Conservative Chronicle for October 5 2016 by Mid-America Publishing Corporation

At Issue this week... October 5, 2016 2016 Election Barone (3) Charen (24) Fields (10) Greenberg (6) Schlafly (8) Tyrrell (14) Bilingual Education Saunders (23) Blacks Sowell (15) Charleston’s Port Will (21) Charlotte Riots Buchanan (17) Lowry (17) Massie (16) Clinton, Bill Morris (31) Clinton, Hillary Cushman (9) Malkin (28) McCaughey (27) Murchison (30) Coffman, Mike Will (12) Dear Mark Levy (19) Death Tax Moore (13) Due Process Napolitano (18) Electorate Barone (11) Elder (20) Lambro (5) Government Shakedown de Rugy (13) Leslie’s Trivia Bits Elman (14) Liberals Harsanyi (1) Limbaugh (2) Thomas (3) Media Bias Bozell (10, 26) Coulter (7) Hollis (6) National Debt Jeffrey (22) Presidential Debate Buchanan (25) Farah (4) Lowry (24) Morris (25) Saunders (4) Short Story Olasky (26) Syria Bay (29) Transgenderism Williams (23) Trump, Donald Shapiro (29) Thomas (20) Trump Foundation Saunders (9)

Liberals by David Harsanyi

Blaming free speech, not Islamism

The administration didn’t go onto Pakistani television and defend American values by saying, “Since its founding the United States has been a nation that respects free speech, and unlike illiberal regimes (some of which we support), America allows all viewpoints.” Instead, Obama decided to, in essence, apologize for our obnoxious habit of allowing free expression: “Since our founding the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate religious beliefs of others.” This is FOR ONE THING, the idea that an av- not only debatable but also completely irreleerage Muslim can be driven to purchase a vant. The founders were concerned about repressure cooker and blow up Chelsea, New ligious liberty, not hurt feelings. York, or massacre infidel children because a U.S. candidate says unkind things about Muslims, inadvertently concedes a terrible truth about the state of Islam today. Moreover, this thinking dangerously (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate underestimates the power of ideology and THEN AGAIN, Democrats generally religion in the world. It’s hard to quantify the depth of self-importance it must take have been more likely to blame Republicans to believe that your patronizing words are — or the Second or Fifth Amendments — for more powerful than someone’s faith. This terrorism than they have been to blame Istrivialization of the problem is reflected lam. Sen. Chris Murphy is far more disturbed when the administration offers an idea as by the National Rifle Association than he is simplistic as “When it comes to ISIL, we Islamism. This allows him to accuse Reare in a fight, a narrative fight with them, a publicans of “selling weapons to ISIS,” and Clinton to praise his efforts. narrative battle.” This is just one way the left uses terrorism Also, Islamists are fully capable of ferreting out propaganda whenever they want, to chill speech. Anyone who’s ever brought anyway. Anyone who’s paid five seconds of up the entrenched violence and illiberalism attention to the Israeli-Arab conflict under- of Islam is to be immediately scolded for stands that the Islamic world is saturated being “Islamophobic.” If the terrorists use a with conspiracy theories and institutionalized hate that makes what we actually say largely irrelevant. The problem is that you’re an infidel, not that you’re a rude infidel. ISIS is no stronger because Trump got into an argument with a gold star father (although supporting policy that made Libya an anarchic state might be a different story). Yet, intimating that Americans should watch what they say is now embedded into the left’s response to every terror attack. I remember the repulsion liberals felt when former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told Americans they should mind their opinions. I guess chilling speech is awful, depending on the topic. It’s also not new. You’ll remember when President Obama and Clinton blamed a promotional trailer for that obscure anti-Islam film rather than admitting that extremists used our liberalism as a pretext to gin up mobs across the Islamic world, and cover their coordinated attack on Americans. t’s one thing to watch liberals euphemize “Islamic terrorism” into a vacuous, politically correct word salad. It’s quite another to hear them blame free expression for Islamists’ actions. And they do it often. When Hillary Clinton accuses Donald Trump of giving “aid and comfort” to ISIS and other extremists because of his crude rhetoric about Muslim immigration, that’s exactly what she’s doing. And she’s not the only one.

David

Harsanyi

firearm, blame the NRA. If the terrorists use an improvised explosive device, blame Republicans for being mean. Above all of that, Clinton has just accused the GOP nominee of treason because he says things she dislikes. Referencing U.S. law, she said that anyone who gives our enemies “aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere” is “guilty of treason.” Those guilty of treason may “suffer death.” One ISIS propaganda expert claims that the group “talks about (Obama) more” than Trump. Should we accuse the president of giving aid and comfort? Clinton loves to say that “words matter.” So surely, as well-versed as she is in law, and as important as accountability is to her, she couldn’t have merely been throwing around this specific language, right? REMEMBER WHEN Trump blamed Obama for the Orlando, Florida, shooting? You should. Understandably, every major news organization covered it. We were plunged into a national conversation about the irresponsibility of the Republican candidate. Do you remember how Republican National Convention attendees chanted “lock her up” when Clinton’s name was mentioned? You should. Afterward, a very serious discussion about civility in politics ensued. I wonder whether we’ll be allowed to have another one. September 23, 2016

Conservative Chronicle

LIBERALS: September 23, 2106

Clinton and Obama, first heal yourselves on race

illary Clinton is the worst kind of political animal, one who will exploit anything for political gain, distort facts and shift her positions at will for votes, significantly more than your garden-variety pandering politician. Remember when Clinton was for the Iraq War and then later savaged anyone who believed as she had as if they were reprobates? Remember when she opined that marriage is between a man and a woman? Remember her claim that she left the White House “not only dead broke but in debt?” Her pathetically laughable yarn that she came under sniper fire in Bosnia in the ‘90s? That all her grandparents were immigrants? That she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who didn’t gain fame for climbing Mount Everest until Clinton was five years old? That she applied for the Marines in 1975? Yeah, that’s believable. LOL. Oh, and I promise I won’t rehash her email and Benghazi lies here.

SHE TOLD MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in 2002 that she wouldn’t apologize for her vote to invade Iraq — emphasizing Saddam Hussein’s “megalomania.” She also defended her position in 2008 against then-candidate Barack Obama’s attacks, only much later changing her position. On same-sex marriage, she wasn’t remotely ambivalent. She went out of her

way to clarify her position in 2000, say- occasionally pays lip service to opposing, “I think a marriage is as a marriage ing violence. If he opposes the looting has always been, between a man and a and violence in Charlotte, he has taken woman.” In the 2008 presidential cam- his time saying it, as any such announcepaign, she reiterated her opposition to ment, to be effective, should be immedisame-sex marriage. Both PolitiFact and ate and heartfelt. But Obama is on his way out, and Snopes.com affirm that she didn’t fully flip on the same-sex marriage issue until Clinton seeks to replace him. She lumped March 2013, when she openly embraced together the police shootings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa and Keith Lamont Scott “marriage equality.” Movingly — for the easily deceived, in Charlotte when she tweeted, “Keith Scott. Terence Crutchanyway — she changed her “H” logo to L a m o n t er. Too many others. be rainbow-colored This has got to end.” (it’s all about soliWhat has got to darity, you know) end? Of course and tweeted, “Evunjustified shootery loving couple (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate ings must end, and & family deserves to be recognized & treated equally under unjustified police shootings of innocent the law across our nation. #LoveMust- civilians, when they occur, even more so. Win #LoveCantWait.” She forgot to add But Clinton has brazenly rushed to judg“except for those Christian bigots,” but I ment on both shootings, while investigadigress. Clinton is utterly hostage to her tions are proceeding and evidence is being gathered. political ambitions. I recall (a term that is alien to Clinton) NO HALFWAY decent person would when people running for chief executive officer of the United States and those attempt to defend unjustified police already serving as such appreciated the shootings. But what about legally justipresident’s duty to execute the laws and fied shootings? Do they have to end, too, the importance of promoting law and or- Mrs. Clinton? Are you saying that cops are never justified in shooting? Do you der. But President Barack Obama has re- have even the slightest pangs of conpeatedly undermined law enforcement science for pouring gas on these issues? Clinton can’t possibly believe what in this country and has inflamed racial tension, especially between the minor- her tweet recklessly implies. But she is ity community and police — though he obviously less concerned about being

David

Limbaugh

levelheaded and fair than with pandering to drive minority voter turnout, which she’ll desperately need if this race continues to tighten. Such rhetoric is igniting a powder keg, and it’s harming minorities, not helping them. Also disproportionately harming minorities are Obama’s dramatically increased government dependency programs, which have had a devastating impact on the nuclear family, on the economy overall and on jobs. How can we be surprised that there is widespread discontentment in America, especially in minority communities, when liberal policies are destroying their standard of living and that sense of “hope” that Obama glibly promised? One of the cruelest lies is that leftist solutions lead to greater prosperity and income equality — that Democratic and liberal policies benefit the black community and that conservatives are indifferent. No, these policies continue to trap minorities in woefully inferior innercity schools and torpedo their upward economic mobility. Obama has had his way for eight years, and the plight of minorities is painfully worse. Clinton would give us more of the same, not because it will help but because it’s her ticket to power. I LONG FOR the day when a majority of Americans and a substantial percentage of minorities finally decide that liberals will no longer get a pass from minorities because of their allegedly good intentions when decades of abominable results scream otherwise.

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October 5, 2016 2016 ELECTION: September 23, 2106

The Democratic Party if Clinton loses

here’s been lots of speculation about the fate of the Republican Party if (as most of the prognosticators expect and hope) Donald Trump loses. There’s been less speculation, though recent polling suggests it may be in order, about the fate of the Democratic Party if Hillary Clinton loses. Certainly there’s reason to think — or fear — that the Republican Party will change. Republicans likely won’t supply the bulk of support for free trade agreements as they increasingly have for 40 years. Prominent Republicans probably won’t press for mass legalization of illegal immigrants, as they did in 2006, 2007 and 2013. IF TRUMP loses, the Republican electorate will have become more downscale and elderly — a continuation of a process that’s been in train since the middle 1990s. The long-term

migration of voters southward along and a few splotches in between. The Interstate 95 will have made the East presidential Democratic Party, like the Coast just about as solidly Democratic congressional Democratic Party, will as the West Coast, leaving a Republi- be concentrated in heavily Democratic can rump in the interior South and the central cities, some sympathetic suburbs and scattered university towns. Great Plains. The shock for Democrats if ClinAnti-Trump Republicans hope the will likely be more seTrump effect will just go away, and ton loses than for Republicans will note that a defeated Trump will v e r e if Trump loses. not leave behind “Imagine the best much in the nacandidate in your ture of an instituparty losing to the tional apparatus, weakest candias the defeated (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate date in the other Barry Goldwater arguably did in 1964. But the argument party,” speculates Dan McLaughlin, for going back to pre-Trump positions writing for the National Review, “after is weakened by the fact that Republi- years of telling yourself that your party cans have lost four of the six presiden- had unlocked the demographic code to tial elections between 1992 and 2012. a permanent majority.” But what if Hillary Clinton loses? ONE OPTION for Democrats The political map in that case will look quite different, with Democratic states would be to moderate their policies, as confined to the Northeast, West Coast the New Democrats urged in the 1980s

Michael

Barone

LIBERALS: September 22, 2106

More terror, more denials

n Florida Monday, following the bombings in New York and New Jersey, Donald Trump referred to the captured bombing suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, as an “evil thug.” He then added, “Hillary Clinton is a weak and ineffective person and I will tell you, if you choose Donald Trump, these problems are going to go away far, far greater than anybody would think.” Whatever one thinks of Trump’s rhetoric, his is a voice of certainty at a time when a growing number of Americans appear fed up with a seemingly ineffective government, weak statements and even weaker responses. Example: Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said on CNN: “What I can tell you is that we are, when it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight, a narrative fight with them, a narrative battle.”

ARE WORDS the cause of so many American deaths from terrorists attacks and on battlefields in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria? Or did bombs and bullets take their lives, limbs, minds and sense of well-being? Many Americans believe their government cares more about the sensitivity of Muslims than it does for them. From releasing detainees from Guantanamo prison, some of whom have gone on to plot terrorists attacks against Americans, to the acceptance of thousands of refugees from Islamic countries where terrorism appears to be a major export, people are rightly concerned. Adding to those justifiable concerns is this Associated Press story: “The U.S.

government has mistakenly granted citizenship to at least 858 immigrants who had pending deportation orders from countries of concern to national security or with high rates of immigration fraud, according to an internal Homeland Security audit.” Why? The Department of Homeland Security says their fingerprints were missing from government databases. This is the same administration that promised “robust” vetting of all immigrants. It’s not the kind of storyline that builds confidence among

Cal

a populace that is increasingly skeptical about their government’s ability to protect the homeland. MANY PEOPLE are afraid to say what should be said for fear of being labeled an “Islamophobe.” Those who deny the threat of Islamic extremism in this country are quick to brand those in opposition with that term, even though in many cases their only sin is taking seriously the virulent rhetoric of racial Islamists, who blatantly admit to wanting to destroy western countries, especially the United States. Srdja Trifkovic is not afraid. He is a Serbian-American writer on international and foreign affairs and editor of the “paleoconservative” magazine Chronicles.

In the September issue Trifkovic writes: “The enemy is Islam, a supremacist ideology of permanent conflict and conquest, which is and has always been structurally unamenable to compromise with non-Islam. It has a highly developed legal, political, and moral doctrine, rooted in its core texts, which denies the legitimacy of any other belief system and form of social organization. Its exponents are state actors (most notably Saudi Arabia), groups with some state attributes (ISIS), decentralized terror networks (Al Qaeda), and self-starting ‘radicalized’ cells and individuals in most Western countries that have a sizable Muslim diaspora.” All Muslims do not buy into these doctrines, but those who don’t are regarded as heretics by those who do. Don’t take my word for it. Do the research. The motives and goals of radical Islamists are in their writings, sermons and media. The latest terrorists attacks, and the possibility of more to come before the election, can only benefit Donald Trump. While some politicians wring their hands, Trump wants to wring necks. His is a voice of certainty amid voices of timidity. Whether good or bad, that resonates with a lot of people who don’t enjoy life in that safety bubble protecting our elected officials. AMERICANS ARE tired of losing wars. This one they want to win. To those who want to win, Trump is Gen. Patton. Hillary Clinton reminds them of a conscientious objector.

and Bill Clinton did in the 1990s. After all, that proved pretty successful. But the current Democratic electorate has little stomach for going back to that strategy. Two decades ago, lots of self-described moderates and even conservatives voted in Democratic primaries. Not so these days. The slump in Democratic primary and caucus turnout, from 38 million in 2008 to 31 million in 2016, was due to a sharp decline in turnout by self-described moderates. Hillary Clinton’s move from her husband’s 1990s triangulation to her near-total acceptance this year of Bernie Sanders’s left-wing platform was a rational response to changes in the Democratic primary electorate. Some Democrats will blame a Clinton loss on her particular problems — lies about her illicit secret email server, doubts about her health — and if she loses it’s not likely she’ll run again at age 73. So who will? One lesson of recent presidential primaries is that Democratic voters are transfixed by identity politics, having elected the first black president and chosen the first female presidential nominee. Another is that there’s a large constituency for left-wing candidates. What they haven’t been interested in is cisgendered white male liberals. The largely forgotten John Edwards fell by the wayside quickly in 2008, and Martin O’Malley, with credentials similar to those of Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis, attracted zero support in 2016. That leaves them with no obvious choices if Clinton loses this year. Their most visible and attractive left-wingers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, will be over 70 in 2020. Prominent black and Hispanic officeholders tend to represent overwhelmingly Democratic constituencies and have made few of the bows to moderation that made Barack Obama a plausible national candidate in 2008. It’s possible that a post-2016 Democratic Party could look like Britain’s Labour Party, which has abandoned the New Labour posture of Tony Blair that produced three landslide victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Now, under farleft-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, the party seems headed for landslide defeat in 2020. OF COURSE, it’s possible Democrats could rebound during an unpopular Trump presidency, just as Republicans could during an unpopular Hillary Clinton term. But it’s also possible that the party’s current left-wing constituency could make a post-Clinton Democratic Party unelectable outside its leftwing redoubts.

Conservative Chronicle

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: September 27, 2106

Let the people roar: I think Trump won the night

e all have theories as to winsky soap opera because he chose to how Donald Trump got lie under oath. Voters rushed to his dethis far. Mine is that Trump fense. I thought voters should turn away has done well among white high school from a politician who led them down this graduates because he acts the way people path, but a hard-core Democrat told me think they would act if they were billion- s o m e t h i n g at the time I will never “Debra, you cannot aires. If Trump ever doubts himself, he forget. stop the will of the never shows it. He people when they calls people names have mobilized because he knows with this kind of he can get away passion.” Right with it. He acts as (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate and wrong don’t if having money takes away anguish — that is, he acts matter. The public believed that special quite differently than most rich people I prosecutor Ken Starr and GOP critics had gone too far and that was that. They know. let Clinton get away with his lying and IF HE DIDN’T pay federal taxes, cheating, because they disliked his opTrump told Hillary Clinton after she ponents’ excess more than they disliked suggested he has not released his tax re- Bubba’s. Trump tells voters what they alturns because he has something to hide, ready think — Washington does not work it’s not a problem. Why? Because if he for them. had paid whatever she thinks he owed, “WHEN THE people get to this Trump riposted, Washington would have “squandered” it. Trump clearly believes point,” my friend said, “there is nothing he would spend the money better — say you can say” to voters. “All you can do is on a golf course, or a private plane or a listen to them roar.” casino. Trump slammed Clinton on trade, PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: September 28, 2106 on Iran and the Islamic State. Clinton held her own and fought back by hitting Trump on temperament. She asked — I think he is vulnerable here — if Trump is as rich as he claims. Toward the end, Clinton got under Trump’s skin by reThe worst part of this is that Trump hate to say it, because I truly peating his assessment of various women believe the election of Donald has come so far in the polls in recent as “pigs, slobs and dogs.” It was a savvy Trump is profoundly important weeks. My guess is that Clinton helped reminder to women that Trump judges for the future of the country, but Clinton herself immensely by standing up for 90 them on one thing only — their looks. minutes, not fainting, smiling and conficleaned his clock in the Great Debate. But I believe Trump won because he dently dueling with Trump. She attacked. He defended. knew how to tap into taxpayer dissatThis is not what I wanted to see. Now, how much sense does that isfaction, and he did so talking in plain make? But I have to be honest about what I English. Washington funds too many Hillary Clinton has been a big part of saw. things that voters don’t want — citizen- the political establishment since 1993. Thank goodness we still have another ship for undocumented immigrants even She lived in the White House for eight month before Americans go to the polls. if they lie to the government, trade deals years. She was handed a U.S. Senate There’s still time for Trump to take her that kill American jobs, arms treaties with seat from New York. She ran for presi- on. He even had his moments tonight — countries like Iran. When Trump says dent in 2008. And she was handed the but not enough of them. That’s Washington wastes tax money, you just job of secretary of state. my observation. know that voters in swing states agree. ON TOP OF that, she should be in THE DONALD closed the debate prison. She should have been indicted taunting the lady in the red pantsuit. for violations of espionage and naWe’re practically even in the polls, tional security laws. The only reason (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate Trump taunted, after you’ve spent a for- she wasn’t is because of her place of tune on the campaign trail, and “I’ve dishonor in the political establishment. HILLARY CLINTON is one of the spent practically nothing.” Trump’s brag- Her shield against prosecution was the easiest targets in American political hisging rights are simple: On the cheap and fact that she was the leading Demo- tory. with a thin staff, he is holding his own crat seeking the presidency. She used She’s not likable. She’s got no accomwith the Democratic Party’s obscenely her office as secretary of state to shake plishments to her credit. She’s a walking well-funded brain trust. down foreigners and corporations for scandal. She’s dishonest. She’s a crook. Clinton should have fared better contributions to the Clinton FoundaBut he didn’t call her out. when she took pride in how hard she has tion. Instead, she indicted Trump — over worked to win the White House. But if and over again. How could he let her get So why was she on offense? she’s even with Trump, what good is her And how on earth did Trump allow away with talking about what might be eat-your-vegetables approach? himself to spend most of the night on in his tax returns? How could he stand It isn’t right. Trump launched his career defense? there and allow her to demean him as in politics with the birther lie and it hasn’t Why was he tougher on Ted Cruz a racist? How could he stand there and hurt him. I’ve covered this phenomenon than he was on Clinton? defend, defend, defend when he should before in 1998 when Bill Clinton put This was a night to take her on and have used the opportunity to attack, atAmerica through the tawdry Monica Le- put her on defense. tack, attack?

Debra J.

Saunders

Hillary wins Round One

Joseph

Farah

All Trump has done in his life is succeed at business. He’s done it better than most. I truly believe he wants to take what he learned in that process and do something great for his country. I also believe he would be a great president. But he didn’t do himself any favors with his strategy for that debate. He allowed Clinton to set the tone. He allowed himself to be put in the position of defending. Not good. Not good at all. Maybe the next time, he’ll go in with an idea of what he wants to get across. I got the feeling he really hadn’t thought about three or four big ideas he wanted to get across to the 27 million undecided American voters out there. That’s the key for the next opportunity — three big ideas and attack, attack, attack. Clinton needs to be on defense the next time. The good news? Ronald Reagan lost the first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984. Trump needs to come back strong in Round 2 — memorably strong. TRUMP HAS his work cut out for him — and I’m not sure anyone else can help him. He needs to watch that debate one time and make sure he stays in control of the next debate.

October 5, 2016 ELECTORATE: September 22, 2106

Americans lack trust in government, and each other Compare the president’s painful ecoAmerica is in trouble. Economically, politically, socially, racially and institu- nomic record with that of Ronald Reagan in his third year in office, when the nationally. The Federal Reserve flatly refused tion’s GDP growth rate soared to 5.6 perthis week, for the umpteenth time, to cent in the third quarter, and then to 7.7 hike interest rates because of the still- percent in the last three months of 1983. By 1984, Reagan was achieving fragile nature of President Obama’s quarterly economic growth rates of 8.5 very weak economy. It is barely growing at a mediocre rate percent, 7.9 percent, 6.9 percent and of little more than one percent. Business 5.8 percent, as the nation responded to tax rates, increased ininvestment is softening. Productivity is l o w e r vestment and higher down, as are facincomes. He won tory orders. The re-election that year real, honest to in a 49-state landgoodness unemslide. ployment rate is (c) 2016, United Media Services We are in the at 10 percent, acclosing weeks of a cording to a Gallup Poll. Most Americans tell pollsters that presidential election in which most polls the economy and jobs remain their top show that large numbers of Americans dislike their choices and have a very unconcern. favorable view of the two major candiYET RESERVE Chair Janet Yellen, dates. Recent polls show that many Ameriwhom Obama appointed, said Wednesday that she and her board members cans not only distrust their political leadwere “generally pleased with how the ers but do not trust many of their fellow citizens to make intelligent decisions U.S. economy is doing.” about the future of our country and its Huh? The median economic growth fore- leadership. A national Gallup Poll found cast among Fed board members is that that “Americans’ trust in their politithe economy will grow by only 1.8 cal leaders and in the American people percent this year, if that — down from themselves continues to decline.” “The percentages trusting the Ameritheir two percent forecast in June. Under Obama’s failed economic policies, can people (56 percent) and political and the threat of ever-higher taxes, the leaders (42 percent) are down roughly American economy has remained in a 20 percentage points since 2004, and deep slump, unable to climb out of its are currently at new lows in Gallup’s long, low-growth range. It’s now sink- trends,” the venerable polling organiing further into an economic quagmire. zation said this week. Their poll asked

Donald

Lambro

American adults how much they trust “the men and women in political life in this country who either hold or are running for political office,” and how much trust they had in their fellow citizens to make “judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing our country.” It also asked how much people trusted “the three branches of the federal government, state and local governments and the mass media.” THE SURVEY’S findings: “Trust in most of these institutions is lower now than a decade ago. This is possibly a symptom of Americans’ low levels of satisfaction with the way things are going in the country,” Gallup said. That so many Americans say they don’t trust their fellow citizens, who make up the nation’s electorate, to make wise decisions is yet another reflection of the deepening divide in this year’s presidential election. A major dividing line is certainly over the issue of taxes. Donald Trump would lower income tax rates across the board

for businesses and individuals to boost investment, savings and family incomes — and get America moving again. Hillary Clinton is running on an agenda — the same one Obama embraced — that would raise taxes on businesses and upper-income Americans. She says, falsely, that they are not paying their “fair share.” The IRS begs to differ, regularly showing that wealthier Americans actually pay the lion’s share of all federal tax revenue annually collected by the IRS. You would think that this falsehood, which Democrats have repeated in every campaign, would be exposed on the nightly network news. But don’t hold your breath. There have been three major tax cuts enacted in the last five or more decades: The Kennedy income tax cuts in the 1960s, the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s, and Bill Clinton’s capital gains tax cuts in the 1990s (which neither he nor his wife, nor the Democrats at large, ever acknowledge). All of them significantly boosted economic growth, jobs and incomes and got the American economy moving. Sadly, much of today’s economic rhetoric has dwindled to even deeper falsehoods that are being swallowed whole by a sizable share of the voters. Consider Trump’s claim that immigrants, legal or illegal, “take American jobs.” Not true, says Factcheck.org. The site published a report in 2010 by Viveca Novak, who wrote that “most economists and other experts say there’s little to support the claim.” “Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs,” Novak reported. “There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.” No wonder that a growing number of skeptical American voters say they no longer trust what their political leaders are telling them. BUT MAYBE, when the votes are counted, they will be the ones who will save our country in November.

Conservative Chronicle

MEDIA BIAS: September 22, 2106

The public doesn’t trust the press so Trump triumphs

ast week, Donald Trump held a press conference that Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post called “the greatest trick he ever pulled.” It was quite a show, all right. Promised a “major announcement,” the press showed up with cameras on, only to get the briefest of statements by Trump that (accurately, as it turns out) laid the “birther” story at the feet of the 2008 Clinton campaign — and then be regaled by a passel of high-ranking military endorsing Trump for president. Result? 90 minutes of more “free” coverage for Donald Trump. BOY, WAS THE press pissed. The outraged tweets that followed were hilarious. They got spanked. And you know what? They deserved it. The press has played “gotcha” with politicians (or, more accurately, conservative politicians for decades. This time, they were on the receiving end of the gag. They aren’t laughing. But the rest of us are, watching them get hoisted on their own sanctimonious petard. Just three days before Trump’s press conference, his running mate, vice presidential candidate Mike Pence, was interviewed by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer asked Pence to denounce infamous racist and ex-KKK member David Duke. Pence’s response was unequivocal. He said, “Donald Trump has denounced David Duke repeatedly. We don’t want his support and we don’t want the support of people who think like him.” Oh, but that wasn’t enough. Blitzer tried to get Pence to call Duke “deplorable.” Pence refused to take the bait. “I’m not in the name-calling business,” he replied. Ladies and gentlemen, this was a classic ProgMedia trap: Call Duke “deplorable” and Pence both becomes a hypocrite and takes the teeth out of Hillary Clinton’s use of the term. If Pence refuses to call Duke “deplorable,” he triggers predictable headlines like those that followed: NBC News: “Mike Pence refuses to call David Duke ‘deplorable’” Salon: “More dangerous than Trump: Why we should fear Mike Pence for refusing to call David Duke ‘deplorable’” The Hill: “Pence declines to call David Duke ‘deplorable’” Huffington Post: “Mike Pence refuses to call David Duke ‘deplorable’” Heavy: “WATCH: Mike Pence refuses to call David Duke ‘deplorable’” See how this works? Pence should have called Blitzer out on this stunt before even responding to the question — it was abundantly clear where it was going — but Pence was professional and polite. In case you’ve forgotten about Mitt Romney, here’s another example of how the press treats

port for Trump among African-Americans. Search the internet for “Trump” and “Hispanics,” and there are plenty of headlines about Trump’s “massive” TRUMP BEATS the press at their problem with that demographic and the own game, and they can’t stand it. But inevitability of his loss as a result. (See the most delicious irony of all is that the also, “Trump; Catholics”). But recent gests that it may not press’ fear and loathing of Trump — as data sugbe as clear-cut as all well as decades of that. media bias and deHow is it that ceit — is precisely the more the press why Trump is (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate lambastes Trump, where he is today. the better he does? One of the reasons A big factor is public distrust of cited as to why Trump skated to the Republican nomination is the media cover- the press. According to a poll this past age he didn’t have to pay for. But as I spring, just six percent of the public noted last week, it was overwhelmingly trusts the media. In the eyes of the public, the press is too willing to sacrifice negative! As it continues to be. Just last month, accuracy — and the public trust — on the Washington Post pooh-poohed the altar of their personal ideologies. claims that Trump was doing better with This goes a long way toward explaining black voters. But two days ago, an L.A. why the press’ visceral — and visible — Times/University of Southern Califor- loathing of Trump translates to increasnia poll showed a sharp spike in sup- ing popular support for him. someone who is professional and polite. No wonder so many people relish Trump’s bombastic tone.

Laura

Hollis

That may have flown back when people were stuck with a handful of news sources that controlled the flow of information, but there plenty of other sources today. And that’s the problem, according to some. In the past two weeks, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (“Social media makes it hard to reach some people”), FBI Director James Comey (“It’s enormously challenging” to counter the “echo chamber”) and Hillary Clinton (“It’s harder to be heard”) all blamed social media for their negative public perceptions. Right on cue, Google, Facebook, Twitter and others announced a coalition “to filter out online misinformation.” GIVEN THE numerous accusations of bias against conservative politicians and viewpoints, this doesn’t exactly instill confidence. As Donald Trump’s juggernaut continues, it’s fairly clear that those who want to stop him will stop at nothing to accomplish that.

2016 ELECTION: September 26, 2106

Wanted — a leader

lexander Hamilton said energy in the executive is essential. That was back in what used to be called the critical period of American history — when the still new Republic was threatening to come apart, as eventually it did in the next century. But this crisis is now and needs to be dealt with now, and decisively now. Instead, the major parties have nominated (a) a buffoon who seems willing to say anything that will give him and his followers a moment in the spotlight in this age of Trump and all things Trumpian, and (b) a “leader” with little but a record of reverses, defeats and setbacks for American policy. The major achievement of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s husband and co-president was to get himself impeached.

worn history, each time with a different cast of characters: Heroes and scoundrels, opportunists like Aaron Burr and traitors like Benedict Arnold, and characters to fill the cast of either a comic opera or a Shakespearean tragedy or both at the same tumultuous time. Cervantes had his kingdoms of both words and action, and so did Winston Churchill, but it would be foolish to compare one with the other, for each lived and dominated their different ages. Call it a variety of the historical error called presentism. For different ages

SO PICK your poison and pray hard. For the Republic is in deep trouble once again, as it so regularly is. The welldesigned piece of clockwork that the Founders bequeathed the nation now resembles a crazy clock more than a magnificent heritage for future generations. Nothing runs of itself despite the popular misconception that a galaxy of demigods set it. No, it requires human help and divine intervention from time to all too predictable time. If you’re looking for evidence of that old theory, just look around you. In this Our Year of the Lord 2016, no prospect looks better than 2020, when hope may be reborn. Just as this Republic was born and reborn through its well-

call forth different saints and sinners, innocent and not-so-innocent bystanders. And the neutrals we will always have with us, waiting till the dust settled before writing in it.

Paul

CARL SANDBURG, the romantic biographer of Abraham Lincoln, said it of a woman he named Tomorrow: The woman named Tomorrow sits with a hairpin in her teeth and takes her time and does her hair the way she wants it and fastens at last the last braid and coil and puts the hairpin where it belongs and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?

My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone. What of it? Let the dead be dead. The doors were cedar and the panels strips of gold and the girls were golden girls and the panels read and the girls chanted: We are the greatest city, the greatest nation: nothing like us ever was. The doors are twisted on broken hinges. Sheets of rain swish through on the wind where the golden girls ran and the panels read: We are the greatest city, the greatest nation, nothing like us ever was. This much we do know: Another crisis is upon us, one of many great and small we have seen and survived. Yet this nation has endured as it will endure. Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson, heroes and villains and in between, are all part of the great pageant we have been part of since time immemorial. May it ever go marching on. And it is not likely to cease as long as we’re part of it. This generation’s immigrants now await their curtain call to enter history’s stage or leave it. And we sit spellbound, as an attentive and active audience should and yet will. Our places will soon enough be taken by the next generation. AND WHAT stories they’ll have to tell!

October 5, 2016 MEDIA BIAS: September 21, 2016

Trump busts Muslim protection racket

orty minutes after the explosion in Chelsea Saturday night, Donald Trump told a crowd in Colorado that a bomb had gone off in New York and said, “We better get very tough, folks. We better get very, very tough.” For the next 48 hours, the media denounced Trump for jumping to conclusions about a “bomb” — and especially for the wild suggestion that government policy had had anything to do with it. (How about our policy of naturalizing 858 people from terrorist-producing countries who were still under orders of deportation? Is it deplorable to ask about that policy?)

THAT NIGHT, CNN boasted that it placed “numerous requests” to the Trump campaign, demanding his evidence that it was a bomb. This explosive-filled device with a detonator that blew up in a dumpster — what makes you think it was a bomb? Hoping to get a snappy riposte from the pouty pantsuit on Trump’s wild leap from an explosion in a dumpster to a “bomb,” the press asked her to comment on Trump’s “conclusion” — as they termed his statement of the blindingly obvious. Hillary referred to the bombing as a “bombing,” then snipped, “I think it’s important to know the facts about any incident like this ... I think it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions.” True, there was a bombing, but that doesn’t mean there was a bomb. Let’s

not fly off the handle. It could have been WRONG! Yeah, but he wasn’t. As Trump said, “I should be a newscaster because I an exploding Edible Arrangement. Even after the dumbest mammal in called it before the news.” By Monday morning, Hillary was doNorth America, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, had admitted it was a bomb, ing PR work for Islam, calling the culjournalists were indignant that Trump prits “bad guys,” but stressing that “we’re had called a bomb a “bomb” before they not going to go after an entire religion.” No one had suggested “going after an ensaid so. gion,” but I guess you can On CNN’s Inside Politics on Sunday, tire relinever be too careful when the New York Times’ Maggie dealing with all those Haberman said deplorable, irredeemthat even Trump’s able Americans. supporters worry A few hours that “he often gets (c) 2016, Ann Coulter later, New Jerahead of inforsey police caught mation” and that Democrats would make it an issue of his the suspect, an Irish Catholic altar boy not being “careful, that he doesn’t wait from Teaneck named Seamus Patrick for facts. That he just goes off and talks.” O’Sullivan. Just kidding! He was an imHey, Maggie? I’m a Trump supporter migrant from Afghanistan named Ahmad and I know lots of Trump supporters. Khan Rahami. This is the doubletalk the public has None of us ever worry about Trump “getbeen forced to endure after every terrorist ting ahead of the facts.” CNN’s Sara Murray complained that attack. Trump “seizes on these moments so inAS DESCRIBED in “In Trump We stantly before we have the facts.” Instead of instantly seizing on this Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!” our media moment to assume Trump was wrong, and politicians are pretty quick to jump to shouldn’t Sara have waited until all the the conclusion that terrorist attacks have absolutely nothing to do with Islam. facts were in? The night a truck bomb was found On CBS’ Face the Nation, the Washsmoldering in Times Square, Mayor Miington Post’s Ruth Marcus announced, “I’m a facts girl” — thanks for sharing chael Bloomberg went on CBS Evening your OKCupid profile with us, Ruth! — News and said he thought it was some“so I think the response, ‘I’d like to wait body “homegrown,” maybe “somebody for the facts until I comment,’ is always a with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” good idea.” The morning after the massacre at a The media was enraged that Trump was sensible enough to realize what had gay nightclub in Orlando, NBC’s law enhappened. HE COULD HAVE BEEN forcement analyst, Jim Cavanaugh, said

Ann

Coulter

that his best guess was that the shooter was a person “rooted in white hate movements,” and had picked the club “because it’s a diverse club and he hates diverse people.” (By which I think he means yours truly! I have the perfect alibi, of course. If I ever found myself in a gay nightclub, I’d be too busy signing autographs to shoot anybody.) The fact that the shooter was a secondgeneration Muslim immigrant named Omar Mateen, who had repeatedly pledged his allegiance to ISIS during the attack, was treated by our media as one of many strands of evidence, not nearly as important as the possibility that Mateen might be gay and had been scarred by America’s endemic homophobia. After the 2009 Fort Hood attack by a Major Nidal Hasan yelling, “Allahu Akbar!” Obama warned Americans not to “jump to conclusions.” (Deplorable, irredeemable Americans are always jumping to unwarranted conclusions!) He proceeded to label the jihadist attack an act of “workplace violence.” To Obama’s credit, his policies have reduced workplace violence considerably by putting so many Americans out of work. The media and Obama administration officials took weeks to settle on a motive for the San Bernardino terrorists, despite their having pledged allegiance to ISIS while committing the attack. That night, the Los Angeles Times falsely reported that an office dispute had preceded the slaughter. The Times won a Pulitzer for the reporting that included this intentional misdirection. The left has apparently decided that white America is a declining demographic and they are going to treat Muslim grievance groups like NARAL: We are with you on everything. It’s probably just a coincidence that Muslim immigrants are advantageous to the Democrats’ electoral prospects. Even the terrorists have been getting impatient with the American left’s refusal to give them due credit. Major Hasan’s spiritual adviser, Anwar al-Awlaki, denounced the Obama administration for denying that the Fort Hood shooting was a glorious act of Islamic terrorism. After Orlando, al Qaeda’s in-house magazine, Inspire, ordered jihadists in America to concentrate on killing Anglo-Saxon Americans to avoid confusing the U.S. media. When American settlers sent scouts to ride ahead and look for Indians, if the scouts returned saying there were 6,000 Sioux on the other side of the ridge, no one cared about their horsemanship or the language they used. TRUMP IS the only politician in 50 years to say, “Immigration security is national security.” The media won’t listen. But the voters are listening.

Conservative Chronicle

2016 ELECTION: September 27, 2106

How Trump can win the women’s vote

s Donald Trump enters the stretch run of his campaign for president, who would have predicted that his major proposal would be an ingenious plan to help mothers of young children? Instead of a weak echo of Democratic talking points, Trump’s pro-family policy for women and families offers a true contrast to Hillary Clinton’s tired feminism.

PROVING THAT Trump is on the right track, the liberal New York Times described his plan as a “cynical play for the women’s vote.” The Times went on to complain that only mothers (not fathers or same-sex partners) would qualify for the maternity benefits that Trump proposed. Headlines proclaimed a new tax deduction for child care expenses, but the benefits are not limited to families that use stranger care in commercial daycare settings. As the campaign explains: “Mr. Trump’s plan will ensure stay-at-home parents will receive the same tax deduction as working parents, offering compensation for the job they’re already doing, and allowing them to choose the child care scenario that’s in their best interest.” What a welcome surprise to have a federal program that preserves maximum family autonomy in the care of children, instead of the regulated, onesize-fits-all solution offered by the

Democrats. Hillary Clinton would give federal grants to highly regulated daycare centers, while also promising that regulated child care workers would be paid higher wages. Clinton also wants to enroll every child in preschool by age four and, for younger children and infants, she wants the federal government to “provide home visits by a social worker.” Those proposals show that Hillary has never outgrown her 20-year association with the radical Children’s Defense Fund. As Ivanka Trump wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Hillary’s child care ideas are “biased in favor of institutional care” — which is no surprise from the author of It Takes a Village. The Trump plan would give the same benefit to mothers who choose “informal child care, such as a mom watching her own kids and a few others in her home.” Trump’s plan may have been influenced by differing choices within his own family. Daughter Ivanka is a working mother of three children under age five, while daughter-in-law Vanessa Trump is the stay-at-home mom of five children under age nine.

THE MOVEMENT of women (including mothers of young children) into the paid labor force is one of the great social changes of the last 60 years. At the same time, the labor force participation rate of men in their prime working years has declined.The long-term trend

toward more working women, and more women working full-time, is usually portrayed as an advance for women. In fact, it shows that it now takes two breadwinners to support a family instead of one — hardly an advance for women, who still prefer to spend more time at home. Until the 1970s in America, most men earned enough to support a wife and provide her a home. That was the model of the nuclear family, which the feminists denigrated as Ozzie and Harriet after the popular TV sitcom of the 1950s.

Between 1950 and 1990, the percentage of women aged 25-54 who were in the workforce doubled from 37% to 74%. But the quarter-century since 1990 has seen no increase in that percentage, as large numbers of women have chosen to stay or return home in order to give their own children the irreplaceable benefit of a full-time mother. Hillary Clinton’s lifelong so-called “advocacy” for women is based on the feminist ideal that all women should spend their entire lives in the workforce while children are raised communally in taxpayer-funded centers. The Trump plan respects the choice of many women to work in a slower lane or take time off to care for their own children at home. “My opponent likes to say that for decades she’s been fighting for women, that she’s been fighting for children. Why, then, are 70 million American women and children living in poverty or on the brink of poverty in our country?” Trump asked his audience in Roanoke last Saturday. The successful Trump campaign shows that Republicans can finally abandon the notorious “autopsy” produced in the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. Formally known as the “Growth and Opportunity” report, the autopsy said the way to attract women voters was to recruit more female candidates and use more women as spokesmen for Republican policies. TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN manager Kellyanne Conway, a pro-life conservative woman, is an outstanding spokesman, as shown by her ability to match wits with anyone on TV including comedian Bill Maher. Kellyanne’s skill as a communicator is reinforced by her candidate’s increasingly solid positions on issues that women care about. John Schlafly and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016).

October 5, 2016 TRUMP FOUNDATION: September 22, 2106

Trump Foundation, charity in name only

onald Trump famously said dollars for own personal ends, attorin January that his support- neys call it “self-dealing.” It’s against ers were so loyal, “I could the law. stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose THE WASHINGTON POST’S David any voters.” It’s amazing that Trump Fahrenthold has done amazing reportwas able to exhibit his low view of his age on the Trump Foundation. Fahrsupporters, and not lose ground in the enthold’s stories belie the image that polls. Still, I wonder how his die-hard T r u m p carefully polished faithful will feel of himself as a as they learn big-shot benefacmore about how tor, always ready Trump used the to write a check ostensibly charifor a good cause. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate table Donald J. It turns out that Trump Foundawhile Trump gave tion to launder purchases of high-ticket his charity $5.4 million from 1987 items the billionaire coveted and to set- to 2006 — kudos for that — Mr. Big tle legal issues for his luxury ventures. Spender hasn’t given a dime to his When charity heads use tax-exempt namesake charity since 2008. Instead,

Debra J.

Saunders

HILLARY CLINTON: September 22, 2106

other business people have contribut- donated $64,000. “No. No. No. I’m ed to the Trump Foundation — while not going to comment on anything. I’m Trump took credit for their generosity. not answering any of your questions,” Stark told the Washington Post . AnWHY WOULD anyone give money other donor responded, “I don’t have to the Trump Foundation so that Trump time for this.” With those brush-offs, could give it away and take the credit? you’d think the donors were involved My favorite answer came from carpet in money laundering, not charitable company executive John Stark, who giving. In January Trump hosted a fundraiser for veterans’ causes that raised $6 million, including $1 million The Donald personally pledged. It wasn’t until May, in the heat of media questions, that Trump donated the $1 million to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement eryone that’s all you need ... Our posi- Association, which helps the families tioning: Experienced leadership you can of fallen Marines and federal officers. count on, someone who can break barri- Team Trump explained it took time to vet worthy recipients. But Trump has a ers for you.” Clinton must regret the “all sizzle history of saying he has given to chariand no steak” reference — but what is ties that say he did not. The Trump Foundation paid written cannot be erased. Nine years later, Clinton is using the $20,000 for a 6-foot tall portrait of same basic positioning. Her message — who-else and $12,000 for a football I’ve been there, I will be your champi- helmet autographed by Tim Tebow. That is OK if the purchases went to a on, I will work on your behalf. Penn wraps up the positioning por- charitable cause, but the Post reports tion stating that, “Hillary is the person the portrait was hung in a Trump golf we turn to because we need someone resort and the helmet’s whereabouts to stand up for us. Someone who has are unknown. So you have to wonder the smarts and strength to get it done. why a charity that is supposed to supThis is a dangerous, uncertain, complex port worthy causes — that’s why conworld, and Hillary knows how people tributions are tax deductible — is used have been ignored ... This is no time for to pad the lush lifestyle of a man who rookies. she will see what needs to be has everything. If Trump is as loaded seen, do what needs to be done. She will as he claims, why can’t he pay for his do it because she knows what to do. She own toys? The Trump Foundation twice gave may not be a new face, but she will give money to other charities as part of this country a new start.” The focus on experience and breaking settlements to resolve a $120,000 barriers is still part of her campaign. The fine from Palm Beach and a $158,000 challenge Clinton has is that the strategy claim against a Trump golf course. that did not work eight years ago does Trump campaign guru Kellyanne Connot appear to be working today. Addi- way told CNN that charities benefited tionally, the bedrock belief by Penn that from the deals, so it’s all good. But she brings the “smarts and strength” to those charities would have benefited get it done are being challenged by her just as much if Trump’s businesses had collapse on September 11, due to pneu- ponied up. monia, and her lapses in memory and FORGET THE crazy sound bites her bad decisions regarding her use of a that have become a staple of cable private email server while she was servnews. The real story of any man is not ing as secretary of state. what he says, but what he does. Take a CLINTON’S STRATEGY did not close look at the White House wannabe secure the Democratic nomination for who flies around in his private plane as her in 2008. In less than 50 days, we will if he’s Richie Rich, who all along has find out if this same strategy serves her a hand out. He tries to distract with the flash of his bling, but morally he is a better in 2016. pauper.

Hillary Clinton: Strategy redux

n August 2009, the Atlantic published a strategy memo crafted by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief political strategist for the 2008 primary. The memo had been written in March of 2007, at the beginning of the primary, when Clinton was polling at 39 percent for the Democratic nomination, followed by Barack Obama at 25 percent, with former U.S. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina trailing with 11 percent. Her nomination seemed inevitable to many.

MANY IN the news media singled out Obama as the only real challenger to Clinton and the memo focused on how she should win the nomination. It covered the normal scope of topics for campaign strategy documents: “situation,” “what holds him up,” “what could hold him back,” “how is the environment,” “so what do we do,” “overall strategy for winning,” “positioning,” and “so how do we win.” What’s intriguing in rereading the missive is how much of Clinton’s current campaign reflects the strategy laid out nine years ago by Penn. Under the category of what could hold him (Obama) back, three of the four items Penn lists are categories that the Clinton campaign uses on Trump. They are “lack of experience,” “removed for working man/woman,” and “phony.” In contrast to Clinton’s current embrace of Obama, the fourth item listed as an attribute that could hold Obama back was “lack of American roots.” The memo stated, “I cannot imagine American electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamen-

tally American in his thinking and his values.” Wow, was Penn wrong. America did. The 2007 memo notes how to frame the situation to take advantage of Clinton’s experience in politics. “It is a complex and dangerous world out there. It is perhaps the most precarious international situation since the start of WWII, with hidden enemies and fractured allies. It is an economy reeling from uncertain global competition. This is no time for rookies. No time for rhetoric. It is a time for experienced leadership that can get results. This is who I am and what I have to offer.”

Jackie

This approach did not work in 2008, and does not appear to be working in 2012. But Clinton continues to lay out this same argument. Last Monday, after the bombings in New Jersey and New York, she laid out her case this time. “I am the only candidate in this race who has been part of the hard decisions to take terrorists off the battlefield.” SHE MAY have been part of the decision, but it leads voters to wonder why we are still dealing with so many issues that have not been resolved. Penn goes on in the memo to talk about Clinton’s position in the race for the Democratic nomination. “The modern buzz word is that it is not about politics but positioning. This of course is Obama’s territory. He is all sizzle and no steak. And he wants to convince ev-

Conservative Chronicle

MEDIA BIAS: September 23, 2106

Time cheers comedians ‘ditching balance’

he Sept. 26 issue of Time magazine cover featured the heads of comedians Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel, and the headline “We Joke. You Decide.” The allusion to the Fox News tagline was deliberate. The subheadline declared that they would report on “The seriously partisan politics of late-night comedy.” Finally, liberals are acknowledging what conservatives have claimed for years. Inside, the headline was “The New Politics of Late Night.” And writer Richard Zoglin began the article saying, “In a wild election with a ripe orange target, comics are ditching balance and taking sides.” Zoglin started with a collection of Bee stingers, calling her description of the Republican convention a “poorly attended rageathon of hemorrhoidal has-beens.” BUT JUST when you thought Zoglin was going to concede and celebrate the left-wing tilt of late-night TV, his analysis fell apart — as liberals’ analyses normally do when they are called to analyze the obvious. Zoglin quoted Bee saying that Jon Stewart “worked really hard to try to be nonpartisan.” Baloney. But he also proclaimed that the departures of Stewart, David Letterman and Colbert’s fakeBill-O’Reilly brought “an unexpected and largely unappreciated payoff.” The new comedians are shooting arrows “from the left flank” and have “triggered an extreme makeover” of political satire, which is now more pointed and “partisan than ever before.” This is a payoff? For whom? Zoglin touted their “fresh perspective on the increasingly vitriolic U.S. political scene.” But they are the ones who are increasingly overflowing with infantile vitriol about their opponents being “hemorrhoidal.” What’s “fresh” about that? Apparently the “payoff” is the comedians convincing the press to get even nastier with Republicans. Noah told Time: “There’s a certain level of naivete when you say Hillary Clinton is worse than Trump. I think that’s a very dangerous position to be in. And I think the press has gotten to a place where they are realizing it’s about truth and not neutrality.” THE COMEDIANS and the press must favor “the truth.” That’s the Clinton side — the lovers of “truth?” Trump’s existence is somehow entirely mythical, as Bee contended saying, “News organizations simply are not equipped to cover a candidate whose entire being is a lie.” It gets better, folks. Of NBC’s Mey-

Obama knew he could show up at ers, Zoglin claimed that “it is rare, not to say unprecedented, for the host of a Comedy Central with that “nonpartimainstream network show to push such san” Stewart slobbering at his feet, in a blatant political viewpoint, yet Mey- awe. The “satire” spared the Democrats ers says NBC is fully on board.” Zoglin somehow slept through the prec- never seems to come up. Zoglin mentioned that edent of the last two election cycles, b r i e f l y Hillary Clinton where Comcast “gets her share loaded up Barack of jabs,” but he Obama’s camcouldn’t be bothpaign treasury, ered to quote one, and NBC added (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate while he eagerly in-kind contributions at the newsrooms and entertain- shared anti-Trump insults, like Bee’s ment studios. In 2012, which NBC calling him a “sociopathic 70-year-old comedian mocked Obama? And which toddler.” He didn’t mention how Meyers lecNBC comedian didn’t mock GOP nomtured grumpy Bernie backers at Demoinee Mitt Romney?

Brent

Bozell

crat convention time: “We’re on the cusp of electing a racist demagogue, and that never ends well. I don’t know which class you ditched to go to those Bernie rallies, but I have a feeling it was history.” By way of contrast, Kimmel offered his show to Clinton by letting her open a jar of pickles on stage to mock those who question her healthiness. THE NETWORK comedians are pressuring the network “news” to abandon any pretense of fairness and use the full force of their propaganda power to tar and feather Trump. It’s working.

2016 ELECTION: September 23, 2106

Campaigns reduced to cliches

very presidential campaign draws on familiar pop culture references to bring the candidates down to Earth. Critics use the references to illuminate the differences between voters of different generations. We the people search for analogues in art, music, theater and even anthropology to find the telling insight that animates observations and interpretations of personality, if not policy. This is especially true in the lead-up to the first debate on Monday night, when voters will be confounded by the divergent styles of two unpopular candidates offering a clash of polarizing sensibilities.

inance. She’ll be thinking of a chimp named Mike, she tells James Fallows in the Atlantic magazine, when she watches the debate. Mike gleefully created confusion and noise that “made his rivals flee and cower.’” Hillary Clinton, staid and prim, is the policy wonk, the strident first wife, the overbearing mother-in-law. She’s sometimes even the mother whose shrill voice a person hears when he thinks

HAVING THROWN away all pretense of even-handedness, the organs of the big media will play out the candidates’ different styles, as the highbrow vs. the lowbrow, the insider vs. the outsider, the university-educated elitist vs. the vulgar business genius. Their followers are the rich vs. the working stiffs. Add to these cultural divisions demographic distinctions ranging from feminists to lunch-bucket working men, from old folks to millennials. They live in the same country, but in different worlds. You choose your favorite caricatures from where you sit. Donald Trump is the punk rocker who grooves on smashing things, a male chauvinist raging against the ladies; or he’s the liberated businessman who hires competent women to run his enterprises. He even married a beautiful model who has her own career. He’s the reality performer who delights in the close-up and is at ease with showbiz spontaneity. He’s certainly not everybody’s taste. Anthropologist Jane Goodall likens him to a male chimpanzee slapping the ground and throwing rocks to win dom-

he might have done something wrong, even when he hasn’t. She usually means well but lacks tact and warmth, and never learned the valuable lesson that you can sometimes be wrong by being right. Pop images collect, coalesce and harden. He’s the crude joker; she’s the uptight schoolmarm. He’s outrageous; she’s buttoned up, all the way to her chin. He’s a banana split with a cherry on top; she’s a double serving of spinach with nothing on top.

Suzanne

Fields

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to balance the pop references and the cliched distinctions. Music and television, always looking for something to entertain the masses, play up strife and division, and now they’re joined by the ubiquitous internet and social media, with their chaos of opinion (usually half-baked). While nearly everyone is exposed to the latest sensation, whether a trend or breaking news, what’s new quickly becomes old. What was avant-garde and revolutionary only yesterday is now ancient history. The reason that Clinton’s celebrated breakthrough as the first woman presi-

dential candidate of a major party hasn’t caught on in a positive and useful way is that her kind of feminism is, in the jargon of today, “so yesterday.” It’s as unhip as her pantsuits. The product called Hillary Clinton is overexposed and stale, a soda that’s lost the fizzle, a hamburger with no sizzle, a label that’s yellowed for being so long on the shelf. If this campaign were vaudeville (instead of sometimes just resembling vaudeville), she would be the straight man looking in vain for his comedic partner; she is an elitist ordering a vintage wine when those in the know among her rich and sophisticated friends choose the latest craft beer. She may be running against who culture critic James Parker describes as “the worst stand-up comedian in the world,” but even when the Donald crashes and burns, he supplies a reality more in touch with the angry times than the woman who’s afraid to say she’s got pneumonia for fear that failing will finally do her in politically, if not physically. DONALD TRUMP may, as one critic put it, look like “a bust that will one day be toppled in a city square,” but he’s admired and applauded by huge crowds for sticking it to the elites, the arrogant arbiters of taste who, like Hillary Clinton, deplore the “deplorables.” In the New York Sun, Conrad Black observes, “This was Empress Hillary emptying the contents of her chamber pot out the palace window onto the heads of those described in the phrase ‘We the people.’” The first debate, expected to draw an audience of 100 million, will probably be decisive. The winner will ride to November in the catbird seat. The loser will get the chamber pot, and all that’s in it.

October 5, 2016 ELECTORATE: September 27, 2106

Domestic migration: A generation of partisan changes

et’s step back, as we approach ten attributed to high Hispanic and Asian the first presidential debate of immigration. But they’re also the result the 2016 campaign, and look of huge domestic out-migration of midback to try to understand how voting dle-class people due to high taxes and patterns have changed over a genera- high-cost housing. From the 1940s to the 1970s Calition, by comparing the 2012 presidential results with those of 1988 — keep- fornia tilted Republican because of vast ing in mind possible shifts since 2012 numbers of newcomers from the Midwest. Starting in the 1980s it became suggested by 2016 polling. My thesis is that changes in states’ strongly Democratic not only because voting behavior can best be explained of vast influxes from Mexico but also by surges of migration over the past because many of the offspring of Midmigrants moved out. generation — not just immigration, a w e s t e r n More than one subject of obvious interest this cammillion descendants paign season, but of Irish, Italian even more of inand Jewish immiternal migration grants from the within the United three-state region States. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate around New York THE OVERALL picture is one of City and from metro Philadelphia have Republican decline, from the 53 per- moved south along Interstate 95. That cent George H.W. Bush won in 1988 to migration has left those metro areas, Mitt Romney’s 47 percent in 2012. But competitive in 1988, solidly Democratic. And those internal migrants have the decline was not uniform. In 14 states with 201 electoral votes made Virginia and Florida, and to a lesser the Republican percentage dropped by extent the Carolinas and Georgia, more double digits. In 20 states with 161 Democratic. Virginia, solidly Republican electoral votes the Republican percent- in the 1980s, voted at the national average increased or dropped by less than age in the Obama elections and has tilted three percent. In 16 states and D.C. more Democratic this year. North Caroliwith 176 electoral votes it dropped by na, competitive in the last two elections, about the national average. (Compar- is so again. It also matters who moves in. The two ing Democratic percentages produces almost identical results, since minor largest states, California and Texas, have candidates got only one or two percent identical Hispanic percentages. California, while losing middle-income whites, in those two elections.) The double-digit Republican drops in is gaining high-education liberals, while Calif., Ill., N.Y., Ne.J. and Conn. are of- Texas’ huge domestic in-migration is cul-

Michael

Barone

turally and economically conservative. As a result California is safe Democratic and Texas safe Republican. In 2014 gubernatorial races, Texas Hispanics voted about as Republican as California whites. STATES THAT have had little or no domestic in-migration and low immigration mostly trended Republican from 1988 to 2012:In the Appalachian chain; southwest from West Virginia through Arkansas and Oklahoma; in most of the Great Plains and northern Rocky Mountain states; and in heavily GermanoScandinavian Wisconsin and Minnesota. Trends in some states may be surprising. Maryland, with heavy black in-

migration from Washington, D.C., has moved from marginal to safe Democratic. Massachusetts, after 1990s tax cuts, has had low out-migration, and its Democratic trend is only about the national average. The largest move to Democrats, 20 percent, was in Vermont, where many New Yorkers like Bernie Sanders have replaced flinty New England farmers, with similar trends in western New Hampshire and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Mississippi, unlike the rest of the interior South, has trended Democratic rather than Republican, evidently because of higher black turnout. Increasing Hispanic and Asian populations in large metro areas’ suburbs, together with greater cultural liberalism among high-education whites, transformed many of them from Republican to Democratic by 2012, a trend likely to be augmented by Donald Trump’s unpopularity among these groups. But Trump’s appeal to low-education and older whites seems to be putting him ahead in places where the elder Bush trailed badly in 1988 — in West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Iowa (Michael Dukakis’ second-best state then). Trump is also doing well in Nevada, which with its many Hispanic and Filipino immigrants trended 13 points Democratic in 1988-2012, because he’s running ahead among its many white non-collegegraduates. THE BIGGEST puzzle is, no surprise, Florida — a must-win for both candidates. The recent Puerto Rican influx in metro Orlando helps Democrats. But domestic migrants from the Northeast were Trump’s strongest supporters in the primary and could swing its 29 electoral votes to the guy from Queens with a house in Palm Beach.

Conservative Chronicle

MIKE COFFMAN: September 25, 2106

In the High Plains, a Republican worth voting for

ere on the High Plains, where with just 48 percent of the vote. In 2014, the deer and the antelope national Democrats recruited a formidaonce played, Denver’s sub- ble opponent, a Yale graduate who had urbs roam toward the Rockies’ front taught, in Spanish, in Central American range and the nature of today’s polyglot schools. So, Coffman learned Spanish politics is written in the local congress- well enough to do an entire debate in the man’s campaign schedule. One day last language, and today banters in Spanthe children at Roca week, Republican Mike Coffman went ish with Fuerte Academy. from a Hispanic The pastor who charter school founded it in 2008 in a strip mall, says this charter to another strip school is anathmall for lunch at (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group ema to, and unan Ethiopian restaurant with leaders of the Ethiopian- derfunded by, the local school district, American community, then to a meet- which is obedient to the teachers union, ing with the editor of the largest of two which dislikes charters that are not obeKorean-language newspapers serving dient to it. The district’s schools have more than 3,000 Korean-Americans in just a 61 percent graduation rate. Roca Fuerte Academy does better. the metropolitan area.

George

Will

COFFMAN WAS elected to Congress in 2008 with 61 percent of the vote, replacing Tom Tancredo, a firebrand who that year ineffectually ran for president as a scourge of illegal immigrants. Coffman’s thinking was somewhat congruent with Tancredo’s. Then, however, the political market — aka democracy — began to work, with an assist from Democrats, who inadvertently made Coffman a better politician and person. After he was re-elected with 66 percent in 2010, his district was gerrymandered to make it more Democratic — 20 percent Hispanic, with a generous salting of other minorities. He won in 2012

SOME OF the academy’s pupils in their school uniforms are antecedents of the pronoun in Donald Trump’s fourword immigration policy: “They have to go.” They were brought here by illegal immigrants. Trump wants to send them “home” to countries they do not remember. Coffman has co-authored legislation that would provide legal status and a path to lawful permanent resident status to those who came before age 16, have lived here five consecutive years, and who have been accepted to a college or vocational school or have demonstrated an intent to enlist in the military, or have a valid work authorization.

At the Nile restaurant, Coffman’s cowboy boots go beneath a table groaning under the weight of trays laden with Ethiopian food that is eaten without utensils, scooped up with bits torn from rolls of bread as thin and flexible as fabric. Coffman sits next to an Orthodox bishop who is wearing a cassock and a glittering pectoral cross. As guests arrive, several kiss a crucifix he holds. He speaks scant English but draws 1,500 to Sunday services. Many of those around the table have been in America for at least a decade and are citizens and

small-business entrepreneurs. Ethiopians are Colorado’s second-largest immigrant community and are grateful for Coffman’s attempts to pressure Ethiopia’s authoritarian government to stop using violence against protesters. Coffman attends the annual “Taste of Ethiopia” festival here in America’s Mountain West and “Ethiopians for Coffman” might matter in November. As might the Korean-American community, which continues to honor those Americans who, like Coffman’s father, fought in the Korean War. Coffman, 61, enlisted in the Army before receiving his high school diploma, which he earned while serving. After leaving the Army and graduating from the University of Colorado, he went to Marine Corps officer training. When he left the Corps he became a state legislator until called back into uniform in 1991 for the Gulf War. In 2005, he resigned as state treasurer to serve a tour of duty with the Marines in Iraq. There he helped organize elections in a place where diversity is rather more problematic than in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District. His opponent this year, who dislikes charter schools and school choice, does not speak fluent Spanish and, unlike almost all candidates challenging incumbents, does not seem to want many debates — she even declined the Denver Post’s. Coffman thinks she does not want anything to distract from her theme, which is: Trump is a Republican and so is Coffman. IN EARLY August, however, Coffman acted pre-emptively with a television ad that began: “People ask me, ‘What do you think about Trump?’ Honestly, I don’t care for him much.” Spoken like a Marine who does 10 sets of 50 pushups daily.

October 5, 2016 GOVERNMENT SHAKEDOWN: September 22, 2106

Anatomy of a multi-government shakedown

According to the European commis’m slow to defend corporations these days because so many of sion, if a country doesn’t tax a comthem have built their business pany as much as the bureaucrats in models around government-granted Brussels want it to be taxed, somehow privileges and are free markets’ worst that’s equivalent to giving the comenemies. However, for all the perks they pany a subsidy or a handout. So even Apple followed the get from governments, they also fall vic- t h o u g h rules in Ireland and tim to their own what it did is legal government. And in both Ireland and sometimes the the United States, shakedown is done the EU retroacby multiple gov(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate tively changed the erning authorities. rules and is now A FEW WEEKS ago, the European demanding lavish sums of cash from Union’s antitrust regulator demanded the company. Forget about the Irish government’s that Ireland get back $14.5 billion in taxes from Apple Inc. At the heart of the right to set its own taxes; when the EU issue are legal tax arrangements between wants your cash, tax sovereignty goes Ireland and Apple passed in 1991 and out the window. As you can imagine, 2007, which allow the company to pay the Irish government isn’t pleased. It an annual tax rate of roughly one percent said it would appeal the decision in oron its European profits channeled to Ire- der “to defend the integrity” of its tax system. land.

Veronique

de Rugy

Good luck with that, says Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute. An appeal requires that Ireland persuade one group of European officials to overturn the decision of another. He explains, “Given the long-standing hostility in Brussels to Ireland’s tax system, that’s an uphill climb — particularly since European bureaucrats have set themselves up to be judge, jury and executioner on these issues.” Also, considering the amount at stake through this Apple tax grab and the tax grab looming over other Ameri-

DEATH TAX: September 27, 2106

Bernie Rodham Clinton

omeone might want to inform Hillary Clinton that greed and envy are two of the seven deadly sins. Her new revised tax plan would raise the estate tax to as high as 65 percent — up from 40 percent, where it is today. She would also apply this hated death tax to as many as twice as many estates. It’s one of her dumbest ideas yet — and that is saying a lot. It won’t raise any revenue to speak of. It’s a bow-tied gift to estate-tax lawyers and accountants. Many studies have found that the cost to the economy of taxing a lifetime of savings more than outweighs any benefits. It actually could end up costing the Treasury money by reducing investment in family businesses, which are a major engine of growth for our economy.

She’s sinking in the polls. She’s terrified of losing the Bernie Sanders voters by not being tough enough on the superrich. So she’s adopted the Sanders tax policy. Sanders has said there’s nothing wrong with taking more and more money from people in the top 0.3 percent of incomes. Clinton: Is a 70 or 80 percent income tax next? This might win over even more Sanders supporters. I’m not going to explain again the economic argument against the death tax. I’m going to make an ethical and moral argument. Who in her

BUT CLINTON wants to take us back to the 1970s. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, the plan would impose a 50 percent rate to estates over $10 million a person, a 55 percent rate to estates over $50 million a person, and the top rate of 65 percent to estates exceeding $500 million in assets for a single person or $1 billion for a married couple. What Clinton doesn’t get is this: Anyone who’s smart enough to make half a billion dollars is smart enough to find a way to dodge this confiscatory tax. That’s the whole history of the death tax: The very rich never pay it. So why this act of desperation from Clinton? The answer is fairly obvious.

right mind thinks that it’s appropriate in America for the government to take two-thirds of someone’s lifetime earnings? A billionaire has already paid millions and millions of dollars in taxes over the course of his life. Why is the government the rightful owner of one’s legacy — the sweat and equity and 60hour workweeks spent building a business — and not that person’s family members?

Stephen

THE ORIGINS of the death tax come from the Communist Manifesto. This tax was touted by Karl Marx as one of the strategies to secure government ownership of assets. Think about it: With a 50 percent death tax, over

time the government will own 50 percent of the nation’s assets. With a 100 percent estate tax — and Clinton’s proposal isn’t far from that — the government eventually owns... everything. This is a big issue, because over the next 25 years or so, tens of trillions of dollars in assets will be transferred from aging baby boomers to their kids and grandkids. The left wants to get its greedy hands on that treasure chest of money. Every American should resist this power grab by the avaricious political class. They are the real robber barons, worshiping money above all else. If Clinton were to win and adopt this death-tax policy, the small-business model in America would largely disappear. Why build a legacy if you cannot pass it on? Donald Trump should insist that it is your right as an American to leave your worldly possessions to your children. Trump would eliminate the death tax. He understands that the proper role of government is to facilitate wealth creation, not to destroy it. CLINTON’S CAMPAIGN justified this new confiscation tax by saying that only a few hundred people every year would pay it. That misses the point. An unjust law is unjust whether it applies to 200 people or two million people. Americans understand this principal of basic fairness better than the Yale-educated Clinton does. They don’t buy into the politics of greed and envy. That’s why two-thirds of voters favor eliminating the tax, not doubling down on it.

can multinational corporations, the EU is unlikely to change its mind. NOW ENTER the United States. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew complained in the Wall Street Journal about the EU’s behavior — calling the move “unfair” and “contrary to well established legal principles” and noting that the move “threatens to undermine the overall business climate in Europe.” True. But don’t be fooled; the only reason Lew has opposed this EU move is that he would rather be the one grabbing that money. Under the current punishing system, U.S. companies doing business abroad and repatriating their foreign earnings home get tax credits for the taxes paid to other governments before being hammered with a ridiculously high 35 percent tax rate. The more taxes companies pay offshore the less is left for Uncle Sam to grab. So if the tax payments to the EU qualify as a tax credit, that’s potentially $14.5 billion less tax revenue in the U.S. tax chest. The EU shakedown of Apple will soon become the EU shakedown of Amazon.com, McDonald’s and many other U.S. companies, so the U.S. Treasury proceeded to put in place its own shakedown mechanism. It’s issuing new rules to restrict how corporations can use tax credits on their foreign tax payments to reduce their U.S. tax bills. The explicit goal of these rules is to avoid suffering a huge tax loss as a consequence of U.S. multinationals having to pay billions of dollars in taxes to the EU version of the Soprano family. IN OTHER words, no matter how you look at it, U.S. corporations are in for a large shakedown from the EU and from the United States. It’s sad, considering that the best solution to this mess would be for the United States to reform its corporate income tax by lowering its rate and moving to a territorial tax system. Such reform would guarantee that U.S. firms operating abroad would not park so much money abroad and subject themselves to arbitrary tax changes by foreign governments. It would also increase U.S. competitiveness and trigger economic growth. But if you think that scenario will happen soon, don’t hold your breath.

Conservative Chronicle

2016 ELECTION: September 22, 2106

Hillary, Donald and the birther demise

id you see the interview over the weekend of a listless and, apparently, exhausted Hillary Clinton? Supposedly she has recovered from last week’s bout with pneumonia, but she could have fooled me. Call me a hypochondriac, but in my opinion her recovery is not going very well. From the back of her airplane, Clinton droned on about “the bombings in New York and New Jersey,” and then launched robotically into yet another attack on Donald Trump. This time, his transgression, according to Clinton, was to prematurely mention the bombing, though she had already introduced the subject. If she were aware of her faux pas — or was it more serious like, say, a blackout? — she gave no sign of it.

IT WAS EERILY suggestive of her kerfuffle over the birther controversy a day or two earlier. That involved more players. In fact, it involved the entire mainstream media, as they once again demonstrated the Taranto principle. According to this unfailing insight, the mainstream media only encourage left-wing politicians’ worst impulses through their diapasonal approval of their lunkheaded behavior. Think of Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign appearance in a tank, wearing an ill-fitting helmet on his diminutive head. Or John Kerry’s campaigning while windsurfing, and a half-dozen other he-man contraptions. Well, before her ill-planned interview, she and the media fell for Trump’s bait on the birther nonsense. He announced that he would make a statement on the birther matter on Friday at the opening of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. At the hotel, he kept the media waiting for 45 minutes while a string of decorated warriors mounted the stage to announce their endorsements of him to the whirring cameras. Finally, he came on and stated tersely and slyly: “President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.” But he also said: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it.” THE MEDIA had been had, but then Clinton was had, too. She appeared before a black audience to announce that “For five years, (Trump) has led the birther movement to delegitimize our first black president.” She went on to say: “His campaign was founded on this outrageous lie. There is no erasing it in history.” Unfortunately for Clinton, that is true. There is no erasing it in history. Shortly thereafter, her surrogates were on the campaign trail claiming that Trump was a liar and that Clinton’s 2008 campaign was innocent. At this point, let me explain why earlier in the column I called the birther

controversy “nonsense.” Back in 2008, later explained it as a clerical error. But or perhaps 2007, I put a reporter on the with Obama and those hoping to make question of where Obama was born. A a buck on him, one never knows the nahigh-ranking Democrat — yes, I said ture of the Kenyan story. That was the Democrat — had informed me that there beginning of the birther legend, and it, was truth to this birther question. It took of course, spread. A s for 2008 Clinton, her my reporter about 48 hours to discover fingerprints are all that there was not over the corpus demuch to the leglicti. She did not end. He checked keep a private the birth notices server in those in Obama’s home(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate days, but evidence town newspaper, that her campaign and sure enough, little Barack was born in Honolulu, was active in promoting the birther Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961. But he also legend exists even without emails. A came up with an explanation for the volunteer who worked for her camensuing confusion. Obama’s literary paign in Iowa was fired when he was agent had claimed in the 1990s that exposed for spreading the rumor; and Obama was born in Kenya. The agent there was word that Clinton’s confidant,

R. Emmett

Tyrrell

Sidney Blumenthal, was also engaged in spreading the rumor. Last week, a former editor at McClatchy Co.’s Washington Bureau came forward to say that Blumenthal had “told (him) in person” of Obama’s Kenya origins. They met in his office in 2008, and the editor said that during the meeting, Blumenthal “strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya.” A reporter was dispatched to Kenya and came back convinced that the story was bogus. IN RESPONSE to this story, Blumenthal emailed the Boston Globe saying: “This is false. Period.” Obviously, the story is true. Blumenthal’s mendacity is as widely known as Clinton’s.

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: September 26, 2106

Leslie’s Trivia Bits

hat to give the bride and groom on their wedding day? It’s a tough question. For the young Queen Victoria on the occasion of her marriage to Prince Albert, cheesemakers in the West of England collected the milk of 700 dairy cows to produce a wheel of cheddar cheese weighing more than 1,000 pounds that they gave to the couple as a wedding gift. Most NASCAR races give the winner a trophy. Winners at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia take home a grandfather clock. It’s among the more coveted prizes in racing, not least because Martinsville is the shortest — and some might say most challenging — track on the Sprint Cup circuit. On Sept. 27, 1964, Fred Lorenzen became the first driver to win a Martinsville clock. More than 125 have been awarded since then, including 12 to Richard Petty. AFTER THE United States entered World War I in 1917, men were released from “unnecessary peacetime occupations” so they could join the war effort. Mowing the White House lawn was considered one such unnecessary occupation, so a flock of sheep temporarily replaced the groundskeepers. (President Woodrow Wilson usually gets credit, but the scheme might have been first lady Edith Wilson’s idea.) The sheep kept the grass — and White House expenses — trimmed. Their wool was auctioned to benefit the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Johannes Gutenberg devised the first operable printing press using mechanical moveable type in the 1440s, adapting his design from the wine presses that he would have known well, living in Mainz,

the heart of German wine country. It took close to 100 years for the first printing press in the New World to be put into operation in Mexico City in 1539. Then another 99 — possibly an even 100 — years passed before Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, opened the first printing press in North America. There are lots of tiny frogs in the world, but Paedophryne amauensis is the smallest. It measures just 7.7 mm — about 0.3 inch — and can fit on the face of a dime. The Louisiana State University herpetologists who discovered the frog in 2010 heard

Leslie

it before they ever saw it. While studying the wildlife of Papua New Guinea, they became curious about an odd mating call they heard at night. Turns out the big noise came from a very small source. SLOT MACHINES were intended to pay winners in cash. You pop in a nickel, spin the wheels and hope to increase your “investment.” But that changed temporarily in 1909 when local anti-gambling ordinances were enacted throughout the United States — even in Las Vegas. Because there was nothing to prohibit machines paying benefits other than cash, some slots were reconfigured to pay off in chewing gum with cherries, melons and other fruit on the wheels indicating the flavor you’d get if you won. TRIVIA 1. Which animated duo helped to revive the popularity of Wensleydale cheese?

A) Lilo and Stitch B) Phineas and Ferb C) Pinky and the Brain D) Wallace and Grommit 2. What politician did Time magazine name as its Person of the Year for 2015? A) German Chancellor Angela Merkel B) Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi C) Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff D) Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker 3. “General” William Booth founded the Salvation Army in 1865 in what city? A) Boston, Massachusetts B) Geneva, Switzerland C) London, England D) Savannah, Georgia 4. Which of these is a principal ingredient in mead wine? A) Butter B) Eggs C) Honey D) Rice 5. In the 1970s, Stephen Sondheim wrote a musical based on “The Frogs” by what ancient Greek playwright? A) Aeschylus B) Aristophanes C) Euripides D) Sophocles 6. Which classic kids game inspired a 1968 smash hit single from the 1910 Fruitgum Company? A) Dodgeball B) Jacks C) Simon Says D) Tic-tac-toe (answers on page 19)

October 5, 2016 BLACKS: September 27, 2106

‘Favors’ to blacks — more harm than good

ack in the 1960s, as large good on the surface but do lasting damnumbers of black students age in the long run. One of these “favors” was the welwere entering a certain Ivy League university for the first time, fare state. A vastly expanded welfare someone asked a chemistry professor state in the 1960s destroyed the black — off the record — what his response family, which had survived centuries to them was. He said, “I give them all of slavery and generations of racial oppression. A’s and B’s. To he-- with them.” I n 1960, before this Since many of those students were expansion of the admitted with welfare state, 22 lower academic percent of black qualifications than children were other students, he (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate raised with only knew that honest one parent. By grades in a tough subject like chemistry could lead to lots 1985, 67 percent of black children were of failing grades, and that in turn would raised with either one parent or no parlead to lots of time-wasting hassles — ent. A big “favor” the Obama adminisnot just from the students, but also from tration is offering blacks today is exthe administration. emption from school behavior rules HE WAS NOT about to waste time that have led to a rate of disciplining of that he wanted to invest in his profes- black male students that is greater than sional work in chemistry and the ad- the rate of disciplining of other categovancement of his own career. He also ries of students. Is it impossible that black males misknew that his “favor” to black students in grading was going to do them more behave in school more often than Asian harm than good in the long run, because females? Or Jewish students? Or oththey wouldn’t know what they were ers? Is the only possible reason for the supposed to know. Such cynical calculations were sel- disparities in disciplining rates that the dom expressed in so many words. Nor teachers and principals are discriminatare similar cynical calculations openly ing against black males? Even when expressed today in politics. But many many of these teachers and principals successful political careers have been in black neighborhoods are themselves built on giving blacks “favors” that look black?

Thomas

Sowell

But Washington politicians are on the case. It strengthens the political vision that blacks are besieged by racist enemies, from which Democrats are their only protection. They give black youngsters exemptions from behavioral standards, just as the Ivy League chemistry professor gave them exemption from academic standards.

them.” Kids from homes where they were not given behavioral standards, who are then not held to behavioral standards in schools, are on a path that can lead them as adults straight into prison, or to fatal confrontations with the police. This is ultimately not a racial thing. Exactly the same welfare state policies and the same non-judgmental exemption from behavioral standards in Britain IN BOTH CASES, the consequence have led to remarkably similar results — unspoken today — is “to he-- with among lower-class whites there. The riots of lower-class whites in London, Manchester and other British cities in 2011 were incredibly similar to black riots in Ferguson, Baltimore and other American cities — right down to setting fire to police cars. One of the few bright spots for black children in American ghettos has been some charter schools that have educated these children to levels equal to, and in some cases better than, those in affluent suburbs. You might think that this would be welcomed by those who are so ready to do “favors” for blacks. But you would be dead wrong. Democrats who have been in charge of most cities with sizable black populations, for decades, are on record opposing the spread of charter schools. So is the NAACP. That is a de facto declaration of moral bankruptcy in both cases, just as in the case of the Ivy League chemistry professor. In all three cases, it is a question of promoting one’s own special interests, while offering “favors” to blacks. THE DEMOCRATS’ special interest is in serving the teachers’ unions, which oppose charter schools and support Democrats financially. The NAACP’s special interest is in serving the same donors — and in keeping ghetto schools controlled by racial activists, as part of their turf.

October 5, 2016

The real reasons for Charlotte-Mecklenburg riots

he smoke and stench of destruc- nal history. Which means he had to have tion by blacks with no sense of purchased the firearm illegally from anmoral propriety rising in the air other street thug. But I digress. The shooting of Scott was the excuse over Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, can be seen for miles. The images used to promote violence and racist vitriof the violence they have perpetrated and ol by blacks. The late Senator Daniel Patthe appalling screeds that flowed from rick Moynihan, (D-NY). Moynihan once their mouths like a severe case of encop- said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” That obresis have been broadcasted worldwide. The abhorrent barbarism that has servation segues perfectly to Moynihan’s shaken Charlotte-Mecklenburg is being profoundly insightful observation: “The incidence of anti-social behavior attributed to the police shooting and killing of Keith Lamont Scott. But that is among young black males continues to be dinarily high ... [T]his the red herring used to silence truthful extraoris the biggest problem criticism and jusblack Americans face tify animalistic be... Because blacks live havior. It may have in de facto segrebeen a secret to the gated neighborrest of America, (c) 2016, Mychal Massie hoods, and go to but it was no secret to those in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg de facto segregated neighborhoods, the area that Scott had a two decade long socially stable elements of the black pophistory of gun violence, which included ulation cannot escape the socially pathothe shooting at police officers in Texas. logical ones. Routinely their children get But as is typical in instances like this, the caught up in the anti-social patterns of most violent of offender is immediately the others... Let me draw your attention heralded to be worthy of sainthood, their to another phenomenon, exactly parallel, lengthy and violent criminal histories and originating in exactly the same social circumstances. Fire ,,, A great many are notwithstanding. more or less deliberately set ... Fires are THE RIOTS, which where in large in fact a ‘leading indicator’ of social papart free shopping sprees, were not about thology for a neighborhood. They come justice; if they had been about justice first. Crime, and the rest follows. The the rioters would have helped police get psychiatric interpretation of fire-setting Scott off the streets long before he signed is complex, but it relates to the types of his own death warrant by disobeying personalities which slums produce. “With no real evidence, I would nonecommands by police to drop the gun he was brandishing. It should also be noted theless suggest that a great deal of the that Scott was breaking the law having crime, the fire setting, the rampant school the gun because legally he could not pur- violence, and other such phenomenon in chase and carry a firearm with his crimi- the black community have become quasi-

Mychal

Massie

politicized. Hatred — revenge — against whites is now an acceptable excuse for doing what might have been done anyway. This is bad news for any society, especially when it takes the form which the Black Panthers seem to have adopted. “This social alienation among the black lower classes is matched and probably enhanced, by a virulent form of anti-white feelings among portions of the large and prospering black middle class. It would be difficult to overestimate the degree to which young well educated blacks detest white America.” (Memorandum For The President; 1/16/1970; https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/releases/jul10/53.pdf)

ica refuses to grasp. The overwhelming majority of blacks hate whites with a hatred that they themselves do not fully understand, to the extent that they understand it at all. Scott’s shooting isn’t the reason for the rioting in Charlotte-Mecklenburg; rioting is the viscous substance that lubricates the engine of inculcated turmoil and acrimony. Blacks share the mentality of another group who are driven by uncontrolled hatred of a united American community. Muslims twist the minds of the malleable leaving the acts of terror and mayhem to their toss-away Jihadis. So too, the black illuminati funded by insanely wealthy white cultural-Marxists are given what MOYNIHAN COULD have written amounts to a bag lunch and cigarette his letter this morning and it would be just money to riot, destroy, loot and plunder as accurate. Herein lies the fact(s) Amer- under the guise of rebelling against an oppressive “white police state.” It is the fool who believes the riots and hate-filled vitriol are based upon a social injustice. The two are not remotely tangential. These conspired waves of savagery are the sharp end of the spear but those holding the spear are they who benefit monetarily and politically. The faces of those associated with domestic terrorist groups like Black Lives Matter, et al, are nothing more than pawns in a global game of social unrest that is designed and intended to reap riches and political fortunes for the George Soros’ of America and the government caricatures who operate from the shadows. BLACKS AND those who feign concern for justice as long as same is defined as demonization of whites and vilification of all authority are entitled to their pernicious heterodoxies, but they are not entitled to make up the facts. The facts are that blacks are usable because they are blinded by unconscious and reflexive contempt for whites that lends itself perfectly to those who benefit from social unrest and immiseration. September 25, 2016

This Week’s Conservative Focus

Charlotte Riots

Is Charlotte our future? We’ve seen it before

elebrating the racial diversity of the Charlotte protesters last week, William Barber II, chairman of the North Carolina NAACP, proudly proclaimed, “This is what democracy looks like.” Well, if Barber is right, so, too, was John Adams, who warned us that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Consider what the protesters, who, exults Barber, “show us a way forward to peace and justice,” accomplished. IN THE FIRST two nights of rioting, the mob injured a dozen cops, beat white people, smashed and looted stores, blocked traffic, shut down interstate highways, got one person shot and killed, and forced the call-up of state troopers and National Guard to rescue an embattled Charlotte police force. This was mobocracy, a criminal take-

CHARLOTTE POLICE Chief Kerr over of Charlotte’s downtown by misfits hurling racist and obscene insults and Putney, also black, after viewing video epithets not only at the cops but also at from a dash-cam and a body-cam of the bystanders and reporters sent to cover officers involved, recommended against filing any charges. their antics. The chief concedes that he cannot, We have seen Charlotte before. It was a rerun of Ferguson, Baltimore and Man- from the video footage, see a gun in hattan, after mobs in those cities con- Scott’s hands at the time he was shot. But how is the legitimate investigation cluded that innocent black men had been deliberately killed by “racist white cops.” of the death of Keith Scott advanced by And if mass civil disYet, one week later, what do we know a mob? obedience is what of the precipitating “democracy looks event in Charlotte? like” in 2016, why Keith Scott, are we surprised 43-year-old Afrithat other nations can-American fa(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate look less and less ther of seven, was shot and killed not by a white cop, but by to American democracy as their model? Moreover, if these repeated reversions a black cop who shouted to him, along with others, almost 10 times — “Drop the of the enraged to street action become the new normal, what do they portend for the gun!” An ex-con whose convictions includ- country? Blanket cable news coverage of the ed assault with a deadly weapon, Scott was wearing an ankle holster and carry- Ferguson riots split us along racial lines. But what purpose did they serve? Even ing a handgun.

Pat

Buchanan

Riot first, ask questions later

he Charlotte rioters didn’t know whether the controversial police shooting of Keith Scott was justified or not, and didn’t care. They worked their mayhem — trashing businesses and injuring cops, with one protester killed in the disorder — before anything meaningful could be ascertained about the case except that the cops said Scott had a gun and his family said he didn’t. Charlotte is the latest episode in the evidence-free Black Lives Matter movement that periodically erupts in violence after officer-involved shootings. The movement is beholden to a narrative of systematic police racism to which every case is made to conform, regardless of the facts or logic. IT DOESN’T matter if the police officer is an African-American with an unblemished record and numerous character witnesses. This describes Brentley Vinson, the officer who fatally shot Keith Scott. It doesn’t matter if the victim disobeys the police in a tense situation and acts in a potentially threatening manner. Despite cops with guns drawn yelling orders at him (and his wife shouting, “Don’t you do it”), Scott exited his vehicle and approached officers without raising his hands. It doesn’t matter if the allegedly unarmed victim turns out to have been armed. Everything points to Scott having had a gun, even though the family

insists he had a book (the police didn’t find one at the scene). The police dashcam and body-camera video of the Scott shooting is inconclusive but broadly supportive of the police story. The quality is too grainy to show definitively that Scott held a gun in his hand, but what appears to be an ankle holster is visible on his leg. His movements and those of the officers around him are consistent with him brandishing a gun.

Rich

THE POLICE recovered an ankle holster and a pistol at the scene. For the police to have planted the gun would require a vast conspiracy involving multiple officers, the top brass of the department and whoever faked lab results showing Scott’s fingerprints and DNA on the weapon. It doesn’t necessarily mean he did anything wrong in this instance, but Scott also has a long rap sheet including weapons offenses, lending additional credence to the idea that he had a gun. These facts didn’t penetrate the Black Lives Matter narrative of the Scott shooting. Such facts never do. The narrative is immune to complication or ambiguity, let alone contradiction. Every police-involved shooting of a black man is taken, ipso facto, to confirm that the police are racists. When the evidence in any particu-

lar instance makes it obvious that the narrative is a lie or a gross oversimplification — e.g., in Ferguson or the Freddie Gray tragedy — the movement simply moves on to the next case, as reckless as before. It is increasingly hard to deny that the movement is anti-police. When any evidence supporting the police is disregarded, and rioters hurl insults and objects at officers whose only offense is trying to maintain public order at a protest, the agenda is clear. And there might be widespread cost to the agitation. The disturbances coincide with an increase in violent crime in 2015, according to new FBI data. It is too early to draw firm conclusions from the numbers. They may be statistical noise, but they also could indicate an uptick in crime resulting from chastened police forces around the country pulling back. After an event like Charlotte, a more responsible movement would keep the pressure on for more facts and wouldn’t indict police conduct without them. It would have a healthy skepticism about both the official version of events and the version of bereaved relatives. It would embrace peaceful protest as warranted, and avoid anything to bring discredit to itself or endanger wholly innocent police officers. BUT THAT movement would be something else entirely. In Charlotte, as in so many other places, it was riot first, and ask questions later. September 26, 2016

Eric Holder’s Justice Department concluded that officer Darren Wilson should not be charged in the shooting death of Michael Brown, who tried to grab his gun. A year ago, Baltimore divided the nation. Six Baltimore cops, three of them black, were charged in an alleged “rough ride” in a police van that killed 25-yearold Freddie Gray. This year, a black judge acquitted three of the cops in three trials, and all charges against the rest were dropped. No evidence was produced that the cops had intended to injure Gray. In New York, the five cops who piled on Eric Garner to subdue him never intended to injure him, said a grand jury. Well over 300 pounds, Garner suffered from obesity, diabetes, asthma and hypertension, and died, not of a police chokehold, but a heart attack. Yes, there have been incidents when cops made mistakes and cases where cops acted criminally. In Tulsa last week, after a white cop shot and killed an unarmed black man who appeared to offer no threat, she was charged with first-degree manslaughter. Is not this, rather than marching mobs, the way to handle such incidents? Inevitably, given the violent crime in our cities — 540 murders this year in Chicago and 3,000 shootings — white and black cops are going to be confronting white and black suspects. Inevitably, some of these collisions are going to result in police shootings and black deaths. While most of those police decisions to shoot are going to be seen in retrospect as justified, some will not be unjustified, and some will be malicious. The latter will be rare, but they are going to happen. But in a nation of 320 million, if every collision between white cops and black men resulting in the death of a suspect is to be seen as legitimate grounds for mob action like Charlotte, we will never know racial peace. Like moths to a flame, TV cameras are attracted to conflict, especially racial conflict. Networks and TV stations reward with airtime the most incendiary of racial charges. Thus, the news going out to homes and bars will continue to polarize us along racial lines. And when the rage of one side and the disgust of the other dissipate, some new incident, between white cops and black men, will occur, and will be recorded, and rushed onto the air. THE STREET action in Ferguson, Baltimore and Charlotte may be what “democracy looks like” to Barber’s NAACP. But to most Americans, it looks like a formula for endless racial conflict — and a touch of fascism in the night. September 27, 2016

Conservative Chronicle

DUE PROCESS: September 22, 2106

Due process is vital to our freedom “No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ...” — Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution The clash in American history between liberty and safety is as old as the republic itself. As far back as 1798, notwithstanding the lofty goals and individualistic values of the Declaration of Independence and the (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate Constitution, the same generation — in some cases the same human beings — that wrote in the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech” enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which punished speech critical of the government.

Andrew

Napolitano

SIMILARLY, THE Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process has been ignored by those in government charged with enforcing it when they deal with a criminal defendant whom they perceive the public hates or fears. So it should come as no surprise that no sooner had the suspect in the recent New Jersey and New York City bombings been arrested than public calls came to strip him of his rights, send him to Gitmo and extract information from him. This is more Vladimir Putin than James Madison. I have often argued that it is in times of fear — whether generated by outside forces or by the government itself —

when we need to be most vigilant about protecting our liberties. I make this argument because when people are afraid, it is human nature for them to accept curtailment of their liberties — whether it be speech or travel or privacy or due process — if they become convinced that the curtailment will keep them safe. But these liberties are natural rights, integral to all rational people and not subject to the government’s whim. I can sacrifice my liberties, and you can sacrifice yours, but I cannot sacrifice yours; neither can a majority in Congress sacrifice yours or mine. The idea that sacrificing liberty actually enhances safety enjoys widespread acceptance but is erroneous. The Fort Hood massacre, the Boston Marathon killings, the slaughters in San Bernardino and Orlando, and now the bombings in New Jersey and New York all demonstrate that the loss of liberty does not bring about more safety. The loss of liberty gives folks the false impression that the government is doing something — anything — to keep us safe. That impression is a false one because in fact it is making us less safe, since a government intent on monitoring our every move and communication loses sight of the moves and communications of the bad guys. As well, liberty lost is rarely returned. The Patriot Act, which permits federal agents to bypass the courts and

issue their own search warrants, has had three sunsets since 2001, only to be reenacted just prior to the onset of each — and re-enacted in a more oppressive version, giving the government more power to interfere with liberty, and for a longer period of time each time. WE KNOW from the Edward Snowden revelations and the National Security Agency’s own admissions that the NSA has the digital versions — in real time — of all telephone calls, text messages and emails made, sent or received in the U.S. So if the right person is under arrest for the bombings last weekend, why didn’t the feds catch this radicalized U.S. citizen and longtime New Jersey resident before he set off his homemade bombs? Because the government suffers from, among other ailments, information overload. It is spread too thin. It is more concerned with gathering everything it can about everyone — “collect it all,” one NSA email instructed agents — than it is with focusing on potential evildoers as the Fourth Amendment requires.

Why do we have constitutional guarantees of liberty? The Constitution both establishes the federal government and confines it. It presents intentional obstacles in the path of the government. Without those obstacles, we might be safe from domestic harm, but who would keep us safe from the government? Who would want to live here if we had no meaningful, enforceable guarantees of personal liberties? When our liberties are subject to the needs of the police, we will end up in a police state. What does a police state look like? It looks like the Holocaust and communism. Everyone who works in government has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. Hence, it is distressing to hear lawmakers calling for the abolition of due process for certain hateful and hurtful defendants. Due process — fairness from the government, the right to silence, the right to counsel and the right to a jury trial with the full panoply of constitutional requirements and protections — is vital to our personal liberties and to our free society as we have known it. If anyone who appears to have been motivated to attack Americans or American values based on some alleged or even proven foreign motivation could be denied the rights guaranteed to him under the Constitution by a government determination before trial, then no one’s rights are safe. The whole purpose of the guarantee of due process is to insulate our liberties from subjective government interference by requiring it in all instances when the government wants life, liberty or property — hence the clear language of the Fifth Amendment. The star chamber suggested by those who misunderstand the concept of guaranteed rights is reminiscent of what King George III did to the colonists, which was expressly condemned in the Declaration of Independence and which sparked the American Revolution. SUPREME COURT Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote that the history of American freedom is, in no small measure, following fair procedures — which means enforcing the guarantee of due process. Without due process for those we hate and fear — even those whose guilt is obvious — we will all lose our freedoms.

October 5, 2016 DEAR MARK: September 23, 2106

Police, narrative battles, Russian election interference

DEAR MARK: In the wake of more police shootings and the riots in Charlotte, liberals are calling for the federalization of all police departments. I’ve known numerous police officers in my life and they have all been professional, courteous and sincere in protecting the public. They have one of the most dangerous jobs imaginable. — Back the Blue Dear Blue: Liberals love to compare Donald Trump to Hitler, yet the Gestapo is the first federalized police force that comes to mind. The overwhelming majority of police departments are just fine; however, I won’t deny there’s room for improvement.Unfortunately libs love to overhaul. Remember that 85 percent of Americans were satisfied with their health insurance and boom, liberals gave us Obamacare. Can’t wait to see what they would do to the police. DEAR MARK: Did I hear presidential spokesperson Josh Earnest right when he said the battle with ISIS is a battle of narratives? Did the administration notice that the bombs used in the recent New York City bombings were filled with explosives not pages from a dictionary? How idiotic do they think we are? — Deplorable Bill in Jacksonville Dear Bill: The Obama Administration just doesn’t care whose sensibilities it offends anymore. They give us Obamacare and tell us it’s great. They give us the stimulus package and tell us the economy is great.They give us the Iran nuclear deal and tell us the same thing. Ditto for vet-

ting refugees. So why not tell the American people that ISIL is the J.V. team? Here’s what Josh said on CNN. “What I am telling you that we are, when it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight, a narrative fight with them, a narrative battle, and what ISIL wants to do is they want to project that they are an organization that is representing Islam in a fight and a war against the West and a war against t h e United States.”

Mark

Nobody’s denying that ISIL wants to be the leader of the Muslim religion but ISIS doesn’t want to simply exchange “narratives.” As we have seen, ISIS is utilizing every violent method possible to convert the world to its form of radical Islam including beheadings, torture, slashings, mass shootings, bombings, conventional warfare, chemical warfare and the list goes on. Maybe President Obama believes he can invite the leaders of ISIS to Harvard for a debate and defeat them on stage. DEAR MARK: With all the panic over possible Russian tampering with our balloting machines, I’m wondering whether anyone has considered going “old school?” I don’t mean a return to hanging chads, but to simply disconnect the machines from the internet and let them tabulate votes at each site independently. At the end of the day the tallies could be verified physically with a copy kept in the case

of a recount. This may be too logical to pass Democratic muster but isn’t it worth a try? — No School Like an Old School Dear Old School: I’m going to sound like an old man yelling hey you kids get off of my lawn but not all technology is good for society or moves us forward necessarily. The majority of today’s generation believes that everything should be paperless and performed by the swipe of a finger. However as Hillary has discovered, modern technology does create some vulnerabilities and I don’t believe that touch screen ballot boxes are immune to ne’er-do-wells. Fortunately each state is allowed to conduct their respective elections in pretty much any manner they see fit. Although corruption is always possible, at least there’s not one national system connecting all 50 states that can be hacked into. With that being said, Team Hillary and the Obama administration have been actively spreading the rumor about Russian interference in our presidential election because they believe Putin would like to see Trump as the next president. If Hillary wins would they still whine about Russian interference in our elections? Due to the recent hackings, the administration has even suggested that the Department of Homeland Security should oversee elections in the name of protecting the integrity of the outcomes from foreign entities. Ahem, what a wonderful idea, because nobody in our own federal government would ever want to meddle with the outcome of elections. 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, Suzanne Fields, 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) Wallace and Grommit helped boost sales of English Wensleydale cheese. 2) Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, was Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2015. 3) William Booth founded the Salvation Army in London in 1865. 4) Mead wine is made with fermented honey. 5) “The Frogs” was a comedy written by Aristophanes in 405 B.C. 6) The 1910 Fruitgum Company sang “Simon Says.”

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Conservative Chronicle

ELECTORATE: September 22, 2106

To ‘Never Trumpers:’ Reagan isn’t rising from the dead A “never Trump” friend I’ve known since law school writes: “My former partner is old enough to have voted for Barry Goldwater. And like me, he is pro-choice, pro-gay rights and libertarian, so there are some Neanderthal Republicans out there who are just too distasteful to vote for. So, like me, he often votes Libertarian. He does not see much about Donald Trump that resembles a traditional Republican.” For the millionth time, Trump is not a fiscal conservative. He is a populist. And his near-embrace by many evangelicals notwithstanding, New Yorker Trump with “New York values” is likely prochoice and pro-gay marriage. The man doesn’t even go to church. And speaking of “traditional Republicans:” OP voters backed Mitt “Romneycare” Romney and John “McCain-Feingold” McCain, but they draw the line at insufficiently conservative Trump?

without hatred. What, because of the at- his key policies. As Fred I. Greenstein, tempted assassination Americans under- a professor of politics at Princeton, puts went an ideological metamorphosis? Of it: ‘He is more successful than any recent course not. In fact, when he was going President in establishing space between through another rough patch, he report- himself and his policies.’” This brings us to 2016. And it’s even edly joked with his wife, Nancy, that left-wing now. Reagan maybe he should go out and get himself m o r e pushed the income shot again. tax top marginal rate Consider this down to 28 percent. passage from the His successor New York Times in raised the rate, as 1986, the middle (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate did Clinton. Yes, of Reagan’s secGWB rolled them ond term and two years after a 49-states-to-1 re-election back to about 35 percent, but they’re blowout over Democrat Walter Mondale: back up. In eight years, Reagan did not raise the “FOR EXAMPLE, (Reagan’s) per- minimum wage. Few of this year’s GOP sonal popularity ratings, especially high rivals, save Rand Paul, made a forceful for a second-term President, are not argument against it. And Rick Santorum matched by public support for some of and Ben Carson wanted to raise it!

HERE’S THE problem. We live in a center-left country. Not center-right — center-left. We talk the talk of low taxes and ending entitlements and terminating this or that social program — until a fiscal conservative true believer proposes legislation to do just that. Goldwater, in 1964, lost in a landslide. The main reason President Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980, despite his many gifts and his conservative principles, was voter disdain for President Jimmy Carter — gas lines, the Iran rescue debacle, stagflation. Most conservatives who romanticize about Reagan don’t get this point! Yes, we “need” another Reagan. But to bring that about, given the ever-increasing leftward tilt of the country, we need another Jimmy Carter. Americans never embraced Reagan’s stated conservative agenda — advocating pro-life policies; standing down the Soviet Union by, among other things, funding “Star Wars;” dramatically lowering taxes; and encouraging true free trade (despite his protection of the auto industry with stupid Japanese car “voluntary” import quotas, and protecting Harley-Davidson, among other measures). David Stockman, Reagan’s young, fiscally conservative then-House member — a Paul Ryan-type numbers guy — headed his Office of Management and Budget. He wanted to take a machete to the size of government. But he failed to roll back much of anything. After leaving in frustration, Stockman wrote The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. He laments that with the combination of special interests and Reagan’s refusal to bat them down, the size of domestic government grew even under the “Great Communicator.” But Reagan was liked personally, and when he was shot, his popularity soared. Americans were proud and impressed at the way he handled it with humor and

It’s time for Donald Trump

Larry

Elder

President George W. Bush tried to partially privatize Social Security — and his party abandoned him on the issue. We now have “universal health care,” which people are forced to join, and a self-described socialist might have won the Democratic nomination had he not stupidly taken Hillary Clinton’s email issue off the table. FINALLY, LOOK at still popular and respected ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, a supposed Republican. He is pro-gun control; pro-choice; pro-affirmative action. He criticized the House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract With America” as a “little too harsh;” twice voted for Obama; and thinks the GOP has a “dark vein of intolerance” — code for racist. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

DONALD TRUMP: September 27, 2106

ow that all of my inside-thebeltway, elitist, morally superior friends and colleagues have weighed in with their self-righteous denunciations of Donald Trump, it’s my turn. After initially opposing his candidacy for president, I have come around to another point of view. The election of Hillary Clinton will perpetuate and probably worsen everything many people hate about our bloated and dysfunctional government, collectively and derisively known as “Washington.” The election of Donald Trump will offer an opportunity — perhaps the last for decades — to “fire” or at least isolate the elites, returning the country to its constitutional boundaries.

gender public accommodations bill, taking effect Oct. 1. The law allows transgender individuals to use public bathrooms that match their gender identities. It also protects them, writes the Boston Globe, “from discrimination in public spaces such as museums, restaurants, malls, and libraries.” And even churches, which may hold different views on the transgender issue, because they routinely hold events such as Bingo night, spaghetti dinners, book drives and charity car washes, all of which are open to the general public. The church hall may

ALL ANALOGIES break down at some point, but let’s engage in a theological stretch. When Jesus overturned the money changer’s tables in the Temple, he said that instead of a house of prayer, the elites of his day had turned the Temple into “a den of thieves.” That increasingly applies to Washington. If Hillary Clinton wins in November, government will grow bigger and more expensive with all of her “investment” ideas, many of which have been tried before and failed. Remember the “stimulus,” which was targeted at infrastructure? Remember “shovelready jobs,” which were neither? Under President Hillary Clinton, what’s to stop secular progressives from exacting revenge on churches and pastors who preach a different gospel than the one they favor? It has already started in Massachusetts with the trans-

now be considered public space. Seventeen U.S. states have similar laws. If Hillary gets to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, will we be forced to accept more like this?

Cal

DONALD TRUMP is addressing the legitimate concerns of a large number of Americans who increasingly feel ignored by their government. These concerns include anemic economic growth. A growing economy produces private-sector jobs that create capital and wealth. These forgotten Americans are against open borders, which the president seemed to champion in his final speech to the United Nations General Assembly. Billionaire George Soros has pledged “to invest up to $500 million in programs and companies benefiting migrants and refugees fleeing life-threatening situations.”

Many are tired of fighting wars we don’t win and fighting terrorism with no clear strategy, all the while admitting more “refugees” from countries where terrorism is a way of death. They are weary of the denigration of law enforcement. Hardworking people are tired of being told they are not paying enough in taxes to a government that only wastes it. The ignored are tired of being branded racists. Christians are tired of being called homophobes and Islamophobes and told their beliefs are inferior to those who want to destroy the country and undermine values that were once widely held. If the secular progressive agenda is considered progress, as they claim, what would regress look like? Choosing a president is always a roll of the dice (to use a Trump casino metaphor). We know what we will get with Hillary Clinton, including corruption at the highest level. Those foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation will undoubtedly expect something in return. With Trump we don’t know for sure what we’ll get, beyond promises he has made and some contradictory positions he has taken. We can only hope that good people will serve and surround him, including running mate Mike Pence and the policy wonk Newt Gingrich. ONLY ONE candidate for president is capable of overturning the “money changers” in Washington. The political, governmental and media elites have had their chance to turn things around and they have failed. Now it’s time for Trump. I just hope I don’t have to eat my words.

October 5, 2016 CHARLESTON’S PORT: September 21, 2106

Deepen Charleston’s port, and the big ships will come

echnology has put powerful McLean’s boxes facilitate, can afford computers in billions of pock- such phones. Protruding from one of the approxiets, but an invention much more mundane than the smartphone — mately 10,000 containers here are 13the shipping container: a rectangular foot- tall tires ($80,000 apiece) heading offroad mining vehicles in steel box — also has changed the world. for tralia, Brazil and Because of it, two of today’s preoccu- A u s elsewhere. The tires pations — infraare made in Lexingstructure and gloton, South Carolina. balization — are About two-hundred connected by a miles inland, in the (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group chain of events Greenville-Sparthat began more than 60 years ago and today runs through tanburg area, there is a building boom igCongress and to the wharves of Charles- nited by the Charleston port, and now by the widening of the Panama Canal. ton’s booming port. Since June, the canal’s new lane has IN 1934, Malcolm McLean, a North the ability to handle enormous ships Carolina high school graduate struggling that carry 14,000 TEUs (twenty-foot in the Depression, spent $120 earned equivalent units) rather than the 5,000 pumping gas to buy a used truck. In 1955, TEUs on ships using the canal before it running what would become the nation’s was widened. The big ships bring Asian fifth largest trucking company, McLean goods to America’s East Coast, and take had an idea: The process of loading ships American goods abroad. More than six — swarms of stevedores stowing (and million square feet of warehouse space often pilfering) cargo packed into ships’ is being built to enlarge the Greenvilleholds in different sizes of wooden crates Spartanburg area’s role as a distribution — was so slow that ships often spent center for imports, and for exports from more time in ports than at sea. Cargo throughout America’s Southeast. Upstate South Carolina suffered brought to docks on trucks or rail cars and sealed in standardized containers when, beginning in the 1970s, Asian imcould be loaded 20 times faster per ton, ports devastated the textile industry. But in that decade, Charleston’s port was one and for one-20th the cost. McLean was no Steve Jobs. He was, reason Michelin (France) began manuhowever, one reason your smartphone facturing tires there. Since then, four is so affordable, and one reason billions other tire companies have come — Giti of people around the world, having been (Singapore), Continental (Germany), swept into the global trade system that Bridgestone (Japan) and Trelleborg

George

Will

Wheel Systems (Sweden). South Carolina manufactures 89,000 tires a day, and exports more tires than any other state. In the 1990s, BMW built an automobile assembly plant and this March exported its two millionth X-model vehicle through the Port of Charleston. Without the port, Mercedes and Volvo would not be building plants in South Carolina. OPERATORS OF the cranes that load the containers onto the ships often earn, with overtime, six-figure salaries. Every day, 3,500 trucks — 70 percent

owner-operated — deliver and depart with containers. Do today’s anti-trade politicians wish that South Carolina was still making towels and T-shirts for Americans rather than cars and tires (and Boeing aircraft, manufactured by more than 7,500 South Carolinians) for Americans and the world? The University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business estimates that more than 187,000 jobs — one of every 11 South Carolina jobs — and $53 billion in economic output are directly or indirectly related to Charleston’s port. It, however, needs further dredging in order to handle more of the biggest ships, which is where Congress enters the picture: Unless it authorizes the project and appropriates the federal portion of the $509 million cost to augment South Carolina’s already committed $300 million, the project will be delayed a year. The deepening project is only 14 percent of the $2.2 billion South Carolina is investing in its port facilities and related access. The biggest ships pay more than $1 million to transit the canal; if they miss their transit time, their fee is doubled. Until the port is deepened, too few can be handled here simultaneously, and they can only enter and leave the port at high tide. THERE IS no controversy in Congress about this project. But unless Congress acts on it before the end of the year, the deepening will not be in the president’s 2018 budget and will be delayed for a year, with radiating costs — inefficiencies and lost opportunities. This a mundane matter of Congress managing its legislative traffic, moving consensus measures through deliberation to action. It will illustrate whether or not Congress can still efficiently provide public works to enhance private-sector efficiency.

Conservative Chronicle

NATIONAL DEBT: September 28, 2106

Forty-four percent hike in taxes covers Obama-era debt

resident Barack Obama has a tax bill on the American people over presided over a federal gov- those 91 months that was approximateernment that has already taxed ly 44 percent higher than the tax bill it more than $20 trillion away from the did impose. What the government did instead American people. But to cover the federal spending he has presided over was tax away $20,197,437,000,000 without increasing the federal debt, he and then borrow $8,878,290,996,028 would have needed to increase federal — placing an essentially permanent burden on future American tax revenues by about 44 percent. taxpayers who must Since he was cover the cost of inaugurated in maintaining that January 2009, $8,878,290,996,028 Obama has comin new debt. pleted 91 full (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate Obama apolomonths in office, gists will argue running from February 2009 through August 2016. As that the debt increased so dramatically this writer has reported at CNSNews. during the Obama years because he com, the monthly Treasury statements took office while the Great Recession show that during those 91 months, the was still in progress (it started in Defederal government collected approxi- cember 2007 and ended in June 2009), mately $20,197,437,000,000 in total that the massive “stimulus” law he signed in 2009 was needed to get the revenues. economy going, and that annual defiBUT THE Treasury’s “Debt to the cits have since declined. So are we now going to balance the Penny” database shows that during those same 91 months, the total federal debt budget and start paying down the debt increased by $8,878,290,996,028.69. — or at least stop it from growing even $20,197,437,000,000 in total taxes was more? Not under current law, accordnot nearly enough to cover the spending to the Congressional Budget Ofing the federal government did in the fice. In an August update to its budget and economic outlook, the CBO estifirst 91 months of the Obama era. To avoid any increase in the federal mated that if “current laws generally debt over those 91 months, the federal remained unchanged,” the federal govgovernment would have needed to haul ernment would tax away $41.658 trilin approximately $29,075,727,996,029 lion over the 10 fiscal years from 2017 in total taxes. In other words, the gov- through 2026 while spending $50.229 ernment would have needed to impose trillion.

Terry

Jeffrey

THAT WOULD result in a cumulative 10-year deficit of $8.571 trillion. In the last three years of the coming decade, the CBO estimated, the annual deficits would be $1 trillion, $1.128 trillion and $1.243 trillion. In 2017, the CBO estimated, the federal government will tax away 17.9 percent of gross domestic product and spend 21 percent. By 2026, it will tax away 18.5 percent of GDP and spend 23.1 percent. Federal taxes will increase as a share of the economy, but federal spending will increase even more.

To eliminate the $8.571 trillion deficit that the CBO estimates the federal government will incur over the next decade while spending $50.229 trillion, the federal government would need to increase taxes by almost 21 percent above the $41.658 trillion CBO now estimates it will collect. In 2026 alone — when CBO estimates the federal government will take in $4.993 trillion in taxes, spend $6.235 trillion, and run a $1.243 trillion deficit — the government would need to increase taxes by almost 25 percent to balance the budget. Since 2011, following the 2010 elections, Obama has been working with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Since 2015, following the 2014 elections, he has been working with a Republicancontrolled Senate. The first spending deal the Republican-controlled House made with Obama took effect on March 4, 2011. From then through the end of this August, the federal debt climbed from $14,182,627,184,881 to $19,510,296,242,765 — a bipartisan increase of $5,327,669,057,884.63. Was this because the government taxed too little? No. In fiscal 2015, the federal government collected a record $3,248,723,000,000 in taxes — more in inflation-adjusted dollars than any previous year. But then the federal government spent $3,687,622,000,000. This fiscal year ends Friday. The current law funding the federal government expires that day. AND THAT means Obama and the Republican Congress will be making another deal — to spend your money and borrow from your children.

October 5, 2016 BILINGUAL EDUCATION: September 25, 2106

Proposition 58: The bilingual lobby is back

some of his siblings fared better in bi- administrators were convinced they lingual classes, he said. Prop. 227 al- had to teach students in their native lowed parents to opt their children out language first. As one activist in the of immersion classes if they could find Latino community told me in 1997, the problem with bilingual education bilingual classes. Meanwhile, it’s important to re- is that it is “misnamed. It should have member the reason voters approved been named Spanish.” Prop. 227. Before 1998, countless EngENGLISH IMMERSION placed lish learners were parked in a multiyear English students bilingual system that failed to teach limitedin classes where them English they could aband, hence, failed sorb a new lanthem in other guage quickly. subjects as well. Gone was the noThere were hor(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate tion that it would ror stories about take five, even 10, English-speaking students wasting away in bilingual years to move English learners into regcourses because of their Spanish sur- ular classes. Within five years of Prop. names, and of students who spent years 227’s passage, the number of limitedin public schools without learning the English students who could speak Engbasics. Parents who tried to steer their lish proficiently tripled. Math scores LARA HIMSELF was in English children into English-immersion class- for English immersion students rose. immersion and “happened to excel,” but es often got nowhere because school The measure brought about the rare

aving to ask parents to sign a consent form should not be considered a burden — and yet activists have put Proposition 58 on the November ballot so that they can relieve themselves of that pedestrian challenge. In 1998, 61 percent of Californians passed Proposition 227, which replaced bilingual education with English immersion classes. Prop. 227 allows parents to opt their children out of immersion classes, if they sign a form. “We have to get waivers from every family every spring,” San Francisco school board member Emily Murase told the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board. She talked as if asking parents to sign a consent form is daunting. The waivers are “barriers” which produce a “chilling effect,” said Democratic state Sen. Ricardo Lara. Prop. 58 would remove this mandate.

educational reform that demonstrably improved student learning. All of this happened because of Ron Unz, a rich tech geek who had challenged then-Gov. Pete Wilson in the 1994 GOP primary and lost. Later, appalled at the second-class education to which immigrant children were consigned, Unz conceived the idea of a ballot measure to make English-immersion — not bilingual — education the standard approach. For his trouble, critics called Unz every name in the book: anti-immigrant, racist, nativist — you get the picture. But Unz soldiered on. At the end of the day, Unz did more for immigrant students than the activists who claimed to have their best interests at heart. Now the bilingual lobby is back. Unz believes Prop. 227 is a victim of its amazing success. “Things have worked out so well over the last 18 years,” Unz told the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board, that he believes people have forgotten how dysfunctional the bilingual system was. Voters may think that a vote for Prop. 58 is a vote to broaden choices, but the choice is there, if only parents sign a waiver. And the signedwaiver provision was essential because transgender XY people to box women bilingual teachers had seen it as their in the WIBA? Then there are the Olym- duty to steer students into bilingual pics. The men’s fastest 100-meter speed education, whether their families liked is 9.58 seconds. The women’s record is it or not. I am no English-only advocate. In10.49. What about giving XY people a greater chance at winning the gold deed, I agree with Lara and other Prop. by permitting them to compete in the 58 supporters that bilingual students women’s event? They could qualify by have an edge when they embark on a just swearing that they feel womanish career. California public schools should encourage students to learn more than or have gender dysphoria. President Barack Obama’s defense one language: That’s the perfect-world secretary, Ashton Carter, wants to pro- scenario. The real-world scenario, bemote sex equality in the nation’s mili- fore 1998, however, was that bilingual tary. I don’t think he’s serious. The students often were monolingual; they minimum fitness test requirement for were not fluent in English. They were 17- to 21-year-old males is to be able to victims of a well-intended social exdo 35 pushups, 47 situps and a 2-mile periment that doomed them to lag berun in 16 minutes, 36 seconds or less. A hind native English speakers. weak male soldier might simply claim I BELIEVE the bilingual courses that he feels feminine. That would mean he could pass the minimum fit- Murase extolled have worked well for ness requirement by meeting the female San Francisco students. When a prominimums of 13 pushups, 47 situps and gram works, parents want to enroll a 19:42 2-mile run. To boot, he would their children in it, as we see in San get to reside in the women’s barracks Francisco. But I have doubts if highand enjoy all the privileges attendant performing bilingual programs can be replicated across the state. I rememthereto. ber how vociferously bilingual believFOR MOST of history, homosexu- ers defended an approach that shortals were unfairly persecuted. They changed English learners, because they pleaded, “Get out of my bedroom. cared more about immigrant children What consenting adults do is no one learning Spanish than English. If a else’s business.” I share that senti- signed waiver is a barrier, then people ment, and for the most part, homosexu- bright enough to develop successful als have won that objective. Had their bilingual courses should find ways to early campaign against persecution surmount that obstacle — unless target included a demand that males be per- parents don’t buy their honeyed words. mitted to use women’s bathrooms, the persecution they suffered would have continued.

Debra J.

Saunders

TRANSGENDERISM: September 28, 2106

Transgenderism can be helpful

orth Carolina’s legislative body passed the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, which mandates a statewide policy banning individuals from using public bathrooms that do not correspond to their biological sex, as opposed to their opinion of their sex. That means people must use bathrooms and other public facilities where occupants can be in various stages of undress according to whether their sex chromosomes are XX, in the case of females, or XY, in the case of males. The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community claims that the use of biology to determine sex is oppressive and limits alternatives. I agree. I all but argued this in a column earlier this year titled “You Are What You Say You Are” (http://tinyurl.com/grgtbrd). Let’s look at some possible benefits of freeing oneself from the oppression of biological determinism.

SAY THAT I am sentenced to a fiveyear prison term for bank fraud. Though confinement can never be pleasant, I’d find it far more tolerable if I could convince the judge that though biologically I have XY chromosomes, in my opinion I’m really a woman and thus my confinement should be in a female prison with a female cellmate. For the court to fail to take my sexual opinion into consideration would violate our Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, I could say. The Atlantic Coast Conference, the entire NCAA and the NBA have threat-

ened to remove important games and championships from North Carolina because of its law denying bathroom rights to males who feel as if they are females and females who feel as if they’re males. I am wondering just how consistent they are. Only a few college basketball players have the skills to make it onto a professional team, but most of these players have skills that exceed most players’ skills in the Women’s National Basketball Association. What if a college basketball

Walter

star were to claim to be transgender and go out for the WNBA? Would the selfrighteous NBA leaders come out and support him if he were to be refused? Aside from this gender question is the gross pay discrimination between the NBA and the WNBA. NBA players such as LeBron James (nearly $23 million) and Carmelo Anthony (also close to $23 million) individually earn twice as much money annually than every single player in the WNBA combined. The WNBA minimum rookie salary is $37,950, and the top salary is $107,000. I bet that if the NBA and WNBA were to permit transgenderism, salaries in women’s basketball would rise dramatically. IT’S NOT JUST basketball that would yield benefits for those with XY chromosomes. What about allowing

Conservative Chronicle

2016 ELECTION: September 23, 2106

What are the checks and balances?

his election year makes a mockery of past complaints about the “lesser of two evils.” That cliche has been trotted out in every election of my lifetime. In every previous contest, though, the choice was not between evils. It was often between flawed candidates (think George W. Bush) and bad candidates (e.g., Al Gore or John Kerry).

THIS YEAR’S decision is different. Hillary Clinton would be a conventional bad candidate (in a substantive, not stylistic, sense) were it not for the revelations about the email server. Her deception, her greed, her progressive views are all terrible (if dismayingly familiar), but the indifference to national security she demonstrated in the use of a private server (on which she did, despite denials, transmit classified information) places her on a plane that no national candidate has occupied before. She should be disqualified for commander in chief. Donald Trump, too, should be debarred. Commentary Magazine’s John Podhoretz likened the gradual acceptance of Trump on the right to the human response to putrid odors. “After about the first 45 seconds, disgust abates as the brain accustoms itself.” I cannot think of a more striking example of defining deviancy down. In order to make their peace with Trump, some apologists argue that the “guardrails” of the American constitutional system are robust enough to withstand even the depredations of an unstable, mendacious would-be autocrat. I wouldn’t care to test that gamble under the best of conditions. If something is truly precious, you don’t want to risk its safety. You wouldn’t set fire to the White House secure in the knowledge that the sprinkler system is in working order. And these are hardly the best of conditions. The Founders included the Electoral College in the Constitution to guard against demagogues, or in Alexander Hamilton’s words, men with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” but lacking the requisite “ability and virtue.” The Electoral College, as originally envisioned, is a dead letter today. So much for that guardrail. What checks and balances remain on an out-of-control president? If Clinton is elected, assuming that it is not a landslide that sweeps in a Democratic House and Senate, the Congress will oppose her. She will not get her universal pre-K or tax increases or “free” college tuition or a “public option” in Obamacare or the Paycheck Fairness Act. She could still do damage through regulation. The abuse of executive discretion during the Obama

years shows just how much latitude Clinton’s (aggressively) or the way it presidents now enjoy to impose their covered Obama’s (pusillanimously)? will through the executive agencies. I’d guess the former, but who knows? The leeching of power out of Congress Also, the press is held in such low reand to the executive has been ongo- gard by the public that it may not even ing for decades, but Obama was par- qualify as a guardrail. What checks would there be on a ticularly flagrant in abusing power to impose policies — e.g., climate rules President Trump? Presumably, he’d a Congress of his and health law changes — traditionally h a v e (lately acquired) reserved for the party. If he were to legislative branch. attempt to impose Would the some of the leftcourts be able to of-center policies thwart Clinton? (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate he favors — uniTo a point. Even versal health care, the Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court ruled for example — would the Republican against Obama on a number of execu- Congress oppose him? What about on tive power cases. Then again, what if trade? Or raising the federal minimum the president flouts the courts as An- wage? Punishing American companies that move plants overseas? Changdrew Jackson did? ing the libel laws? Some of the same IS THE PRESS a check on abuse people who excoriated the Republiof power? Will it cover a Hillary Clin- can Congress for supposedly “giving ton presidency the way it covered Bill Obama everything he wanted” now

Mona

Charen

attempt to reassure Trump opponents that Republicans in Congress would stand up to a president (nominally) of their own party. Almost all Republicans have failed to counter Trump now, before he’s invested with the vast powers of the presidency. It’s fantasy to imagine that they will find their voices later. As for the press, they’d oppose Trump as hysterically as ever, but as to their influence, see above. Ditto the courts. In foreign policy, through law and custom, presidents enjoy tremendous latitude. Always have. SO THE institutional guardrails are quite rickety. In the end, the only true guardians of a liberal republic are the people themselves. They must prescribe minimal standards of decency. I will be voting for Evan McMullin, the only candidate (of five) who doesn’t pose a threat to our national welfare.

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: September 22, 2106

How Trump could win the debate

illary Clinton will almost certainly win Monday night’s epic presidential debate on points — and still could lose. It’s hard to see how Clinton, who has marinated in public policy for 30 years and is preparing for the debate like it is the invasion of Normandy, won’t best Donald Trump on substance. Her strength in this area perfectly matches Trump’s weakness. Trump has appeared to learn for the first time in public such basic information as that the Trans-Pacific Partnership doesn’t include China and that Russia has already invaded Ukraine. He sometimes reads his speeches as if they include revelations to him — “so true,” he’ll interject after coming across a striking fact or observation in the text. SO TRUMP won’t be particularly well-informed, and figures it won’t particularly matter — and may be right. Trump has a built-in advantage in that there is a lower standard for him — not because the media isn’t tough enough on him, as all the media mavens agree, but because he is the de facto challenger and candidate of change in a change election. Trump can win by clearing a bar of acceptability, whereas Clinton has to either clearly wound Trump or make a compellingly positive case for herself that has so far eluded her in both 2008 and 2016. To be sure, Trump will be on treacherous terrain. He can’t bully and mock

Clinton. Without a teleprompter, message discipline still tends to elude him. The one-on-one format for an hour and a half could make his thin knowledge painfully obvious. And any misstep or outburst that reinforces the idea that he lacks the qualities to be commander in chief would be devastating. But Trump just needs to seem plausible, and the very fact that he is on a presidential-debate stage, the most rarified forum in American politics, will benefit him. During the Republican debates, the intangibles worked in his favor, and they presumably will on Monday, too. Trump is a big personality with a dominant physical

Rich

presence. His critics often sneeringly say he is a reality-TV star, but you don’t become one without charisma and a performative ability that are major political assets. TRUMP WILL have to stumble badly — and probably sabotage himself — to live down to Hillary’s critique of him. She has made her campaign almost entirely about how he is a monstrous madman. Trump doesn’t need to mount a convincing, detailed defense of his tax or child care plan or anything else to invalidate Clinton’s

critique of him; he just needs to seem a reasonable person. That is why Trump shouldn’t be the aggressor. As long as he’s firm and calm, he is implicitly rebutting the case against him on temperament. Then he can look for a big moment or two that will be memorable and drive the postdebate conversation. These contests aren’t evaluated by college-debate judges. Trump won one of the Republican primary debates with his barbed quip in response to Vicente Fox’s vulgar declaration that Mexico wouldn’t pay for the wall, “The wall just got 10 feet higher.” This wasn’t an argument or a policy; it was a sentiment. If Trump has taught us anything, it is that simple, evocative statements can make up for a multitude of evasions and confused nonanswers. In the past, most presidential debates have had a slight or ephemeral effect on the race. Monday could be different because it is an event tailor-made for Trump to change one of the main factors holding him back. By roughly 60 percent to 30 percent, people think Clinton is prepared to be president; by roughly 60 percent to 30 percent, people think Trump is not. A credible performance could move that number for Trump, and appreciably increase his odds of winning the presidency. SUCH IS the dynamic of the race and the way most voters absorb information that Hillary Clinton could “win” on points, and still lose ground.

October 5, 2016 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: September 23, 2106

How Trump wins the first presidential debate

n one of my first trips to will be a president of whom they can New Hampshire in 1991, to be proud. He has to show the country a Trump challenge President George H. W. Bush, I ran into Sen. Eugene Mc- that contradicts the caricature created by those who dominate our politics, Carthy. He was returning to the scene of his culture and press. The Trump on stage at Hofstra Uni‘68 triumph, when he had inflicted the will have 90 minutes first crippling wound on Lyndon John- versity to show that the son. malicious cartoon “Pat, you don’t of Donald Trump have to win up is a libelous lie. here, you know,” He can do it, he assured me. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate for he did it at “All you have to the Mexico City do is beat the point press conference with President Pena spread.” “Beat the point spread” is a good de- Nieto where he surprised his allies and scription of what Donald Trump has to stunned his adversaries. Recall. Kennedy and Reagan, too, do in Monday night’s debate. came into their debates with a crucial WITH ONLY a year in national slice of the electorate undecided but politics, he does not have to show a ready to vote for them if each could remastery of foreign and domestic policy lieve the voters’ anxieties about his bedetails. Rather, he has to do what John ing within reach of the button to launch F. Kennedy did in 1960, and what Ron- a nuclear war. Kennedy won the first debate, not ald Reagan did in 1980. He has to meet and exceed expecta- because he offered more convincing artions, which are not terribly high. He guments or more details on the issues, has to convince a plurality of voters, but because he appeared more lucid, who seem prepared to vote for him, likable and charismatic, more mature that he’s not a terrible risk, and that he than folks had thought. And he seemed

Pat

Buchanan

to point to a brighter, more challenging future for which the country was prepared after Ike. After that first debate, Americans could see JFK sitting in the Oval Office. REAGAN WON his debate with Carter because his sunny disposition and demeanor and his “There you go again!” airy dismissal of Carter’s nitpicking contradicted the malevolent media-created caricatures of the Gipper as a dangerous primitive or an amiable dunce. Even George W. Bush, who, according to most judges, did not win a single debate against Al Gore or John Kerry, came off as a levelheaded fellow who was more relatable than the inventor of

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: September 21, 2106

How Trump can win the debate

s we point out in our book Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary” there is a fundamental flaw in Hillary Clinton’s campaign approach, and the debate coming up on Monday, Sept. 26, should make it evident. Clinton and the Democrats have based their campaign on demonizing Donald Trump, calling him dangerous, unpredictable, racist, Islamophobic, demagogic, sexist, lacking in temperament and judgment, bombastic, jingoistic and a litany of other names. His supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables.” It is a campaign conducted by a speechwriter with a well-thumbed thesaurus. Against Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George McGovern in 1972, such a strategy of name-calling could and did work. But now we have televised debates. (There were none in ‘64 or ‘72).

WE WILL MEET Trump and will see that he is none of the things Clinton says he is. Before he takes a single stand on a single issue, it will be evident that he is not the diabolic candidate Clinton paints. In some cases, the road is coming up to meet him. The problems he has focused on have become so serious that his formerly extreme rhetoric now makes

sense. How can we look at the mayhem caused by an Afghani immigrant without thinking about stopping more from coming in? In other cases, his rhetoric has toned down. He still wants to build a wall, just like Bill Clinton did in 1993. Bill’s stretched 300 miles along the California/Mexico border — and still stands. Trump’s would be longer. But he no longer calls Mexicans drug dealers and criminals, and he has abandoned the idea of a Gestapo-style roundup of illegal immigrants for deportation.

Dick

ALL TRUMP needs to do is to lay out positive proposals and avoid ratifying Clinton’s accusations. The Donald’s constructive programs on taxes, national security, immigration, the economy and child care form a basis for projecting a national image that will sweep aside Clinton’s campaign. For her part, Clinton has to look healthy and energetic. A modulated, laidback performance will destroy her claim that she is well enough to be president.

Tactically, we would suggest the following for Trump: — He should attack Bill Clinton’s record on bank regulation, making clear that his decision to deregulate banks as he left office opened the door to the ‘07 and ‘08 crash. — He should challenge Hillary Clinton to close down the Clinton Foundation so there can be no “pay for play” deals involving a president. — In his outreach to African-Americans, he has stressed school choice. He can outflank Clinton on education and make strong inroads into the ranks of black women. — He needs to show a balanced approach to the recent police shootings and make clear that he will be sure that police violence against unarmed minority boys will end. — He should hang Obamacare around Clinton’s neck. The issue has been almost absent from the campaign so far and it represents President Obama’s and Clinton’s biggest failure on the national stage. EVERYTHING IS tending Trump’s way as he enters the debate. A strong performance will catapult Donald Trump ahead of Hillary Clinton, perhaps to stay.

the internet or the windsurfer of Cape Cod. The winner of presidential debates is not the one who compiles the most debating points. It is the one whom the audience decides they like, and can be comfortable taking a chance on. Trump has the same imperative and same opportunity as JFK and Reagan. For the anticipated audience, of Super Bowl size, will be there to see him, not her. He is the challenger who fills up the sports arenas with the tens and scores of thousands, not Hillary Clinton. If she were debating John Kasich or Jeb Bush, neither the viewing audience nor the title-fight excitement of Monday night would be there. Specifically, what does Trump need to do? He needs to show that he can be presidential. He needs to speak with confidence, but not cockiness, and to deal with Clinton’s attacks directly, but with dignity and not disrespect. And humor always helps. Clinton has a more difficult assignment. America knows she knows the issues. But two-thirds of the country does not believe her to be honest or trustworthy. As her small crowds show, she sets no one on fire. Blacks, Hispanics and millenials who invested high hopes in Barack Obama seem to have no great hopes for her. She has no bold agenda, no New Deal or New Frontier. “Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?” wailed Hillary Clinton this week. The answer is simple. America has seen enough of her and has no great desire to see any more; and she cannot change an impression hardened over 25 years — in 90 minutes. But the country will accept her, if the only alternative is the Trump of the mainstream media’s portrayal. Hence, the strategy of the Democratic Party for the next seven weeks is obvious: Trash Trump, take him down, make him intolerable, and we win. No matter how she performs though, Donald Trump can win the debate, for he is the one over whom the question marks hang. But he is also the one who can dissipate and destroy them with a presidential performance. IN THAT SENSE, this debate and this election are Trump’s to win.

Conservative Chronicle

MEDIA BIAS: September 28, 2106

Moderator Lester Holt learns his Lauer lesson

Holt’s colleagues — and Clinton’s ashington Post reporter Callum Borchers should campaign — said very publicly that he win some kind of award must go after Trump as a clear and presfor the worst pre-debate spin. He tried ent danger to America. That’s exactly to defend NBC anchor and presidential what he did. debate host Lester Holt: “It turns out ON THE MORNING after this oneHolt is actually a registered Republican. Trump still might find things to com- sided assault, Holt’s colleagues in the plain about Monday night, but a case for liberal media projected an image of him low and reserved, partisan bias against him will be tough as meland therefore nonto make.” partisan. The New Launches Manhunt After Lester Holt Right after the York Times head- Vanishes From Debate.” debate, despite line was “Lester all evidence, the To stick to its “minimalist moderaHolt Opted for Re- tor” spin, the Times chose to ignore most Post’s Chris Cil(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate straint.” Reporter of the debate. Weeks before, Grynbaum lizza doubled Michael Gryn- wrote an anguished piece after the Lauer down, saying: “Want a testament to how well Holt baum began the column saying, “Call forum called “Matt Lauer Fields Storm did? I guarantee you no one is talking him the minimalist moderator.” He de- of Criticism Over Clinton-Trump Foscribed how Holt “opted to lie low” and rum.” He even quoted tweets that manabout him tomorrow. That’s a win.” “was silent for minutes at a time,” and gled the facts, such as one from political THAT IS precisely as the press then reported that the New Yorker had commentator Norman Ornstein, which would want this. But that’s not what published a liberal parody called “CNN said: “Lauer interrupted Clinton’s anAmerica saw. Holt’s performance was a partisan disgrace. Holt asked Donald SHORT STORY: September 26, 2106 Trump about his taxes, and then challenged him on his answer. He asked Trump about stop-and-frisk policies, and then challenged him, stating it was ruled unconstitutional, which it wasn’t, thus conjuring visions of the Candy orty-year-old John McKnight know how much tuition is.” John said, “I Crowley Ghost of Flubbing Debate was precise in his business do. This is nothing personal, it’s strictly Moderators Past. He asked Trump about and theology. He tithed 10 business: I want your very best offer.” the birther issue, and then challenged percent and kept a ledger book to make The next day the discount was $5,000. him on his answer. He asked him about sure he didn’t sin. He tipped 15 percent John, chuckling, signed the contract. Iraq, and then interrupted and chal- and always had $1 bills and quarters in By the time John was 55 he had $5 lenged him five different times. his pocket so he could leave the right million in the bank, along with his fourWhat about Hillary Clinton? There amount. He marked up the windows he bedroom house. He had married at 45 was not one single challenge to any- sold by 20 percent. His bank balance in- and had no children but faithfully taught thing she said, not one tough question creased by 25 percent each year. Sunday school for one quarter every 2½ about any policy or any controversy, be John also taught a course, Negotia- years and had become a deacon. Then it Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, her tions, in the University of Texas MBA his wife Jill walked out on him after nine medical records or her emails — unless program. Students over time forgot years, even though he had provided for you want to count when Holt politely much of what he said but almost always her well and been faithful. suggested: “(Trump) also raised the is- remembered one takeaway: Discern who sue of your emails. Do you want to re- is eager, maybe even desperate, to have spond to that?” your business. Then, ask the seller, “Is The Rasmussen Reports poll that this your very best offer?” If he offers came out just before the debate showed a small reduction, leave him twisting in (c) 2016, God’s World Publications that based on the historical record, 46 the wind for a day or two to see if he’ll percent of Americans believe most come back with something larger. moderators will tilt the debates in favor John was depressed. His pastor said, of Clinton. Only six percent think they WHEN JOHN decided to hire a “I have something to help you out of will try to help Trump. That’s an 8-to-1 small company, Martinez & Son, to paint your funk. Take charge of our deacons’ landslide. his four-bedroom house, he researched assistance fund for four hours each FriHolt confirmed the wisdom of the the cost of paint and the going rate for day afternoon. Homeless people come American people. the immigrants from Mexico who would and tell you their stories. If they sound It became obvious that Holt internal- do the work. He thought Edgar Martinez genuine, you give them a $20 bill.” ized all the howls of outrage from the might have a cash flow problem, so he liberal media against Matt Lauer for peered over his glasses and asked him, JOHN AGREED to serve and found being even-handed with the candidates “Is this your very best offer?” When Ed- he enjoyed being the judge of legitiat the commander-in-chief forum ear- gar said he could cut the price by $1,000, macy. One day the ragged man standing lier in the month. Editorials were writ- John said, “I bet you can do better than before him looked familiar. John asked, ten by anguished staff of both the New that. Come back to me in two days with “Do I know you?” The man replied, York Times and the Washington Post. He your very best offer.” “Yes, you do: name’s Martinez. I paintmight have even heard Jimmy Kimmel Edgar returned the next day with a ed your house 15 years ago.” rant at The Apprentice creator Mark Bur- $2,000 reduction. John said, “I gave you John, momentarily startled, said, nett while hosting the Emmy Awards. two days. Come back tomorrow with “You did good work. Why are you He said, “Thanks to Mark Burnett, we your very best offer.” Edgar said, “This here?” The answer: “Ran out of mondon’t have to watch reality shows any- is a good offer. I need to pay my men. ey. Started drinking. Hit my wife. Left more because we’re living in one.” My son’s at your university, and you town. But I heard my son started up the

Brent

Bozell

The very best offer

Marvin

Olasky

swers repeatedly to move on. Not once for Trump.” In fact, Lauer interrupted Trump 13 times and Clinton seven times. THE ONLY similarity in the stories is that Grynbaum failed to locate an actual conservative or Republican critique of either NBC journalist. That’s because the liberal media can’t help but slant everything in favor of the left. It’s no wonder most Americans no longer trust them.

business again. Once I get cleaned up I’ll go see Nick.” John gave him a $20 bill and almost pulled out his wallet to contribute $100 of his own, but then remembered he should stick with the rules. When he went home, he walked all the way around the exterior of his four-bedroom house and saw what he hadn’t noticed before: A drip down one wall had left boards bulging out. Paint was chipping in some places. The Texas sun had discolored others. John’s internet search yielded a cornucopia of house-painting businesses, but he fixated on a small one: Martinez. On Saturday Nick Martinez, the image of his dad, did a walk-around with John and answered questions about how the painting business was these days. The next day, after church and a sermon on Matthew 17, John scrutinized an email with a bid. Fair price, sure, but he suspected it could go lower. MONDAY MORNING Nick and John sat with a desk between them. Nick handed over a contract. John peered over his glasses and asked, “Is this ...” He couldn’t finish the question. He started again: “Is this ...”—his throat clutched again. Nick asked, “Is anything wrong?” John sighed, then signed, then smiled: “No. Is this something you can start on tomorrow?” Reprinted with permission of WORLD. To read more news and views from a Christian perspective, call 800951-6397 or visit WNG.org.

October 5, 2016 HILLARY CLINTON: September 28, 2106

Hillary Clinton’s failure at Foggy Bottom

But Benghazi wasn’t an isolated illary Clinton boasts that her experience traveling to 112 case. Clinton failed to secure diplomatic countries as secretary of state posts in Pakistan, Addis Ababa, Ethioqualifies her to be president. Don’t be- pia and other global hot spots. Internal State Department reports show the posts lieve it. At the end of her taxpayer-funded au- lacked emergency plans in case of attack. dition on the world stage, she came home Guards assigned to them had no trainempty-handed, with no meaningful gains ing in chemical or biological threats and, ingly, some hadn’t unfor the United States. Voters are too smart a m a z dergone background to be wowed when checks. she rattles off Clinton tried to names of Islamic weasel out of takterrorist splinter ing the blame for factions and third(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate Benghazi, testifyworld capitals. Evidence shows she left the State ing to Congress that she wasn’t personDepartment in shambles and our nation ally involved in embassy security. But weaker. If anything, her record at Foggy emails later revealed that was false. Investigators also point to Clinton’s Bottom should disqualify her to be presitotal neglect of cybersecurity. The Bush dent. administration — reeling from the attack HER FAILURES go beyond leaving on the World Trade Center — had made it four Americans to die in Benghazi, the ri- a top priority to protect information flow diculous Russian “reset” and the carnage among embassies, the CIA and FBI. But in Syria that she and President Obama Clinton dropped the ball, creating what idly watched unfold — and which gets the department’s inspector general called “undue risk in the management of informore horrific by the day. A string of investigative reports from mation.” In November 2013, the IG issued an the Obama administration show that she botched key management jobs as secre- alert to the State Department’s top extary of state, threatening American lives ecutives about the urgent “recurring weaknesses” in cyber security that had and our diplomatic secrets. Clinton’s State Department repeatedly been red flagged in six previous reports rebuffed requests for additional security between 2011 and 2013, almost all on for the vulnerable compound at Beng- Hillary Clinton’s watch. The “recurring hazi, Libya. The result? On Sept. 11, weaknesses” had still not been addressed, 2012, heavily armed terrorists were able including vulnerabilities to hackers. One of those previous reports — from to storm the compound and kill Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other July 2013 (shortly after Clinton’s departure) described how much of the cyberseAmericans.

Betsy

McCaughey

curity work was actually being done by contractors rather than department staff, contrary to government policy. The report noted that Edward Snowden, the thief of a huge trove of documents — was similarly a contracted systems administrator. John Bentel, in charge of State’s cyber security during Clinton’s tenure, is one of the five State Department staffers who demanded immunity before talking to FBI investigators about the Clinton’s private server scheme. HE APPARENTLY took his duties regarding Clinton’s secret server more seriously than his duties to safeguard national cybersecurity. According to an IG report, Bentel “instructed his subordinates not to discuss the secretary’s email.”

Rudy Giuliani told me on Saturday that Clinton’s use of a private email service for official business was like taking “all our top secret material and throwing it out on Fifth Avenue.” Outrageous, but still a lesser offense than Clinton’s neglect of the entire department’s digital security — exposing communications between thousands of agents and diplomats across the globe. Even after the WikiLeaks released 250,000 confidential State Department documents in 2010, Clinton didn’t plug the obvious holes in State’s cyber setup. Yet during Monday’s debate, Clinton had the nerve to claim that she takes threats to the nation’s cybersecurity very seriously. That’s a laugh. Clinton’s management of finances at State was also slipshod, according to inspector-general reports that point to a whopping $6 billion unaccounted for during her tenure. Clinton’s chaotic mismanagement created “conditions conducive to fraud,” the IG warned, and made it harder “to punish and deter criminal behavior.” She must have felt right at home. True to Clinton’s instinct to cover her tracks, she thwarted several investigations of sexual misconduct and prostitution at State. Investigators complained of “an appearance of undue influence and favoritism.” This presidential race is a contest between a builder and a blabberer. The builder, Donald Trump, manages 185 major business ventures around the globe. Until 2009, Clinton had never run anything. Running the State Department was her chance to prove she could do it. She failed miserably. SO WHAT are the odds Hillary Clinton would run the federal government with integrity, keep the nation safe and get taxpayers more for their money? Zero.

Conservative Chronicle

HILLARY CLINTON: September 28, 2106

Hillary, interrupted: The campaign cries sexism

Then there were the female writhatever happened to “I Am Woman, Hear Me ers for left-wing Vox who balked at Roar?” Whither “Girl Trump’s 51 interruptions involving Power?” When did Rosie the Riveter’s “petulant asides,” “loud, insistent fili“We Can Do It!” give way to Hillary busters,” and the “one-word, schoolthe Haranguer’s “We Can’t Handle boy-like ‘Not’.” Clinton supporters to Clinton: It?” Queen! It’s 2016, and the Democrats’ femi- Slaaaay, Trump to Clinnist heroine runton: “Not.” ning for comOh, no. The opmander in chief is pressive “Not!” whinnying about Queen slayed. being — wait for (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate The Vox gals it — interrupted. Quick! Prepare a complaint to the (is “gals” a trigger?) cited research United Nations Committee on the dating back to the moldy-oldy 1970s Elimination of Discrimination against about the ravaging effect of workWomen. Poor, fragile, defenseless place interruptus on wimmin. Playing Hillary Clinton is a victim of the inter- Clinton’s narrative amplifiers, they national human rights crime of serial commiserated. “For most women in the workplace, the phenomenon is exconversational obstruction. haustingly familiar.” Still feeling verbally battered TuesMAINSTREAM MEDIA outlets (also known as the Coalition of Lib- day morning, Clinton’s old crony fixer eral Narrative-Benders For Hillary) and bagman, campaign chair John Pohowled about the unconscionable in- desta, told reporters that Trump’s injustice after Monday’s first presiden- terruptions were “reminiscent of the way a lot of women feel about bullies tial debate. “Donald Trump Interrupted Hillary in their lives.” Female reporters AnClinton 51 Times at Debate,” moaned drea Mitchell and Jennifer Epstein duUS Weekly, which is owned by Clin- tifully tweeted Podesta’s dog whistle ton supporter and longtime Clinton do- to feminists. Spare me, you shameless sacks of nor Jann Wenner. “Donald Trump couldn’t stop in- spin. Un-stage-managed debates usually terrupting Hillary Clinton,” complained the Huffington Post, founded involve spontaneous and contentious by female Cambridge Union debating back and forth. Without the jibes and jeers and repartee and sighs and sidechamp Arianna Huffington.

Michelle

Malkin

eyes, you’re not debating. You’re side- ing campaign forums with daytime by-side monologuing with a Kabuki talk show diva Matt Lauer and primary moderator keeping time and warming opponent Bernie Sanders. a seat. Ironically, the Clinton campaign publicized a letter this week from the SERIOUSLY, WHAT kind of role candidate to a seven-year-old schoolmodel for girls is a female presiden- girl encouraging her to always “make tial candidate who claims to be “ready your voice heard.” She advised her to lead” — yet whose campaign cries young fan to not “be afraid to carve out sexism whenever she’s confronted a space of your own.” Sound advice. with anything less than full and com- But you can’t have it both ways, sisplete obeisance in the public square? ter. Either you’re a strong woman warRemember: Clinton similarly suf- rior capable of handling anything — or fered from acute interruptophobia dur- you’re a grievance-mongering grouser who can’t out-bellow the boys. I speak from experience. Growing up, I was a small, shy brown girl afraid to assert myself. I was petrified to talk in front of my classmates. I was too humble to claim credit for my own work. I was invisible because I made myself invisible. Then I grew up and refused to defer to anyone because if I didn’t speak up for myself, nobody would. I didn’t come from a privileged background. I didn’t marry into power. I didn’t ask anyone to give me a platform. I worked for it and made my own. Most importantly, I learned to stop waiting for my turn. Feminism is supposed to be about holding your own, not about being entitled to everyone else holding their tongues in your sainted presence. In 21st-century America, there is nothing holding girls and women back from amplifying their message. If male pushback and “petulant asides” bruise your egos, you put some ice on that, to borrow a phrase, hold your ground, and tell the interrupters to hush. YOU CONTROL your volume button. Don’t remonstrate. Roar.

October 5, 2016 SYRIA: September 28, 2106

The U.S.-Russia Syrian partnership unravels

n August 2011, six months after flict. Russia opposes ISIS. In concept, Syria’s Arab Spring revolt erupt- Russia and the U.S would become parted, U.S. President Barack Obama ners dedicated to ending Syria’s chaotic put American prestige on the line and civil war and defeating ISIS. The conceptual partnership, however, insisted Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad be a beast with two cede power. “For the sake of the Syr- would heads. Russia supports ian people,” Obama the Assad regime, the said, “the time has one that Obama said come for Presimust “step aside.” dent Assad to step The concept aside.” (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate also ignored six It is Septemdecades of Krember 2016. Assad remains in power. Other vicious actors lin policy. During the Cold War, Syrian have emerged in Syria’s cauldron. In dictator Hafez al-Assad’s regime was a client of the Soviet Union. The post-Cold Spring 2014, ISIS asserted itself. In September 2011, Syria’s civilian War dictatorship run by his son, Bashir, death toll was around 3,000. In Sep- remains a Russian client. When the tember 2016, death toll estimates (civil- Assad regime failed to defeat the Arab ian and military) range from 300,000 to Spring revolt, the Kremlin promised aid. 450,000. Whatever the number, Syria is There was an argument advanced at the a slaughterhouse, so ending the conflict time that Arab Spring’s rapid toppling of authoritarian governments demonstrated is a worthy goal. the vulnerability of all authoritarian reSOMETIME IN 2015, the Obama gimes. Russia’s authoritarian regime had Administration decided closer coopera- an interest in stopping that trend. The artion with Russia would help end the con- gument may have a kernel of truth, but

Austin

Bay

the Vladimir Putin-controlled Kremlin had a definite interest in demonstrating that post-Cold War Russian support was as solid the USSR’s. Operating in Syria also made Russia an active player in the Middle East. Syria’s heterogeneity, however, complicated (and still complicates) these Russian objectives. Syria is a fragile mosaic of religious and ethnic groups. The Assads’ Alawite ethno-religious group

DONALD TRUMP: September 28, 2106

Excuses for losing just don’t cut it

hen Mitt Romney lost in 2012, there was very little discussion of blame. Everyone assumed that Romney simply lost because he didn’t do a good enough job of convincing voters to punch the ballot for him. He didn’t debate Barack Obama properly; he didn’t stand up to Candy Crowley; he backed off of the Benghazi issue, or botched it completely; he gratuitously insulted 47 percent of Americans. ROMNEY LOST, Republicans generally believed, because Romney deserved to lose — even if he deserved to win morally. That’s not so for Donald Trump. Never has a presidential candidate had so many ready-made excuses for his mess of a campaign. Since the primaries, Trump’s defenders have justified his every gaffe by saying, “Well, he’s just a businessman!” His anti-conservative heresies have been excused with a wave of the hand and a comment of, “Well, conservatism has never accomplished anything, anyway!” His general ignorance with regard to basic issues has been shrugged away: “He’s learning!” His general unpopularity has been attributed not to his own narcissistic nastiness but to an unnamed group of conspirators out to get him. Sometimes, it’s the eeeeevil Never Trumpers hiding in their holes, waiting to strike him down at any moment. Sometimes,

it’s the Machiavellian “establishment” seeking to crush this supposed change agent. And sometimes, it’s a suspiciously defective earpiece forcing him to go soft on David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. Now, after his airplane vomit bag of a debate performance — a performance in which he spent the first 30 minutes bloodying Hillary Clinton, only to revert to insecure,

Ben

incoherent defenses of birtherism, his business record and his Iraq war opposition — Trump has a whole new set of excuses. FIRST, TRUMP’S defenders attack his microphone. Yes, his microphone. According to Trump, some nefarious conspiracy took place to sabotage his weapon of mass instruction, throwing him off his game. This seems both implausible and irrelevant. More realistically, Trump’s defenders rightly point out that debate moderator Lester Holt hit Trump far harder than he hit Clinton. That’s absolutely true. Holt interrupted Trump far more frequently — although, in Holt’s defense, Trump bulldozed both him and Clinton routinely. Holt asked Trump

about birtherism and his Iraq war opposition and his IRS records and his mean comments about Clinton’s “look,” but didn’t ask Clinton about the Clinton Foundation or Benghazi. And he asked her zero follow-up questions about her private email server. Holt clearly did Clinton’s dirty work. So what? Trump has known this entire campaign that the media would target him. He said so before the debate. He had every opportunity to swivel and hit both Clinton and the media, and he failed to do so. That’s on him. This entire campaign is on him. It’s nobody’s fault but Trump’s that he spends the morning after the debate complaining about a Miss Universe contestant gaining too much weight. It’s nobody’s fault but Trump’s that he ignored hitting Clinton over the Clinton Foundation so he could massage his own feelings over his prior business bankruptcies. Trump is the candidate. It’s time for those who defend him to own it. IF THEY don’t, if they keep allowing Trump to get away with excusing all of his failures by blaming somebody else, then they’ll be paving the way to his defeat. Losers whine about the playing conditions and the referees. Winners change their game plans. Those who whine for Trump won’t be winning for him.

provides the regime’s military backbone, but it comprises 10 percent of Syria’s population. Until February 2011, the minority Alawite dictatorship imposed a police state on Arabs, Kurds, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Druze and numerous Christian sects. THE DICTATORSHIP has many enemies. Though ISIS is among them, the regime may or may not regard ISIS terrorists as its most immediate threat. Despite Pentagon warnings that military cooperation with Russia in Syria entailed risks, in July 2016 the Obama Administration agreed to coordinate Russian and U.S. airstrikes against terrorist targets. On September 9, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced a ceasefire deal. The ceasefire would apply to all parties except ISIS. However, the ceasefire quickly collapsed. In last two weeks, the “dual intervention” has disintegrated into a serious diplomatic confrontation between Washington and Moscow. ISIS was the terrorist target the Obama Administration wanted the partnership to attack. The Kremlin, however, insisted on interpreting “terrorist target” as any enemy of the Assad regime. So the Russian airstrikes of September 24 on rebel-held Aleppo should have been no surprise. The attacks killed at least 85 people and wounded many more. They were not ISIS militants. After the attacks, American UN Ambassador Samantha Power told the UN Security Council that “What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counter-terrorism, it is barbarism. Instead of pursuing peace, Russia and Assad make war.” The Russian government quickly rejected Power’s criticism. In the Kremlin’s view, Russian forces in Syria are doing what they have been ordered to do. IN 2008, Candidate Obama promised to pursue “smart diplomacy.” His administration’s foolish Syria policy has produced a military and diplomatic quagmire that is definitely his responsibility.

Conservative Chronicle

HILLARY CLINTON: September 27, 2106

Hillary Clinton’s four-letter word: ‘Plan’ I said most of the time. A governWell, who won? We might let that popular and logi- ment without duties of some sort to cal query go for the moment. There are the peace and freedom of the populace other aquatic specimens to fry in the would be no government at all. The context of Monday night’s so-called wind would blow through it, as through debate: Chief among them Hillary an open window. Americans by and large, nevertheClinton’s try at addressing the leadergot by without the pleniship question she seems to be hanging less, long tude of plans our leaders see out there like damp laundry as essential to the Clinton asked good life — healthher national audipromoting (Obamence a soggy and acare, anti-fossil bedraggled rhefuel measures), torical question: (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate income-provid“Who can put into action the plans that will make your ing (higher minimum wages) familyreinforcing (paid maternity leave), life better?” “Plans?” Make life “better” for me mind-opening (free college), comfortreinforcing (taxpayer-funded mortgage and thee? programs). And so on. A GREAT cry of horror ought to WE’RE A bigger, more complex have arisen across the nation. It didn’t. You see, we’re accustomed to this and more contentious society than the

William

Murchison

ernment meant originally to guarantee and protect their liberties. A paterfamilias government dangles goodies over our heads. Fewer and fewer voters cry out for the government to just drop the stuff and to let us get on with defining our own notions of good — irrespective of Clinton’s notions, those embodied in her “plans” for us. Lord knows the lady has “plans,” as does, by virtue of his membership in the Great Society of Presidential Candidates, Donald Trump. Trump, businessman as he is, understands private — as distinguished from public — plans. The likelihood is that, if elected in preference to Clinton, he would not come bouncing toward us, waving a

manner of framing the question of presidential duties. The president, or the latest aspirant to that dignity, has got a Plan for us. Once enacted, the Plan will make things unimaginably better, nicer, sweeter, kinder, more joyful, more full of sunshine and delight. “Plan:” There’s a four-letter word for you. Ugh! And double-ugh! We don’t need, Lord help us, another Plan. We don’t need politicians — who lack moral credentials superior to those of grocery checkers or flugelhorn players — prescribing for the varied conditions of 330 million Americans living, supposedly, in a land of varied opportunities and challenges. We’re in the mess we’re in now due in no small measure to government’s super-nanny appetite for framing “plans.” That’s not what the government, most of the time, is supposed to do — not in the vision of the framers.

wilderness republic inhabited by Benjamin Franklin and James Madison. Naturally, we have a bigger government and more numerous programs of uplift and improvement. The resultant problem is two-fold. First, the attitude that Clinton takes for granted and revels in: The hunger of the people for more programs of uplift and improvement, and for the better tuning of existing programs. Yes, we the people of the United States take for granted — take as our civic right — those measures that move income around from earner to earner and establish regulations, increasingly harsh and formal in kind, for the living of life. “That’s how life works!” we seem to affirm. Well, does it or doesn’t it work that way? The second part of the old I’ve-gota-plan conundrum: The taut ties of dependency linking the people to a gov-

briefcase full of ideas meant to make life ever so much better than it has been. I discern about him an altogether commendable hardness of head that in no way reflects hardness of heart. OH, THAT “heart” business! In our day of plans galore, office-seekers of the Clinton variety love to advertise their love of us: Their compassion, the softness and purity of their hearts. A truly loving politician would seek ways to reduce government dependency, the kind that comes directly from all that — uh — compassion. I tend to doubt that Clinton has just that goal in mind.

October 5, 2016 BILL CLINTON: September 23, 2106

How Bill Clinton helped rehab the Saudis after 9/11

But none of that bothered Bill Clins President Obama prepares to veto legislation giving the ton. Not at all. Business is business and families of 9/11 victims the he saw the large piggy bank that was right to sue Saudi Arabia, a prominent waiting at the end of the expansive Araand devoted Clinton loyalist, Joe Cona- bian Desert. According to Joe Conason’s new son, reveals in his new book how Bill Clinton worked to rehab the Saudi image book, Man of the World, Bill Clinton accepted the invitation of the then Crown in return for tens of millions of dollars. In early 2004, Bill Clinton quietly Prince, now King Abdullah bin Abdul agreed to help the Saudi Arabian ruling Aziz, who offered his jet to bring Clinfamily in their revolting attempts to re- ton and an entourage of dozens of his to Saudi Arabia. Amr hab the Kingdom’s besmirched image. cronies al-Dabbagh, a Saudi Once considered businessman joined a strong American in the invitation, ally, Saudi Arawhich included bia was widely featuring Clinton condemned after (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate at the Jeddh Ecoshocking revelations about the role of Saudi nationals nomic Forum, where Clinton’s appearin implementing and financing 9/11. ance could easily be interpreted as an The kingdom needed a new look, a new imprimatur of the Kingdom, whether he wanted it to be or not. brand. The king and his friend were no AND THE former president was all strangers to Clinton. Saudi Arabia had too willing to offer his prestige to take donated between $10 and 25 million to on that dubious, but ultimately lucrative the Clinton Foundation. (The Clinton Foundation only reports donations in assignment. The Saudis had an enormous prob- ranges.) And Dabbagh had paid Clinton lem: Americans didn’t like them. Gallup $900,000 for three speeches just a few polls since 9/11 consistently showed that months earlier, and ponied up more later. almost 60 percent of Americans have a It was a match made in heaven. According to Conason, “While Clinnegative view of Saudi Arabia. And it’s no surprise. Recall that 15 of ton no doubt felt grateful for their larthe 19 hijackers from 9/11 were Saudi gesse, the broader aim of the trip also appealed to him.” citizens. And what was this appealing broader And that the FBI found convincing evidence that Saudi citizens living in the aim? To try and reverse the reputational U.S. — including the wife of the Saudi damage that Saudi citizens had caused ambassador to the U.S. — provided by attacking the Twin Towers and helpmoney to support a number of the hijack- ing to fund the terrorists who killed 3,000 ers while they were in the United States. innocent Americans.

Dick

Morris

THAT WAS THE “noble cause.” As Conason puts it: “Hoping to mitigate the public relations damage done by the involvement of their citizens in the 9/11 attacks, top Saudi leaders wanted more Americans to visit their country and meet their people.” Yet the true purpose of seems obvious: The Saudis wanted Bill Clinton to legitimize them, to flack for them, to show the international community that he was a friend who did not hold their terrorist links against them. And that’s what he did. Again and again. Keep in mind that Conason’s comments are not the rantings of an antiClinton diehard. No, Conason is a longtime Clinton supporter who has defended

him for decades. Yet he reveals what Clinton did. And although Conason insists that Clinton was not paid for the speech he gave during the trip, he had already been paid $1 million a few months before by Dabaggh and would ultimately receive between $35 million and $70 million from the Saudis and their key businessmen. And the amenities were wonderful. The king’s luxurious jet had a huge central living room with lots of couches so that Clinton’s guests could be comfortable. Included in those who joined him were the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, Chevy Chase, John Cusack, Strobe Talbott, mega Clinton donors Elizabeth and Smith Bagley, Alan Patricof, and Google execs Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt rounded out the manifest. And, of course, Clinton patron Ron Burkle was also aboard. No doubt the trip convinced them that Saudi Arabia was a great place. (Unless you’re a woman or a Jew.) After a week of fun, the king’s jet took the entourage to Switzerland for the Davos Forum. Another perk for Clinton. And, as mentioned above, it was a wise decision to go there. Possibly, a $70 million decision. Years afterward, we learned even more damaging information about the Saudis. The 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, asked to speak to a federal judge and claimed that “prominent members of the Saudi royal family were major financial backers of al Qaeda in the 1990s.” He claimed that Osama bin Laden instructed him to keep a digital database of donors and he identified top Saudi government officials and rulers were on the list. YOU ARE THE company you keep. And for Bill Clinton, he chose the company, and money, of potential terroristbackers.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2016 • Volume 31, Number 40 • Hampton, Iowa