguing that America’s economy would be destroyed by free trade agreements. But presidents in both parties have championed free trade agreements and presided over their expansion, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, who expanded Reagan’s North American Free Trade Agreement to include Mexico. Notably, both left office with their popularity intact as successful stewards of a growing, job-producing economy. But that hasn’t been the case under President Obama, whose chief legacy has been a long and painfully sluggish recovery, anemic job creation, a shrinking labor force, and an underperforming economy that continues to this very day. That America continues to sell its goods and services throughout the world and buys a lot of exports is not the cause of our mediocre economy, which is growing at little more than one percent. Our economic troubles stem from excessive tax rates on businesses, investors and families that have stunted economic growth; and a mountain of crushing government debt, costly federal regulations, and a massive, antiquated bureaucracy in need of a top-to-bottom housecleaning. No one has argued more convincingly against tariffs and other tax penalties on trade than the late free-market economist Milton Friedman in his bestselling book Free to Choose. “The gains to some producers from tariffs and other restrictions are more than offset by the loss to other producers and especially to consumers in general,” he writes in the chapter titled “The Tyranny of Controls.” “Ever since Adam Smith there has been virtual unanimity among economists ... that international free trade is in the best interests of the trading countries and of the world,” Friedman reminds us. THAT TRUMP makes his suits and shirts in countries that charged him the cheapest price that benefits American consumers and businesses only proves Friedman’s point.

March 23, 2016 AEI: March 11, 2016

The Sea Island conspiracy — oligarch collusion

ver the long weekend before Sulzberger, publisher of the Trumpho- benighted, AEI, Neocon Central, bethe Mississippi and Michi- bic New York Times. lieves less in democracy than in perpetuBush guru Karl Rove of FOX News al control of the American nation by the gan primaries, the sky above Sea Island was black with corporate was on hand, as were Speaker Paul Ryan, ruling Beltway elites. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and jets. If an outsider like Trump imperils Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Larry Sen. Lindsey Graham, dispatched by that control, democracy be damned. The Page and Eric Schmidt, Napster’s Sean Trump in New Hampshire and a ber- elites will come together to bring him Parker, Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, and serker on the subject of the Donald. down, because, behind party ties, they So, too, was William Kristol, editor of are soul brothers in the pursuit of power. other members of the super-rich were jetting in to the exclusive Georgia re- the rabidly anti-Trump Weekly Standard, Something else sort, ostensibly to participate in the who reported back was revealed by the annual World Forum of the American to comrades: “The Huffington Post — key task now, to Enterprise Institute. a deeply embedded Among the advertised topics of dis- ... paraphrase Karl corruption that cussion: “Millennials: How Much Do Marx, is less to permeates this (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate They Matter and What Do They Want?” understand Trump capital city. than to stop him.” That was the cover story. Kristol earlier tweeted that the Sea THE AMERICAN Enterprise InAS REVEALED by the Huffington Island conclave is “off the record, so stitute for Public Policy Research is a Post, Sea Island last weekend was host please do consider my tweets from there 501(c)(3) under IRS rules, an organizato a secret conclave at the Cloisters off the record.” tion exempt from U.S. taxation. Redeeming itself for relegating where oligarchs colluded with Beltway Million-dollar corporate contribuelites to reverse the democratic deci- Trump to its entertainment pages, the tions to AEI are tax-deductible. sions of millions of voters and abort the Huffington Post did the nation a service This special privilege, this freedom in lifting the rug on “something rotten in from taxation, is accorded to organizacandidacy of Donald Trump. Among the journalists at Sea Island the state.” tions established for purposes such as What we see at Sea Island is that, de- “religious, educational, charitable, sciwere Rich Lowry of National Review, which just devoted an entire issue to spite all their babble about bringing the entific, literary ... or the prevention of the topic: “Against Trump,” and Arthur blessings of “democracy” to the world’s cruelty to children or animals.”

Pat

Buchanan

POVERTY: March 10, 2016

White poverty and me

n his continuing effort to pit races and classes against each other, Democratic presidential candidate and socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has said that if you are white, “you don’t know what it’s like to be poor.” He should drive some of the roads I’ve driven in West Virginia, among other places. Some of the homes of the white poor look like throwbacks from an earlier time. Sanders attempted to “clarify” his comment (a political synonym for walking it back when it didn’t play well) during a town hall meeting Monday night in Detroit. Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked him about his remark and Sanders replied, “I know about white poverty. There is no candidate in this race who has talked more about poverty than I have.”

THEREIN LIES the problem. The left talks a lot about poverty, but when it comes to programs and ideas to help people climb out of poverty, their only solution is to spend more money. If money alone were enough to extricate people from poverty and help them sustain themselves with a job and a strong family, then the more than $1 trillion spent on anti-poverty programs since the Great Society was launched by President Johnson in 1964 would have

reduced the number of poor people in America. And yet, the poverty rate changes very little. A rational person might conclude that spending more money on programs that have failed to achieve their stated goals is not the right answer. In April and May of 1964, President Johnson and the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, toured the Appalachian states. After their visit he vowed to wipe out poverty. He didn’t and his successors haven’t either.

Cal

What do I, a now “prosperous” white guy, know about poverty? IN 1965, I was a private first class in the U.S. Army, working at Armed Forces Radio in New York City for the astronomical wage of $99 a month. All of us enlisted men had second jobs to make ends meet. Mine was as an engineer at WOR-TV. I had no car, the subway was 10 cents (soon to jump to 15 cents, producing cries from the left that it would harm the poor). I had no savings and as one payday approached I had only a dime in my pocket for a one-way trip to work. Had the paycheck not arrived,

I had no idea how to get home to our little apartment in Elmhurst, Queens. Hitchhiking in New York City was not an option. What I did have was incentive. I did not accept my poverty status as the final verdict on a young life. To paraphrase the song, if I couldn’t make it in America, I couldn’t make it anywhere. And so I kept at it until my Army discharge and then I moved back to Washington where I finished college, worked at a civilian media job and persisted until breaks came. While poverty does not have simple solutions, there are solutions. They begin with relaying stories to the poor about people who used to be in their situation but liberated themselves from a life of want and need by making the right life choices. Inspiration and hope do not come from government. They come from within. They also come from churches, more of which can and should “adopt” a poor family and help them move out of poverty. “You gotta have hope, mustn’t sit around and mope,” says the song from the musical Damn Yankees. Where does anyone hear that in our blame, envy and entitlement political discourse? WHERE HAVE you gone Horatio Alger? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

What the co-conspirators of Sea Island were up to at the Cloisters was about as religious as what the Bolsheviks at that girls school known as the Smolny Institute were up to in Petrograd in 1917. From what has been reported, it would not be extreme to say this was a conspiracy of oligarchs, War Party neocons, and face-card Republicans to reverse the results of the primaries and impose upon the party, against its expressed will, a nominee responsive to the elites’ agenda. And this taxpayer-subsidized “Dump Trump” camarilla raises even larger issues. Now America is not Russia or Egypt or China. But all those countries are now moving purposefully to expose U.S. ties to nongovernmental organizations set up and operating in their capital cities. Many of those NGOs have had funds funneled to them from U.S. agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which has backed “colorcoded revolutions” credited with dumping over regimes in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia. In the early 1950s, in Iran and Guatemala, the CIA of the Dulles brothers did this work. Whatever ones thinks of Vladimir Putin, can anyone blame him for not wanting U.S. agencies backing NGOs in Moscow, whose unstated goal is to see him and his regime overthrown? And whatever one thinks of NED and its subsidiaries, it is time Americans took a hard look at the tax-exempt foundations, think tanks and public policy institutes operating in our capital city. How many are like AEI, scheming to predetermine the outcome of presidential elections while enjoying tax exemptions and posturing as benign assemblages of disinterested scholars and seekers of truth? How many of these tax-exempt think tanks are fronts and propaganda organs of transnational corporations that are sustained with tax-deductible dollars, until their “resident scholars” can move into government offices and do the work for which they have been paid handsomely in advance? How many of these think tanks take foreign money to advance the interests of foreign regimes in America’s capital? We talk about the “deep state” in Turkey and Egypt, the unseen regimes that exist beneath the public regime and rule the nation no matter the president or prime minister. What about the “deep state” that rules us, of which we caught a glimpse at Sea Island? A DILIGENT legislature of a democratic republic would have long since dragged America’s deep state out into the sunlight.

Conservative Chronicle

REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT: March 12, 2016

How can America be saved without our right to choose?

oliticians and agenda-driven tine O’Donnell, the Republican candipundits on both sides of the date who had upset the establishment aisle are droning on that this favorite Mike Castle (DE). Even though election is about saving America blah- Rove was forced to publicly walk back blah. They are using that as dogma in- his tyrannical diatribe, the gauntlet tended to deceive the unwitting. The had been thrown down and it was ly understood that truth they are trying to conceal from you c l e a r Rove’s public contriis that the 2016 tion did not reflect presidential electhe true sentiments tion is about savof the Republican ing the right of establishment. We the People to (c) 2016, Mychal Massie O’Donnell may choose the candinot have been a mensa club member but dates of our choice. Specific to my point, there are three she was a loyal conservative who would epochs including the current that prove have honored her promises to We the my point. The first was the Tea Party People. Castle is as left-wing as the late movement that began in 2009. Voters Arlen Specter had been. It was reported from every demographic, regardless that the first call Castle made upon losof Party affiliation came together in a ing to O’Donnell was not to the GOP movement that blazed across America but to Obama. Yet this was the person Rove wanted reelected. like a wind driven brush fire. Suddenly the Tea Party movement, IN 2010 we were witnesses to one its candidates, and those who were of the greatest voter-driven tsunamis elected as Tea Party members came in election history pursuant to election under attack. It is widely believed that turnovers. We the People flexed our Rove was at least partly responsible muscle under a united banner of smaller for the NAACP and other black front government and lower taxes and we groups attacking the Tea Party as being racist. Republican establishment figures were massively successful. I warned that Karl Rove and the es- like Mitch McConnell (KY) gloated tablishments of both Parties would do and mocked Tea Party candidates that their best to delegitimize the movement establishment figures were able to deand that is exactly what happened. The feat. Rove, in calling for the defeat of Republican establishment led by Rove Tea Party Candidate Todd Akin (MO), set about to undermine the movement in joked about having Akin killed. Rove’s flaccid later apology was met with harsh the aftermath of 2010. Many will remember the angry skepticism. Republican leadership blacklisted screed by Rove on FoxNews as he threatened to not make campaign funds longtime highly successful Republican available to Tea Party candidate Chris- marketing companies that were also

Mychal

Massie

fundraising for Tea Party conservative who are convinced that the Republican candidates. establishment was responsible for the political demise of Herman Cain. Why? AS I WARNED the Republican es- Because he was giving voice to We the tablishment would do everything in their People and the establishment was not power to crush the Tea Party movement going to permit that. because it posed the very real threat of The third epoch is taking place at empowering We the People. this very moment. The Republican esThe second epoch was the 2012 tablishment doesn’t want us to think presidential election when Herman Cain for ourselves nor do they want us to enthreatened to break the Republican es- joy our Constitutional right pursuant to tablishment’s good ol’ boy network. freedom of choice. They want to dictate When it became clear that We the People whom we support and control who gets were backing Herman Cain and that he elected. posed a very real threat to the existence The Republican establishment tried of the establishment, FoxNews and the to foist Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt front group pundits began the under- Romney, Jeb Bush, and then Marco Rumining of Cain’s presidential pursuit. bio upon us and they have shown their There are many, myself included, willingness to even lose rather than allow We the People to truly be involved. The Republican establishment gives the illusion of our being involved. They have us think the game is conducted fairly, then when our candidate loses, we are expected to immediately fall in line and give our money and complete support to them. They have been successful for many election cycles running a game that was rigged to not allow for true choice. The Republican establishment set up straw men who had less than no hope of winning and called it a choice between same and the actual candidate they wanted. Now for the first time since Barry Goldwater gave rise to Ronald Reagan, the Republican establishment faces a threat from We the People that truly threatens to overturn their political litter box. And that threat is Donald Trump. IF THEY are able to prevent Trump from getting the nomination through subterfuge and corrupt machinations, it is not Trump who would lose — it is We the People because once again the establishment will have been successful in denying us our right to choose.

March 23, 2016 AMERICAN PRINCIPLES: March 9, 2016

Three changes that America needs America has seen a decade of political upheaval. Ten years ago, voters took control of Congress from the party of the incumbent president and gave it to the opposition party. Two years later, they gave the White House to that other party, too. Two years after that, they gave the House of Representatives back to the party that opposed the new sitting president. Four years later, they gave the Senate to that opposition party, too. NOW, IN THIS presidential primary season, it has become a cliche to say many voters in both major parties are angry at the government and driven by an anti-establishment sentiment. And, on its current path, the United States is headed toward multiple crises. If our nation continues to trend downward economically and cultur-

ally — and moves away from its heri- country. What will happen if America tage as a place where people could live continues down this debt-accumulating freely under a constitutionally limited path? “The likelihood of a fiscal crisis in government that protected rather than threatened their basic God-given rights the United States would increase,” the — then our politics will become more, Congressional Budget Office said in its budget outlook released in not less, volatile. January. “SpecifiIf we permacally, the risk would nently abandon rise of investors’ the fundamental becoming unwillprinciples that ing to finance the made this nation (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate government’s boruniquely prosperrowing unless they ous, free and secure, then we will no longer be uniquely were compensated with very high interest rates. If that occurred, interest rates prosperous, free and secure. The first change America needs is to on federal debt would rise suddenly and turn back toward individual responsibil- sharply relative to rates of return on ity and self-reliance — and away from other assets.” government dependency. TO AVERT national bankruptcy, the The federal government is already nearly $19.1 trillion in debt — more federal government needs to reform mathan $160,000 for each of the approxi- jor benefit programs — including Social mately 117,700,000 households in the Security and Medicare — and roll back

Terry

Jeffrey

MEDIA: March 11, 2016

Media malpractice 2016

ne of the greatest challenges a human being can face is to find a “political strategist” on any cable news network who has actually worked for well-known politicians within the last four years — or even last decade. The lack of core competence in campaigns actually shapes the lack of core competence in reporting on campaigns. Many of those who report on campaigns have never actually worked on one. Many of those on television pontificating about campaigns as so called “political strategists” do not know the difference between a margin of error and a margin on paper. They go with the conventional wisdom that sounds good.

JUST THIS past week, the conventional wisdom became that Marco Rubio’s campaign collapsed because he dared to get in the gutter with Donald Trump. As Rubio himself noted, he had to do that because it was the only way to shift the media’s attention. In truth, Rubio getting in the gutter with Trump had little to do with his campaign collapse. The real reason was poor long term strategic planning wherein his campaign decided to run a national campaign without the resources to do so. That reason, however, ignores Donald Trump. The pundits and pontificators on cable news cannot ignore Donald Trump. He is ratings gold and news shows will let Trump break virtually any rule of propriety so long as they can get him on. Last Tuesday, Donald Trump held a victory press conference at Mara Lago,

his palatial resort in Palm Beach, FL. On display were Trump steaks, Trump magazine, Trump wine, and Trump water. His press conference became an infomercial about his branded products as he responded to accusations that businesses related to those products had gone under.

Erick

The media treated Trump’s infomercial as legitimate news, choosing to ignore Ted Cruz, who had surprised everyone with a second place finish in Michigan that night and a win in Idaho. Most of the media uncritically gave Trump a pass on his infomercial. Anderson Cooper was one of the few to point out that the Trump steaks were not actually Trump branded. IT TOOK several more days for other reporters to get around to reporting Trump’s infomercial had been yet another con. The steaks were actually from Bush Brothers, no relation to Jeb. The Trump magazine on display was not actually the Trump magazine that folded. The Trump water, as Zeke Miller of Time noted, was actually Village Springs Water rebranded. It was all a farce. But it’s a farce the media loves. It has become a routine occurrence that cable news goes wall to wall with

Donald Trump press conferences. CNN even covered Trump Farce One’s landing in some campaign location as if it was Air Force One. When other candidates speak, the press ignores them or cuts in and out of their events. With Trump, it is wall to wall coverage and often uncritical coverage. They just let Trump speak. Donald Trump is, in fact, a media created candidate. Should he secure the Republican nomination, his supporters will be in for a rude awakening when the press turns on Trump. No longer will he get free rides. No longer will he be able to literally phone in an interview. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this media malpractice is how so many Trump supporters claim the media has for too long picked the Republicans’ nominee. Now Trump’s supporters are complicit in this media campaign and do not even see it. The major media outlets in the United States refuse to take responsibility. Frequently, reporters have taken to claiming it is not their obligation to investigate the candidates. That would be news to candidates in the past. The herd mentality of the American press corps and their fixation on ratings instead of fact has helped transform the 2016 presidential election into a national embarrassment. WHEN IT IS all over, the media will refer to the candidates as “clowns” and claim to have had no role in any of it. Then we will do it all over again in four years.

welfare programs such as Medicaid and food stamps. The second change America needs is for the government to once again protect the God-given rights of individuals and respect, rather than attack, traditional values and the traditional family. As the welfare state has grown, the family has declined. Back in 1965, only 7.7 percent of American babies were born to unmarried mothers. In each of the last seven years on record (2008 through 2014), it has been more than 40 percent. Since the Supreme Court declared in 1973 that taking the life of an unborn child is a “right,” our nation has usually aborted more than a million babies a year. The federal government is now trying to force the complicity of individuals and institutions in taking the lives of innocent humans by compelling them to buy or provide health insurance plans that cover abortion-inducing drugs and devices. In pursuing this new element in the entitlement state, the federal government is simultaneously attacking the right to life and the freedom of conscience — and, thus, doing exactly the opposite of what our federal government was founded to do. The third change America needs is a foreign policy that seeks to prudentially advance the freedom, security and prosperity of this nation rather than change the nature of other nations. In recent years, the United States attempted to transform Iraq and Libya. The Islamic State terrorist group took advantage of the power vacuums our mistaken policies helped create and is now perpetrating genocide against Christians and other religious minorities in the territories it controls. At the same time, we left our own borders open and our government does not know or control who or what crosses it. Recently, the president sent Congress the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership deal that, if approved, would bind the United States into a trade zone with the Communist regime in Vietnam and would have the United States, as the agreement puts it, “[a]ffirm that stateowned enterprises can play a legitimate role in the diverse economies of the parties.” In the future, U.S. foreign policy decisions must not be governed by globalist or Utopian visions, but by careful consideration of this question: Does it use moral and constitutional means to advance the freedom, security and prosperity of the American people? THIS NATION does not need a new revolution. We need to go back to the principles of that first revolution that made us the United States of America.

Conservative Chronicle

2016 ELECTION: March 11, 2016

Dems dispirited, GOP hobbled by excess of spirit

ad news for both parties in the primaries and caucuses in the seven days in March following Super Tuesday. Start with the higher-ratings, higherturnout Republican race. Donald Trump won two solid victories in Michigan and Mississippi Tuesday, after weak showings in the five contests over the weekend. From March 2 to March 8 he netted 124 delegates, to 125 for Ted Cruz, 41 for Marco Rubio and 27 for John Kasich.

THAT’S NOT helpful, since it’s imperative for Trump to win the 1,237-delegate majority in primaries and caucuses. If he falls visibly short of that after the last primaries June 7, there will be moves to assemble a majority — call it “brokering” if you want to — for another candidate. Nobody is going to wait until the convention assembles in Cleveland July 18 to make what Trump calls “great deals.” Trump supporters argue it’s illegitimate to deny the nomination to the candidate leading in delegates. But in past races such candidates were widely acceptable to Republican politicians and voters. Trump isn’t, for reasons as difficult to explain to Trump enthusiasts as their enthusiasm is to Trump detractors. March NBC/Wall Street Journal and ABC/Washington Post national polls show Trump’s support in four-way races at 30 and 34 percent. And in contrast to past years, about half seem durably opposed to the front-runner’s nomination. They are as entitled to try to give effect to their views as the Trump-supporting minority is. Trump would get more than halfway to 1,237 if he prevails in the winnertake-all primaries in Marco Rubio’s Florida (99 delegates) and John Kasich’s Ohio (66 delegates) next Tuesday. That would force Rubio and Kasich out of the race or leave them splintering the anti-Trump vote among the upscale voters they appeal to. Kasich is running close behind Trump in Ohio polling, and his local popularity with a downscale-heavy electorate could deny Trump delegates he would otherwise win. The Florida race is more complicated. Ted Cruz is campaigning there, inviting non-Trump voters to reject Mitt Romney’s suggestion that they vote for the candidate closest to Trump in local polling. He’s running anti-Rubio ads and got ex-candidate Carly Fiorina into Miami to endorse him. The risk for Rubio is that his voters, dismayed by his poor March 2-8 showings, will migrate to Cruz. Rubio’s argument is that he’d be a stronger candidate in later non-Southern primaries and in the general election.

As in all Northern and some SouthTrump in his victory monologue March 8 argued that he would bring ern states so far, Clinton lost white votnew people into the electorate and ers to Sanders. She won black voters, with about 65 percent thus, contrary to almost all recent poll- but only vote to Sanders’ 30 ing, would easily beat Hillary Clinton. of the percent, compared He pointed out with her 89 peraccurately that in cent the same day Michigan, as just in Mississippi about everywhere (where Sanders outside Vermont (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate got only 10 perand Massachusetts, Republican turnout was higher cent). That may cause her to double down on issues such as police tactics than Democratic turnout. and gun rights Black voters in Michigan and the THAT LOW Democratic turnout produced a “yuuuge” surprise in Mich- North generally have lived under libigan. Recent polling showed Hillary eral city governments and often unClinton up 19 points over Bernie Sand- der Democratic state governments. ers. But Sanders won, 50 to 48 percent. The Flint water crisis, which Clinton That owed something to the trade issue talked so much about, was the result in a state with nostalgia for auto as- of bad decisions by local Democrats, sembly jobs lost long ago. But it also compounded by failures of Republican suggested weaknesses for Clinton in state and Democratic federal regulators. A vote for the socialist Sanders the fall.

Michael

Barone

may, ironically, be a protest against Obama-style big government. Clinton currently has poll leads in Ohio, Ill. and Pa. that resemble her Michigan poll numbers — and may turn out to mean as little. Efforts to woo black voters with stands criticizing police tactics and urging gun control may hurt her with white noncollege Democrats like those Sanders carried in Michigan. That may leave her being nominated by party insiders, the superdelegates — a liability in a year of protest. MEANWHILE, THE usually docile Republicans are deeply split, with plenty of people ready to protest whether Trump is nominated or not. These seven days in March have shown Democrats suffering from dispiritedness and Republicans from an excess of spirit.

HEALTH CARE: March 16, 2016

Obamacare’s tax-time torment “Where is my 1095-A? This is what it must be like dealing with a government agency in a third world country.” That was the lament on Twitter of just one poor citizen this week trying to get his tax records in order. Nationwide, hard-working Americans are struggling to meet the April 18 IRS filing deadline. Standing in the way: the bumbling Obamacare bureaucracy. In Minnesota, an estimated 18,000 people who were on health insurance plans last year offered through MNsure, the state Obamacare health insurance exchange, still haven’t received their 1095-A form. It’s the “health insurance marketplace statement” required to file accurate tax returns and claim the premium tax credit.

TWIN CITIES officials blame “technical bugs” and promise they’ll be sending more of the documents out next week. But it’s small consolation to farmers in Minnesota who were required to file their taxes by March 1. “This is the second year in a row MNsure has been late sending my 1095-A form and it’s cost me extra money when I have to file for an extension on my tax filings,” farmer Robert Marg of Winona County, Minnesota, told his local TV station. In Hawaii, the paper-pushers sent out their 1095-A forms on time — but the documents are worthless to thousands of taxpayers enrolled in the state’s nowdefunct Obamacare exchange, the Hawaii Health Connector. According to the Pacific Business News, “approximately

80 percent of the forms sent out to taxpayers” contain errors, including address problems. The Aloha State is still digging out from the mess the overseers of the bankrupted state exchange made last year, when Hawaii Health Connector staff issued 1095-A forms manually because the bureaucracy did not have a working automated system for creating 1095-As. How many taxpayers were affected? “CMS and IRS have not been able to provide error rates for 2014,” PBN reported. What century is this?

Michelle

Malkin

AFTER I REPORTED on my own bizarro 1095-A nightmare last year and revisited the Obamacare tax-time troubles last week in Conservative Review, I gathered yet more horror stories. Citizens trying to get through to the HealthCareGov.com hotline have been trapped in the spiral of “escalation” — Washington-speak for getting the runaround. “On the phone with @HealthCareGov for more than an hour. I just want my 1095A or B form. #nomoreescalationsplease,” one Obamacare hostage wrote. “So apparently you have to re-escalate the escalation of the escalation. All to get my 1095A. This is INSANE,” another wrote.

One reader detailed for me how she had withdrawn from Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, in 2014, yet received 1095-A forms two years in a row incorrectly showing that she was enrolled. Insurer Anthem “said that they called Covered California and reported that I did not have coverage for 2015,” the reader told me. “Then 45 days later, we received a corrected 1095. However, it was not corrected. It was the same 1095 we previously received containing the same mistakes. After being on hold for 40 minutes with Covered California, the person I spoke with said, “Yes, I was not covered in 2015, but no one had gone into the system to generate a corrected 1095 and that I will be receiving the new one within 45 days. Unfortunately, that will be after April 15 when I am due to file taxes. What a nightmare.” Yet another reader lamented that D.C. politicians have been deaf to their plight. “Thank you so much for the kindness in responding to me,” she wrote after we traded stories. “I am not kidding, I just about cried that a real human being has finally heard me. My husband and I know we are nobodies in the world. He’s a small-business owner (a handyman) and I have an online vintage store on Etsy. So no one on the Hill cares about what people like us are going through.” IT’S ALWAYS taxpayers who are forced to pay for the incompetence and apathy of their government tormentors.

March 23, 2016 GOP RACE: March 11, 2016

An appeal to Marco Rubio supporters

appealed to Donald Trump sup- of Republican primary voters disagrees porters to consider voting for Ted with you and intends to do something Cruz, and I now make the same about it. It’s too late in this primary campaign for you to dissuade them. request of Marco Rubio supporters. Cruz supporters are staunch constiI must emphasize that my primary motivation is to advance conservatism, tutional conservatives, and most are not to defeat Trump, though the two also anti-establishment because they might be more similar than dissimilar. believe that the GOP establishment The remedy for what ails America is hasn’t fought hard enough to block dent Obama’s agenda full-throated conservatism, not a smat- P r e s i and has sometimes tering of populist enabled it. Cruz ideas — no matwould be taking a ter how forcefulrisk to unify with ly implemented Rubio at this — and Cruz rep(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate point, because resents the best Trump supporters opportunity we’ve had in decades for effecting conserva- would claim that it proves Trump is the only bona fide outsider in the race. tive solutions. They would paint it as a sellout, espeADMITTEDLY, A union of Cruz cially on the important immigration isand Rubio supporters would be tricky sue. But even if Cruz went so far as to because Cruz is anti-establishment and Rubio remains the de facto establish- select Rubio as his running mate, it ment candidate, despite John Kasich’s wouldn’t be a sellout. As president, Cruz would set executive policy. This increased visibility. This is an overwhelmingly anti-es- is also true of the other major issue on tablishment year, as seen by the com- which they differ — foreign policy. bined vote totals of Trump and Cruz. While Rubio’s foreign policy is more The Trump phenomenon is real, and it proactive than Cruz’s, Cruz is far has arisen out of the anguished cries from an isolationist and would vigorof his anti-establishment support- ously protect our interests at home and ers, which are legitimate. Washington abroad, first by rebuilding the military. hasn’t been listening, much less re- Throughout history, presidential candidates have picked running mates who sponding, to the people’s concerns. Even if you disagree that anti-estab- haven’t perfectly aligned with them on lishment sentiment is justified or reject policy. How about from Rubio’s perspecthe very notion of “establishment,” surely you’ll concede that a large group tive? Well, both he and his supporters

David

Limbaugh

have said that he is nearly as conservative as Cruz and that he’s certainly not for open borders. They insist that even if there was a great difference between him and Cruz on immigration before, that gap has significantly narrowed. And I believe the foreign policy hawks in Rubio’s camp could comfortably live with Cruz’s approach — particularly compared with Trump’s. RUBIO SUPPORTERS reject the idea that Marco is establishment or centrist in any way. They say he’s a 97 percent conservative and resent the claim that Cruz is the only true conservative in the field. Throughout the budget battles during the past several years, Cruz’s GOP opponents, many of whom are now Rubio supporters, have said that their differences with Cruz and the conservative “firebrands” in Congress are more about strategy than policy. I have expressed my skepticism about that before, but now is a good time to put that to the test. If they really just disagree with Cruz’s tactics and even have thought he has been grandstand-

ing, surely they can put those concerns aside and support Cruz because he is the last best chance to advance conservative ideas they say they believe in. This campaign has been especially strident from both sides as each of the candidates has challenged the other’s integrity. The tension between their supporters has been palpable. If the candidates are big enough to mutually forgive for the good of the nation, surely their supporters should follow suit. How about concerns that Cruz wouldn’t be able to work with Congress? Well, if Cruz is elected on presenting the most unambiguous conservative message in years, he will have a mandate to push his conservative solutions through Congress, many of whose members will have been elected with the same message. The climate for advancing an unapologetically conservative agenda under a Cruz presidency would be dramatically different from the one Cruz has encountered under Obama’s presidency. Also, I assume Rubio supporters would consider Rubio a great asset in a Cruz administration because he could help bridge gaps and build coalitions. Trump boasts that he is building the Republican Party by bringing in new constituencies, and we should applaud that — but not at the expense of losing our bearings. What is the point of expanding a party if, in the process, the party’s platform becomes incoherent? The point of a party is to advance ideas, not the other way around. We mustn’t lose sight of that. Rubio may be hanging on to the hope that he can turn the tide, but I can’t see how that is remotely realistic. I hope he will withdraw soon and urge his supporters to back Cruz. I have no idea whether they can ever formally join together in a unity ticket, but for the reasons I’ve stated, I am quite open to the possibility. IN THE MEANTIME, I urge Cruz supporters and Rubio supporters not to attack and further alienate each other. We each sincerely believe in our respective causes. Let’s remember that the primary agents of destruction are Obama and his leftist colleagues and causes. Let’s bury the hatchet for the good of this nation, for which conservatism is the only answer.

Conservative Chronicle

ABORTION: March 11, 2016

Trapped in a pro-abortion bubble

n the libertine left, one of the me, I will not participate in the tyranny of most revered “social justice patriarchy and stand silent.” Texas abortionist Amy Hagstrom warriors” is the abortionist. “Abortion providers” are revered as liv- Miller is a master at deconstructing the ing statues of liberty, granting the free- English language. She allows women dom from being “punished with a baby,” to “exercise their right to full humanity to quote our current president. Entire and dignity. And so a lot of time when people say, ‘What kind of documentaries celebrate them. work do you do?’ The latest is obviously the anTrapped, named swer is, ‘I’m an after the pro-aborabortion provider,’ tion lingo for any but I usually I say law that regulates (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate I work in the stigthe abortion industry, or as they spin it, “targeted regulation ma-eradication, self-esteem boosting, of abortion providers.” In the Los Angeles identity-examination business.” It’s not just stigmas these abortionists Times, Katie Walsh provided the propagandistic ooze: “These providers embody are eradicating. The filmmaker is Dawn Porter, who a remarkable mix of tenacity and tenderness as they comfort patients and attempt feels pro-lifers are “terrifying.” In an into discern and comply with labyrinthine terview with NARAL Pro-Choice America leader Ilyse Hogue for Lena Dunham’s regulations.” online “Lenny Letter,” Porter asked: “I Tenderness. remember seeing you interviewed with THIS FILM followed the usual route Charmaine Yoest, the president of Amerof an abortion propaganda film. Abortion- icans United for Life. How do you deists receive a standing ovation when the bate people like that? Did you ever feel film premieres at the Sundance Film Fes- like you wanted to hit her?” Hogue said tival, national newspaper film critics like “I don’t.” Yet, Porter insisted that she Walsh overpraise it as “galvanizing and gets “really angry, because they seem to lucid,” clips appear in the middle of pro- have no regard for the truth. Because the abortion “comedy” rants on HBO, and people who are often frightened the most it’s shown across the country at events are the people who aren’t getting a lot of by pro-abortion groups like NARAL Pro- health care access, and they [clinic proChoice America. The cycle ends when testers] are just terrifying to people.” In an interview with Jezebel, Porter it gets a broadcast TV showing on PBS. could only see “mean-spirited” protestTrapped airs on June 20. In Trapped, the abortionists show they ers, while an abortion clinic employee have no conscience. They are not only who prayed with a woman procuring an capable of doing anything, but of saying abortion was “very godlike.” anything that advances their daily horINSIDE PORTER’S pro-abortion rors. Dr. Willie Parker, a black abortion- bubble, the abortions are always heroicalist celebrated for bringing the “right to ly compassionate. There are no Kermit choose” to Mississippi, compares his Gosnells committing live-birth abortions. butchery to Lincoln freeing the slaves: The women seeking abortions need “ac“And as Abraham Lincoln said, when cess” to their “full humanity.” They are asked why he freed the slaves, he simply never to be morally judged for their acsaid, ‘As I would not be a slave, so I would tions, no matter how many abortions they not be a master.’ So because I would not acquire. And the fetuses? They are literwant to have my rights taken away from ally invisible in the world, or in Parker’s

Brent

Bozell

view, they are the fetters of patriarchal take a swing at people who would want to slavery. put the brakes on the perpetual abortion machine. PORTER CANNOT imagine how Since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion easily she can be described in the way nationwide in 1973, over 58.5 million she sees her adversaries: rigid, extreme, fetuses have been killed in the United self-righteous and mean-spirited, ready to States by abortionists like these.

DONALD TRUMP: March 14, 2016

Maximum Leader Trump

he notion that Donald Trump to restore its old stability. He didn’t. He is some new phenomenon on only made things infinitely worse. Ditto the Perons in Argentina, which the political scene is sadly mistaken. Would that he were. His type is still struggling to recover from their has been seen before — all over Latin misrule. It may be hard to remember there was a time America, which may explain why the now, but when Argentina United States has was the breadprospered, and basket of the New even remained a World, attracting republic, while investment and much of the rest of (c) 2016, Tribune Media Services industrious immithe continent has grants from all over seen dictatorships come and go. the world. But it isn’t now that a succesJUST ABANDON the foundations sion of little Mussolinis have had their of republican government — like the way with it. And now Donald Trump promises rule of law under an independent judiciary — and there’s little to prevent our to perform the same disservice for this becoming a banana republic too. Our country. The same tactics have been tried here current president toys with ruling by executive decree every time Congress before, too — by Aaron Burr in the still refuses to do his bidding. And begins early days of this republic, which reimitating those Latin American strong- mained one, no thanks to him. Popularimen who turn out to be weak indeed. It ty, as evinced by landslide electoral viccan be a popular move — till the peo- tories, also tend to turn our own leaders’ ple catch on. But we’re told desperate heads. After his party swept the country times require desperate measures. Even in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt set out to if these times are scarcely desperate. As pack the Supreme Court, and though he calmer heads like Warren Buffet keep failed, it wasn’t by much. saying. THE PRICE of republican governEven the longest-running democracies aren’t immune to fits of hysteria. ment remains eternal vigilance — and There was a time when Venezuela, a sense of restraint on the part of even too, was a stable republic. But when its and especially the most popular leadeconomy soured and corruption grew ers. Else, we’re inviting the reign of the rampant, a caudillo appeared, promising Donald Trumps.

Paul

Greenberg

March 23, 2016 AMERICAN JEWS: March 11, 2016

The Holocaust and the Jewish identity

Which, incidentally, is the answer to revealing about the state of Jewish the perennial question, “Why is it that identity in contemporary America. Think about it. There are several alter- Jews vote overwhelmingly Democratnate ways American Jews commonly ex- ic?” Because, for the majority of Jews, ideals of liberalism are the plain the role Judaism plays in their lives. the social tangible expressions of (1) Practice: Judaism as embedded in m o s t their prophetic Jewish their life through faith. religious practice When Sanders or the transmission was asked about of Jewish culture his Jewish idenby way of teach(c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group tity, I was sure his ing or scholarship. Think Joe Lieberman or the neighbor- answer would be some variation of Tikkun. On the stump, he plays the Old Teshood rabbi. (2) Tikkun: Seeing Judaism as an ex- tament prophet railing against the powpression of the prophetic ideal of social erful and denouncing their treatment of justice. Love thy neighbor, clothe the the widow and the orphan. Yet Sanders naked, walk with God, beat swords into gave an entirely different answer. (3) The Holocaust. What a strange plowshares. As ritual and practice have fallen away over the generations, this has reply — yet it doesn’t seem so to us bebecome the core identity of liberal Juda- cause it has become increasingly comA FASCINATING answer, irrel- ism. Its central mission is nothing less mon for American Jews to locate their evant to presidential politics but quite than to repair the world (“Tikkun olam”). identity in the Holocaust. ernie Sanders is the most successful Jewish candidate for the presidency ever. It’s a rare sign of the health of our republic that no one seems to much care or even notice. Least of all, Sanders himself. Which prompted Anderson Cooper in a recent Democratic debate to ask Sanders whether he was intentionally keeping his Judaism under wraps. “No,” answered Sanders: “I am very proud to be Jewish.” He then explained that the Holocaust had wiped out his father’s family. And that he remembered as a child seeing neighbors with concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms. Being Jewish, he declared, “is an essential part of who I am as a human being.”

Charles

Krauthammer

GEORGE WALLACE: March 14, 2016

Our George Wallace

eorge Wallace knew how to handle the hecklers who routinely disrupted his events. “These are the folks,” he declared at a rally in 1968, “that people like us are sick and tired of. You’ve been getting a good lesson in what we’ve been talking about. They talk about free speech but won’t allow it to others.” Wallace knew the protesters were priceless to him in stoking passions and drawing media attention. “They on our payroll,” he joked. GEORGE WALLACE had unsurpassed skills as a popular agitator, but even he would have to admire how Donald Trump parlayed a canceled Chicago event where supporters and protesters shoved and punched one another into wall-to-wall media coverage and an advertisement for his alleged stalwartness against the forces of anarchy. Trump bears a striking resemblance to Wallace, another entertaining, anti-establishment bomb-thrower who became — to the shock of respectable people — a kind of tribune of the American working class. For all his ugliness, Trump isn’t, like Wallace, a segregationist fueled by his opposition to civil-rights legislation and federal power. But he is a voice of rough-hewn populism that hasn’t had such potent expression since the Alabama governor ran for president, finding more support than anyone thought possible. (Stephan Lesher’s biography, George Wallace: American Populist, is the source for much of what follows.) Like Trump, the Alabaman was hated by his own party’s establishment, and

widely discounted by political observers until his strength in 1968 as a thirdparty candidate became undeniable. He drew enormous crowds, even in unexpected places. At the end of the 1968 campaign, he drew 20,000 in Boston and packed 25,000 people into Madison Square Garden. He was funny and had, in the words of Time magazine, “a histrionic flair for the crude, sardonic image.” He told hippie protesters, “You can come up here and I’ll autograph your sandals.” And taunted their hair, “There must be a barbers’ strike around here.”

Rich

HE TALKED tough. He warned protesters getting in the way of his car that it would be “the last car they ever blocked.” He was anti-intellectual. He lambasted “pointy-headed professors who can’t even park a bicycle straight.” He hated the media (while soaking up as much coverage as possible). Journalists were “sissy-britches intellectual morons.” He supported law enforcement to the hilt: “I am going to give the moral support of the presidency to the police and firemen.” He relished the idea of cracking down on speech he disliked. He promised “to seek indictment against any college professor who calls for a communist victory [in Vietnam].”

He was light on policy. He didn’t produce a platform until three weeks before the election in 1968, and it was full of meaningless platitudes. He had no principled opposition to government, and in fact, touted programs he found congenial. He had no hesitation in making absurdly paranoid accusations, like that Richard Nixon was manipulating public opinion in 1968 through his control of pollsters. Like Trump, Wallace didn’t run a highly organized political operation — he lived off the land of his own native political talent and the fervent support of his fans. He relied on what one journalist called — in a formulation that could apply equally well to Trump — his “uncanny and total and undistracted instincts for the primitive dynamics of the American democratic system.” Wallace was a hideous racist who appealed to racists, but also crystallized a deeper anger and discontent with a country that had gone soft and wasn’t winning anymore. He obviously wasn’t a statesman who took these popular passions and refined them, but a demagogue who exploited them and made them more base. The same is true of Trump. YET WALLACE never came close to capturing a major’s party nomination and arriving at the doorstep of the presidency. With Donald Trump leading in the Republican contest, the realestate mogul would probably have not just George Wallace’s respect, but his envy.

For example, it’s become a growing emphasis in Jewish pedagogy from the Sunday schools to Holocaust studies programs in the various universities. Additionally, Jewish organizations organize visits for young people to the concentration camps of Europe. THE MEMORIES created are indelible. And deeply valuable. Indeed, though my own family was largely spared, the Holocaust forms an ineradicable element of my own Jewish consciousness. But I worry about the balance. As Jewish practice, learning and knowledge diminish over time, my concern is that Holocaust memory is emerging as the dominant feature of Jewishness in America. I worry that a people with a 3,000year history of creative genius, enriched by intimate relations with every culture from Paris to Patagonia, should be placing such weight on martyrdom — and indeed, for this generation, martyrdom once removed. I’m not criticizing Sanders. I credit him with sincerity and authenticity. But it is precisely that sincerity and authenticity — and the implications for future generations — that so concern me. Sanders is 74, but I suspect a growing number of young Jews would give an answer similar to his. We must of course remain dedicated to keeping alive the memory and the truth of the Holocaust, particularly when they are under assault from so many quarters. Which is why, though I initially opposed having a Holocaust museum as the sole representation of the Jewish experience in the center of Washington, I came to see the virtue of having so sacred yet vulnerable a legacy placed at the monumental core of — and thus entrusted to the protection of — the most tolerant and open nation on earth. Nonetheless, there must be balance. It would be a tragedy for American Jews to make the Holocaust the principal legacy bequeathed to their children. After all, the Jewish people are living through a miraculous age: the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty, the revival of Hebrew (a cultural resurrection unique in human history), the flowering of a new Hebraic culture radiating throughout the Jewish world. MEMORY IS sacred, but victimhood cannot be the foundation stone of Jewish identity. Traditional Judaism has 613 commandments. The philosopher Emil Fackenheim famously said that the 614th is to deny Hitler any posthumous victories. The reduction of Jewish identity to victimhood would be one such victory. It must not be permitted.

Conservative Chronicle

BORDER SECURITY: March 16, 2016

Border walls would humanely enforce a just law

he federal government has a or approximately 826 miles — of our duty to enforce this nation’s southern border. By failing to secure the border, the borders and do it in a humane manner that minimizes harm to human federal government not only allows forlife both inside U.S. territory and on the eign nationals to come here illegally to live and work, but also provides approaches to it. nue for deadly drugs, The best way to do that at the border an avefor the criminals with Mexico is to who bring them and build effectively for potential terrorimpermeable barists. riers that send a The failure to simple, straight(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate secure our southforward message: ern border harms American workers You can only cross this border legally. For years, our government has sent a whose jobs are put at risk and whose different message: You may be able to wages are suppressed by competition with immigrant workers here illegally. cross illegally. It also harms Americans who become MORE RECENTLY, that inapt addicted to deadly drugs smuggled message has been compounded by an- across the border, and it harms Ameriother: If you make it here illegally, we can communities where those drugs are distributed. may let you stay. “Mexican transnational criminal orBetween 2005 and 2010, according to the Congressional Research Service, ganizations (TCOs) remain the greatthe Department of Homeland Security est criminal drug threat to the United used a measure called “operational con- States; no other group can challenge trol” to describe the stretches of border them in the near term,” the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in its it had secured. “Operational control describes the 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment number of border miles where the Bor- Summary. “These Mexican poly-drug organizader Patrol can detect, identify, respond to, and interdict cross-border unauthor- tions traffic heroin, methamphetamine, ized activity,” CRS said in a report pub- cocaine, and marijuana throughout lished last month. “In February 2010, the United States, using established the Border Patrol reported that 1,107 transportation routes and distribution miles (57 percent) of the Southwest bor- networks,” said the DEA assessment. “They control drug trafficking across der were under operational control.” That means our government, accord- the Southwest Border and are moving ing to the Border Patrol, did not have to expand their share of U.S. illicit drug operational control of 43 percent — markets, particularly heroin markets.”

Terry

Jeffrey

“National-level gangs and neighborhood gangs continue to form relationships with Mexican TCOs to increase profits for the gangs through drug distribution and transportation, for the enforcement of drug payments, and for protection of drug transportation corridors from use by rival gangs,” said the assessment. FAILURE TO secure our border not only harms people in the United States, it also harms people in Mexico and would-be illegal border crossers. Mexicans are victimized by the drug cartels that exploit our unenforced border, and migrants seeking to cross our unsecured border to illegally live or work here put

themselves at risk in remote regions and in the custody of human traffickers. The message our federal government should send is: If you are coming here illegally, you will not be able to cross, so do not try. Building physical barriers along the border that make it impossible for people to illegally pass either on foot or in vehicles — and deploying sufficient manpower to patrol those barriers — would send that message. Failing to build those barriers and sufficiently man them says: The people who run our federal government are still not serious about securing our border. America is a generous nation when it comes to legal immigration. Between 1980 and 2012, according to a 2014 report published by the Department of Homeland Security, the United States granted lawful permanent resident status to approximately 28,370,000 immigrants. Those 28,370,000 legal permanent residents equaled more than three times the Census Bureau’s July 2013 estimate for the population of New Jersey (8,911,502), more than twice the population of Illinois (12,890,552) and exceeded the populations of New York (19,695,680), Florida (19,600,311) and Texas (26,505,637). America is also generous in granting refugee and asylum status to those who face a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their home countries. In 2013, this country granted refugee status to 69,909 individuals and asylum to 25,199. We should not turn our back on those who seek refuge and asylum, especially Middle Eastern Christians who face genocide by Islamic State terrorists. Nor do we need to stop legal immigration. BUT THE BORDER of the United States is a just law that the federal government has duty to enforce. Building walls that deter and stop illegal crossers is a humane way to do it.

March 23, 2016 BART: March 10, 2016

BART is not a homeless shelter

ay Area Rapid Transit Direc- only when the two-seat hog seems hostor Joel Keller wants to pass a tile, mentally ill or inebriated that others bill that would make it illegal hesitate to inquire. Smell is also a factor. During the winter months, the homefor individuals to take up more than one vexing. seat on the train. Call it the one-seat-per- less can be especially you are riding the butt rule. Keller told the San Francisco W h e n train to work, Chronicle’s Miit’s irritating to chael Cabanatuan see others taking that the measure up space during is not intended to heavy commuting target homeless (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate hours in an effort people; it’s really aimed at everyone, including “people to stay warm and dry. The public pays with backpacks, with luggage, with oth- fares to use BART as a conveyance, not er things occupying seats.” Fed up com- to ride in railcars that double as homeless shelters (for which working stiffs muters are bound to approve. also pay). Also contributing to the dysfuncBART IS experiencing record ridership — which makes BART riders tion: Once you pay the minimum fare, cranky and envious of those who can sit you can ride all day; some charities give and avoid the human crush. But whom BART tickets to homeless people, osdoes Keller think he’s kidding when tensibly to help them travel for job inhe says his proposal isn’t aimed at the terviews or social services. They mean homeless? If a simply inconsiderate well, but everyone would be betterpassenger is taking up an extra seat for a served if their charitable dollars went to backpack or luggage, another commuter shelters period, not to turn BART into will ask that person to make room. It’s a shelter.

Debra J.

Saunders

Keller is not your hardcore law-andorder type. He knows that riders usually resolve seat disputes; there shouldn’t have to be a law to enforce the one-seatper-butt concept. But without an ordi-

MSNBC: March 16, 2016

MSNBC turns intolerably white?

n the liberal lexicon, “backlash” is a word that only describes conservatives getting what’s coming to them. But as MSNBC reduces its number of shows and time slots for race-obsessed black hosts, this was bound to happen. The hashtag that appeared as the left began to devour itself was #MSNBCSoWhite. After MSNBC hired leftist, race-fixated hosts, it was only natural that the news station would be trashed as “going white” when the reality of it’s terrible ratings — for shows hosted by academics preaching about how badly America stinks — cost Comcast some serious cash.

ter movement bender. When this selfdescribed over-educated scholar felt her four-year-old show was being curtailed for weekend campaign coverage, she sent an outraged email to her co-workers that leaked to the New York Times. “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” she wrote. “I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobblehead. I am not owned by (NBC News Chairman Andrew) Lack, (MSNBC President Phil) Griffin or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.” She claimed that her audience — which she calls Nerdland — was hurting.

THEY GAVE the Rev. Al Sharpton a nightly show at 6 p.m. It had absolutely nothing to do with the infamous race-baiter’s skills on television; he has none. It was all about stroking the ego of a leftist black activist. His mangling of the words on the teleprompter was so routine that the word malapropism could be re-categorized as “Sharptonism.” Early in his “career” at MSNBC, he proclaimed “but resist we much — we must — and we will much — about — that — be committed.” That laughable clip was all over conservative talk radio. That was just one of many. When they demoted Sharpton to a show on Sunday morning, he went quietly. By contrast, professor Melissa Harris-Perry went out in a Black Lives Mat-

Bozell

Brent

ONE WAS almost waiting for Hurricane Katrina analogies: the NBC brass were drowning minorities with their floods of campaign chatter. Then a longer memo with more Harris-Perry self-pity leaked out. She was outraged at being left out of political coverage. “I have a Ph.D. in political science and have taught American voting and elections at some of the nation’s top universities for nearly two decades, yet I have been deemed less worthy to weigh in than relative novices and certified liars.” She burned every bridge with a rhetorical flamethrower.

ABC’s The View interviewed Harris-Perry on March 14, and she again slammed the race card on the table. “The history of mammy is that mammy is the black woman who cares more about the master’s family than about her own. And so, what I’m saying is, I don’t care more about MSNBC’s reputation than I do about the Nerdland family, about the thing that we built, about our viewing audience and about our team.” What she built, compared to Fox and CNN, would make molehills swell with pride. She said her show’s end absolutely has racial implications because her show’s guest list was so diverse. “Taking this show off the air, even if you put me, individually, back on as a host meant that the folks who sat at our table, whether they were transgender women of color, whether they were Latino Republicans, they just weren’t going to be there anymore because we were the folks who put them on air each and every week.” THE RATINGS problems at MSNBC would be helped by curtailing the radical leftists. But the brass must know that conservatives and independents still won’t trust a network of Obama-tinglers and Hillary Clinton-boosters, from Rachel Maddow to Chris Matthews to Andrea Mitchell. They may have avoided an Al-Jazeera dive, but the leaning forward mess continues.

nance, BART police have no leverage — other than asking politely — when someone wants to splay his or her bounty over multiple seats. Keller doesn’t want BART police to enforce the policy when trains aren’t full. He’s open to reducing the proposed fine of $100 for a first offense or even issuing warnings only for first offenses. Homeless riders are not the only offenders, Keller told me. He has heard tales of inconsiderate commuters who, when asked, refuse to move their backpacks, laptops or makeup kits to accommodate fare-paying fellow travelers. Boo, hiss on them. Last month, I had a sit-down with BART Police Department Deputy Chief Benson Fairow, as I’ve wondered about what can be done to ease the commute for people who rely on BART to get to work or school. BART has heard from many like-minded riders who don’t understand why police cannot do more. “Put yourself in the police officer’s shoes,” Fairow told me. “I don’t get to pick who I serve.” The police cannot treat someone on BART differently for looking as if he or she does not have a good reason to be there. He’s right. Point taken. That’s why Keller’s modest idea makes sense. It is directed at all seat hogs, unless they have a physiological reason for occupying two seats. Next job: Clean up downtown San Francisco BART stations. WHEN YOU get off BART at the Civic Center and Powell Street stations, you see people sleeping in de facto encampments in hallways — and the platforms stink of urine. In bad weather, walking through Civic Center and Powell stations can feel downright menacing. When taxpayers don’t feel safe taking BART, when all they see is squalor, they will find other ways to get around — and that defeats the whole idea.

Conservative Chronicle

NATIONAL DEBT: March 16, 2016

A radical idea for GOP victory, liberty, prosperity The Republican debate last week was encouraging. It was more issue-oriented. There was less personal sniping. And, perhaps best of all, there seems to be agreement among the two leading candidates that government needs to be reined in, cut back in size and scope, with the objective of returning Washington to its constitutional mandate of strictly limited power and responsibility.

THE QUICKEST way to move in that direction, as I have pointed out repeatedly for the last five years since the GOP took control of the House, is to stop borrowing. But the will to do so has been lacking. Perhaps 2016 could be the year America elects a president who understands it’s the most important step Washington needs to take to return to constitutional government and the liberty and prosperity it protects. Think about it. The debt is approaching $19 trillion — greater than America’s gross national product. There are grave consequences for continuing to rely on borrowed money to run government programs, agencies and departments that are unconstitutional, abrogate powers that rightfully belong to the states, are counterproductive to individual liberty and immorally burden future generations, yet unborn, with overwhelming financial obligations for which they had no representation, no input, no say. There is only one responsible way to deal with the debt — one first step. That is to stop borrowing, forcing government to live within its more-than-ample means. It’s against the nature of government to live within its means or to be satisfied performing its prescribed duties and nothing more. That’s why government tends to keep growing. When it can no longer collect revenues commensurate with its desire to take on more and more responsibility and power, it borrows. Everyone knows endless borrowing is unsustainable, but few are courageous enough to buck the tide. It would spell the end of their own pet projects. It might make re-election a tough prospect. For some, it would mean their own constituents would lose out on “benefits” — rewards for their political support. Could this be the year a Republican presidential candidate uses the staggering $19 trillion debt as an opportunity to shrink the size and scope of Washington as a vital tool to return government to its proper role? The president’s power, too, is limited, but not when it comes to borrowing money. The president must actually approve raising the debt limit. So must each house of Congress.

By freezing all borrowing at the Lately, the two top GOP candidates — Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — have federal level, forcing Congress to pass both asserted they want to cut the gov- budgets that live within their means ernment in significant ways. It won’t without raising taxes. Obviously no Democratic president be politically easy selling Congress on eliminating the Department of Educa- is going to do this. But it’s entirely possible we could tion, as both have suggested. It’s a good idea. Like some other departments and elect a Republican president this year will use his power to agencies, it has no justification in the w h o do just that. Constitution. It is In fact, it may be counterproducthe most importive to the goal of tant thing the next community-based president can do to education. It didn’t (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate save Washington exist before 1980. And it has contributed nothing positive from itself. If the president refuses to raise the to the education of any children. It’s just a command-and-control bureau- debt limit, Congress will have no powcracy supported by resources sucked er to do so. The decision of the presiout of each of the 50 states while man- dent cannot even be overridden by an dating more and more rules and top- irresponsible Congress. Of course, there will be doomsaydown regulations on them. ers who claim freezing the debt will SO HOW DO you start cutting gov- inevitably result in default on the debt. But that is absurd. The president also ernment?

Joseph

Farah

has the power to instruct his treasury secretary to continue servicing the debt before any other obligations are paid. The effect of such an action would be the boldest move in the history of the United States to return the government to constitutionally limited government. If Donald Trump and Ted Cruz want to get Americans excited about their campaigns this primary season, they should start talking about a debt freeze right now. Polls show 80 percent of Republican voters want to see it happen, while 60 percent of Democrat voters do. IT’S A WIN-WIN — for a Republican presidential victory in 2016. It’s a win-win for freedom. It’s a win-win for the Constitution. It’s a win-win for returning American to solvency, prosperity and morality.

CDC: March 16, 2016

Heads must roll at the CDC

onsumer Reports is sounding the alarm about a vicious infection raging through hospitals, even prestigious academic medical centers such as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic. Clostridium difficile, or C. diff for short, sickens half a million people each year, and 29,000 of them die in less than 30 days. Worse, while the deaths mount, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps bungling the response. Sounds like the Veterans Administration — another dysfunctional government agency with blood on its hands. No heads are rolling at the VA, and likewise, no one is being held accountable at the CDC. That needs to change. THE CDC botched Ebola, bungled measles and is already playing catch up on Zika. But its failure to stop C. diff is by far its costliest mistake. While the CDC repeatedly promises to reduce C. diff, touting one goal after another, it never succeeds. Infections are up four percent, not down, in the most recent annual agency data. Bad news for patients. Contracting C. diff drastically reduces your chance of leaving the hospital alive. If two patients come into the hospital with the same diagnosis, the one who gets C. diff is four times more likely to die. C. diff causes severe diarrhea, and the invisible particles spread every-

where. That’s how other patients get it. The route is oral-fecal contamination, meaning traces of a patient’s diarrhea wind up in another patient’s mouth. Not a pretty picture. How could that happen? Inadequate hospital cleaning. The C. diff germ lurks unseen on bed rails, tables, call buttons — everywhere. Patients touch these surfaces and pick up C. diff on their fingers. Then they touch their mouth or food and swallow the germ.

Betsy

If you’re assigned to a hospital room where a patient before you had C. diff, your risk skyrockets because cleaning staff typically overlook about half the surfaces in a room. The germ can live for weeks. Yikes. THE MAYO CLINIC reduced C. diff by 85 percent in a pilot project by cleaning surfaces around patients’ beds daily with a bleach wipe. Why isn’t every hospital doing that? The CDC is largely to blame. Its lax guidelines give hospitals an easy out. True, money for cleaning staff is in short supply, but hospitals can redeploy their staff from duties such as ritual floor mopping to cleaning the surfaces doctors and patients touch with their hands. The CDC should be leading the way, but instead it’s busy moving goal posts.

In 2009, the agency set a goal of reducing C.diff by 30 percent by 2013 — a meager target given what scientists can achieve. Even so, the CDC failed. Now the agency’s toying with a new goal: reducing C. diff 30 percent by 2020. But there are no signs the CDC is doing what it takes to meet that goal either. In contrast, Britain’s cash-strapped National Health Service actually cut C. diff infections by more than 50 percent over three years. In the U.S., institutions like Stamford Hospital in Connecticut, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and Mayo Clinic are ramping up their efforts by using robotic cleaners — hydrogen peroxide room foggers, pulsating ultraviolet machines and even a continuous 24/7 technology built into air conditioning ducts — to sanitize hospital rooms. Can hospitals afford this? They can’t afford not to. C. diff adds a staggering 40 percent to the cost of treating a patient. Where’s the CDC on these high-tech cleaning methods? Dawdling, saying it needs “a better understanding” of these machines. Meanwhile, patients are dying. DENISE CARDO has overseen the agency’s infection control programs since 2003, watching while C. diff overwhelmed hospitals and killed our loved ones. The Consumer Reports disclosure is the latest reminder of this ongoing failure. It’s time for Cardo to go and to take her longtime deputy director, Michael Bell, with her.

March 23, 2016 MISSILE DEFENSE: March 16, 2016

Question presidential candidates on missile defense

residential debate moderators missiles will get through. Anti-ballistic would perform a public ser- missiles also provide protection should vice if they ask the candidates regime psychopaths gamble and launch. Iran is another problem. On March — in both parties — to publicly state their positions regarding U.S. missile 10, Iran launched two intermediate range ballistic missiles. A vicious mesdefenses. in Hebrew, was painted A missile defense question address- sage, on the missile boostes immediate and ers: “Israel must be emerging national wiped out.” security threats to America’s America and its U.N. ambassador allies. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate called the launchNorth Koes “”provocative rea has ballistic missiles and threatens to use them. and destabilizing.” Secretary of State On March 13, regime propagandists John Kerry said Iran had violated U.N. claimed their state possesses a hydro- resolutions. Security Council Resolugen bomb and were it “to be mounted tion 2231 forbids Tehran from launchon an intercontinental ballistic missile ing nuclear-capable missiles. Iran claimed the launches don’t vioand fall on Manhattan in New York City, all the people there would be late any U.N. resolutions and don’t viokilled immediately and the city would late President Barack Obama’s “P5+1” Iran nuclear weapons deal. burn down to ashes.” Iran’s dictators read the president’s NORTH KOREA recently test-fired vaguely worded but majesticallya missile that may have intercontinen- named Joint Comprehensive Plan of tal range; it claims it has miniaturized Action (2015 nuclear deal) and connuclear weapons. Translation: it can put clude they can build any missile they desire, as long as they assure the world nukes on missiles. On March 10, Admiral William the missile won’t bear a nuke warhead. Get real. The missiles Iran is develGortney, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aero- oping are integral components of a nuspace Defense Command, told the Sen- clear war-fighting program. The presiate that it is “prudent” to assume North dent’s nuclear deal freed up billions of Korea has miniaturized nuclear weap- dollars for Tehran to use to procure advanced missiles. ons and can target the U.S. Iran’s current missiles have a range U.S. missile defenses help deter attack. North Korea can’t be certain its of some 2,000 kilometers; Persian Gulf

Austin

Bay

Arab states, Turkey and Israel already face attack. Cairo is right at max range. Iran’s next generation solid fuel ballistic missile will likely have a 2,500 kilometer range. The mullahs can nuke Black Sea NATO nations. ISRAEL INTENDS to protect itself. In December 2015, Israel successfully tested the Arrow 3, a high altitude ABM. Attention debate moderators: Israel and the U.S. jointly developed the Arrow 3. The missile is the offspring of

President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Remember how Democrats ridiculed SDI? Ask the candidates whether the ridicule was shortsighted, or just a result of plain ignorant partisanship. South Korea says a medium-range U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense ABM battery will improve its security. In February, Japan deployed a short-range U.S. Patriot PAC-3 launcher in downtown Tokyo, in case North Korea’s test missile headed for the city. The U.S. and Japanese navies both have the capable Aegis ABM system on Aegis warships. To counter North Korea, Hawaii may receive an Aegis Ashore battery. NATO is in the process of deploying Aegis Ashore missiles in Eastern Europe — to protect European NATO nations from a missile fired from ... Iran’s direction. ADM Gortney testified that the U.S. needs improved missile defenses “to engage the (missile) threat throughout its flight, keep them on the ground, kill them on the (launch) rails, kill them in boost phase” and also be able to destroy warheads “in space in mid-course.” Apparently, Gortney wants more Ground Based Mid-Course Defense interceptors, which provide limited defense against ICBMs. Pricey GMDs intercept enemy missiles in outer space. In 2010 the US had 30 GMDs. Obama Administration initially opposed more GMDs then in 2013 authorized buying 14 more. ATTENTION DEBATE moderators: Ask the candidates to analyze the missile threat America confronts. Quote ADM Gortney. Ask the candidates if they agree with him. If they don’t, why not? If they do, will they give missile defense the budget slice it needs?

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Michael Barone, Austin Bay, Brent Bozell, Pat Buchanan, Mona Charen, Linda Chavez, Ann Coulter, Jackie Gingrich Cushman, Larry Elder, Leslie Elman, Erick Erickson, Joseph Farah, Paul Greenberg, David Harsanyi, Laura Hollis, Terence Jeffrey, Charles Krauthammer, Larry Kudlow, Donald Lambro, David Limbaugh, Rich Lowry, Michelle Malkin, Mychal Massie, Stephen Moore, Dick Morris, William Murchison, Andrew Napolitano, Marvin Olasky, Dennis Prager, Debra J. Saunders, Phyllis Schlafly, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell, Cal Thomas, Matt Towery, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., George Will, and Walter Williams.

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Read Michael Barone, George Will & R. Emmett Tyrrell on Pages 16-17

2016 Election

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Read Dennis Prager’s Column on Page 1

The Left’s Assaults on Free Speech

Left-Wing Attacks

Wednesday, March 23, 2016 • Volume 31, Number 12 • Hampton, Iowa