Conservative Chronicle for November 30 2016 by Mid-America Publishing Corporation

At Issue this week... November 30, 2016 Academia Will (2) Williams (22) Big Government de Rugy (3) Clinton, Hillary Barone (4) Congress Will (10) Dear Mark Levy (19) Democrats Barone (17) Coulter (7) Hollis (16) Thomas (17) Divided Nation Buchanan (31) Charen (30) Electoral College Harsanyi (1) FBI Napolitano (24) Feminism Prager (27) Fermi, Enrico Greenberg (29) Gender Gap Fields (5) Growing Older Cushman (21) Immigration Enforcement Lowry (21) Schlafly (20) Left, The Lowry (5) Malkin (11) Murchison (6) Sowell (25) Tyrrell (26) Leslie’s Trivia Bits Elman (14) Liberals Bozell (26) Jeffrey (28) Media Bias Goldberg (13) Nationalism Buchanan (23) Obama, Barack Limbaugh (15) Massie (10) Obamacare McCaughey (12) PBS Documentary Thomas (14) Pence, Mike Morris (29) Religious Freedom Parker (6) Republicans Lambro (18) Sanctuary Cities Saunders (30) Short Story Olasky (25) Trump, Donald Bozell (22) Elder (8) Moore (9) Shapiro (9)

Electoral College by David Harsanyi

Long live the Electoral College

his week, anti-Trump protesters hit the streets in big cities around the country, chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” Yes. That’s the problem. For many Democrats, the greatest political system is the one that instills their party with the most power. Now that it looks like Hillary Clinton will “win” the fictional popular vote over Donald Trump, people — not just young people who’ve spent their entire lives being told America is a democracy, but people who know better — are getting hysterical about the Electoral College. Not only is it “unfair” and “undemocratic” but like anything else progressives dislike these days it’s also a tool of “white supremacy” and “sexism.” IF LIBERALS truly believe majoritarianism is the fairest way to run a government, then why shouldn’t 50 percent of states be able to repeal constitutional amendments? (Democrats run only 13 state legislatures. But you know, when it’s convenient.) Why should a bunch of white men from the late 18th century have any say in how contemporary Americans live? If proportional government is unfair, why do we even have two senators from each state? Why not 20 from California and one from Wyoming? Why have states at all? Maybe we should have a series of referendums instead of relying on Congress. Maybe we should let protesters overturn elections? Granted, because of our childish propensity to use the word “fair,” I understand that the Electoral College must seem like a relic that undercuts the sacramental notion of “one man, one vote.” As if a losing vote ever counts anyway. But if you still generally believe the Founding Fathers did a decent job setting up the conditions for material prosperity and individual freedom to guarantee a stable government and dispersed political power, you should be a big fan of the Electoral College. If it needs repeating, in the United States of America, we have an Electoral College, wherein the president and vice president aren’t elected directly by the voters, but rather by electors who are chosen through the popular votes from each state. Your state’s portion of electors equals the number of members in its congressional delegation — one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your senators. We have 51 separate

elections. This is done so that every part of the nation has some kind of say over the next executive. The president, after all, is not a monarch. He does not make laws. Not even President Barack Obama was supposed to do that. Voters need to view the system as a whole to understand why this is “fair.” Diffused democracy weakens the ability of politicians to scaremonger and use emotional appeals to take power. It blunts the vagaries of the electorate. So, naturally, the left has been attacking the Electoral College for years — including talk of a national “compact” to circumvent smaller states.

David

NEED IT be repeated again, the Electoral College, and other mechanisms that balance democracy, create moderation and compromise — they stop one party from accumulating too much power. It is certainly possible that Obama’s unilateral governance over the past eight years had a lot to do with the pushback of three consecutive losses in the Senate and Congress, and the election of Donald Trump. To some extent, the Electoral College impels presidents and their political parties to consider all Americans in rhetoric and action. By allowing two senators for both Wyoming, with a population of less than 600,000, and California, with a population of more

than 38 million, we create more national cohesion. We protect large swaths of the nation from being bullied. We incentivize Washington, D.C. — both the president and the Senate — to craft policy that meets the needs of Colorado as well as New York. Moreover, besides protecting the rights of Americans who reside in those states, it should also remind us that smaller states have industries and functions that outweigh a measurement in population alone — the agriculture sector of a state, for instance. In a world with increasing productivity, this matters more than ever. Smaller states are laboratories for ideas, as are bigger ones. If they become marginalized and then coerced to embrace the policies favored by the people in urban areas, the nation loses valuable resourcefulness, imagination and brainpower. IT’S ALSO worth remembering that the dynamics of this election would be completely different if the popular vote actually mattered. The election is geared toward winning states, not people. There is no guarantee that Hillary Clinton would have won. There are tons of conservatives in blue states, for instance, who do not vote because they understand that the majority around them have a different political outlook. A direct national election would mean focusing on blue-state Republicans and red-state liberals. I’m not sure that setup works out for Democrats exactly as they imagine. November 28, 2016

Conservative Chronicle

ACADEMIA: November 20, 2016

Did academia help elect Donald Trump?

any undergraduates, their fawn-like eyes wide with astonishment, are wondering: Why didn’t the dean of students prevent the election from disrupting the serenity to which my school has taught me that I am entitled? Campuses create “safe spaces” where students can shelter from discombobulating thoughts and receive spiritual balm for the trauma of microaggressions. Yet the presidential election came without trigger warnings? THE MORNING after the election, normal people rose — some elated, some despondent — and went off to actual work. But at Yale, that incubator of lateadolescent infants, a professor responded to “heartfelt notes” from students “in shock” by making that day’s exam optional. Academia should consider how it contributed to, and reflects Americans’ judgments pertinent to, Donald Trump’s election. The compound of childishness and condescension radiating from campuses is a constant reminder to normal Americans of the decay of protected classes — in this case, tenured faculty and cosseted students. As “bias-response teams” fanned out across campuses, an incident report was filed about a University of Northern Colorado student who wrote “free speech matters” on one of 680 “#languagematters” posters that cautioned against politi-

cally incorrect speech. Catholic DePaul increasingly prehensive forms of power University denounced as “bigotry” a that shape human and non-human mateposter proclaiming “Unborn Lives Mat- rialities in Palestine.” ter.” Bowdoin College provided counEVEN PROFESSORS’ books from seling to students traumatized by the cultural appropriation committed by a serious publishers are clotted with presombrero-and-tequila party. Oberlin Col- tentious jargon. To pick just one from lege students said they were suffering innumerable examples, a recent history breakdowns because schoolwork was of the Spanish Civil War, published by ford University Press, interfering with their political activism. the Oxsays that Franco’s Cal State UniverSpain was as “hisity, Los Angeles erarchizing” as established “healHitler’s Germany, ing” spaces for stuthat Catholicism dents to cope with (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group “problematized” the pain caused by a political speech delivered three months relations between Spain and the Third earlier. Indiana University experienced Reich, and that liberalism and democracy social-media panic (“Please PLEASE are concepts that must be “interrogated.” PLEASE be careful out there tonight”) Only the highly educated write so badly. because a priest in a white robe, with a Indeed, the point of such ludicrous prose rope-like belt and rosary beads was iden- is to signal membership in a closed cleritified as someone “in a KKK outfit hold- sy that possesses a private language. An American Council of Trustees and ing a whip.” A doctoral dissertation at the Univer- Alumni (ACTA) study — “No U.S. Hissity of California, Santa Barbara uses tory? How College History Departments “feminist methodologies” to understand Leave the United States out of the Mahow Girl Scout cookie sales “reproduce jor,” based on requirements and course hegemonic gender roles.” The journal offerings at 75 leading colleges and uniGeoHumanities explores how pumpkins versities — found that “the overwhelmreveal “racial and class coding of rural ing majority of America’s most prestiversus urban places.” Another journal’s gious institutions do not require even the article analyzes “the relationships among students who major in history to take a gender, science and glaciers.” A Vassar single course on United States history or lecture “theorizes oscillating relations government.” Often “microhistories” are between disciplinary, pre-emptive and offered to history majors at schools that

George

Will

require these majors to take no U.S. history course: “Modern Addiction: Cigarette Smoking in the 20th Century” (Swarthmore College), “Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl” (Bowdoin College), “Witchcraft and Possession” (University of Pennsylvania). At some schools that require history majors to take at least one U.S. history course, the requirement can be fulfilled with courses like “Mad Men and Mad Women” (Middlebury College), “HipHop, Politics and Youth Culture in America” (University of Connecticut) and “Jews in American Entertainment” (University of Texas). Constitutional history is an afterthought. Small wonder, then, that a recent ACTA-commissioned survey found that less than half of college graduates knew that George Washington was the commanding general at Yorktown; that nearly half did not know that Theodore Roosevelt was important to the construction of the Panama Canal; that more than one-third could not place the Civil War in a correct 20year span or identify Franklin Roosevelt as the architect of the New Deal; that 58 percent did not know that the Battle of the Bulge occurred in World War II; and that nearly half did not know the lengths of the terms of U.S. senators and representatives. INSTITUTIONS OF supposedly higher education are awash with hysteria, authoritarianism, obscurantism, philistinism and charlatanry. Which must have something to do with the tone and substance of the presidential election, which took the nation’s temperature.

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November 30, 2016 BIG GOVERNMENT: November 17, 2016

Will new bosses be the same as the old bosses?

the Patriot Act, McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, a bloated farm bill, the expansion of Medicare through the creation of a prescription drug benefit, a crony energy bill, a pork-ridden transportation bill and war, war and more war. In President Bill Clinton’s last year in office, the federal government spent THE FIRST time we had a unified $1.86 trillion. Six years later, under Republican government since the ‘50s Bush and a Republican-dominated Conoccurred just a little more than a de- gress, the figure was $2.73 trillion. As cade ago, when then-President George a share of the economy, spending went W. Bush enjoyed Republican control of from 17.6 percent of gross domestic Congress for 4 1/2 of his first six years product to 19.1 percent of GDP durtime, and it went on in office. Four months into Bush’s first ing that to be well over 20 term, Republican percent by the time Sen. Jim Jeffords Bush finally left ofof Vermont defice. Critics of the clared himself an Obama administraindependent and (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate tion rightly scold caucused with the Democrats, thus breaking a 50-50 tie it for the large growth in federal debt and giving Democrats slight control of under its watch, but the Bush years set the Senate until the GOP recaptured it the table; Obama delivered the turkey. That last point is critical to underjust over a year later. Most readers have probably forgot- stand. The Bush administration and its ten about Jeffords, but what shouldn’t Republican allies in Congress played be forgotten is the massive growth in a major role in making the excesses of federal power under a Washington dom- the Obama administration possible. The inated by the GOP. Allow me to quickly present concern should be that excesses of both administrations will help lay the refresh your memory. The following is a rogues’ gallery foundation for the excesses of the new of Republican-engineered expansions one. That means it isn’t just liberals who of the federal government’s size and should be worried about President-elect scope: The No Child Left Behind Act, Donald Trump and a complicit Repubor only the second time since the early 1950s, a Republican president will wield power with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress. With that incredible power, small-government advocates can’t help but hope that this change will bring about good policies and much less government than under President Barack Obama. Maybe.

Veronique

de Rugy

lican Congress. Conservatives, libertarians and anyone else who cares about free markets and the need to constrain our overgrown federal government should be just as concerned. IF WE ARE to take Trump’s campaign promises seriously, then his anti-free market stances on international trade are alarming enough. Unfortunately, we shouldn’t underestimate the willingness of congressional Republicans to throw trade under the bus if it

means appeasing parochial demands for federal protection. While there is a real possibility of repealing the Affordable Care Act, the risk of a replacement plan that is best described as “Obamacare light” is also very real. And it isn’t difficult to imagine that no reforms of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will take place, either, especially because many in Congress will be happy to embrace the magical thinking that “growing the economy” will sufficiently cover the escalating bills for entitlements. We already know that Trump has the Republican support to turn the spending spigot back on for the Pentagon and defense contractors. For those who think Trump’s campaign promises will turn out to be much more malleable, there’s always the hope he will be persuaded to pull back from the more destructive ideas and instead focus on much-needed reforms, such as corporate tax reform. But Trump comes into office with no government experience and a small network of loyalists. That means that with thousands of appointments to make and not nearly enough true believers available to fill those roles, the president-elect will be forced to rely on the very same political insiders he decried during his campaign. So rather than a draining of the swamp as Trump has promised, there is a risk that the swamp won’t shrink at all. FINALLY, A good number of his appointees will probably have served time in the aforementioned Bush administration and the Bush-enabling offices of Republican members of Congress. If that isn’t cause for concern, then I would suggest rereading the beginning of this piece.

Conservative Chronicle

HILLARY CLINTON: November 18, 2016

Clinton’s dishonesty cost her the Midwest, and election

illary Clinton lost the election percent in 2012 and 41 percent in 2016. in the Midwest. Donald Trump The drop was similar in Wisconsin outwon 50 Midwestern electoral side Milwaukee and Madison (54 to 50 votes that went to Barack Obama in 2012 to 41 percent), Michigan outside Detroit — Iowa, Wis., Mich. and Ohio — plus and Grand Rapids (55 to 52 to 41 per20 more in Pennsylvania, where the two- cent), Ohio outside Cleveland, Columbus thirds of voters beyond metro Philadel- and Cincinnati (48 to 47 to 35 percent) phia are Midwestern in culture and con- and Pennsylvania outside Philadelphia cerns. Trump could have lost Florida and and Pittsburgh (48 to 44 to 36 percent). Similar outstate drops were not quite still won. to carry Minnesota In the popular vote, Clinton came e n o u g h for Trump and were close to equaling swamped in Illinois Obama’s 2012 by metro Chicago. percentages in the But they were South and notenough to switch yet-fully-counted (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate the Midwestern West, and her four electoral vote from percent drop in the Northeast cost her no electoral votes. 80-38 Democratic in 2012 to 88-30 ReBut in the Midwest and Pennsylvania, publican this year. These outstate areas aren’t growing the Democratic presidential percentage dropped from 54 percent in 2008 and 51 demographically, but they’re not tiny, either. They cast 100 percent of the votes percent in 2012 to 45 percent in 2016. in Iowa, 61 percent in Wisconsin, 47 perTHOSE DROPS came mostly out- cent in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and side the Midwest’s big cities, though 44 percent in Ohio. What accounts for the abandonment black turnout sagged notably in Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee. Univer- of Clinton in areas hitherto reachable for sity towns turned in their typical lopsided Democrats? The outstate Midwest is loaded with majorities — e.g., 68-26 percent in metro non-college-educated whites — 62 perMadison, Wisconsin. But in Midwestern outstates — coun- cent in Iowa, for instance. Nationally, ties outside metro areas with a million- that demographic moved from favoring plus people — the shift away from Mitt Romney by a 25 percent margin in Clinton looked like the shifts of white 2012 to favoring Trump by a 39 percent Southerners away from Democrats in de- margin this year. In the Midwestern outstates, the shift was even more vivid. cades past. Such voters have been bypassed by Iowa, the largest state with no metro area of a million-plus people, was typi- sluggish Obama-era economic growth, cal: 54 percent Democratic in 2008, 52 and many believe that their jobs have

Michael

Barone

been lost by trade agreements and that their wages have been undercut by lowskilled immigrants in other parts of the country. Trump emphasized these issues, and previous Republicans hadn’t. That’s part of it. THERE’S ALSO the condescension of Clinton and her campaign, headquartered in trendy Brooklyn, New York. “Religious beliefs,” candidate Clinton said in 2015, “have to be changed.” She told a Manhattan audience that half of Trump’s supporters were “irredeemable” — “deplorables” characterized by “implicit racism.” Outstate people who voted for Obama — or whose neighbors or friends at church did — probably weren’t attracted

by such statements. Decent people don’t like to be called racists and told that their religion needs to be changed (by the government?). The Clinton campaign’s strategy to win over folks beyond Brooklyn and Manhattan was to send West Wing actors into Ohio and hold a concert with Beyonce and Lady Gaga in Philadelphia. That’s going to do it! One other factor worked against Clinton in the outstate Midwest: Honesty. People in the outstate Midwest value honesty. They react against public officials who break laws, flout regulations and repeatedly lie and try to cover it up, as Clinton did with her secret email servers. In the 1970s, the outstate Midwest broke against Republicans because of Watergate. Democratic victories in two House special elections in outstate Michigan in 1974 signaled voters’ displeasure with Richard Nixon, and the Democrats swept in elections that fall. Dozens of Democratic politicians began long, successful outstate careers in the Watergate years. Liberal pundits Jonathan Alter and E.J. Dionne characterized the Clinton email lawbreaking and lies as non-scandals. Maybe they weren’t scandals in Chicago and Massachusetts, where they grew up, but they were in the outstate Midwest. Hints of Clinton’s general election weakness came in Democratic primaries, when she lost outstates badly in Wisconsin and Michigan and ran barely even in Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Maybe outstaters were voting not for Bernie Sanders’ socialism but against Clinton’s “da-- emails.” TEAM CLINTON is now saying it was beaten by FBI Director James Comey’s intervention. But Comey would not have been heard from if Clinton hadn’t broken the law. That’s a vote-loser in the outstate Midwest — and an election-loser in America.

November 30, 2016 GENDER GAP: November 17, 2016

The 2016 massacre at the gender gap

hen the term “gender gap” was coined several decades ago it sounded like something from a playful satirical movie set in the Old West. “Gender gap” gained prominence in the language of politics when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, with 55 percent of male voters and just 47 percent of women voters. THE MEDIA was obsessed with the gender gap, Republicans were concerned about it, and it was a factor in President Reagan’s decision to appoint the first woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1981, the Gipper got his chance to prove he had listened to the lament of the ladies. When William French Smith, his attorney general, called Sandra Day O’Connor to tell her that she was being considered for a federal position, she joked, “I guess you must mean in a secretarial position!” When she was

interviewed at lunch in her home, she ic mass of attitudes about anything. Afimpressed the men with smarts, savvy ter the suffragettes won the vote, marand a salmon mousse salad. The rest is ried women mostly voted just as their “herstory,” with three women on the Su- husbands did, ending the great male preme Court now. chauvinist fear in the 1920s. The meaning and mechanics of the Several decades of debate among gender gap has fluctuated wildly since women in second-stage feminism fothose innocent days when women first cused on a multiplicity of divisive isbegan to seek power in the boardroom sues posed by feminists like Gloria as well as in the bedroom. As more and Steinem and Betty Friedan, discussing more of them entered the job market, it whether women and men are more alike quickly became clear they were creating or different, or more nurturing another gap, one or more aggressive, between collegeand how famieducated women lies are affected by and less-educated changing sexual women. An inroles. There were (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate come disparity deidentifiable winveloped and affected diverging political ners and losers in this revolutionary war and cultural attitudes. How women saw between the sexes (though widespread the glass ceiling depended on whether fraternization with the enemy continued there was a crystal chandelier hanging unchecked), and class became a greater or a naked lightbulb. determinant than biology on how womWomen have never been a monolith- en voted.

Suzanne

Fields

THE LEFT: November 17, 2016

Assumptions: History strikes back

resident Barack Obama won’t explicitly say that Donald Trump is on the wrong side of history, but surely he believes it. The president basically thinks anyone who gets in his way is transgressing the larger forces of history with a capital “H.” In 2008, he declared John McCain “on the wrong side of history right now” (the “right now” was a generous touch — allowing for the possibility that McCain might get right with History at some future date). Obama has returned to this phrase and argument obsessively. It is deeply embedded in his, and the larger progressive, mind — and indirectly contributed to the left’s catastrophic defeat on Nov. 8.

THE NOTION that History takes sides is a distant cousin to the Marxoid idea that we are on an inevitable path to socialism, and borrows heavily from the (genuine and very hard-won) moral capital of the abolitionists and civil-rights movement. Obama likes to quote Martin Luther King Jr. for the proposition that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Whoever is considered on “the wrong side of history” by the left is always loosely associated with the opprobrium of slavery and Jim Crow. This means that progressives wield History as a weapon, and make it an occasion for constant self-congratulation. But there is a downside in the accompanying sense of smug inevitability that is off-putting at best and blinkered and self-deluding at worst.

For the left, History is not a vast, unpredictable, untamable force, but has all the characteristics of a stereotypical Whole Foods shopper. History reads the Huffington Post, and follows Lena Dunham on Twitter. It really cares whether transgender people get to use the appropriate bathroom. History was probably hanging out at the Javits Center on election night, and collapsed into a puddle of tears right around the time Wisconsin was called. The political dangers of this point of view should now be obvious:

Rich

It assumes that certain classes of people are retrograde. Why would Democrats bother to try to appeal to workingclass white voters if they are stamped with the disapproval of History? IT BECOMES a warrant for all manner of overreach. History evidently favored trying to get nuns to sign up for contraceptives they didn’t want and forcing small business to bake cakes for gay weddings. And, if History is thought to have an ascendant electoral coalition (and a heck of a data operation), it creates an unjustified sense of political inevitably. This is what the theorists of the “emerging Democratic majority,” and most pundits on the left, bought into.

All that said, the evidence was pretty good for the proposition that welfarestate programs, once ensconced, could never be reversed and therefore must enjoy the approval of History. This assumption pervaded the Obamacare debate. Sen. Harry Reid lambasted Republicans for not “joining us on the right side of history” and compared them — of course — to defenders of slavery. In retrospect, History might not have been so enamored of sprawling legislation based on faulty economic premises. When Republicans pass a repeal bill, it will constitute the most significant rollback of the welfare state ever. Another progressive assumption is that the nation-state is bound to decline, as supranational institutions like the European Union grow and cross-border migrations increase. In a trip to Germany in April, President Obama deemed Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming a massive wave of migrants as “on the right side of history.” Never mind that its recklessness has caused a backlash that is still brewing. Obama believed the same of his own latitudinarian views on immigration, apparently never imagining people might consider it progress to tighten our borders rather than render them more porous. NOW, A president who so confidently associated himself and his cause with the tide of the future has presided over a political wipeout that will send much of his legacy into the dustbin. If nothing else, History has a keen sense of humor.

HILLARY CLINTON’S trajectory from Yale Law School to wife of a governor to wife of a president to senator to secretary of state and, finally, to presidential nominee reflects the personal and public changes in the expectations of educated women. Donald Trump’s route was more of a zigzag. He is both a throwback to a 1950s man, given his coarse attitudes toward women out of the television series Mad Men, and a post-modern man, employer of strong women in top administrative jobs. He’s also a veteran of three marriages and now a family man with a wife and adult daughters and sons, all participants in his businesses. The Donald won and Clinton lost, and the debate on gender gap runs white-hot again, this time from a unique perspective. Susan Chira in the New York Times observes: “While Democrats have won some blue-collar white women in the past, in this election, class emerged as a powerful and divisive force that swung decisively Republican. All the talk about angry white men glossed over the fact that they were married to angry white women.” That’s why Trump won 62 percent of white women without a college education. These women rightly believe they were not on Clinton’s radar because glass ceilings were not what they were looking for. Clinton earned only 34 percent of their vote. These are the women who populate J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a decaying steel town in the heart of the Rust Belt, which went decisively for Donald Trump. The Republican candidate specifically addressed the suffering of men and women in the battleground states, whose votes cut into Clinton’s margins with educated women. They heard an authentic sympathy in the Donald’s voice when he talked of working-class struggles of families with addictions, broken homes, unemployment and fractured lives. They understood that they were the men and women Clinton meant when she dismissed them as irredeemable “deplorables.” They heard the Donald talk about bringing jobs back to “make America great again,” and he sounded like maybe he really could transform hopelessness into hope. With his rough talk, pugilistic and subversive style, and combative scorn for the politically correct, he sounded authentic and familiar. TO THE comfortable, educated middle class, elitism sounds good, not bad. To the working-class poor — who experience the condescension and glibness of Hollywood, Washington and the media — “elitism” is writ large and painful. So what if Donald Trump was a billionaire? He got it, and Hillary Clinton didn’t.

Conservative Chronicle

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: November 23, 2016

Crucial religious freedom case at Supreme Court

mong the factors that drove the electoral victory of Donald Trump was his very strong support from evangelical Christians. Trump won the white evangelical vote 81 percent to 16 percent. This was a higher percentage of the evangelical vote than received by the last three Republican presidential candidates. And one very strong factor driving this evangelical vote was concern about the Supreme Court.

SHORTLY BEFORE the election, the Pew Research Center reported that 77 percent of conservative Republican and Republican-leaning voters said Supreme Court appointments were an important consideration in their vote. For conservatives, the appointment of a justice whose conservative credentials are as solid and unwavering as those of the late Antonin Scalia is vital. Even with Scalia’s presence on the court, Obamacare survived two crucial court decisions that could have dealt it fatal or near-fatal blows. And then, last year, by a 5-4 vote, the court redefined marriage. Conservatives know that a loss of Scalia’s conservative anchor would open the door for our nation’s highest court to turn completely into a group of black-robed Hollywood scriptwriters. One example of the many challenges facing us is a case dealing with religious liberty, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Pauley, which the court recently agreed to hear. Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Missouri, operates a preschool, a child learning center, open to all children in the local community age two to kindergarten. The school includes a playground. In 2012, the school applied for grant in a program run by the State of Missouri that would have enabled them to resurface the playground with a surface safer for the children. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources operates the Playground Scrap Tire Surface Materials Grant Program. They recycle tires and produce a rubberized product as a pour-on surface for playgrounds that is safer and more friendly for kids than gravel and other materials. Trinity Lutheran applied to the program and was ranked fifth out of 44 applicants. The government then rejected their application. The Missouri constitution, they said, prohibits directing government funds to religious institutions because of an 1875 amendment — the Blaine Amendment. The church filed a lawsuit but lost in district court and then lost again on appeal. They then, under representation by the Alliance Defending Freedom, peti-

tioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, and the high court has agreed. What does making a playground safer for kids at a church school have to do with religion? Why should it be any different than any other school? The constitution’s first amendment guarantees each citizen’s right to “free exercise” of their religion. The fourteenth amendment guarantees “equal protection” under the law. Refusal of a state government to use public funds, designated for the safety of children, for children at a school run by a church is anything but “free exercise” of religion and anything but “equal protection” under the law for kids at a church school.

It is one thing to use the power of government and government funds to promote a certain religion. This is clearly what the U.S. constitution wishes to prevent. But it is quite another thing to discriminate against a citizen of faith and not make government resources available to that citizen, resources that RELIGION IS now widely viewed are available to other citizens, because in our courts as an obstacle to freedom of that individual’s faith. rather than something crucial that a free Can it possibly be that the safety of society must protect. a child playing at a church-operated

school is a different issue than the safety of a child a secular school? THE TRINITY Lutheran Church has already lost twice on this question. It’s why our courts need a strong and powerful conservative injection. Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. Contact her at www.urbancure.org.

THE LEFT: November 22, 2016

The God gap: Implications for us

od (lucky Him!) doesn’t vote. But this indisposition does not make Him a mere spectator of our electoral processes — or their aftermath. If you go to church regularly, the Pew Research Center says, you are likelier than not to have voted for Donald Trump. If you hardly ever darken a church door, you are even likelier still to have voted for Hillary Clinton. Neither finding will knock most of us off our pins, the so-called “God gap” in American politics having manifested itself since Pew began measuring it in 2000.

THE POINT is not so much the existence of the gap as it is the implications it has for our life together as Americans. Some large non-negotiables require negotiating. There are things to be worked out that are not amenable to the skills of the conference room or the steady gaze of skilled bargainers. Church attendance and non-attendance both bear on the viewpoints around which we organize government and implement government policies. For instance: Obamacare and government-paid contraceptive devices. One of the numberless notions behind Obamacare is that personal choice in sexual relations is a very good thing, riding down objections from old-fashioned moralists with their pince-nez and pained expressions. Let’s fortify, therefore, the constitutional right to copulation without consequences by compelling employers to pick up the insurance tab. Religious orders, too? Religious orders — the Little Sisters of the Poor

come quickly to mind — that care for the sick and suffering? Groups that, on religious grounds, view contraception as morally impermissible? Yes, according to Obamacare, these, too, have to get with the program. Religion can’t get in the way. Religion’s for Sunday morning and the stained-glass propriety associated with those increasingly atypical American institutions called churches. Out of our way, Sisters!

YET THEOLOGY somehow never reduces to mere politics; nor can politics be stuffed successfully into an offering plate or a pyx. The case of the Little Sisters of the Poor remains unresolved. The U.S.

William

Supreme Court wiped out fines against the organization. But appellate courts, nonetheless, are bogged down, by high court order, in the details of how to get the thing right. In bygone times such questions wouldn’t have arisen. This notion of “copulation without consequences” wasn’t a political issue. It was a religious and moral issue, not meant for resolution by judges or bureaucrats. Political attempts, generally led by secularists, to wrest moral issues from the grasp of the churches generally don’t turn out well. How could it be otherwise? There’s no government code of behavior adequate to the task of stilling moral disputes. There might

be in Mosul, Iraq, but not here. Moral witness is, in most historical settings, the job of churches, synagogues and, yes, mosques (of the better sort), acting upon commandments and intuitions scarcely debatable on the campaign trail. The reason for the “God gap” is the enthusiasm of the left for pushing social overhaul without God’s getting in the way. Voters recognize as much — and tend to support the side whose view of religion generally tracks their own. Obamacare and the Little Sisters of the Poor are tips of the iceberg below the surface of present-day politics. We may call the iceberg “Belief.” What’s important? And how can we know? On what authority? The say-so of a blogger? That is not how moral fundamentals come to be fundamental. They root themselves in the heart before emerging as guideposts to human action. The left hasn’t much interest in fundamentals, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat pointed out a few days ago. “It is precisely older, foundational things that today’s liberalism has lost,” wrote Douthat — including the tutelage of religion, which secularists, clustered primarily in the Democratic Party, see as less compelling than an Elizabeth Warren speech. BEHOLD THE God gap. Expect it to grow or contract in our political contests as one side or both weigh the attested proposition, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).COM

November 30, 2016 DEMOCRATS: November 16, 2016

Literally shaking: Doomsday scenario for Dems

In fact, that tells us nothing whatsontil the nationwide protests of the last few days, I had no ever about Trump, but does tell us that idea how bad the problem liberal parents are intentionally raising was, but our nation is drowning in drama neurotics by telling their children that they are living in Nazi Germany. queenery. Americans who make $20,000 a year The immediate reaction of most celebrities to Trump’s victory was: “THE are made fun of by Samantha Bee for goWORLD IS WAITING FOR MY TAKE ing to Wal-Mart. These are all people ON THE ELECTION!” who will knife one Aaron Sorkin another in the back and David Remto get their kids into nick, in matching $50,000-a-year allpink housecoats white preschools. and fuzzy slip(c) 2016, Ann Coulter But they think pers, wrote hysterical jeremiads about the cataclysm of they’re less racist than other Americans because of their pleasant interactions Trump’s election. with Rosa when she comes to clean. In the modern Democratic Party, SORKIN WAS especially irked that Trump was supported by white men who out-of-work coal miners are constantly don’t appreciate rap music. As proof that denounced for their “privilege” by halfthe end was near, he triumphantly re- black girls at Yale — who wouldn’t have ported: “The Dow futures dropped 700 gotten in without the black half — and points overnight.” After a brief drop, the who will be paid a quarter-million dolDow surged to historic highs, recording lars as the “diversity coordinator” at some Fortune 500 corporation. its biggest weekly gain in five years. Taking their cue from rich celebriBut I can’t wait to read the letters these guys wrote to their children about ties, not terribly bright college students Bill Clinton! Don’t leave us hanging have responded to Trump’s election with “spontaneous demonstrations” guys — post those, too, please. In Hiplandia, “I couldn’t stop cry- — with chartered buses and pre-fab ing!” and “I vomited!” are dispositive A.N.S.W.E.R. signs. Who knew “love proof that Trump is a bad man — not Trump’s hate” required so much arson that these people are mentally unbal- and property destruction? Apparently the new method of deanced. Their own paranoia is cited to veloping opinions is to figure out what’s show how evil their enemies are. It’s supposed to say something about trendy and allowing celebrities and coTrump that people are posting little hom- medians to act as your personal shoppers. I’m just so busy, I don’t have time to ilies titled: “How to Tell a Child Donald Trump Won the Election.” (Google pro- know things. Could you help me pick out my views? duces 60 million hits for that idea.)

Ann

Coulter

Absolutely! I’ve got some great opinions for you. How do you like, “I can’t believe this is my country” or “I am literally shaking?” Oh yes, I love those — that looks great on me! This is why the snowflakes are smashing windows, beating up Trump supporters and calling for the assassination of Trump and the rape of his wife. If you’ve ever wondered how France’s Reign of Terror happened, observe the anti-Trump protests — the main result of which is to convince people who had misgivings about voting for Trump that they did the right thing. TRUMP IS denounced for his alleged “racism, homophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia!” No one stops to think: Wait a minute! These are all groups Trump has showered with affection, with the exception of Muslim immigrants — who persecute the other four. This is the mob’s muscle memory kicking in, as when Sen. Patty Murray reached for her mental file on “Good Things a Leader Can Do” and ended up praising Osama bin Laden after 9/11 for

“building day care facilities, building health care facilities.” The protesters are pulling out slogans from their “Things We Pretend to Hate” file. These riots are mostly serving to convince people who had misgivings about voting for Trump that they did the right thing. All this is the consequence of the Democratic Party’s decision in the 1970s to get rid of all the normal people. Back when the party contained a large segment of the working class, there was a safety valve. They couldn’t afford to be associated with airhead celebrities pushing insane ideas. Mayor Richard Daley, for example, did not travel to Cuba or brag about his friendship with Daniel Ortega. But then the head of the auto union had to be kicked out of the party because he was “anti-choice.” Really? But he’s been a Democrat for 18 years ... Well, maybe it’s time we hear from the REST of America! Unfortunately, the rest of America wasn’t large enough for Democrats to win elections. So they had to import Third World immigrants to vote for them. Trump’s election is the Doomsday Scenario for Democrats because they were just on the verge of turning the whole country into California through mass immigration. Then they’d never have to think about those hicks in the icky parts of the country ever again. It would be so much better to be able to win elections by whipping up resentment toward white people. Last year, old lefty Bernie Sanders said mass immigration was a disaster for the working class, driving down their wages. He called open borders “a Koch brothers idea.” Representing the modern, yuppified Democratic Party, the low-testosterone boys at Vox went nuts. Dylan Matthews sneeringly cited the many benefits of mass immigration — to wit: cheap gardeners, maids and nannies. He also compared a pro-American immigration policy to the massacre of “10,000 foreign civilians to save a single American life.” HE DIDN’T say it, but I got the distinct impression that Dylan was “literally shaking.”

Conservative Chronicle

DONALD TRUMP: November 17, 2016

Just because ‘our guy’ won: Trump still a populist Just because “our guy” won, EconomIf Keynesian economics (government ics 101 hasn’t been repealed. spending to jumpstart the economy) Donald Trump is still a populist, not actually worked, the last eight years a fiscal conservative or a states’ rights should’ve been an economic blockbuster. federalist. And isn’t it interesting — and hypocritiTrump’s waffling on minimum wage cal — that when China fiddles is as disturbing as with its interest rates him saying, as he and money supply, did on 60 Minutes, it’s “currency manipthat we should ulation.” When we keep “the strongest do it, it’s “quantita(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate assets” of Obamtive easing.” acare — coverage Trump implied for pre-existing conditions and “children his Supreme Court justices would reverse living with their parents for an extended Roe v. Wade, sending the issue “back to period.” Insurance, by definition, guards the states.” But when asked about gay against unknown risks, not known ones. marriage, Trump said SCOTUS has “settled” the issue. By that reasoning, SCOAND WHAT’S the difference be- TUS “settled” the issue of abortion 40 tween Donald Trump’s proposal for years ago. “infrastructure investing” and President Barack Obama’s “stimulus?” I’m old TRUMP SAID on 60 Minutes he had enough to remember when we called it to hire lobbyists in his new administra“pork.” President Ronald Reagan had no tion because “they know the system right such spending program, and when Presi- now:” “We are trying to clean up Washdent Bill Clinton attempted a “stimulus,” ington. ... That’s the problem with the Congress stopped him. Government system — the system. ... We’re doing a spends. It does not “invest.” As a percent lot of things to clean up the system. But of GDP, we already spend more on infra- everybody that works for government, structure than does the European Union. they then leave government and they beAnd Trump wants to “invest” more?! come a lobbyist, essentially. I mean, the Recall Obama’s “stimulus” lament, whole place is one big lobbyist.” True, “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready but the reason lobbyists lobby is that govprojects.” Calling it “infrastructure in- ernment has its fingers in virtually every vestment” — rather than “stimulus” — phase of our lives. Lobbying or “redress doesn’t change the fact that it’s not the of grievances” is protected by the First fed’s job to do the states’ work. Amendment. The one sure way to reduce

Larry

Elder

the size and scope of lobbying is to reduce the size and scope of government. Reagan’s head of Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman, a true-blue fiscal conservative, quit after four-and-a-half frustrating years. He wrote the Triumph of American Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. The book describes how he tried to cut this program and that agency, only to face an army of the vested, recalcitrant Republicans in Congress, as well as a President who often talked the talk about limited

government, but didn’t always walk the walk. The only way to eliminate lobbyists and “special interests” is to reduce the federal government’s footprint, giving them nothing to lobby about. Reagan couldn’t even get rid of low-hanging fruit like the Department of Education, despite his promise to do so. Trump didn’t even make such a promise. Yes, he’d get rid of Common Core, but that’s barely reaching first base. As for Trump’s kids’ involvement in policy and strategy, it was Ivanka who, according to Trump, came up with his proposal of six weeks of “paid” maternity leave. Reagan showed us the formula — leave more money in the pockets of the people, slow down the rate of government spending and lighten the regulatory load. Yes, he engaged in protectionism, as the nation has through much of its history, but it doesn’t justify bad policies. About Trump’s economy-crushing protectionist ideas, recall Patrick Buchanan, President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter-turned-television-commentator, who became Reagan’s White House Director of Communications and later ran for the presidency. He got in because he felt the GOP had drifted from its principles. He campaigned in Iowa and heard a boatload from farmers about foreigners “dumping” their products. Buchanan then morphed into Bernie Sanders on trade. Still, the worst of Trump was at least matched by the bad goals of Hillary Clinton and her party. The best of Trump is quite good — corporate tax cuts, moratorium on EPA regulations, securing the borders — but these can be offset, if not undone, by the bad.

IT’S NOT enough to win. Trump must succeed. Populism is good politics, but bad economics.

November 30, 2016 DONALD TRUMP: November 23, 2016

Will conservatives stand up to Trump if they must? Here’s an alternate-reality scenario. ate it. She says that she’ll divest herself It’s 2016, and the president-elect of of all connections to the Clinton Founthe United States is ready to take office. dation but refuses to hand it off to any Her chief advisor pledges a trillion- third party to handle, insisting instead dollar stimulus package directed at in- that Chelsea Clinton run the place. frastructure. The advisor explains: “It’s Meanwhile, she brings Clinton into topeverything related to jobs. The conser- l e v e l diplomatic meetings vatives are going without informing to go crazy. I’m the press. When the guy pushing a Vice Presidenttrillion-dollar inelect Tim Kaine is frastructure plan. met with protests (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate ... It’s the greatat a public event, est opportunity she takes to Twitto rebuild everything. Shipyards, iron ter to castigate the attendees, demandworks, get them all jacked up. We’re ing an apology. She goes on to criticize just going to throw it up against the talk radio and Fox News for unfairness. wall and see if it sticks. It will be as ex- “Equal time for us?” she asks. citing as the 1930s. ... We’ll govern for This is an alternate reality. But each 50 years.” and every statement and event mentioned above has already happened to MEANWHILE, President-elect President-elect Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton allegedly meets with Trump’s top advisor, Stephen Banforeign business interests working to non, is pushing economic statism, grinenrich her. She deploys her allies to in- ning at the destruction of conservative form ambassadors that if they patronize economists. Trump met off the record the Clinton Foundation, she’d appreci- with property developers Sagar and

Ben

Shapiro

DONALD TRUMP: November 15, 2016

Atul Chordia, the builders of the first firm claims to be the “exclusive India Trump-brand property in India, as well representative of the Trump Organizaas developer Kalpesh Mehta, whose tion.” He sneaked Ivanka Trump into a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He tweeted his thoughts on the cast of Hamilton and the one-sided comedy of Saturday Night Live, asking, “Equal time for us?”

Yes, Trump will double growth and jobs

millions of new jobs and trillions of dollars of extra output — along with new royalty payments to the government. And we will not waste hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing solar panels. Sorry, Elon Musk.

On the regulatory front, Trump wants to immediately repeal dozens of President Obama’s anti-business executive orders. At the top of the stack headed for the dustbin is the Clean Power Plan law that has put tens of thousands of our coal miners out of work. I am for free trade and don’t always agree with Trump on this issue. But he understands that the U.S. needs trade, and he himself said: “I am not an isolationist.” Trump wants to negotiate from a position of strength with countries that steal Americans’ intellectual property or compel companies to disclose trade secrets as a condition of entering their markets. Negotiating better trade deals and enforcing the current ones would increase jobs in export industries such as agriculture and technology. Trump will also bring an Americafirst, pro-business approach to economic policy. Having someone in the White House who knows how to run a business and meet a payroll has to be a psychological lift for this battered and bruised economy.

THE POINT of this exercise isn’t to rip Trump. It’s to point out that conservatives who rightly tore Hillary Clinton apart for pay-for-play corruption and hardcore big government leftism shouldn’t grant Trump a free hand just because he leads the Republican Party. In fact, that’s the biggest mistake Republicans can make. Trump has already challenged traditional conservative standards. He’s made Republicans back off their “character matters” arguments. He’s forced Republicans to swallow anti-conservative heresies on economics (free trade is a negative; entitlements should be left alone), social issues (he thinks samesex marriage should be enshrined by the Supreme Court and praises Planned Parenthood) and foreign policy (his coziness with Russia used to be taboo). Republicans did all of this to stop Hillary Clinton. But now, Clinton has been dispatched. That means it’s time for conservatives to hold Trump accountable. There’s no longer any “better than Hillary” excuse making. It’s time for Trump to perform.

EVEN FORMER Bill Clinton campaign manager Jim Carville admitted on Tuesday night that Obamacare is Obama-Gone. It’s the fastest-growing entitlement program of all, and it will be replaced with a consumer-choice health plan. This will cut costs for families and businesses by as much as 30 percent.

THE DEMOCRATS and their gang of pundits assure us that four percent growth cannot and will not happen under President-elect Trump. But let’s not forget: These are the same geniuses who have assured us for the last year that there would never be a President Trump. Wrong again.

IT’S TOO EARLY to tell whether Trump will become a decent president. But conservatives ought to fight for something better than “not Hillary” — or else, they can simply acknowledge that they had no real objective standards for those who seek to govern other than political convenience.

hen Donald Trump said last week that he will double the American growth rate, his skeptics scoffed. The left doesn’t think four percent growth is possible, because they never came close to that target under Barack Obama. But there’s no law of nature or economics that says America is doomed to anemic growth rates. We believe that with the right policy fixes, fast growth is not just possible; it’s probable. In the 1980s, the Reagan agenda had quarterly growth rates of six, seven and even eight percent. Over the course of his administration, the nation created about two million jobs per year. Now, that’s a recovery! And Trump is right that if India and China can grow at eight to 10 percent, surely we can aspire to half that growth rate.

corporate tax rate of 15 percent would make it easier for American firms to repatriate earnings, bringing capital back to these shores. The House tax bill is similar to Trump’s. We can get this through Congress in the first 150 days. The Tax Foundation says this will add about $150 billion in higher output. Next, a pro-growth energy policy would develop all of America’s abundant resources — oil, natural gas and coal. Trump’s plan could make America the world’s No. 1 energy producer within five years, producing

FASTER GROWTH of the economy is imperative if America is to retain our world super-power status — especially given the new rivalry of fastgrowing China. This requires the new Trump plan, which will take American competitiveness seriously. Here’s how Trump will ramp up growth. First, Trump will enact the biggest pro-growth tax cut since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 reform. Trump will simplify the tax code and significantly reduce marginal rates, encouraging investment and economic expansion. His proposed

Stephen

Conservative Chronicle

CONGRESS: November 17, 2016

Draw the curtain on Dems’ theater of pointless gestures

eventeen days before President Donald Trump, his spoken oath of office still lingering in the wintry air, lifts his left hand from Scripture (a leather-bound edition of The Art of the Deal), the Republican-controlled Congress will begin working. Fittingly, on Jan. 3 the First Branch of government will go first, flexing its somewhat atrophied Article I muscles.

WHEN TRUMP reaches his desk on the morning of Jan. 21, he should find there two congressional measures emblematic of how quickly elections can have consequences. One should be the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act (REINS). The other should be legislation mandating construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. As president, Trump will have the authority and intent to proceed with construction, but Congress should make the point that this concerns national policy, which Congress should set. The REINS Act would begin Congress’s retrieval from the executive branch of responsibilities the Founders vested in the legislative branch. The act would sharply slow the growth of regulations that are suffocating economic growth. REINS would require Congress to vote on — to have its fingerprints on — all “major” regulations, understood as those with an annual economic impact of at least $100 million. Congress would thus take responsibility for, and be held accountable for, the substance that executive agencies’ rule making pours into the almost-empty vessels that Congress imprecisely calls “laws.” After the preamble, the Constitution’s first substantive word is “all:” “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress.” But the more than 170,000 pages of the Code of Federal Regulations contain tens of thousands of rules promulgated by largely unaccountable agencies. The agencies fill voids in congressional “laws” such as the Dodd-Frank financial reform, which mandates, but does not define — that is left to executive rule makers — “fair, transparent and competitive” financial products and services. As of five years ago — it is substantially worse now — the government itself estimated that regulations cost the economy more than $1.75 trillion, almost twice the sum of income tax receipts then. Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has illustrated environmentalism’s, and the Democratic Party’s, descent into the theater of pointless gestures. The nation is crisscrossed with more than two million miles of natural gas pipelines and 175,000 miles of pipelines carrying hazardous liquids. Yet our theatrically thoughtful current president wasted seven years pretending to ponder the weighty question of whether Keystone’s

vast wealth will not find another way into the international oil market. Furthermore, without Keystone XL, more oil will be transported by trains, SOME OF the oil would be from which have notable carbon footprints Canada’s tar sands. Keystone oppo- and sometimes spectacular spills. nents say such oil is especially “dirty,” Hence legislation mandating the pipeso the pipeline, by enabling the oil to line’s construction will not only creget to market, would injure the climate. ate jobs, which once upon a time was But even if the opponents’ allegations a Democratic priority, it should soothe anxieties. about the tar sands oil can be trusted, c l i m a t e So, Congress the allegations should call this are irrelevant: Keystone XL legThe opponents islation the “Zach, evidently believe We Feel Your Pain that if the pipeline (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group Act.” After the is not built, Canelection, someone ada will simply say “Oh, dang!” and leave the world’s reportedly named Zach, a Democratic third-largest proven crude oil reserve National Committee staffer, suffered — larger than Iran’s — locked up in a hilarious eruption of hysteria. In the the tar sands. The opponents evidently process of blaming DNC interim Chair think that if they block the pipeline, this Donna Brazile for the lost election 1,179 miles — bringing oil from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska — might somehow menace the nation and planet.

George

Will

(wrong woman, Zach), he said, according to The Huffington Post: “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.” WELL. SUPPOSE Zach is 30 and expects that, although he appears to be unhealthily excitable, his life expectancy is 90. If climate change subtracts 40 of Zach’s years, it is going to kill him within 20 years. Perhaps Zach can take grim pleasure from the fact that Brazile, a vigorous and cheerful 56, probably will still be spry when the Grim Climate Reaper swings his deadly scythe. Be that as it may, consider that Zach’s scary arithmetic probably represents commonplace thinking within the Democratic Party, aka “the party of science.”

BARACK OBAMA: November 19, 2016

Obama’s legacy: A story of cudda’ been

ealizing that the true public opinion of him fell far short of his personal bravissimo and overinflated opinion of himself, Obama sought to proselytize blacks to once again, hail him as worthy as the general election closed in upon him. He begged them saying: “I need you to go out and nag the heck out of folks who aren’t voting [for me]; I need you to tell them that Barack is personally asking them.” He said that he would take it as a “personal insult” to his legacy if they did not turn out and vote. IN WHAT this essayist viewed as an Erebusic form of socinianism, Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC), who is chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, opined that: “President Obama will take it as a repudiation if we, [i.e., blacks] don’t vote [for him]. We’ve got to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’ve got to protect the Obama legacy.” It was tragic to observe the person who had been received into office with godlike praise and adulation some seven years ago, now reduced to begging his former “flock” to support a wholly corrupt, diseased, barely ambulatory, incoherent, shoddy old “white” woman, so as to preserve whatever was left of his imagined legacy. A shoddy old “white” woman, whom I might add, hates the ground he walks on. It was tragic because it did not have to end this way. Obama, even though many of us despised his policies, could have in fact had a legacy that could at least be honestly debated. In reality, however, the only thing that can be de-

bated with any degree of truth is how much worse he was than President Jimmy Carter, and his wasted possibilities. As I said in one of my VideoRants titled: “Obama Could Have Been Great President.” (See: mychal-massie.com; YouTube Channel; 9/21/2016) But alas, he near single-handedly gutted the Democrat Party by costing them majorities in House and Senate, by costing Democrats governorships and by costing Democrats state level seats. He lied to the American people and looked down upon us with the contempt of a feudal lord for serfs.

Mychal

It wasn’t that Obama lied as such; he’s a politician and that is what they do — he lied and then personally boasted along with his malevolent jackals how clever they were in putting one over on We the People. Obama did it with “cash for clunkers;” those he surrounded himself with joined him in boasting of the public’s “stupidity” pursuant to the Iran deal and obamacare. HIS WIFE took usufruct to unparalleled extremes and heretofore not witnessed levels of spending and an in our face lavish lifestyle with a disregard that exceeded that for which Marie Antoinette was legendary. Obama, as I have stated numerous times, had the opportunity to end the

fractious divisiveness of race mongers. Obama had the golden scepter with which to virtually speak racial discord and the fomenters of same into oblivion. Instead he embraced and consciously increased racial animus and immiseration. Obama embraced and projected the lowest common denominator of moral propriety, all the while preening and sneering contemptuously at those he viewed as beneath him, or perhaps more accurately stated, those he viewed as his subjects. And while we can thank him for proving beyond deniability that Americans will fight cultural-Marxism and the neo-Leninist application of same to our dying breath, Hillary Clinton would have cemented said political zeitgeist. Or so Obama certainly believed, which is why he was begging blacks to vote for her. It is a truism that any life is a terrible thing to waste. Said bromide is multiplied by infinity when a life with the potential to accomplish great things and the goodwill to reset history in a positive way for generations to come, is wasted by self-indulgent vanity, contempt for civility, disregard and disrespect for those who strived to believe in him. OBAMA HAS no legacy save that of being the first “color” to hold the highest office in the world. But legitimate and truthful historians will view his time in office as a period to advance America in a positive way that was lost and squandered.

November 30, 2016 THE LEFT: November 23, 2016

The return of assassination fascination

lert the CDC: Left-wing vowed to “assassinate Trump like I’m America has been overcome (George) Zimmerman.” Inevitably, the Kill Trump mania by another contagious epidemic of assassination fascination. It’s has spread overseas. French radio host Pablo Mira reportedly gloated: “Donald time to declare a public health crisis. In San Antonio last week, two high Trump and his victory have given a hope school students performed a sicko skit in the American people — the hope that be killed even before depicting the assassination of Presi- he would his inauguration.” dent-elect Donald Trump. Where is your In Cleveland, condemnation of unhinged 24-yearthese perverted inold Zachary Bencitements to vioson tweeted his lence, President “life goal is to as(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate Obama? sassinate Trump.” Where are you, media concern trolls, The hashtag #AssassinateTrump surfaced on Twitter, along with a flood of to bemoan the anti-Trump culture of hatred and climate of intolerance? bloodthirsty death wishes. AWOL, of course. The Blame Righty Another #AssassinateTrump threat came from Atlanta public transit em- crowd that has falsely blamed random ployee Aleama Philips, who tweeted, shootings and suicides on conserva“I wish I had the balls to kill him my- tive talk radio, the tea party, right-wing self,” illustrated with a photo of Trump blogs and Fox News is nowhere to be dead and riddled with bullets. She was found when left-wing violent extremfired by the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid ism rears its ugly head. Double-standard-itis is a chronic Transit Authority last week. and recurring condition, accompanied IN SAN DIEGO, the loony (and by politically expedient amnesia. Asnow former) CEO of cybersecurity sassination chic was all the rage when firm PacketSled, Matt Harrigan, took George W. Bush took office and extendto Facebook on election night to de- ed throughout his two terms in office. clare: “I’m going to kill the president.” I remember — even if the civility and He further threatened that he was “get- tolerance police at the New York Times ting a sniper rifle and perching myself don’t. Protesters displayed signs of a dewhere it counts. Find a bedroom in the White House that suits you, [expletive]. capitated Bush gushing blood from his neck and slogans proclaiming “Bush — I’ll find you.” In the music world, rapper Rick Ross the only dope worth shooting.”

Michelle

Malkin

“KILL BUSH” T-shirts spattered with fake blood went on sale at CafePress.com. An art exhibit in Chicago featured Al Brandtner’s work titled “Patriot Act,” a sheet of mock 37-cent red, white and blue stamps showing a handgun pointed at Bush’s head. Off-Broadway play I’m Going to Kill the President led audience members in a group chant screaming, you guessed it, “I’m Going to Kill the President.” “Comedian” Rich Hall performed a public hate anthem, “Let’s get together and kill George Bush.”

Former Democratic Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear joked: “When I mention that Democrats are problem solvers, I can think of only one Republican who can be a problem solver — that is Vice President Dick Cheney (who accidentally shot a hunting companion in 2006) if he would just take George on a hunting trip.” Nicholson Baker penned “Checkpoint,” a novella conversation between two people debating assassinating President Bush with “radio-controlled flying saws” or a “remote-controlled boulder made of depleted uranium.” Sarah Vowell wrote “Assassination Vacation,” a best-selling murder travelogue of assassinated Republican presidents, in which she confessed she was so crippled by hatred of Bush that she couldn’t even write his name and admitted that her “simmering rage against the current president scares me.” Across the pond, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker lamented Bush’s election with a screed asking, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?” British docudrama Death of a President imagined the assassination of Bush by a gunman at the Chicago Sheraton hotel after an anti-war rally. And Code Pink poster woman Cindy Sheehan penned an autobiography in which she confessed her presidential murder fantasy — going back in time and killing the infant Bush in order to prevent the Iraq War. She admitted she had entertained this infanticidal fantasy “often.” FROM “KILL BUSH” to #AssassinateTrump, the naked hypocrisy of the “love and peace” left is on full display. Spare us the lectures about diversity, tolerance and safe spaces. Look in the mirror. Put down the haterade. Seek help.

Conservative Chronicle

OBAMACARE: November 23, 2016

President-elect Trump’s path to repeal

n the stump, Donald Trump Medicaid is managed. That’s urgentpromised to repeal and rely needed. Federal Medicaid spendplace the Affordable Care ing has shot up 40 percent in the last Act. Now obstacles are emerging on three years. Research shows that extra the left and right. Democrats are sow- spending is not improving health. What about the other nearly five miling panic, falsely predicting that 20 million will lose coverage. Newly elected lion newly insured? They’re in Obamplans, along with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer a c a r e another six million claims Trump who already had will “rue the day” insurance, and Obamacare is reall of them are pealed. having a tough Meanwhile, (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate time. Technically, on Trump’s right they’re “covered,” flank, House Republicans are pushing Medicare “re- but many can’t come up with the cash form” and taxes on workers’ health to see a doctor. They’re struggling with benefits — unpopular ideas that will un- exorbitant deductibles — $6,000 per dermine Trump’s political support and person for the typical bronze plan. In short, about five million previderail his agenda. ously uninsured people — not the boHERE’S THE real deal about re- gus 20 million — may need help after repeal. Trump is proposing market peal. reforms to lower costs and increase Will 20 million lose coverage? Not even close. Sixteen million of choices for consumers stuck in the inthose who gained coverage are enrolled dividual market. Will people with pre-existing condiin Medicaid, the public program for low-income residents. Obamacare al- tions lose out? No. All the GOP replacement plans lowed states to expand who could sign up for Medicaid, with the federal gov- protect them, but not through the cyniernment covering the tab. Repeal could cal, coercive scheme that Obamacare result in less federal funding. But no one used. Obama forced two groups of peois pushing to abolish the nation’s health safety net. And states that just expanded ple into the same insurance pool: The Medicaid are unlikely to do a 180 and healthy and the chronically ill. Healthy shrink it. The 16 million are likely safe. people would pay premiums but never President-elect Trump proposes meet their sky-high deductibles. Ingiving states more flexibility in how stead their premiums would foot huge

Betsy

McCaughey

medical bills for the chronically ill, who consume 10 times as much medical care. Healthy people saw it was a scam. They refused to sign up, despite the penalty. Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel says forcing the healthy to enroll is essential. SORRY. THERE’S a fairer way. Trump would allow insurers to charge ill people more, and then subsidize these “high-risk” customers with taxpayer dollars. That spreads the cost

fairly over the whole population, instead of burdening people in the individual market. Voila, premiums and deductibles will drop fast for people in the individual market. President Obama is incredulous that people think Obamacare “doesn’t work.” More than 200 million have been hurt by it. Count them: 155 million with employer-provided plans whose deductibles have soared thanks to the ACA, plus the 11 million paying ACA penalties for not enrolling, plus hundreds of thousands of part-time workers whose hours were slashed by employers dodging the mandate, and 55 million seniors harmed when Medicare funding cuts bankrolled Obamacare. Is this the time to change Medicare? No way. House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Budget Committee Chair Rep. Tom Price want Medicare “reform” this spring. But candidate Trump promised to replace Obamacare, fund infrastructure, cut taxes and fix immigration. Not change Medicare. A Medicare battle could torpedo his agenda. Remember the demagogues, who vilified Ryan in 2012 with images of granny going over the cliff in a wheelchair? Paul Ryan and Mike Price also want to cap the tax exemption on employer-provided health plans. That would betray union workers who for years have swapped raises for lavish taxfree health benefits. These workers just gave Trump his remarkable win. TRUMP MADE the election a referendum on Obamacare. Republicans in Congress need to respect the voters and make Donald Trump’s agenda the priority.

November 30, 2016 MEDIA BIAS: November 22, 2016

The tsunami the media never saw coming

’m going to take a wild guess and say that nobody in what passes for the mainstream media saw the tsunami coming, the wave of discontent that we witnessed on Election Day. I’m sure there were one or two journalists who said something like, “Of course, Trump must be taken seriously because, as we all know (ha-ha) he could win.” But I’m pretty sure that’s not what they were saying privately. And how many thought Donald Trump would win and the GOP would hang onto both the House and the Senate? I’ll be generous and say it was a number slightly greater than zero.

IT’S NO SECRET that reporters were rooting for Hillary Clinton. All that was missing were buttons on their coats saying, “I’m with her.” As Will Rahn nicely put it on the CBS News website: “Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking ‘we did it’ feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.” The media elite thought she was right when she said half of Trump supporters belonged in a basket of deplorables. They thought if his minions weren’t racist or sexist, they were, you know, not too smart. So, on Election Day, voters fed up with the arrogance of the elites didn’t only reject Hillary Clinton — or Barack Obama and his legacy, or big swatches of liberal culture in general — they also rejected the liberal media elite, the ones

who thought they were smarter and better than ordinary Americans. All of this got me thinking about something I wrote in my 2003 book, Arrogance, in a chapter entitled “Lose the Enablers”: “It’s not just a cliche. Confession really is good for the soul. So now it’s time to move on. “Literally! “Alcoholics need to smash the bottle. Druggies need to flush their stuff down the toilet. And the media elites need to leave New York City. Simple as that!” I went on to say, “There are too many enablers in New York, too many liberals whom the media elites are shamelessly trying to please.” And the enablers, I wrote, “keep telling their friends that they don’t have a bias problem, that they’re doing just fine, that only those right-wing nuts think there’s a liberal bias problem in the news.” So what to do? Here’s what I suggested: “I have come up with a list of five very nice places in this great country of ours, any one of which would be a good choice for ABC, NBC and CBS to locate their new worldwide news division headquarters, far from New York City.” I suggested, Tupelo, Mississippi, or Mitchel, South Dakota, or Oklahoma City, or Indianapolis, or Laughlin, Nevada. I could have picked a hundred different cities and towns. The places I settled on mattered only because they were not New York City or Washington, D.C.

I UNDERSTAND that the sophisticates who populate America’s liberal newsrooms would rather drink battery acid and walk on shards of broken glass before they’d live in any of those places. But in Arrogance I asked: “Wouldn’t it be a good thing for the elites to live among people who have a different worldview than they do? Wouldn’t it be helpful if the elites sent their children to public school with the children of people who work at the (Mitchell, South Dakota) Corn Palace or the Oklahoma Opry or at Don Laughlin’s casino (in Nevada)? What is so wrong with that? Are they afraid their

kids will get cooties if they sit next to ‘regular’ kids? And while we’re on the subject, why would it be any worse than what we have now: Elite parents sending their elite children to school with the elite children of other elite parents? “What kind of diversity is that?” Living in any of those places between Manhattan and Malibu would make them better journalists, I wrote. “Too many newsmen and newswomen don’t know the kinds of people who live in places like that.” In any of those places, journalists would be exposed to people with different views — on abortion, on guns, on how to deal with terrorism and on a lot of other hot issues of our time. Right now, too many journalists live in a comfortable, elite, liberal bubble where they can go for a day, a week, a month, a year ... and just about never run into someone with a different opinion on the thorniest issues confronting our country. That’s not good for journalism, and it’s why journalists didn’t understand what Trump was tapping into. The people he was attracting, by and large, weren’t elites living in the bubble journalists knew best. They were ordinary Americans trying to get by. I was a correspondent at CBS News for 28 years. So I speak with some credibility, I think, when I say that too many journalists are smug. And during this recent campaign, they dismissed the angst of ordinary Americans who they never really liked or respected anyway. And on Election Day, ordinary Americans rejected them, the journalists who didn’t see the tsunami coming. IF THEY were living in Tupelo, maybe they would have. This column was written by Bernard Goldberg.

Conservative Chronicle

PBS DOCUMENTARY: November 22, 2016

Race relations: Black America Since MLK

hat race continues to be a plores viewers to listen to their legitimate major source of anxiety and expressions of sadness and anger at not division in America is an un- being treated as human beings equal to deniable fact. While some politicians all other human beings. These programs continue to use race to divide, Harvard invite blacks and whites to a table of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is trying conversation, not confrontation. It is in again to bridge the gap in his latest PBS listening to each other and our differing riences that we create documentary series Black America Since life expethe best atmosphere MLK. for bridging the raAs a conservacial divide. tive white person, In conversation, what I like about as Oprah Winfrey this program and (c) 2016, Tribune Media Services says, “you are able Gates’ previous to connect to the programs is that he doesn’t judge or preach. He lets facts heart of somebody.” When you are able and people speak for themselves. Many to connect with someone’s heart you whites do not understand the African- connect with a real person that has nothAmerican struggle, because they have ing to do with the color of their skin, but not lived it. They should listen to the sto- rather, as Dr. King said, the content of their character. ries.

Cal

Thomas

OPRAH WINFREY quotes Jesse Jackson as saying, “Excellence is the best deterrent to racism.” Who could disagree with that? The story that gripped my heart most is told by Ronald Day, a man who grew up in the projects and dropped out of high school because he saw no future for himself. Day turned to selling drugs and made a lot of money before he was eventually caught. He served 15 years in prison. A legitimate point is made that blacks go to prison more often than whites for selling basically the same drug — crack cocaine in mostly urban areas, powdered cocaine in middle- and upperclass neighborhoods. The program notes that between 1983 and 1997, the number of African-Americans incarcerated for drug crimes grew by 2,000 percent, more than six times the rate of increase for white Americans. While I wish there had been more conservative African-American voices in the series — I’ve heard enough from Cornel West, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton whose perspectives are familiar — we do hear the Rev. Calvin Butts denouncing the misogyny and language of rap music and businessman Armstrong Williams noting that African-Americans have let government “overtake their lives,” unlike, he says, the Jewish community, whose members look out for one another. GATES ENDS the program by asking: “Were the problems we faced really of our own making, or were they part of the unfinished business that the civil rights movement never had a chance to resolve?” The answer is both, which is not a contradiction. African-Americans may now be open to listening to new voices. One indication of that is that Donald Trump won seven percent more of the black vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012. What I like about Gates is his gentle nature. He draws people out and im-

WATCH THIS program and check your local listings for time and date, especially if you are a white conservative. You can also go to PBS.org and see the

entire series. It is worth your time. Gates is making a valuable contribution to race relations in America. Who doesn’t consider that a worthy and necessary goal?

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: November 21, 2016

Leslie’s Trivia Bits

he Caribbean island nation of Dominica is the only country with a parrot on its national flag. Specifically, it’s a Sisserou parrot, an endangered species found only in the rainforests of Dominica. The flag was designed in 1978 when Dominica became independent from the United Kingdom. At the time, the purple-breasted parrot had its back to the flagpole. Ten years later, the parrot was turned to face the flagpole, which is how it stands today.

DURING HER 66-day journey aboard the Mayflower in 1620, Elizabeth Hopkins gave birth to a son. She named the baby Oceanus, which seems appropriate for a baby born at sea. Shortly after the pilgrims arrived in New England, Susanna White gave birth to a son she named Peregrine, from the Latin for traveler. Telling males from females in a group of pilgrim geese is easy to do. Males are born with yellow to silvergray feathers and orange bills. As adults they’re pure white. Females are born with gray feathers and brown bills that turn orange as the bird matures. Adult females are gray with a sprinkling of white around the eyes. What’s harder to determine is where pilgrim geese come from. Popular legend says they arrived with the pilgrims from England, but it’s more likely pilgrim geese were developed by an American poultry breeder in the 1930s. In a historical account from Pliny the Elder, Cleopatra bets Marc Antony that she can serve the most expensive meal imaginable. When he agrees to the wager, she presents a huge banquet. Then

for dessert, she orders a cup of vinegar, into which she drops one of her priceless pearl earrings. The pearl dissolves, and she drinks the vinegar, thereby winning the bet. Pearls are made of calcium carbonate, the active ingredient in Rolaids and Tums. So, if that ancient story is true, Cleopatra washed down her feast with the world’s most expensive antacid. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison once remarked on the dearth of monuments commemorating the lives of enslaved people in the United States. Not even a “bench by the road,” she said. And that was the impetus for the Toni Morrison Society’s Bench By the Road Proj-

Leslie

ect, which places black steel memorial benches at sites of significance in black American history. The first was installed in 2008 at Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, the landing point for nearly half the captured Africans who were sold into slavery in the United States. AT THE FIRST modern Olympic games in Athens in 1896, Germany’s Carl Schuhmann competed in four separate disciplines -- gymnastics, athletics, weightlifting and Greco-Roman wrestling -- and went home with four top prizes, three in gymnastics and one in wrestling. His career in competitive gymnastics continued right up to the 1936 Berlin games where, at age 66, he took part in a gymnastics exhibition.

TRIVIA 1. Doctor Dolittle’s parrot shares what name with a Pacific Island location? A) Caroline B) Marshall C) Polynesia D) Yap 2. Which ship attempted to sail with the Mayflower to the New World in 1620? A) Mary Rose B) Speedwell C) Susan Constant D) Valiant 3. The Franklin, the Reeve and the Miller are pilgrim characters in what written work? A) The Canterbury Tales B) The Mayflower Compact C) Perceval, the Story of the Grail D) The Pilgrim’s Progress 4. Grand Ole Opry star Minnie Pearl wore a straw hat with what dangling from the brim? A) Fruit B) Guitar picks C) A price tag D) Ribbons 5. Ratified in December 1865, which amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery? A) 13th B) 15th C) 18th D) 21st 6. Which novelist was named an “Outstanding American” by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame? A) Ernest Hemingway B) John Irving C) Joyce Carol Oates D) John Updike” (aonswers on page 19)

November 30, 2016 BARACK OBAMA: November 18, 2016

Barack Obama’s disconnects and delusions

resident Obama, in Greece, George W. Bush for his own lackluster said world leaders should learn economy and unconscionable deficits from the U.S. presidential elec- in the latter half of his first term. It was tion and pay attention to the public’s amazing that he kept making this argufears and frustration about the economy. ment with a straight face through the Why? He never has. 2012 presidential election. How can a man living in such a fanBut why not? It worked. When tasy world presume to tell other people you’ve got a liberal media covering how to perceive others and react to y o u r tracks and slanting problems as if everything in your he’s been an infavor, you can apnocent bystander parently fool milwitnessing these lions. horrors for years? But Obama (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate Scratch that. is still making He doesn’t think we’ve experienced the same arguments today after eight horrors. He thinks the U.S. economy straight years of malaise. So how did he has been wonderful under his watch. fight against the worst recession since Listening to him characterize his eight- the Great Depression? Well, he spent year record is to witness willful blind- money we didn’t have like a drunken ness on a scale my willing suspension sailor, increased taxes and smothering of disbelief is incapable of processing. regulations, bad-mouthed entrepreneurship and producers, and vilified THE AMERICAN economy, said the “wealthy” for not paying their fair Obama, was contracting faster than it share. did during the Great Depression. “We How did that work out? Contrary had to fight back from the worst reces- to his bizarre self-assessment, we have sion since the Great Depression. ... But had the worst economic recovery in we were able to intervene, apply lessons 60 years. So he’s bragging about that? learned and stabilize and then begin We’ve had a stagnant economy his engrowth again.” He tastelessly bragged, tire tenure in office, and he is touting it in front of his Greek audience, that his as sustained growth? Of course he is, economy recovered better and faster and the media continue to cover for him. than most of Europe’s. Then he began He talks about the unemployment critiquing Greece’s economy, as if he is rate’s going down, but this obscures the a wizard of economics. reality that tens of millions have opted No American politician — and cer- out of the workforce in despair. The metainly no president — in my lifetime has dia know that the unemployment figure caused such destruction and suffered is meaningless when factoring in the laso little personal accountability for it. bor participation rate. Whether Obama It was ridiculous when he still blamed is able to accept it, given what this

David

Limbaugh

knowledge would do to his unreflective try,” he says, “is indisputably better off, ego, is debatable. and those folks who voted for the president-elect are better off than they were OBAMA COVERS his bases. He when I came into office, for the most gets to have his cake and keep it, too, part.” and, if you haven’t noticed, he remains But here was the punchline: “Peoskinny. He tells us the economy’s great; ple,” he said, “seem to think I did a then he kind of says it isn’t. Other- pretty good job. And so there is this miswise, why would he still have to blame match, I think, between frustration and Dubya? Why would he have to blame anger. Perhaps the view of the American the recent election results on an angry people is that (we) just need to shake populace? Why would he say, “The things up.” problem was I couldn’t convince the Well, if there’s any mismatch or disRepublican Congress to pass a lot of connect here, it’s Obama’s perception of (my agenda items)”? What problem? I his performance and reality. His narcisthought things were rosy. sism makes him allergic to self-doubt, You see, he thinks the main economic and his dogged ideology and oversize problem we face is income inequality. pride preclude him from admitting his He thinks people are angry because oth- failures. ers are making more money than they This same ideology compels him to do and so they had a temper tantrum and project onto others his own prejudices. elected Donald Trump. But hasn’t there He has been saying since before he was always been income inequality? Isn’t elected that “bitter” Bible toters who that guaranteed in a free system? But if “cling to guns” in small-town America the people are inconsolable with envy, are just suspicious of people who don’t that might have something to do with look like them. But that’s offensively Obama’s constant harping on it, railing false. He is the one who always has race against the rich. on his mind, and he’s a virtuoso of bitNope. The hoi polloi are just restless; terness. there’s nothing to see here. “The counRemember when his Homeland Security Department was on the lookout for returning military personnel and tea party types, rather than Islamists, as possible domestic terrorists? Pro tip: These peace-loving, ordinary, patriotic Americans have had their fill of his attacks on their traditions, their worldview and their lifestyle. They sent that message resoundingly in the congressional elections in 2010 and 2014, yet he escaped accountability with his own re-election in 2012. Another frightful disconnect. But there can be no mistaking this year’s election results. The people’s rejection of his agenda and Hillary Clinton is so severe that we are seeing a major restructuring of the electorate. He, his media co-conspirators and the liberal punditry can blame Clinton’s flaws for this, and they are indeed part of it, but Obama’s leftist agenda got shellacked up and down the ticket and in state elections throughout the country. THIS WAS NOT a glitch; this is a wave. And the longer he and his cohorts remain in denial about it the more it will grow. That, my friends, is a beautiful thing.

November 30, 2016

After the earthquake, the tsunamis

ny severe earthquake can be tanite Marxists, coddled academics and devastating. When one hits in “hate-AmeriKKKa first” Occupy Wall just the right location, the tsu- Streeters. It was only a matter of time benamis that follow can wreak even more fore voters — you know, those “my-family-has-voted-Democrat-for-generations” havoc. So it is for the Democratic Party fol- voters — noticed. In 2016, they noticed. lowing last week’s presidential election. And they finally said, “Enough.” If the Democrats want to start winning Reliably left institutions — academia, the entertainment industry, the press, elections again, here’s a little unsolicited pollsters — were completely blindsided; advice: 1. Stop calling people names. none saw it coming. You can’t rally people you profess to I know, I know — they were all living yes, it’s pretty obvious in an “echo chamber,” as others have not- hate. And, that the hard-core ed. Even so, this left hates a lot of is inscrutable. It’s people. Hillary like living on the Clinton’s “basket San Andreas Fault of deplorables” and pretending (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate comment set off that “the big one” can never happen. Meanwhile, electoral such a firestorm because it summed up “temblors” have been rattling the politi- so succinctly what everyone to the right cal landscape for the past few years: The of Che Guevara has been subjected to rise of the tea party, the 2010 and 2014 for years. This is one of those foreshocks elections that gave Republicans both that should have tipped you off that a sea houses of Congress. And the states — oh, change was coming. Americans are tired the states! Republicans now control 32 of being called racists, sexists, bigots, state legislatures and hold 33 governor- xenophobes, homophobes and haters beships, including in bluest-of-blue Minne- cause they disagree with you on policy. You lost because you didn’t listen. And sota and Illinois. how do you respond? By demonizing 60 THE SAME class of people who’ve million people. This suggests that you been declaring the Republican Party still prefer to ignore facts in favor of “nar“dead” since Barack Obama was elected rative” (Rolling Stone, call your lawyers), are now wailing that the Democrat Party and that you’re weak on substance. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in your is finished. Wrong then, wrong now. But, as is the political acumen. 2. Stop blaming people for things they case with the GOP, a big chunk of Demohaven’t done. crat voters have sent a strong message. It should follow from the above, but Frankly, the Democratic Party leadership went off the rails years ago, when just in case it doesn’t: People don’t like to it stopped listening to farmers, factory be accused of things they didn’t do. We’ve moved from “discrimination,” workers, military folks and other middleclass Americans, and embraced Manhat- meaning conduct, to “racism,” meaning

Laura

Hollis

attitude, to “systemic racism” — meaning whatever the left wants it to. It’s as if there aren’t enough individuals who are actually engaging in reprehensible conduct, so those whose political livelihoods depend upon finding grievances need something new to be pi--ed off about. Et voila! “Privilege” to the rescue! It was a perfect political tool; it was incapable of being refuted, as refutations only proved culpability. How could it fail? UNTIL IT DID. Smearing all people of European heritage was a one-way ticket to Epic Failureland. You shouldn’t be surprised that voters pushed back. And, no, they weren’t all white, either. 3. Stop using the government as a bludgeon. It used to be the goal of Democrats to persuade fellow Americans about the rightness of their causes. They had great success in the early 20th century with

labor conditions, wages and civil rights for minorities. But the sexual revolution seems to have been a turning point. For the past few decades, Democrats and social activists have tried to use the government to force people not only to tolerate things with which they disagreed, but to pay for them, to promote them and even to participate in them, or else be publicly destroyed. For a political party that professes its love of diversity, the Democrats seem not to be able to grasp the implications of a very diverse country of nearly 330 million people. So here’s a word to the wise: You are never — EVER — going to force everyone to approve of your sexual conduct, your divorce(s), your extramarital affair(s), your college hookup(s), your abortion(s), your homosexual or bisexual or pansexual or ecosexual or whateverelse-sexual thing you happen to dig. And they shouldn’t have to. In other words, fine, do your own thing. But stop pushing for ever-larger and more intrusive government to advance your social engineering goals at the expense of our civil liberties. Most of us don’t care what you do; don’t give us a reason to. And, relatedly ... 4. Embrace the Constitution. Look who’s discovered the benefits of checks and balances! It’s amazing, isn’t it, how contemporary events reinforce the brilliance of the Founders? Now do you understand the benefits of a smaller federal government? Why the limits on the Executive Branch matter? Why one party shouldn’t cram unpopular legislation down everyone’s throats? The Constitution is the set of rules that apply to everyone. That’s what ensures that fair play — and fair government — remains fair. DO I THINK that the Democrats will heed this, or any other advice? It’s too early to tell. But it’s a safe bet that if they don’t, the disasters will keep on coming. November 17, 2016

This Week’s Conservative Focus

Democrats

The not-yet-emerging Democratic majority

leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer book, America Ascendant, thoughtfulhave held party or elective office since ly elaborated on this theme. But a vulgarized version of this the 1970s and interned in Sen. Daniel many Democrats — Brewster’s office in the 1960s. Sen- idea got apparently including ate leader Chuck the high command Schumer was of Hillary Clinelected to the New ton’s campaign in York Assembly in Brooklyn, New 1974, when whip (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate York — thinkDick Durbin was ing that an eternal already a congresDemocratic majority would be a dead sional staffer. The Democrats’ plight is all the certainty. Between 9 and 10 o’clock more poignant because up to election Eastern time on election night, it benight, many of them believed that the came clear that this was, in the title of future would be forever theirs — and Trende’s shrewd analysis, “the god that failed.” with some reason. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis’ 2002 NOW IT’S beginning to seem posbook, The Emerging Democratic Majority, pointed the way, predicting that sible that Barack Obama’s two electorblacks, Hispanics and single women al majorities were an exception to the would produce increasing Democratic rule. In 2008, when Republican foreign margins over time. National Journal’s and domestic policies seemed in ruins, ITS CONGRESSIONAL leaders Ronald Brownstein and Democratic Obama gave Americans the chance to are able but getting on in years. House pollster Stanley Greenberg, in his 2015 do something many had been longing hat is to become of the Democratic Party? The world’s oldest political party, which traces its roots to 1792, is in as dire straits as it has ever been. It has lost a presidential election most of its followers expected to win. It failed to win a Senate majority, gaining just two seats in a year when it had nearly a dozen plausible targets. Its minimal gain in the House leaves it with just about as few House seats as it has controlled since the 1920s. It holds only 18 governorships and fully controls, through governorships and legislative majorities, only five state governments — giant California, midsize Oregon and small Hawaii, Delaware and Rhode Island. The total party strength index calculated by Sean Trende and David Byler at RealClearPolitics has them at their lowest point since 1930.

Michael

Barone

We won, you lost, deal with it

hree years ago when Republicans were battling President Obama over the debt ceiling and a government shutdown, the president said, “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election.” That is what Republicans did on Nov. 8. In addition to winning the presidential election, Republicans also maintained majorities in the House and Senate and now have 33 governorships and 32 state legislatures under GOP control. It was a consequential repudiation of the farleft policies of the Democratic Party. To paraphrase Mr. Obama: Republicans won, Democrats lost, now deal with it.

DEMOCRATS ARE having a hard time dealing with it and so instead of examining why they and their policies were so roundly rejected, they have decided to take a familiar path. They are smearing newly named White House counselor and chief strategist Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, as an anti-Semite and bigot with little or no evidence, other than guilt by association for incendiary articles posted on Breitbart.com when he was chairman. In other overreaction to the election results, some despondent lefties have announced their intention to continue violating the law when it comes to illegal aliens. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who can’t control the shooting gallery

his city has become, has said Chicago will continue to be a sanctuary city for any and all people who broke federal immigration laws. He joins the mayors of New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and more than two dozen other cities and towns who have made similar declarations, thus violating federal law and their oaths of office to defend the federal and state constitutions, which state that lawmakers,

Cal

not mayors (or presidents, or judges) are the ones who pass laws. WASHINGTON, D.C., radio talk show host Chris Plante has a good idea to counter this lawlessness. On his program Tuesday, Plante said that if an illegal immigrant in a sanctuary city commits a crime, especially murder, the mayor of that city should be prosecuted by the Justice Department as an accessory. The Trump administration should also announce it will withhold federal funds for any city that harbors people who broke immigration laws to get here. Billionaire globalist George Soros met in Washington this week with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to plot strategy for how to stop Trump.

Here’s how a story in Politico put it: “George Soros and other rich liberals who spent tens of millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton are gathering in Washington for a three-day, closed-door meeting to retool the bigmoney left to fight back against Donald Trump.” That was wasted money given the outcome. In business, if your strategy isn’t working, you change the strategy. In liberal politics, it’s like a cult. You believe despite any and all evidence that proves your beliefs wrong. The left and angry Democrats believe and behave as if government is their property and when Republicans win they are stealing merchandise that doesn’t belong to them. In their efforts to kneecap Trump before he takes office, they will again rely on the big media as their ally. Except it didn’t work during the campaign and it won’t work now because the public’s trust in news organizations is at a record low. THE DANGER for Democrats and the left is that the very same “angry white voters” they alienated during the campaign might be driven even further away, if they won’t even allow Trump to take office and have the traditional honeymoon period to see if his ideas can be implemented and whether they work. That can only mean more Republican victories in the future. Deal with it! November 17, 2016

to do for years: Elect a black president, a landmark in our history. But the Obama coalition turned out to be too heavily clustered to be easily replicated in an election decided by electoral votes and much too heavily clustered to make the party competitive in congressional and legislative elections conducted in equal-population districts. Clinton’s campaign blithely assumed that rallying “people of color” and millennials would produce victory. They didn’t figure that Midwestern non-college-educated whites, who had long voted Democratic as a bloc, wouldn’t be dazzled by Lady Gaga concerts. The Democrats’ initial reflex seems to be to lurch further left. Schumer joined Bernie Sanders in backing Rep. Keith Ellison as Democratic national chairman. Ellison may be articulate and charming, but he’s also a Muslim representing a Minneapolis district that went 73 percent for Obama in 2012. Back in 2007, he said the 9/11 attacks were “almost like the Reichstag fire” in that they enabled a leader to “have authority to do whatever he wanted.” That sounds uncomfortably close to 9/11 trutherism and equating George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler. It’s not likely to win votes for Democrats in Wright County, 40 miles outside Ellison’s district, where Hubert Humphrey had a lakefront home and Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton 62-29 percent. A party with a leftist national chairman and congressional leaders from Brooklyn and San Francisco is not ideally positioned to appeal to voters where Clinton fell short. Exit polls showing Republican improvement among blacks, Hispanics and Asians suggest regression to the mean — with people considered minorities behaving more like the national average. The results also suggest that when you keep telling white Americans that they soon will become a minority — a message that sometimes sounds like “hurry up and die” — then many non-college-educated “deplorables” may start acting like members of a self-conscious minority and vote more cohesively against your side. THE ELECTION results certainly don’t guarantee an eternal Trump Republican majority. Trump’s margin was thin, and it’s reversible if events turn out badly or policies fail. But the results also suggest that the arrival of a leftist “ascendant” Democratic majority is not inevitable, either. The polarized partisan patterns familiar for two decades have been shaken up this year — and not, so far, to Democrats’ advantage. November 22, 2016

Conservative Chronicle

REPUBLICANS: November 17, 2016

Trump’s transition in disarray, but GOP is soaring

resident-elect Donald Trump’s efforts to staff a new government aren’t going as smoothly as he’d hoped on Election Day. Problems include reports of purges of key figures in his camp whose full loyalty to Trump have been questioned, including the ouster of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie from the chairmanship of his transition team.

cial on the transition team said he had been ruled out because he lacked any diplomatic experience. As Trump proceeds to choose the people who will head and run the departments, agencies, bureaus and offices of his administration, one worrisome characteristic emerges: With few exceptions, there is no big foot on his frequently changing list of nominees. If we learned anything from his canFORMER REP. Mike Rogers, R- didacy throughout the course of this Mich., has been pushed out of his post year’s campaign, Trump is not someone as the transition team’s national security who surrounds himself with high-level adviser, the result of what were termed p o l i c y specialists, as have “perceived ties past candidates who to Christie.” The won the presidency. former chairman Ronald Reagan’s of the House Insenior campaign telligence Comadvisers went on (c) 2016, United Media Services mittee was the to occupy major fourth transition figure who has left in posts in his administration and were the past week. He had been considered a known for their experience in statecraft, top candidate for secretary of state, but national security, domestic policy and is now said to be an unlikely choice. thorny fiscal matters. Trump, on the othSimilarly, Tennessee Sen. Bob Cork- er hand, appears to have lowered the bar er, who chairs the prestigious Foreign on many of his pending appointments. Relations Committee, was considered a Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a possible candidate for secretary of state, loyalist in his inner circle of advisers, but is now said to be off the list. was said to be on the short list for secreThere have been other troubling tary of defense. But this week the Washsigns in Trump’s bumpy appointment ington Post said that “Senate confirmaprocess where frontrunners for high- tion of Flynn, who also voiced interest level jobs simply lack the background in serving as director of national intelfor such positions. ligence, could be difficult. Former New York City mayor Ru“He was forced out as director of the dolph Giuliani was said to be in the run- Defense Intelligence Agency after two ning for secretary of state, but an offi- years over concerns about his leader-

Donald

Lambro

ship, and he has potentially problematic connections to foreign governments,” the Post reported. Other internal factors are making observers increasingly nervous about the kind of people Trump has elevated in his post-campaign team. Nearly two weeks after his election, the two top people in his chain of command are his new chief of staff, Reince Priebus, a longtime political operative who runs the Republican National Committee, and Stephen Bannon, the fiery nationalist provocateur who ran the controversial Breitbart News website, and who now, apparently, will be chief strategist in the White House. TIME WILL tell what kind of people Trump will choose to run the executive branch, but thus far, the list is shaping up to be, shall we say, underwhelming. What is overwhelming, however, and has largely been underplayed by the national news media, is the size of the GOP’s nationwide election victory last week.

When Trump is sworn into office in January, Republicans will control not only the executive branch of government, but also both houses of Congress, the majority of the nation’s governors, and nearly 70 percent of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers. In due time, Republicans will effectively win control of the Supreme Court, too, when the GOP’s Senate majority is likely to confirm Trump’s nominee to the high court next year to fill the vacancy left by the late Antonin Scalia. Republicans will control the Senate by a slim 52-to-48-seat margin, the House by a muscular 241 seats, and 33 out of the 50 governorships. While the state legislatures do not receive much, if any, national media attention, the GOP’s mushrooming political strength in the nation’s state capitals is a bullish sign of the party’s political future. The state legislatures are the effective training grounds for future gubernatorial and congressional candidates and, perhaps, presidential contenders, too. According to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), Republicans will now control more legislatures “than at any other time in the history of the Republican Party.” “They also hold more total seats, well over 4,100 of the 7,383, than they have since 1920,” the NCSL said. What this means in terms of the GOP’s future political power cannot be overstated. “In 24 of the 32 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, voters have also elected Republican governors, compared to only six states for the Democrats,” the NCSL reported. To a large extent, this is the political legacy of Barack Obama’s unpopular eight-year presidency. “Since Obama won in 2009, his party has lost 919 state legislative seats nationwide,” the NCSL said. So Obama leaves office with his national party in ruins, an economy that has all but stopped growing, a broken government in need of a complete overhaul, and the GOP in full control of the levers of power. WE WILL soon learn whether Trump, a TV reality star and wealthy rent collector, is up to the many tough challenges he will now face over the next four years.

November 30, 2016 DEAR MARK: November 18, 2016

Suck it up buttercup — life isn’t fair “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” — Franklin Roosevelt “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall.” — Ronald Reagan “Suck it up buttercup.” — Bobby Kaufman Iowa State Representative Bobby Kaufman is my new hero. Kaufman proposed a bill nicknamed the “suck it up buttercup” bill, which basically limits funding to Iowa universities that spend additional funds on “election related grief.” Or as Representative Kaufman calls it ‘coddling students.”

TRUMP’S DEFEAT of Hillary Clinton brought out the wimpiest of wimpy reactions from the non-Trumpers. Protests and riots have erupted across the country because people weren’t happy with the election results. East and West coast workers called in sick. Celebrities posted tearful videos on the internet expressing their fear and grief over the Trump win. People are wearing safety pins to show others they are “safe” meaning they didn’t vote for Trump and therefore they’re not racist, xenophobic homophobes. Fragile collegians ran for the nearest campus safe spaces and petting zoos to process how “hate” could win and how a wonderful woman like Hillary could possibly lose to a Neanderthal like Trump. Iowa State student body president Cole Staudt who opposes Kaufman’s bill showed exactly why this legislation is needed when he said “It’s about the message he’s sending, that our students’ feelings aren’t important. If we need to spend more money making sure our students feel safe going to class, absolutely I think we should be doing it.”

Feelings, really? Cry me a river Mr. Student Body President and all the other buttercups and snowflakes wasting time protesting the election results. Feeling “safe” at school or at work is about reasonable accommodation for physical safety not providing puppies and excused absences because you’re afraid a phony boogie man created by liberal politicians, academia and the media is going to steal the rights of anyone who isn’t a straight white American.

Mark

TODAY, COLLEGE campuses are the safest places in the country for the free expression of ideas unless of course they’re conservative ideas. You don’t see College Republicans scribbling in coloring books for therapy or whining about “safe spaces.” Doesn’t Mr. Staudt realize that this wimpy politically correct attitude is one of the reasons Donald Trump won the election in the first place? I’m no burly frontiersman but somehow I managed to make it through high school when Carter defeated Ford. I didn’t call into work “vulnerable” when Clinton defeated both Bush and Dole. I didn’t smash windows the day after McCain lost to Obama and I certainly didn’t seek the companionship of a puppy when Obama was re-elected over Romney. I just kept doing the only thing conservatives know how to do and that was to continue my faith in God and keep working to provide for my family. I also worked my tail off utilizing our Democracy to peacefully change the leaders in our government.

As a result of the coddling Representative Kaufman refers to, millennials as well as full grown liberals believe the narrative they themselves created which is: If you disagree with President Obama, it’s racism. If you want strong borders, it’s xenophobia. If you believe marriage is between one man and one woman it’s homophobia. If you didn’t vote for Mrs. Bill Clinton, it’s misogyny. If you believe men should only use the men’s restroom, it’s anti-LGBT. If you want better international trade deals for the United States, it’s jingoism. Finally liberals believe if you voted for Trump you must be all of these to the nth degree. Hillary supporters are too gullible to understand that this liberal narrative was created simply to divide the country and portray conservatives as “deplorables” all in the name of votes. I understand not too many liberals live in reality but the truth is this: Hate and racism didn’t win this election. There was a clear difference in political policies between the two and Trump’s policies won. LIFE ISN’T fair snowflakes. You might lose a job or be outbid on your dream home. Your mate might leave you or you might lose a promotion. Starbucks might run out of soy milk or your television bachelor chooses the wrong bachelorette. And sometimes a corrupt, overly entitled, bitter woman loses a presidential election. So suck it up buttercups. E-mail your questions to marklevy92@aol.com. Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkPLevy

CONTACT INFORMATION Individual Contact Information Fields - suzannefields2000@gmail.com 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, David Harsanyi, Laura Hollis, Terry Jeffrey, Larry Kudlow, David Limbaugh, Dick Morris, William Murchison, Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell 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) Doctor Dolittle owned a parrot named Polynesia. 2) The Speedwell set sail with the Mayflower to the New World in 1620 but had to turn back for repairs. 3) The Franklin, the Reeve and the Miller are characters in The Canterbury Tales. 4) Minnie Pearl’s famous straw hat had a $1.98 price tag dangling from the brim. 5) The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. 6) Novelist and wrestling coach John Irving was named an “Outstanding American” by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

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Conservative Chronicle

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT: November 22, 2016

Trump assembles his ‘dream cabinet’

resident-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General was perhaps the finest Cabinet pick of any president in the last half-century. Senator Sessions will bring muchneeded enforcement of our immigration laws to the Department of Justice. The perfect encore would be Kris Kobach to head the Department of Homeland Security. Currently serving as Secretary of State in Kansas, Kobach has been a conservative leader on immigration and other issues for more than a decade and served on the Republican platform committee every convention since 2008, adding strong language for Second Amendment rights. . THIS YEAR Kobach was credited with inserting a provision into the platform to build a wall along our southern border with Mexico, as Trump repeatedly promised. Instead of milquetoast language about electronic monitoring, the platform calls for a physical barrier on our southern border. On Sunday, the athletic-looking Kobach met with Trump amid the rolling hills in New Jersey, and Kobach was evidently loaded with fabulous ideas for real immigration reform. A photographer caught a glimpse of how prepared Kobach was, by snapping a picture that happened to include a portion of Kobach’s detailed, typewritten agenda for his nearly hour-long meeting with Trump. Thanks to high-resolution photography, we can see that Kobach’s agenda for

Homeland Security began with “extreme vetting for high-risk aliens; question them about support for Sharia law” and continued with “reduce intake of Syrian refugees to zero.” Reinstatement of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) would insure that “all aliens from high-risk areas are tracked.” Also visible in Kobach’s written plan was a promise to deport a “record number of criminal aliens in the first year” and to begin a “rapid build” of the border wall. He would also “draft amendments to National Voter Registration Act” allowing states to require proof of citizenship from persons registering to vote. Kobach was long a favorite of Phyllis Schlafly, who had him speak at her conferences and arranged to file legal briefs in defense of his laws against illegal aliens. Kobach’s proactive approach to reversing illegal immigration makes him the ideal candidate for the Cabinetlevel position of Secretary of Homeland Security. Kobach, aged 50, has a prodigious intellect and limitless energy that would boost Trump’s entire Cabinet. In addition to immigration, Kobach is also an expert on voting laws, which would be immensely helpful to the new Department of Justice as it unwinds Obama Administration policies in blocking state-initiated election reforms. Kobach and Phyllis Schlafly were visionaries in sounding the alarm bells about the harm caused by immigration long before the issue tipped the balance in a presidential election. Kobach even

wrote some of the ordinances used by cities to push back against an overwhelming influx of illegal immigration that burdened their schools, hospitals and law enforcement. THERE ARE more than 41 million immigrants in the United States today, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Immigrants vote for the Democratic Party in astronomical percentages, often using ballots printed in their own foreign languages to do so. Los Angeles County alone has an immigrant population of 3.4 million people, and Hillary Clinton racked up one of her largest margins of victory there. Liberals

criticize Donald Trump for not winning the popular vote, but votes by immigrants in California using foreign language ballots should not dictate who the president will be for the other 49 states that reject California’s embrace of sanctuary cities. Immigrants voted the American hero Sheriff Joe Arpaio out of office in Maricopa County, which has one of the largest immigrant populations in our entire country. The shifting demographics in this traditionally Republican county gave Trump only a three-point margin of victory, where just four years earlier Mitt Romney won the county by 11 points. The long-term plan of liberals is to turn Arizona and Texas into “blue” states based on massive immigration that votes Democratic. Arizona nearly went for Hillary Clinton this year, while Texas voted for Trump by a smaller margin than other conservative states. Trump was elected to halt such political manipulation, and he could not have picked a finer Attorney General than Jeff Sessions. Senator Sessions will bring much-needed integrity to the office, and should discontinue the overheated litigation that the Obama Administration was pursuing at taxpayer expense to advance the Leftist agenda. AS A SPECTACULAR one-two punch against the Establishment, Kobach would be the perfect choice to head Homeland Security or join the Cabinet in another capacity. By chance he met Phyllis Schlafly one last time at the Cleveland airport as they were leaving the Republican convention, and she would have been thrilled for him to join Trump’s Cabinet. John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6.

November 30, 2016 IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT: November 21, 2016

NSEERS and the Muslim registry that wasn’t

he first thing to know about Reuters. Kobach noted that the adminDonald Trump’s alleged pro- istration might reinstate a Bush-era proposal for a Muslim registry is gram tracking visitors to the U.S. from countries with active terrorist threats. that it isn’t a Muslim registry. This has been lost in a freak-out that This suggestion was spun into a first has some brave souls already promis- step toward herding our Muslim neighinternment camps. ing acts of civil disobedience to disrupt bors into Kobach was reand overwhelm ferring to the Nathe prospective tional Security registry. The conEntry-Exit Registratroversy tells us tion System, or much more about (c) 2016, King Features Syndicate NSEERS, which how the media placed special rewill cover the Trump administration — i.e., through quirements on adult male visitors from the lens of a fact-free hysteria — than countries like Saudi Arabia. Implementabout the administration’s immigration- ed after Sept. 11 — when, you might recall, adult male visitors from Saudi Araenforcement agenda. bia toppled the World Trade Center — it THE SOURCE of the fracas is a collected fingerprints and photographs comment from Kansas Secretary of when visitors from the select countries State Kris Kobach, a Trump immigra- arrived and required them to check in tion adviser and (excellent) candidate periodically to confirm that they were for Homeland Secretary director, to abiding by the terms of their visas.

Rich

Lowry

It also required that certain individuals from these countries who were already here go through a process of “special registration,” including an interview with immigration officials. This is a far cry from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s notorious Executive Order 9066 setting in motion the Japanese internment of World War II. It is true, as the critics point out, that the selected countries all were, with the exception of North Korea, majority Muslim. But any program concerned with

GROWING OLDER: November 17, 2016

My perspective: Because I can

his week, I turned 50. It’s one of those really big birthdays, and I thought about it often during the year leading up to the occasion. What would it mean? Would I feel different? Would it change my outlook or perspective? Well, now it has come and gone, and I am still sorting out the answers. My daughter Maggie asked me, on the night of my birthday, what I was looking forward to during my next 50 years (ever the optimist, that young lady); and it made me pause and think. What was I looking forward to? What do I want next?

MY ANSWER to her was to be around and healthy when my children turn 50. Maggie thought that my answer was a little less than inspiring. “Of course you will be,” she said. Then I reminded her that my own mother passed away more than three years ago. I miss her still. While it might appear that my mother missed my goal, she way overachieved her own. Diagnosed with cancer when I was in middle school, her goal was to live and watch my sister Kathy and me graduate from high school. Well, she beat that by 29 years, quite a record. During that time, she was with both of us as we married, and got to know her grandchildren, Maggie and Robert. She retired from teaching high school math when her grandchildren came along. She spent many hours, days and weeks with them, watching them during Vacation Bible School. While she’s

gone, she’s still with us in many ways: in the angel food cake we shared at my birthday; in the stories my children tell their friends (I love to hearing the embellishments along the way); but mostly in our hearts. Her motto was: Do the best you can with what you’ve got. Mine is similar: “If you can, you should.” This comes in handy when reminding my children to unload the dishwasher or clean up the kitchen. If something needs to be done, and you can do it, you should pitch in and help. Now this is not a call for overextending oneself to the point of exhaustion, because our activities should not lead us to collapse. Instead, it’s about

Jackie

perspective, self-awareness and understanding what we can and what we cannot accomplish. It takes away the option of sitting back and letting others take charge while we, well... don’t do much. MY VERSION of the motto — if you can, do — leads me to be involved with and active in my community, to help others, and to connect with people along the way. An article in the November, December edition of Tennis Magazine, by Tom Perrotta, titled, “Golden Opportunity,” inspired me last week.

international terrorism will, inevitably, focus largely on Muslim countries (although European countries like France and Belgium have developed an indigenous terror threat). The 9/11 hijackers, notably, all came from majority Muslim countries. IT IS SAID that the Bush program didn’t lead to the prosecution of any terrorists. According to the Migration Policy Institute, “The New York Times reported in 2003 that, out of roughly 85,000 individuals registered through the NSEERS program in 2002 and 2003, just 11 were found to have ties to terrorism.” Although tracking down anyone here who has ties to terrorism isn’t necessarily something to sniff at, the Bush program proved best-suited to identifying visa overstayers. Of the 85,000 initial registrants, nearly 14,000 were put into removal proceedings. For the critics, this is an indictment. Liberal website Vox complains that the program “made it easier to deport someone who then overstayed his visa than it would have been to deport him if he’d refused to register at all.” But why shouldn’t it be easier to deport visa-overstayers, who constitute about half of the population of illegal immigrants? If we are serious about our immigration rules, our approach to visaoverstayers from all countries should be much more restrictive and hardheaded. The requirements of the Bush program were watered down over time until it was suspended by the Obama administration in 2011. But the program wasn’t illegal or unconstitutional (the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in its favor). Nor was it immoral — foreign visitors should be subject to any reasonable strictures we impose in exchange for the privilege of coming here.

The article profiles Gail Falkenberg, a 69 year old tennis player who is still competing professionally. “Falkenberg, who will turn 70 in January, plans to keep playing professionally. She’s doing it because she can. She’s doing it to for herself. And she’s doing it to motivate others,” wrote Perrotta. “‘Older people, they say I’m the inspiration for them to keep going,’ she says, ‘Because it is possible.’” Well, she’s an inspiration to younger people as well. She’s doing it because she can, and that’s a good enough reason. At 50, I feel blessed for what I do have, and less worried about what I don’t. I’m glad when I can play tennis, and am able to play my best, even when I lose (which I really don’t like to do). I don’t worry about what people think about me, and I understand that, when others respond negatively, it says more about who they are than who I am. I am more careful about who I spend time with and work with. Trust and kindness are at the top of my list of required THAT THE so-called Muslim regisattributes, and I try to enjoy every mo- try is now a thing, a subject of high dudment that I have with those I love, while geon and hot debate, is testament to how I try to create more moments to treasure. the same media that complains about “fake news” is committed to manufacturI ENJOY spending an evening at ing and driving its own narratives only home with my family as much (or may- loosely connected to reality. Whether the be even more) than I enjoy going out to Trump administration revives a version a grand ball. And I miss my cat when of the Bush program or not, a similar she is not curled at my feet. But most of campaign of obloquy will be directed at all I attempt to remember that if I can, all of its immigration enforcement meaI should — because one day I won’t be sures. It will have to pursue its agenda able to and I better get in and participate against a backdrop of media hostility and while I can. constant misinformation.

Conservative Chronicle

DONALD TRUMP: November 23, 2016

Memo to President-elect Donald Trump skin with them. Keep it up. Take a page from President George H. W. Bush. No one laughed harder at Dana Carvey’s devastating impersonation of him — and that was at the White House with Carvey as his guest. 4. Stop tweeting! @realDonaldTrump #itisgettingreallyold. You were right to say that tweeting is a terrific way to communicate directly with the American people. You showed your marketing brilliance by employing this weapon before anyone. It worked beautifully (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate for you. THE ENTIRE But enough. You’re the presidentestablishment was arrayed against you and did everything to vilify you. It was elect now. It’s so beneath the office! It’s the establishment Republican Party. You sad! The public expects leadership and were a direct threat to their fiefdoms, gravitas. It could be embarrassing! You so they tried to destroy you. When they don’t need to use this medium. It’s unfailed, most headed for the tall grass rath- necessary! When you need to say someer than to support you — now, of course, while they were with you all along. Let ACADEMIA: November 23, 2016 ‘em squirm. Establishment Democrats? Even better. When the swamp is drained, they’re headed down the commode with the rest of the sewage, and they know it. Enjoy the scene. It will be something out of f one needed more evidence of Night of the Living Dead, except in this the steep decay in academia, case the zombies that have been feasting Donald Trump’s victory providon America will be headed over a cliff. ed it. Let’s begin by examining the reHollywood? Academia? They won’t sponses to his win, not only among our be able to build safe spaces fast enough wet-behind-the-ears college students, for this crowd. In fact, they’ll probably many of whom act like kindergarteners, come to you for infrastructure funding. but also among college professors and Resist. Suggest they work out their ag- administrators. gressions with therapeutic wall-building. 2. Laugh. Nothing infuriates the left THE UNIVERSITY of Michigan’s more than to see someone who not only distressed students were provided with is not intimidated by them but also bursts Play-Doh and coloring books, as they out laughing at them when attacked. (See sought comfort and distraction. A UniRush Limbaugh.) Watch your popular- versity of Michigan professor postity soar. It won’t be just that supposedly poned an exam after many students “angry” base that will chuckle along. complained about their “serious stress” This will transcend your base. Your po- over the election results. Cornell Unilitical enemies in Washington will attack versity held a campuswide “cry-in,” you viciously and personally. Don’t take with officials handing out tissues and the bait. Go Reagan and laugh. You will hot chocolate. One Cornell student said, bring millions to your side. The enemy of “I’m looking into flights back to Banmy enemy is my friend, especially when gladesh right now so I can remove mymy friend is ridiculing my enemy. self before Trump repatriates me.” The 3. Pick and choose your TV spots. College Fix reported that “a dorm at the President Obama could safely navigate University of Pennsylvania ... hosted TV at will because the entertainment in- a post-election ‘Breathing Space’ for dustry unanimously slobbered over him, students stressed out by election results unlike any president in modern history. that included cuddling with cats and a That ain’t gonna happen with you. The puppy, coloring and crafting, and snacks Stephen Colberts and Bill Mahers de- such as tea and chocolate.” spise you and will low-blow you at every The University of Kansas reminded opportunity. Refuse their invitations for its stressed-out students that therapy appearances. More importantly, demand dogs, a regular campus feature, were that no one in your administration give available. An economics professor at these leftists the time of day. Yale University made his midterm exam “optional” in response to “many THAT SAID, there are those in that heartfelt notes from students who are industry who will poke fun at you within shock over the election returns.” At out the ugly edge — Jimmy Fallon, Jim- Columbia University and its sister colmy Kimmel, etc. You’ve shown a thick lege, Barnard, students petitioned their Dear Mr. President-elect, Everyone else is giving you advice, so why can’t we? (Then again, the last time you asked for our advice, we told you over lunch that winning was not in the cards, so you might be hitting the delete button before this sentence is complete.) But here it comes. Five thoughts. 1. Relax. This campaign’s over. It was brutal, with haymakers start to finish (and yes, we’ll say it: A few sucker punches, too). But it’s over; you won against all odds. And what odds they were.

Brent

Bozell

thing formally, let your staff release a statement. Want to personalize that statement? Conduct an interview. You’ll never disappoint. 5. Pay attention to the experts — not. The editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post have serious thoughts on the direction your administration should take. There are profound ideas coming from seasoned political observers at PBS and NPR. I know it doesn’t appear this way, but the anchors (and

producers and reporters and executives) at NBC, ABC and CBS do want to help. BY ALL MEANS, have them in for a chat. Hear them out. Then laugh out loud while you throw them out. Watch as they pull out their cellphones on the sidewalk to furiously tweet their feelings to the world: “@realDonaldTrump hurt our feelings! #needasafespace! #whereismygriefcounselor? Sad!”

Trump and college chaos

professors to cancel classes and postpone exams because they were fearful for their lives and they couldn’t take an exam while crying. Barnard’s president did not entirely cave, but she said, “We are, however, leaving decisions regarding individual classes, exams, and assignments to the discretion of our faculty.” She added, “The Barnard faculty is well aware that you may be struggling, and they are here for you.” At Yale, it was reported that the “Trump victory (left) students reeling.” Students exhibited “teary eyes, bowed heads and cries of disbelief” and had the opportunity to participate in a postelection group primal scream “to express their frustration productively.”

Walter

WHETHER YOU are a liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, you should be disturbed and frightened for the future of our nation based on the response of so many of our young people to an election outcome. We should also be disturbed by college administrators and professors who sanction the coddling of our youth. Here’s my question to you: Does a person even belong in college if he cannot handle or tolerate differing opinions? My answer is no. What lies at the heart of multiculturalism, diversity and political correctness is an intolerance for different opinions. At Brown University, some students

claim that freedom of speech does not confer the right to express opinions they find distasteful. A while back, a Harvard University student organization representing women’s interests advised law students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence if they feel that it might be traumatic. Such students will be useless to rape victims and don’t belong in law school. In a previous column, I cited an article on News Forum For Lawyers titled “Study Finds College Students Remarkably Incompetent,” which referenced an American Institutes for Research study that revealed that over 75 percent of two-year college students and 50 percent of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks. About 20 percent of four-year college students demonstrated only basic mathematical ability, while a steeper 30 percent of two-year college students could not progress past elementary arithmetic. NBC News reported that Fortune 500 companies spend about $3 billion annually to train employees in “basic English.” Many of today’s college students are not only academically incompetent but emotionally so, as well, and do not belong in college. THESE COLLEGE snowflakes and their professors see themselves as our betters and morally superior to ordinary people. George Orwell was absolutely right when he said, “There are notions so foolish that only an intellectual will believe them.”

November 30, 2016 NATIONALISM: November 18, 2016

Is Barack Obama’s world a utopian myth?

peaking in Greece on his vale- pire” of Ronald Reagan’s depiction, dictory trip to Europe as presi- liberating Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hundent, Barack Obama struck a garians, Romanians and Bulgarians, and familiar theme: “(W)e are going to have breaking apart the Soviet Union into 15 to guard against a rise in a crude form nations. Was that so terrible for mankind? of nationalism, or ethnic identity, or tribNationalism brought down the Berlin alism that is built around an ‘us’ and a Wall and led to reunification of the Ger‘them’ ... people after 45 years “(T)he future of humanity and the fu- m a n of separation and ture of the world Cold War. is going to be dePresident George fined by what we H.W. Bush may have in common, have railed against as opposed to (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate “suicidal nationalthose things that separate us and ultimately lead us into ism” in Kiev in 1991. But Ukrainians ignored him and voted to secede. Now the conflict.” That the world’s great celebrant of Russified minorities of the southeast and “diversity” envisions an even more mul- the Crimea wish to secede from Ukraine ticultural, multiethnic, multiracial Amer- and rejoin the Mother Country. This is the way of the world. ica and Europe is not news. This dream Out of the carcass of Yugoslavia came has animated his presidency. Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, BUT IN this day of Brexit and pres- Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo. As naident-elect Donald Trump new ques- tionalism called into existence Moldova, tions arise. Is Obama’s vision a utopian Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, it immyth? Have leaders like him and Angela pelled South Ossetians and Abkhazians Merkel lost touch with reality? Are not to secede from Georgia. Was it not a sense of peoplehood, of they the ones who belong to yesterday, nationhood, that drove the Jews to create not tomorrow? “Crude nationalism,” as Obama said, Israel in 1948, which today insists that it did mark that “bloodiest” of centuries, be recognized as “a Jewish State?” All over the world, regimes are marthe 20th. But nationalism has also proven to be among mankind’s most powerful, shaling the mighty force of ethnonationalism to strengthen and sustain thembeneficial and enduring forces. You cannot wish it away. To do that selves. With economic troubles looming, Xi is to deny history, human nature and the transparent evidence of one’s own eyes. Jinping is stirring up Chinese nationalA sense of nationhood — “I am not a ism by territorial disputes with neighbors Virginian, but an American,” said Patrick — to hold together a people who have ceased to believe in the secularist faith of Henry — ignited our revolution. Nationalism tore apart the “evil em- Marxism-Leninism.

Pat

Buchanan

WITH COMMUNISM dead, Vladimir Putin invokes the greatness and glory of the Russian past and seeks to revive the Orthodox faith. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invokes nationalism, Attaturk, the Ottoman Empire, and the Islamic faith of his people, against the Kurds, who dream of a new nation carved out of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. “So my vision ... may not always win the day in the short run,” Obama said in Greece, “but I am confident it will win the day in the long run. Because societies which are able to unify ourselves around values and ideals and character and how we treat each other, and cooperation and innovation, ultimately are going to be more successful than societies that don’t.” What is wrong with this statement?

It is a utilitarian argument that does not touch the heart. It sounds like a commune, a cooperative, a corporation, as much as it does a country. Moreover, not only most of the world, but even the American people seem to be moving the other way. Indeed, what values and ideals do we Americans hold in common when Obama spoke in Germany of “darker forces” opposing his trade policies, and Hillary Clinton calls Trump supporters “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic ... bigots.” Did not the Democrats just run “an us and a them” campaign? Less and less do we Americans seem to be one country and one people. More and more do we seem to be separating along religious, racial, cultural, political, ideological, social and economic lines. If a more multicultural, multiethnic America produces greater unity and comity, why have American politics become so poisonous? Trump’s victory is due in part to his stand for securing the U.S. border against foreigners walking in. Merkel is in trouble in Germany because she brought in almost a million Muslim refugees from Syria. The nationalist parties that have arisen across Europe are propelled by hostility to more immigration from the Third World. Outside the cosmopolitan elites of Europe and North America, where in the West is the enthusiasm Obama detects for a greater diversity of races, tribes, religions, cultures and beliefs? “Who owns the future?” is ever the question. In 2008, Obama talked of Middle Pennsylvanians as poor losers clinging to their Bibles, bigotries and guns as they passed from the scene. YET, NOW, it’s looking like it may be Obama’s world headed for the proverbial ash heap of history.

Conservative Chronicle

FBI: November 17, 2016

The Federal Bureau of Political Investigation

hen Hillary Clinton de- with the DOJ because subpoenas in livered a campaign post- criminal cases can be issued only by mortem to her major sup- grand juries and only DOJ lawyers can porters in a telephone conference call ask grand juries to issue them. Usually, late last week, she blamed her loss in the FBI and the DOJ work together to the presidential election on FBI Di- present what they have to a grand jury rector James Comey. She should have in order to build a case for indictment blamed the loss on herself. Her refusal or to induce a grand jury to issue subto safeguard state secrets while she poenas and help them gather more eviwas secretary of state and her failure to dence. Federal judges grasp the nationbecome involved wide resentment when search wartoward governrants or arrest ment by the forwarrants are gotten folks in the (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate needed. These middle class were are often emergent far likelier the situations, as the evidence to be seized cause of her defeat than was Comey. Yet it is obvious that law enforce- or the person to be arrested might be ment-based decisions in the past four gone if not pursued in short order. months were made with an eye on They require the presentation of eviElection Day, and the officials who dence to a judge quickly and in secret. It is the judge’s role to decide whether made them evaded the rule of law. the DOJ/FBI team has met the constitutional threshold of probable cause. HERE IS THE back story. The statutory obligation of the FBI Probable cause is met when the prosis to gather evidence to aid in the pros- ecutorial team shows the judge that the ecution or prevention of federal crimes evidence the team seeks from the exor breaches of national security. The ecution of the warrant more likely than process of complying with this obliga- not will implicate someone in criminal tion necessarily involves making some behavior. Having issued many search and legal judgments about the relevance, probity and even lawfulness of the arrest warrants myself, I know that gathered evidence. These judgments judges need to be curious and skeptiare sometimes made on the streets in cal. After all, only one side is appearan emergency and sometimes made ing before the judge, and the whole after consultation and consensus. But appearance is often quick, unorthodox the whole purpose of this evidence- and in secret. A healthy curiosity and gathering and decision-making is to skepticism will cause a prudent jurist present a package to the Department of to ask whether the grand jury really Justice, for which the FBI works, for needs what the search warrant seeks. If its determination about whether or not the reply is that there is no grand jury, most judges will terminate the applito seek a prosecution. In cases in which subpoenas are cation and conclude that it is a fishing needed, the FBI must work in tandem expedition — or going “sideways,” as

Andrew

Napolitano

law enforcement says — not a serious criminal investigation worthy of judicial involvement. All of this is commanded by law to be kept secret so as to preserve evidence, avoid tipping off a potential defendant capable of flight and preserve the reputation of a person not indicted.

chance to redeem himself with his critics. He unlawfully announced the unexpected discovery of a treasure-trove of 650,000 emails that he and his team had not then examined but that they thought might affect the decision not to prosecute. This caused a second firestorm, in which this writer and others accused Comey of profound violations of federal law, not the least of which was an assault on Clinton’s right to due process. Knowing this announcement — not the resumption of the investigation but the announcement of it — was unlawful, Attorney General Loretta Lynch did nothing to prevent it. Clinton began to sink in the polls. Her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, now the president-elect, began to gloat and celebrate. Then, two days before the election, Comey announced that the FBI had reviewed all 650,000 recently discovered emails in a week and concluded that none of them affected the decision not to prosecute Clinton. Shortly thereafter, a DOJ official announced that the email investigation was closed — for a second time. What have we here? We have the gross mismanagement of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. We have a DOJ uninterested in the truth and willing to shield a target of a criminal investigation for political reasons. We have the improper and unlawful revelation of matters the law quite properly commands be kept secret. We have the dangerous injection of the FBI into elective politics, which can do ruinous harm to the rule of law.

THAT IS AT least the way these things are supposed to work. Yet none of this happened in the recently reopened and re-terminated investigation of the misuse of emails containing state secrets by Clinton. In that investigation, the DOJ did not present evidence to a grand jury. Thus, it did not obtain any subpoenas. And it did not seek any search warrants. It cut deals left and right, promising not to prosecute those from whom it sought problematic evidence. After accumulating a mountain of evidence of Clinton’s guilt, the FBI did not present it to the DOJ. Rather, Director Comey held a news conference on July 5, at which he declared that he and his colleagues in the FBI — not the DOJ — had concluded that “no reasonable prosecutor” would take the case; so Clinton would not be prosecuted. He then proceeded to outline in detail the gathered evidence against Clinton. He endured a firestorm of criticism for his public presentation of the gravity of the evidence in the case and his unilateral determination of no prosecution. The firestorm was generated largely by his own FBI agents who had become convinced of Clinton’s guilt of the failure to safeguard state secrets (espionage), as well as their collective belief that someone somewhere had AND WE HAD a candidate who told Comey what to do. should blame only herself for the Then, just 11 days before the 2016 whole controversy. presidential election, Comey saw a

November 30, 2016 THE LEFT: November 22, 2016

Those backward-looking ‘progressives’

eople who call themselves “progressives” claim to be forward-looking, but a remarkable amount of the things they say and do are based on looking backward. One of the maddening aspects of the thinking, or non-thinking, on the political left is their failure to understand that there is nothing they can do about the past. Whether people on the left are talking about college admissions or criminal justice, or many other decisions, they go on and on about how some people were born with lesser chances in life than other people.

WHOEVER DOUBTED it? But, once someone who has grown up is being judged by a college admissions committee or by a court of criminal justice, there is nothing that can be

done about their childhood. Other in- finalists or by various other achievestitutions can deal with today’s chil- ments. dren from disadvantaged backgrounds, THE ONLY child has also done and should, but the past is irrevocable. Even where there are no economic better, on average, than children who differences among various families have siblings. The advantage of the in which children are raised, there first born may well be due to the fact or she was an only are still major differences in the cir- that he child for some time, cumstances into perhaps for several which people are formative years. born, even within By the time peothe same family, ple have grown which affect their (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate up and apply to chances in later college, all that is life as adults. For example, among children of the history. Nothing that a college admissame parents, raised under the same sions committee can do will change roof, the first born, as a group, have anything about their childhoods. The done better than their later siblings, only things these committees’ deciwhether measured by IQ tests or by sions can affect are the present and the becoming National Merit Scholarship future. This is not rocket science.

Thomas

Sowell

SHORT STORY: November 18, 2016

The gift of some medics The New York Sunday World on Dec. 10, 1905, published “The Gift of the Magi” by William Sydney Porter (pen name: O. Henry). Here’s a modern version, No. 5 in an occasional series of short short stories.

ONE DOLLAR and 20 cents. That was all. And 20 cents of it was in nickels. Three times Della counted it. Was it a sign from God that the one dollar and 20 cents she had grabbed out of the loose change cup was exactly the amount her co-pay would be for the medication? Della flopped down on the shabby little couch and howled. She couldn’t shake the doctor’s cast-down forecast: “You might have only three months to live. This new chemotherapy drug probably won’t help, but it’s your only chance, medically.” Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with a tissue. She stood by the window and looked out dully at the December scene: Gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. She reviewed what the insurance company had told her husband Jim and her. The company would not pay for the costly drug her doctor had recommended but would pay the total cost of suicide pills, except for one dollar and 20 cents. Della the night before had put the issue before her support group, which had been supportive until voters legalized assisted suicide the month before. “It’s different now,” one member said. “You have to weigh some extra time against a child’s education. We’re leaving for the next generation a huge national debt. Aren’t we selfish to add medical expenses to that?”

Jim didn’t accept that argument. “I love you and need you,” he insisted. Della protested: “We have no money. We’ve run through our savings since the plant shut down.” Jim said, “Don’t worry. I’ll find a way.” After making calls he had gone out an hour ago, joking that he was starting a collection agency. One December years before, when Della had long hair and Jim a gold pocket watch, she had cut her hair to buy a chain for his watch, and he had sold his watch to buy tortoiseshell combs with jeweled rims for her hair. Since then they had taken a mighty pride in one attribute of their married life: They had

Marvin

pledged not to make any major decisions, ranging from borrowing money to undergoing an operation, without consulting the other. DELLA SMILED at the memory and whispered to herself, “I’ve known love.” On went her old brown jacket. On went her old brown hat. She faltered for a moment while a tear splashed on the worn red carpet. But then, with a sparkle in her eye, she fluttered out the door, heading for a walk that would, almost accidentally, take her by the pharmacy. For Jim, the next four hours tripped by on rosy wings. He visited two old friends and two cousins and told them what the insurance company had de-

creed. All four took out their checkbooks. The result was enough money to pay for not just three months but a year of chemotherapy. “Think positively,” one cousin said. Della told herself the same thing as she got into bed and looked upward, past the flaking ceiling: “Think positively.” She had a habit of saying little silent prayers. Now she whispered, “Please God, make him remember how much I’ve loved him.” At 6 p.m. the door opened and Jim stepped into the living room. He had prepared his speech, “Della, Merry Christmas! Yes, I’ve borrowed money without talking it over with you, but I knew you’d say no, and your life is more important than anything else.” But where was she? He walked into the bedroom, saw her sleeping, and tiptoed to bedside. THERE HE shook her, shook her again, saw the empty pill bottle next to her, and a note: “I love you. Please forgive me. It’s better this way.” With a mighty howl Jim started beating the mattress with his fist and saying, “It’s not. It’s not.” (News story, Oct. 20: An insurance company tells a California woman that it will not pay for her recommended chemotherapy, but will pay for suicide pills, “and you would only have to pay $1.20.”) Reprinted with permission of WORLD. To read more news and views from a Christian perspective, call 800951-6397 or visit WNG.org.

Nevertheless, there are people who urge college admissions committees to let disadvantaged students be admitted with lower test scores or other academic indicators. Those who say such things seldom even attempt to see what the actual consequences of such policies have been. The prevailing preconceptions — sometimes called what “everybody knows” — are sufficient for them. Factual studies show that admitting students to institutions whose standards they do not meet often leads to needless academic failures, even among students with above average ability, who could have succeeded at other institutions whose standards they do meet. The most comprehensive of these studies of Americans is the book Mismatch by Sander and Taylor. Similar results in other countries are cited in my own book, Affirmative Action Around the World. When it comes to criminal justice, there is much the same kind of preoccupation on the left with the past that cannot be changed. Murderers may in some cases have had unhappy childhoods, but there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do to change their childhoods after they are adults. The most that can be done is to keep murderers from committing more murders, and to deter others from committing murder. People on the left who want to give murderers “another chance” are gambling with the lives of innocent people. That is one of many other examples of the cruel consequences of seemingly compassionate decisions and policies. Ironically, people on the left who are preoccupied with the presumably unhappy childhoods of murderers, which they can do nothing about, seldom show similar concern about the present and future unhappy childhoods of the orphans of people who have been murdered. Such inconsistencies are not peculiar to our time, though they seem to be more pervasive today. But the left has been trying, for more than 200 years, to mitigate or eliminate punishments in general, and capital punishment in particular. What is peculiar to our time is the degree to which the views of the left have become laws and policies. A LONG overdue backlash against those views has begun in some Western nations, of which the recent election results in the United States are just one symptom. How all this will end is by no means clear. Just as the past cannot be changed, so the future cannot be predicted with certainty.

Conservative Chronicle

LIBERALS: November 18, 2016

The cracked crystal ball of liberal celebrities

efore the shock of President in at the Capitol, surrounded by actor Donald Trump wears off, Gary Busey and rockstars Meat Loaf, let’s remember to tip our Gene Simmons and Bret Michaels. When asked for comments about hats to Tinseltown. What would we do insults in March without it? The self-absorbed Beauti- Tr u m p ’s 2016, Rosie ful People of the O’Donnell protown called on claimed, “He will America to benever be presicome as enlightdent!” ened as they by (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate In May, supporting HillGeorge Clooney ary Clinton. They proudly donned their “I’m With Her” announced: “There’s not going to be a President Donald Trump. It’s not gobuttons. Now, like their candidate, they are ing to happen. Fear is not going to be in a state of shock. America’s response something that drives our country.” In October, comedian Joy Behar inon Nov. 8 was go pound sand. sisted: “No one’s going to be happier OH, HOW THE arrogant elites than President Obama when Trump joked — especially about the Repub- loses! No one, except for me!” Oops. Then there’s the arrogance of the lican convention — that Trump had such a short list of lightweights in celebrity-in-chief, President Obama. Scott Baio, Antonio Sabato Jr. and that Bible-thumping Baldwin brother, THE LEFT: November 17, 2016 Stephen Baldwin. Clinton could tout George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Ellen DeGeneres, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Bruce Springsteen, Jay-Z, “Queen” Beyonce and hundreds of others. Hollywood wrote n Friday, the BBC enlisted checks, too — hundreds of millions of me to defend my support of dollars in checks. Donald Trump for president. All for nada. Though the ensuing television interThe voters even dared to reject those view was conducted in English, I found mega-celebrities Barack and Michelle it incomprehensible. I was speaking in Obama, whom the media unfailingly my native tongue to two apparently inpresented as supersurrogates, not-so- telligent English-speaking women, yet secret weapons, the best campaign their responses to my clear, if amused, speakers of all time, blah blah blah. rejoinders amounted to gibberish. They These leftist stars with their mega- sought to understand Trump’s victory watt brains had a cracked crystal ball. but did not have the most elementary unThey relentlessly insulted Trump as derstanding of the American democratic unelectable and were uber-confident process or any grasp of rational thought. that on Election Day we’d see a rout. I detected no whiff of alcohol on their In 2011, NBC’s Seth Meyers joked breath or any other sign of inebriation. at the White House correspondents They showed no sign of drunkenness dinner — with Trump in attendance — or drug abuse, so I left the studio perthat “Donald Trump has been saying plexed. Ultimately, I wrote my friend he will run for president as a Republi- of 35 years, Andrew Roberts, the discan, which is surprising because I just tinguished historian, and asked, “What assumed he was running as a joke.” gives with the BBC?” In 2013, from his sidekick perch on The Daily Show, John Oliver egged on FIRST, I asked Andrew whether he the idea of a Trump campaign: “Do it. had ever heard of the so-called novelist Look at me. Do it! I will personally whom the BBC brought forth to engage write you a campaign check now on me. I had never heard of her, and for behalf of this country, which does not decades I have kept an eye on the intelwant you to be president, but which lectual vistas as editor-in-chief of the badly wants you to run!” American Spectator. She is a Nigerian lady of supposedly great gifts named IN OCT. 2015, Stephen Colbert Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, though it predicted: “Mr. Trump, to answer your soon became apparent that she was in an call for political honesty, I just want to impenetrable fog about the recent elecsay, you’re not going to be president. tion. She gave a highly emotional renIt’s been fun. It’s been great. ... But dering of the election, saying something come on, come on, buddy! ... There is about how it left her feeling very much zero chance we’ll be seeing you be- alone, and I guess bereft. Why on Earth ing sworn in on the Capitol steps with she was appearing before a British auyour hand a giant golden Bible!” He dience to discuss an American election doubled down with a visual, a Photo- I have no idea. If the BBC wanted to shopped image of Trump being sworn explore creative writing, I suppose she

Brent

Bozell

He was asked in January by NBC’s Matt Lauer whether he could imagine President Trump offering a State of the Union address, and he joked, “I can imagine it in a Saturday Night (Live) skit.” Just a few weeks ago on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Obama came to read mean tweets about him, one of which said: “President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the

history of the United States. Exclamation point! @realDonaldTrump. Well, @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a president.” IT’S ALMOST a little sad that these spoiled Beautiful People had their balloon popped. Try not to point and laugh.

A quiet afternoon with the BBC

up because people like Hillary Clinton want to bring the KKK up.” I began to add that the Klan was composed of a few hundred stoneheads living marginal lives in the American outback until they could be dredged up to serve the Democrats’ malign purpose, but the moderator interrupted me to ask, “So it doesn’t shock you?” I responded, why not talk about the influence of the Knights of Columbus?

(Maitlis) has asked a question about the KKK, and it hasn’t been engaged with, and instead we’re being told that there’s this other group called the Knights of Cint-whoever.” I replied: “Balderdash. That is balderdash,” which “engaged” both of these ladies. The conversation’s downward spiral continued. A memorable moment was when Adichie notified me: “If you’re a white man, you don’t get to define what racism is. You really don’t.” I responded, “Do you know that the false consciousness, which is the theory you’re talking about, is a Marxist concept?” She had not a clue as to what false consciousness meant, but you might think about its consequences for intelligent debate the next time you hear it employed by a lazy mind. Then la Adichie came up with more evidence of the president-elect’s alleged racism. When Trump says that a judge “is unable to judge him fairly because he is Mexican, that is racist,” she said. I supplied her with the judge’s name, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, and suggested he is as white as me. We are both white men. Race was not at issue between us. My correction had no impact on her. She continued in her invincible ignorance.

MY INTERLOCUTORS apparently had no idea what the largest Catholic male organization in America might be. The host inquired, is it “another extremist group?” At that point I was reminded that fruitful conversation is utterly impossible with the woefully ignorant. My thought was reinforced by the everhelpful Adichie who observed: “There seems to be a refusal to accept reality. So

THE NEXT day, Andrew Roberts got back to me. He had never heard of Adichie either. And he added, “The idea that white males have nothing to say on race is itself racist (and sexist)!” Thus, my brush with these two ladies has been put in historic perspective by a historian. But I feel there will be more inscrutable moments with the left before its members quiet down. Medication might help.

was their gal. But then what was I doing there? The interview got off to a bad start and became worse. The moderator, Emily Maitlis, commenced asking: “The first ever black president will be followed by a president who is endorsed by the (Ku Klux Klan). ... Where does that leave you?” My response was what any normal American would respond. I said, “I can’t imagine anybody (sic) more marginal to American elections than the KKK.” I went on to say, “Every four years the KKK comes

R. Emmett

November 30, 2016 FEMINISM: November 22, 2016

Feminism makes weak women

In one of modern life’s bigger ironies, eminism claims to stand for two things above all: Women’s feminism has actually achieved the very equality and enabling women opposite. In America today (as opposed to, let us say, Saudi Arabia, where it does to be strong. Regarding the first aim, no decent take strength to be a feminist), the more man or woman opposes the concept of stridently a woman identifies as a femiequality of the sexes. But people who nist, the less strong she is. Feminism has do not call themselves feminists have created what is undoubtedly the weakest a problem with the feminist notion of generation of women in American hisgrandmother, who equality: Most feminists have conflated tory. My never heard the equality and sameword “feminist” ness. And that’s a and never graduhuge mistake; the ated high school, sexes are equal, was incomparably but they are dif(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate stronger than alferent. most any collegeA second major problem regarding the feminist claim educated feminist I have ever encounof aspiring to women’s equality is that tered, or the many I have listened to and feminists frequently provide false evi- read. My grandmother (and I suspect dence to prove that women are not treatyours) would never have felt the need to ed as equals. retreat to a “safe space” when encounTHE BEST-KNOWN example is tering an idea with which she differed. the false statistic that American women Yet we have a generation of young femiearn about 25 percent less than men nist women that is so weak that even if when they do the same work for the a woman comes to the women’s campus to argue, for example, that when all same amount of time. Another example was relentlessly relevant factors are taken into account expressed during Hillary Clinton’s cam- there is no gender wage gap, they seek paign for the presidency, and has been the comfort of stuffed animals, balloons especially expressed since her defeat: and Play-Doh in “safe spaces.” They the assertion that she was the victim also need “trigger warnings” alerting of misogynistic comments and that she them that they may read something that lost because she was a woman. None of disturbs them. I first suspected that feminism was it is true. But it keeps feminists thinking of women as victims — and people a cover for weakness when, as a young who think of themselves as victims are man, I engaged in a public dialogue with the mother of modern feminism, Betty rendered weak. That brings us to the second goal of Friedan. At one point I said something feminism: Enabling women to be strong with which she disagreed, and after calling me a “male chauvinist piglet” she and making women strong.

Dennis

Prager

stood up and walked off the stage. No man I have ever argued with has done that — and, believe me, I’ve said far tougher things to many men than I did to Ms. Friedan. (For the record, she voluntarily returned to the stage after I neither apologized nor asked her to return.) Nothing has changed since that evening (which was some time around 1980). Feminists still find intolerable words that men routinely use when addressing other men with whom they differ. DURING ONE of their presidential debates, Donald Trump called Clinton a “nasty woman” in response to an attack on him. His remark was universally condemned as sexist by feminists — both male and female. But didn’t Trump mock Sen. Marco Rubio’s height, label Sen. Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” and offer other similarly negative descriptions of male competitors? (And by the way, tens of millions of American women also find Clinton to be nasty.) Modern feminists are afraid of life. They are afraid of differences of opinion. And they’re especially afraid of men. As one example, the Boston Globe reported in 2014, “A realistic-looking stat-

ue of a man sleepwalking in his underwear near the center of (the all-female) Wellesley College ... has caused outrage among some students in just one day after its Feb. 3 installation.” (I admit that I, too, was outraged about that statue — outraged that an idiotic sculpture of a man sleepwalking in his underpants is considered art, and that it was placed there by the college’s Davis Museum.) A petition signed by hundreds of Wellesley students said, “It has already become a source of undue stress for many Wellesley College students.” Clearly, hundreds of Wellesley College students are very weak. Feminists are outraged and unduly stressed by much of life itself, particularly by all but the most feminized men. Nearly every time the words “misogyny” and “sexist” are used, they are untrue and only reinforce the conviction that feminists are weak. When Donald Trump used the moniker “Miss Piggy” in speaking to the Miss Universe who gained nearly 60 pounds within months of winning her beauty title, that was neither sexist nor misogynistic. It was insulting. And when Donald Trump privately boasted to another man that he was so famous that women would allow him to “grab them by the p---y,” that, too, was neither sexist nor misogynistic. It was juvenile. The male desire to touch the bodies of just about every woman they are attracted to is — trigger warning — normal. It has nothing to do with hatred of women or viewing women as unequal. Gay men want to touch the bodies of just about every man they find attractive, and they don’t hate men or consider them unequal. Such is male sexual nature. Strong women know this. Weak women, aka feminists, and their fellow male feminists (who are just as weak) deny it. It’s too painful for them to deal with. You want to know what women are strong? HERE’S AN example: Any young woman who announced in a college class that as much as she may want a career, she is more interested in finding a good man to marry. In other words, any young woman who announced that she isn’t a feminist.

Conservative Chronicle

LIBERALS: November 23, 2016

The tyranny of the Broadway bullies

ven though it was in midtown ed, and Clinton had even held a fundraisManhattan and even though the er at a performance of Hamilton. Her positions that it ought to be legal people there had to pay hundreds of dollars just enter the room, there to kill a child right up to the moment of birth and that government has the power was no unanimity among them. Some in the audience liked Mike to force Catholic nuns to provide insurance for abortion-inducing drugs apPence. Some did not. “When we arrived we heard a few parently created no anxiety among the command of Hamilton boos and we heard some cheers, and executive did it disturb their I nudged my kids and reminded them — nor celebrated concern that’s what freefor human rights. dom sounds like,” But having Pence the vice presidentbring some family elect said on Fox members to watch News Sunday. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate the show was difHe was describing what happened when he entered a ferent. It was traumatic. ‘’We had to ask ourselves, how do we theatre on Friday night to watch a perforcope with this?’’ Seller told the Times. mance of Hamilton. ‘’Our cast could barely go on stage the AT THE END of the show, a similar day after the election. The election was freedom was not exhibited on the stage. painful and crushing to all of us here.” He threw the smallest of concessions Among the actors and actresses who came out for a curtain call, there were not to the newly elected vice president. “We two views. There was not a multitude of are honored that Mr. Pence attended the show,” he told the Times, “and we had to views. There was only one. The producer of the show, Jeffrey use this opportunity to express our feelSeller, and actor Brandon Victor Dixon ings.” Actor Dixon explained to CBS his — who plays Aaron Burr — explained separately to the New York Times and role in this drama — and how he was cast for the part. CBS This Morning how that happened. “Why you?” Charlie Rose asked him. Seller told the Times that he, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and direc- “In other words, did you ask to do it, to tor Thomas Kail decided they needed to deliver the message?” “No, I did not,” Dixon said. “The promake a statement to Pence — and colducer, Jeffrey Seller, called me about an laborated in drafting one. Miranda had been “an outspoken sup- hour, an hour and a half, before the curporter” of Hillary Clinton during the tain, and said that this is something that presidential campaign, the Times report- we thought we wanted to do and asked

Terry

Jeffrey

me if I would be willing to do it. I am not Rose interrupted him: “So, they wrote sure why they decided to ask me, but I it, and then you shared it with the cast, was happy to.” and said: Everybody stand behind this and —” DIXON DID not believe he would “Well, and then after that,” Dixon be speaking merely for the creator, pro- said, “some of the other cast members ducer and director of the show, but also and myself made some adjustments to it for the cast. and then we went out and made the state“I was honored to represent our cast ment after the show.” and our show that way,” he said. Before he did, Dixon called on the auDixon, too, said the statement was dience to record what he said to Pence initially drafted by the creator, producer and to publish it. and director of the show. ‘’I encourage everybody to pull out “They shared it with me,” Dixon said. your phones and tweet and post because “I read it to the cast, and then I myself this message needs to be spread far and and a few other castmates —” wide,” he said on the recording posted by the Associated Press. “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that you and your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir,” said Dixon as the cast stood literally arm in arm behind him. “But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf all of us. All of us. Again, we truly thank you for sharing this show, this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men and women of different colors, creeds and orientations.” But were these Broadway actors — all standing dutifully at attention as one of them read a statement initially drafted by their employers — a truly diverse group? In their political views — or at least in the political views they were expressing at this moment at their place of employment — they were not even as diverse as the Americans who bought tickets to their show and who applauded Mike Pence when he walked through the door. THE BROADWAY branch of the liberal establishment is just like the media branch — or the branch on Capitol Hill. To belong you must conform.

November 30, 2016 ENRICO FERMI: November 15, 2016

Fermi conducted the music of the atomic particles

whom he and more politically aware Americans in general were out to outrace to the Bomb. Enrico Fermi’s efforts for his Italian homeland might have resulted only in a grand failure like all Werner Heisenberg’s efforts to produce the Bomb for Germany, but who knows? Anything is possible in the strange world of quanSAID PERSON, one Enrico Fermi, tum physics and alternate universes. had just collected a Nobel Prize en But this caller at the Navy Departroute to political asylum in this coun- ment came armed with his own steely try from Italy, complete with his Jew- nerves and complete confidence in then only theoretiish wife, Laura. If she and her family his own cal but sure work. were persona non Enrico Fermi grata in Herr Hitseemed surprisler’s Reich, he ingly unpretenwould be more tious in a world than welcome, (c) 2016, Tribune Media Services of prima donnas. and more than useful in this land of the free and still As his daughter Nella put it, “It wasn’t home of the brave. Enrico Fermi’s that he lacked emotions, but that he theoretical physics had given Il Duce lacked the ability to express them.” Or the one chance he had to make Italy — pretended to. Maybe had been taught Italy! — a nuclear power as early as to suppress his nature by his mother, the 1930s. But it was really the Nazis who brooked no nonsense and inhe year was 1939 and the month was March, as in Beware of the Ides of. His arrival at the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., was unceremoniously announced by the desk officer, who informed Admiral S.C. Hooper, United States Navy, “There’s a wop outside.”

Paul

Greenberg

MIKE PENCE: November 16, 2016

Pence drains the swamp

ice president-elect Mike Rogers’ influence as the wife of the Pence has started to fulfill House Intel Committee. Although not the most basic promise of directly responsible for security at the Donald Trump campaign: To drain Benghazi, her firm had significant rethe Washington swamp. This territory, sponsibilities in the area. Perhaps motivated by these famwhich began as swampland before it was constituted the District of Colum- ily concerns, Congressman Rogers bia, is no longer inhabited by snakes, blocked the formation of a special tee to investigate alligators and other reptiles but rather commitBenghazi. When by their evoluthe committee was tionary human set up, over Rogequivalents: Lobers’ objections, it byists, special didn’t do much to interests and bu(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate clarify what hapreaucratic parapened at Benghazi sites. Now Pence has reversed the trend of recent de- and why, but it did lead to the disclocades by kicking lobbyists off the tran- sure of Hillary Clinton’s private email sition teams that New Jersey Governor server. Without this committee, led by Chris Christie established to guide the Congressman Trey Gowdy, Hillary new president in his choice of person- Clinton might well have been elected president. nel.

Dick

Morris

THE FIRST to go — and the most deserving — is former Congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, formerly a Republican from Michigan. Slated, some say, to be the new director of the CIA, Rogers was a key force in obstructing and delaying the Benghazi investigation in order to shield his wife, Kristi, from scrutiny. Kristi Rogers ran a private military contracting firm, Aegis Defense Services, to provide security to U.S. diplomatic missions abroad. Aegis had won several major contracts, likely through

THE INFLUENCE of lobbyists for foreign governments is, in particular, a key part of the degradation of ethics and standards in contemporary Washington, D.C. Mike Pence should continue his efforts to clean house by acting to implement the reform agenda articulated by candidate Donald Trump in his October speech at Gettysburg banning former executive branch employees from lobbying within a five year window after their departure. Go Mike!

formed him: “In this home naughty boys are not tolerated.” Any more than he would tolerate star turns by others. He would lose a beloved older brother young, and suffer many another wound in childhood, but they seemed to make him only stronger, if more solitary. AND SO IT was that Fermi armed himself with a letter to President Roosevelt which would prove the beginning of the now famous Manhattan Project, which would result in the world’s first nuclear reaction. Brick by brick, all carefully assembled in a University of Chicago squash court. Talk about tension, he never showed it. In a couple of weeks toward the end of 1942, Fermi and Co. would oversee the controlled nuclear reaction they had initiated.

Ever so calmly, ever so effectively. Uranium no longer held any secrets from him and his careful colleagues. TO CITE A recent biography titled The Pope of Physics (by Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin, Henry Holt, 351 pages, $30), Fermi became an expert at standing out without standing out. He could outplay even himself at this all-important game. As early as 1933, Hitler’s first year as Reich chancellor, this experimental scientist had already determined the Fuehrer’s fate. Yet he said not a word to anyone about it, for he understood the meaning of another most important term in a way this year’s presidential candidates don’t: Top Secret.

Conservative Chronicle

SANCTUARY CITIES: November 20, 2016

‘Sanctuary’ means career criminals can run and hide

onald Trump understood something that many Washington insiders missed. Many Americans and some naturalized citizens bristle at elected officials constantly defending the rights of nonAmericans to migrate here illegally — and to be rewarded for breaking the law with a path to citizenship. Toward that end, and in deference to his campaign promises, Trump seems primed to deport undocumented immigrants and withhold some federal funds from sanctuary cities like San Francisco.

TRUMP HAS dispensed with some of his magical thinking. For example, Trump has ditched his one-time (but impossible to fulfill) promise to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants. Now he says he would focus on two million or more undocumented immigrants with criminal histories. That is, his focus now is on mainstream ideas that the news media can brand as extreme only at the peril of their credibility. Trump told 60 Minutes he wants to “get the people that are criminals and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers. We have a lot of these people; probably two million, it could even be three million. We are getting them out of the country or we are going to incarcerate.” It’s hard to call that position “extreme” when it lines up with President Obama’s direction to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to focus on removing undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records. Under Obama, ICE’s Priority Enforcement Program has targeted convicted criminals who threaten public safety or national security. The big difference, I suspect, will be that Trump means it when he says he will deport “criminal aliens,” and Obama didn’t really mean it. After all, if Obama truly believed in deporting criminal aliens, he would have challenged sanctuary cities like San Francisco that protected repeat offenders from ICE. In 2010, Obama’s Department of Justice sued Arizona after lawmakers passed a law to allow local law enforcement to check the immigration status of those suspected of breaking state laws. A Department of Justice brief claimed “a state may not establish its own immigration policy or enforce state laws in a manner that interferes with the federal immigration laws.” BUT THE OBAMA administration failed to challenge a 2013 San Francisco ordinance that protected Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez from being turned over to ICE. Lopez Sanchez had been convicted of seven felonies and

deported five times when San Fran- there are tangible penalties in place.” What we don’t know is if Trump cisco District Attorney George Gascón dropped a decades-old marijuana will try to be as tough on sanctuary charge and then-Sheriff Ross Mirkari- cities that simply shield undocumentmi released Lopez Sanchez rather than ed crime victims from being reported hand him over to ICE, as ICE request- to ICE — which seems reasonable — be on San Francisco, ed. Weeks later, authorities charged as he should its extreme stance the Mexican national for the shooting w i t h on defending cadeath of city resireer criminals dent Kate Steinle. who are in the Lopez Sanchez country illegally. has pleaded not California’s state guilty. (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate law also shields Trump is likely to borrow from past legislation intro- repeat offenders from ICE. The duced by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., to TRUST Act policy sends a message pull federal funding from sanctuary that people can live in America illegalcities because, Vitter argues, “sanctu- ly and continue to break laws without ary cities will continue to exist until having to face the consequences.

Debra J.

Saunders

The problem for the next president: If repeat offenders figure they can evade deportation by fleeing to “social justice” havens, then it will be harder for immigration officials to target the worst threats to public safety. THERE IS ALSO a principle involved here. “As a lawyer for 60 years and a judge for 10,” Superior Court Judge Quentin Kopp recently told me, “I’m a believer in the law. That’s why I don’t understand accepting, much less rewarding, disregard of the law.” That’s a pretty basic belief. If the cream of Washington understood that contract, then perhaps Donald Trump would not be president-elect.

DIVIDED NATION: November 18, 2016

Reconciliation: Rise to the occasion

he parades of protesters weeping, vandalizing businesses, carrying the Mexican and Palestinian flags, shouting “Not my president!” and otherwise giving peaceful protest a bad name have been justly rebuked as hysterical. In the week since his election, the presidentelect has behaved in a restrained and sober fashion, has observed the rituals of power transition without incident, and has made two hires: One reassuring and the other somewhat troubling. Surely everyone who wishes the country well should be hoping that the majesty of the office will inspire its next occupant to rise to the occasion. Besides, he hasn’t done anything yet.

THE MOST powerful job in the White House, structurally, is chief of staff. Everything depends upon the president, of course, and Donald Trump could do things differently, but in most White House administrations, the COS holds the reins because he controls who gets to see the president. The man who will wield that power in the Trump White House, Reince Priebus, is the author of the 2013 Republican Party “autopsy” report. Remember that? It recommended that the party improve its outreach to women and minority groups. It endorsed comprehensive immigration reform. If anyone should be in the streets over Trump’s picks so far, it’s arguably the immigration hawks. As for Steve Bannon, we don’t know what he’ll advise, and we don’t know whether President Trump will heed his advice, whatever it is. His boast that he had made Breitbart.com a platform for the alt-right is not encouraging, nor is much of what appears on that site.

The left has worked itself into a froth over this election in part because they are in a perpetual state of arousal. Some of the terrors they conjure in a Trump era show that they haven’t been listening. “The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency sent panic through much of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community,” reported the New York Times. But Trump has never suggested the smallest hostility to LGBT people or their agenda. He volunteered, for example, that Caitlyn Jenner should use any bathroom Jenner is comfortable with.

Mona

If you watched his convention acceptance speech, Trump seemed to signal distrust of Republicans on gay issues. He took note of the Orlando terror attack and vowed, “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. Believe me.” When this was met with applause, he added, “And I have to say that as a Republican that it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.” Was he perhaps expecting that Republicans would be fine with terrorists committing mass murder at gay clubs? AND YET, some of the fear, however overwrought it may seem, is clearly sincere. One thing we know about America’s political culture is that the tendency to live within our own news

echo chambers has intensified in recent years. Liberals are reading and hearing about swastikas scrawled on synagogue walls by suspected Trump supporters, while conservatives are seeing stories about protesters carrying signs reading “rape Melania” and about people wearing “Make America Great Again” hats being beaten up. We scarcely speak to or hear one another at all. As Bill Maher, Frank Bruni and other Democrats have acknowledged, the left has a wolf-crying problem. When you denounce every Republican or conservative as racist, you lose credibility. But the right also has a problem this year, in that Trump truly has transgressed certain taboos. Whipping up a crowd against a Hispanic judge on the grounds of his ethnicity (or for any other reason actually) is indecent and destructive. Falsely insisting that “thousands” of American Muslims celebrated after 9/11 and retweeting false statistics about black-on-white crime is irresponsible. WHILE MANY of those in the streets deserve no sympathy, others who are fearful about a Trump presidency could use reassurance. There is no greater megaphone than the presidency, and some signals of magnanimity and unity coming from Donald Trump could go a long way. They might even penetrate the news silos we’ve erected. After one of the ugliest campaigns in history, Trump has an opportunity to offer reconciliation. All but the most bitter partisans would welcome it.

November 30, 2016 DIVIDED NATION: November 22, 2016

A besieged Trump presidency ahead

fter a week managing the Racism. A second, scheduled for Jan. 21, transition, vice president-elect is a pro-Hillary “Million Woman March.” While the pope this weekend deplored Mike Pence took his family a “virus of polarization,” even inside the out to the Broadway musical Hamilton. As Pence entered the theater, a wave church, on issues of nationality, race and of boos swept over the audience. And at religious beliefs, that, unfortunately, is the play’s end, the Aaron Burr character, America’s reality. In a new Gallup poll, speaking for the cast and the producers, 77 percent of Americans perceived their country as “Greatly Divided read a statement directed at Pence: on the Most Impor“(W)e are the tant Values,” with diverse America seven in eight Demwho are alarmed ocrats concurring. and anxious that On the camyour new admin(c) 2016, Creators Syndicate puses, anti-Trump istration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our protests have not ceased and the “crying parents, or defend us and uphold our in- rooms” remain open. Since Nov. 8, mobs alienable rights, sir. But we truly hope have blocked streets and highways across this show has inspired you to uphold our America in a way that, had the Tea Party people done it, would have brought calls American values.” for the 82nd Airborne. In liberal Portland, rioters trashed IN MARCH, the casting call that went out for actors for roles in this musical cel- downtown and battled cops. Mayors Rahm Emanuel of Chicago ebration of “American values” read: “Seeking NON-WHITE men and and Bill de Blasio of New York have declared their cities to be “sanctuary citwomen.” The arrogance, the assumed posture of ies,” pledging noncooperation with U.S. moral superiority, the conceit of our cul- authorities seeking to deport those who tural elite, on exhibit on that stage Friday broke into our country and remain here night, is what Americans regurgitated illegally. Says D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, “I when they voted for Donald Trump. Yet the conduct of the Hamilton cast have asserted firmly that we are a sancputs us on notice. The left neither accepts tuary city.” According to the Washington its defeat nor the legitimacy of Trump’s Post, after the meeting where this declaration had been extracted from Bowser, triumph. His presidency promises to be embat- an activist blurted, “We’re facing a fascist maniac.” tled from Day One. Such declarations of defiance of law Already, two anti-Trump demonstrations are being ginned up in D.C., the first have a venerable history in America. In on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, by AN- 1956, 19 Democratic Senators from the SWER, Act Now to Stop War and End 11 states of the Old Confederacy, in a

Pat

Buchanan

“Southern Manifesto,” rejected the Supreme Court’s Brown decision ordering desegregation of the public schools. Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett and Alabama Gov. George Wallace all resisted court orders to integrate. U.S. marshals and troops, ordered in by Ike and JFK, insured the court orders were carried out. To see Rahm and de Blasio in effect invoking John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of interposition and nullification is a beautiful thing to behold. AMONG THE reasons the hysteria over the Trump election has not abated is that the media continue to stoke it, to seek out and quote the reactions they produce, and then to demand the president-elect

give assurances to pacify what the Post says are “the millions of ... blacks and Latinos, gays and Lesbians, Muslims and Jews — fearful of what might become of their country.” Sunday, the New York Times ran a long op-ed by Daniel Duane who said of his fellow Californians, “(N)early everyone I know would vote yes tomorrow if we could secede” from the United States. The major op-ed in Monday’s Post, by editorial editor Fred Hiatt, was titled, “The Fight to Defend Democracy,” implying American democracy is imperiled by a Trump presidency. The Post’s lead editorial, “An unAmerican Registry,” compares a suggestion of Trump aides to build a registry of Muslim immigrants to “Nazi Germany’s ... singling out Jews” and FDR’s wartime internment of 110,000 Japanese, most of them U.S. citizens. The Post did not mention that the Japanese internment was a project of the beatified FDR, pushed by that California fascist, Gov. Earl Warren, and upheld in the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision, written by Roosevelt appointee and loyal Klansman, Justice Hugo Black. A time for truth. Despite the post-election, bring-us-together talk of unity, this country is hopelessly divided on cultural, moral and political issues, and increasingly along racial and ethnic lines. Many Trump voters believe Hillary Clinton belongs in a minimum-security facility, while Hillary Clinton told her LGBT supporters half of Trump’s voters were racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes and bigots. Donald Trump’s presidency will be a besieged presidency, and he would do well to enlist, politically speaking, a war cabinet and White House staff that relishes a fight and does not run. The battle of 2016 is over. THE LONG war of the Trump presidency has only just begun.

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

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Wednesday, November 30, 2016 • Volume 31, Number 48 • Hampton, Iowa