Peter Wood
CHINA’S ENERGY CRISIS
Northern China is facing an energy crisis this winter due to shortfalls in heating gas. Many schools have not had heating since November 15—though the average temperature during the day has been close to, or below freezing. These schools were required to remove coal-fired heating ahead of the winter season as part of a larger initiative to reduce smog and CO2 emissions.
As the world’s top consumer and producer of coal, this is no easy task. In fact, China consumes four times as much coal as all of Europe (including Russia) and Central Asia combined.
By contrast, Chinese consumption of natural gas in 2016 was eight times its level in 2000. However, the attempts to smoothly transition from coal to gas appears to have failed and are the root cause of the current gas shortfall. Across China, the price of liquefied natural gas (LNG) has risen by 300 percent. This is having significant downstream effects and has led to rationing.
The effects of the shortages are spreading. This is because the shortages and accompanying spike in prices are manifestations of a larger problem.
THE ANATOMY OF HILLARY’S MONEY-LAUNDERING SCHEME
In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of my client, Alabama engineer Shaun McCutcheon, in his challenge to the Federal Election Commission's (FEC) outdated "aggregate limits," which effectively limited how many candidates any one donor could support (McCutcheon v. FEC).
Anti-speech liberals railed against McCutcheon's win, arguing it would create supersized "Joint Fundraising Committees" (JFCs). In court, they claimed these JFCs would allow a single donor to cut a multimillion-dollar check, and the JFC would then route funds through dozens of participating state parties, who would then funnel it back to the final recipient.
Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer claimed the Supreme Court's McCutcheon v. FEC ruling would lead to "the system of legalized bribery recreated that existed prior to Watergate." The Supreme Court, in ruling for us, flatly stated such a scheme would still be illegal.
The Democrats' response? Hold my beer. What SCOTUS declared illegal in McCutcheon is exactly what Hillary and the Dems did – and we can prove it.
THE PARTY OF THE RICH WILL PAY IN 2018
Just before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 passed last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told us what she thought of the bill in the proverbial "no uncertain terms" –
“In this holy time, the moral obscenity and unrepentant greed of the GOP tax scam stands out even more clearly... This GOP tax scam is simply theft, monumental, brazen theft from the American middle class and from every person who aspires to reach it. The GOP tax scam is not a vote for an investment in growth or jobs. It is a vote to install a permanent plutocracy in our nation.”Did Pelosi actually believe this hortatory bilge or was she just banking on the stupidity of the American public and the unyielding support of the Democrats' ever-loyal media claque?
Well, the latter is almost always reliable – for when it comes to "permanent plutocracy in our nation" few should know more about that than Nancy. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, she has a net worth of $196 million.
Truth is, it’s the Democrats who are now the Party of the Rich – Silicon Valley, Hollywood, media, much of Wall Street – and they are going to pay for it Big Time in 2018.
THE PAPER CIVIL WAR ON TRUMP
The original Civil War was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new Civil War is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.
From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, the cold civil war set off by the Left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.
The left’s legal civil war appears to reject the authority of the Federal government. Yet despite the posturing, blue staters aren’t serious about seceding. Nor have they become newfound converts to the rights of states to go their own way when they disagree with DC.
New York and California’s #resistance apparatchiks aren’t rejecting the authority of Federal judges. They’re turning to them and relying on them. Instead they’re rejecting the authority of elected Federal officials. Their secession isn’t from the Federal government, it’s from democracy. They want a strong central government. They just aren’t willing to allow the American people to decide who gets to run it.
That’s what the Paper Civil War is about.
THE DEATH RATTLE OF OBAMA’S REPUTATION
The members of Barack Obama’s administration in exile have become conspicuously noisy of late—even more so than usual.
Former CIA Director John Brennan accused Donald Trump and his administration of engaging in “outrageous,” “narcissistic” behavior typical of “vengeful autocrats” by threatening proportionate retaliation against countries that voted to condemn the United States in the United Nations, as though that were unprecedented. It is not.
James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, all but alleged that the president is a Russian “asset.” He isn’t.
Perhaps the most acerbic and incendiary series of accusations from the former Democrat president’s foreign-policy professionals were placed in the New York Times by Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice. In her estimation, America has abdicated its role as a “force for good.”
It’s no coincidence that these overheated condemnations accompany abundant evidence that the Trump administration is finding its legs. As the last administration’s undeserved reputation as sober-minded foreign policy rationalists is dismantled one retrospective report at a time, its jilted members are lashing out.
A TRUMP-REAGAN DOCTRINE FOR IRAN
Iran’s geopolitical ascent is the most significant and dangerous development in the Middle East this century.
But while the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy properly identifies Iran as among the important challenges to U.S. security interests, it doesn’t offer a concrete strategy on how to counter Iran’s growing regional power.
President Trump should follow the example of President Reagan, who pursued an offensive strategy to undermine the Soviet Union that included supporting indigenous anti-communist insurgents around the globe: the Reagan Doctrine.
Today, America should support indigenous forces that oppose – and seek independence from – Iranian domination: a Trump-Reagan Doctrine.
THE TROUT IN THE MILK
There is strong circumstantial evidence that an insidious plot unprecedented in American history was hatched within the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to help elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
And when this apparent effort to improperly influence the election did not succeed, the suspected conspirators appear to have employed a fraudulent investigation of President Trump in an attempt to undo the election results and remove him as president.
Such a plot would show that partisans within the FBI and the Justice Department, driven by personal animus and a sense of political righteousness, surreptitiously conspired to subvert electoral democracy itself in our country.
As of now, we have no proof beyond a reasonable doubt of such a plot. But we have very strong circumstantial evidence.
And as the philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1850: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
NOW, THIS IS PRESIDENTIAL OBSTRUCTION
What if a president used his power to interfere with a federal investigation involving foreign powers committing serious crimes in the United States as well as elsewhere?
Such a thing would be considered a terrible scandal and, no doubt, lead to a federal probe by a special counsel who would be expected to get to the bottom of such a mess.
But if you think this is a reference to the investigation led by Robert Mueller into possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign and obstruction of justice once President Trump took office, you’re wrong.
While proof that the Trump campaign actually plotted with Russia still has yet to be presented, evidence of another scandal involving President Barack Obama and Hezbollah, Iran and the Russians has just been uncovered in an investigative story by Politico yesterday (12/18).
The tale involves an administration decision to spike Project Cassandra, a federal probe into international drug smuggling, money laundering and terrorism by Hezbollah. The conclusion is inescapable: the President of the United States willfully on purpose aided and abetted terrorists and drug-smuggling.
MIDNIGHT AT THE DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKESS CAFÉ
The Democracy Dies in Darkness Café is located conveniently near the Capitol, the Hill and the FBI headquarters. It’s open all night and I stopped in for a late-night coffee with my friend, a fiction novelist who was depressed.
“I spent a year writing about a coup attempt against an outsider who by strategic brilliance defeated the handpicked candidate of a cabal of establishment powerhouses” he explained. “It involved the highest officials of the FBI and Department of Justice. They manipulated a FISA Court into letting them electronically surveil the candidate and all who worked with him, unmasked their names, leaked what they found, and they still couldn’t beat him.”
“Sounds great,” I said, so why are you depressed?”
He sighed. “Every publisher I sent it to rejected it as being too implausible to sell to readers.”
It was hard to talk much as the place was rocking. There was a private room to the side, packed with white collar criminal defense counsels drinking champagne and downing tenderloin. Every single one of them had fat retainers to defend the accused, the top brass of the FBI and former Department of Justice officials.
THE TRUMP DOCTRINE OF STRATEGIC REALISM
The President speaking at the Ronald Reagan Bldg. Dec. 18, 2017
Presidential administrations by law must publish strategic manifestoes.
Indeed, the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of October 4, 1986 required every subsequent government to issue periodic and formal national strategic strategy blueprints.
Most of these documents dating from the Reagan Administration are blah-blah boilerplate announcements of the obvious.
They offer platitudinous promises of a sober internationalist United States leading the world in promoting global institutions while using its preeminent strength to partner with allies to counter perceived rising threats, such as rogue nations or terrorism. And so on.
The Trump Administration has just released (12/18) its first National Security Strategy. Here is the White House Summary. Here is the Full NSS Text as a pdf download.
But to be frank, it is unlike most all prior manifestoes. The contrast with the 2015 Obama doctrine (his last, there was none in 2016) is stunning. Let’s take a look at why it’s so stunning.
TRUMP PARKS HIS TANKS ON THE SIERRA CLUB’S LAWN
There was a lot of good news in President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) — the document which finally told the truth about climate change: that green activists pose a bigger threat to U.S. security than anything the climate can manage.
But nothing in the NSS is likely to provoke quite so much fury among environmentalists as one of the clauses buried among another of the Trump administration’s recent reform measures: the bit in the tax-reform package which permits part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be opened to oil exploration.
Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has long been a Sacred Polar Bear for environmental campaigners. It’s their line in the snow: the ne plus ultra of pristine wilderness, majesty, and loveliness to be preserved at whatever cost. Democrats have been fighting to prevent it being developed for oil since the 1970s.
So Trump’s announcement that soon oil companies will be allowed to explore there is about as a big a provocation as if he’d turned up to the Sierra Club’s summer vegan barbecue, spit-roasted a baby manatee, and served it up with a snail darter reduction and spotted owl sauce.
ONE MUELLER INVESTIGATION COINCIDENCE TOO MANY
Special Counsel Mueller was himself appointed in rather strange circumstances.
Former FBI director James Comey deliberately leaked his own confidential notes about conversations with President Trump, hoping to prompt appointment of a special investigator to investigate a president — whom he said, also under oath, that he was not investigating.
Comey’s ploy worked all too well. Department of Justice officials, now in the Trump Justice Department but who once served in Barack Obama’s administration, selected Comey’s close friend and long associate Robert Mueller as investigator.
From that germination, an innate conflict of interest was born — given that Mueller’s appointment assumed that Comey himself would not come under his own investigation, a supposition that may be increasingly untenable.
Okay — one such conflict of interest swallow does not make a discredited spring. But then, we now have an entire flock of such swallows. Let’s count them.
MUELLER AND HIS CABAL OF VILLAINOUS KNAVES
By now it should be clear to every sentient American that the Mueller "investigation" is not an investigation at all. It is, as President Trump and others have noted, a witch hunt.
As surely as the witch trials that began in 1692 were driven by hatred and hysteria, this one, too, is driven by hatred, intolerance, and fear.
The progressive left still refuses to accept the outcome of the 2016 election and has been trying to undo it by any means necessary. The "collusion with Russia" meme was and remains a non-starter, so now the real motive for Mueller's appointment as special counsel is evident for all to see.
It was always to find a way to remove Trump from office. The question now is: Why is this travesty being allowed to continue?
ALABAMA WASN’T ABOUT ALABAMA
Alabama means nothing to George Soros – or Democrats
The Alabama Senate election was about everything except Alabama.
And in the end, Alabamans stayed home and let the inevitable turnout tide of passion politics take its course. Minority voters rallied to Obama. Republicans stayed home. And the GOP is now holding on to a bare one-seat Senate majority.
The Democrats had abandoned Alabama, along with much of the South. They weren't interested in Doug Jones until they smelled weakness. And they still aren’t interested in representing Alabamans now. They just want another Senate seat to bring them closer to blocking and impeaching President Trump.
Alabama isn’t a place to them. It’s another chess piece in a Washington D.C. game that they can use to block judicial nominations, shut down the government and reverse the results of the previous election.
They have Alabama now, but history suggests that unless they learn the lessons that cost them their former strongholds in the South, they won’t hold on to the seat that they paid a very pretty penny for.
WHY THE ARAB STREET DIDN’T JUST EXPLODE
New Allies
In the wake of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last week (12/06), the “experts” crowding the media predicted strategic calamity: Vast, violent protests and a wave of terror would sweep the Muslim world in the coming days.
Instead, the largest demonstration anywhere this weekend was the funeral procession for Johnny Hallyday, the “French Elvis.” Nothing in the Middle East came close.
We have witnessed, yet again, the carefully phrased anti-Semitism of the pristinely educated; the global left’s fanatical pro-Palestinian bias; and the media’s yearning for career-making disasters.
But rather than waves of protest, the waiting world got tepid statements of disapproval from otherwise-occupied Arab governments. An act of justice for Israel did not ignite Armageddon.
That’s because “Palestine” is so over. Here’s why.
ANDREW JACKSON, TECUMSEH, AND THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION
Frieze portraying death of Tecumseh, Rotunda, US Capitol
After Jack Wheeler wrote Trump Ends the Snipe Hunt for Middle East Peace last week (12/07), then discussed President Trump’s admiration for our 9th President Andrew Jackson in the HFR of 12/08, I posted comments on the Forum connecting what I saw were the dots.
Jack was kind enough to ask that I flesh out my comments in a TTP article. I’ll start with a synopsis. If that intrigues you, read on!
My Synopsis
This will be interesting to watch. No one before Trump has attempted to apply Jacksonianism as a cure to the problems created by the Balfour Declaration.
History says that it might work. Jacksonian concepts of merit and decentralized federalism, deregulation, and local banking (vs politicized banking, racial, religious, and class identity politics) superseded the lingering European ideas that the British had counted on to re-conquer the United States with the War of 1812.
If President Trump’s approach works in the Middle East, then unleashing this proven antidote to socialism and identity politics will affect many more political regions than just the land between Egypt and Israel. Particularly ours
The strength of the Jacksonian attitude is with its ability to break logjams and make things happen. The Wikepedia entry for Jacksonian Democracy is worth reading, as you’ll quickly see the parallels between Jackson and Trump.
Here, I want to make an analogy between the Palestinians of our day and the Woodland Indians of Jackson’s time.
TRUMP AND CONGRESS CHALLENGE THE PALESTINIANS TO GROW UP
The ball is now in their court
The president's decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem announced yesterday (12/06) is already sending the usual suspects into a tizzy.
The famous Arab Street, we are told, will be erupting. The despicable fascist that runs Turkey has warned of imminent disaster. And the president of France is doing what the French usually do vis-a-vis the Jews -- well, not quite that bad.
But the real question is how the Palestinians themselves will react once the dust has settled.
Will they continue decades of self-destructive violent protests that have led many of us to believe they never had an interest in a two-state solution in the first place, that it was all posturing for handouts?
Or will they grow up and realize the time has come to negotiate to a conclusion and accept the responsibility of their own state and the adult compromises that would naturally entail?
By finally moving U.S. policy at least two degrees off years of unimaginative stagnation, Trump has forced the Palestinians to face some measure of reality. But he is not alone. They are also being challenged forcefully by Congress.
A SAUDI PEACE PLAN THAT COULD ACTUALLY WORK
Mahmoud Abbas and Crown Prince Salman in Riyadh
On Sunday (12/3), The New York Times published the Palestinian response to an alleged Saudi peace plan, headlined Talk of a Peace Plan That Snubs Palestinians Roils Middle East.
Saudi Crown Prince MBS bin Salman (known as MBS) reportedly presented it to PLO chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas last month. According to the Times’ report, MBS told Abbas he has two months to either accept the Saudi proposal or leave office to make way for a new Palestinian leader who will accept it.
The Palestinians and their European supporters are up in arms about the content of MBS’s plan. MBS has become a hated figure in wide circles of the foreign policy establishment in the West due to his trenchant opposition to Iran’s rise as a hegemonic power in the region.
Yes, surprise, the voices leading the charge against MBS are the same ones that developed the media echo chamber in pursuit of then president Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. The truth is, they hate MBS’s plan because it actually could work.
DONALD TRUMP, FEMINIST HERO
Why is it that liberal-run cities and institutions all seem to be hotbeds of sexism and racism? Maybe there’s a reason the Left is so obsessed with sexual harassment and racism, because it is practiced so much in their communities and institutions.
The firing this week of Matt Lauer from NBC, the latest sex scandal of leftie journos and Hollywood bigs, brings to mind an interview with “feminist” actress Amber Tamblyn about the Harvey Weinstein scandal that started all this.
The Cosmopolitan magazine interview, dated October 26, was headlined:
Yes, although she doesn’t realize it, she’s arguing the President is a Feminist Hero.
THE MEDIA PLAYS CHECKERS – TRUMP PLAYS 3-D CHESS
The checkers-chess cliché is overused but often accurate. It was the media's meme for George W. Bush; he played checkers, and China and the rest of the world played chess.
The media hated W. almost as much as they loathe Trump, but this time, it is Trump who plays the media as Isaac Stern plays the violin.
He tweets or tosses off a line, as he did this week when he referenced Elizabeth Warren, then sits back and watches the fun begin. The press corps goes berserk and accuses Trump of all the usual crimes: racism, sexism, etc.
The "racial slur" allegation was particularly off the mark. These lefty journalists leap into the expected fray before they remember to think. Trump knows this and enjoys trolling the press. The reporters rise to the occasion every time. They put on a show of perpetual outrage, no matter how flimsy, misplaced, or phony their indignation.
So convinced are the media that they are Trump's intellectual superiors that they make utter fools of themselves on an almost daily basis.
CALLING WARREN POCAHONTAS IS THE BEST WAY TO FIGHT RACISM
Senator Elizabeth Warren, America’s greatest living Fake Indian, is outraged.
"There he was, at a ceremony to honor Native Americans,” the former Harvard Law prof, who claimed to be Native American on account of her grandfather’s high cheekbones, fumed on Monday (11/27), “And President Trump couldn't even make it through a ceremony to honor these men without throwing in a racial slur.”
The “racial slur” was calling a woman who is as Indian as the pilgrims, Pocahontas.
Taunting an American Indian that way might be a racial slur. Taunting Warren that way doesn’t insult her race. The millionaire former asbestos lawyer is as white as cottage cheese. It insults her character. It reminds everyone that Warren is as much a fighter for the “little guy” as she was a Cherokee.
UNDOING THE DIS-EDUCATION OF MILLENNIALS
I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn.
But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
They cannot learn until their minds are freed from that prison. This year in my Foundations of Law course for first-year law students, I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi.
Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits. So, a couple of weeks into the semester, I decided to lay down some ground rules. I gave them these rules just before beginning our annual unit on legal reasoning.
Here is the speech I gave them.
THE BELLS OF BARCELONA ARE TOLLING FOR EUROPE
Barcelona
President Trump got bad advice about the secession crisis in Catalonia. When Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy visited the White House last week, he said that Spain's northeastern region would be "foolish to secede."
On the contrary, the gutsy Catalans are the world's poster-kids for populism. Their independence movement is a real revolution. America shouldn't meddle in Spain's internal affairs, to be sure, but we ought to recognize a kindred political movement when we see it.
Unlike the anti-clerical left-wing movements of the past, the Catalan revolutionaries today evince thoroughly bourgeois goals. As a revolutionary movement, the Catalans better resemble the Americans of 1776 than the French of 1789, the Russians of 1917, or the Catalan revolutionary government of the late 1930s that ultimately was crushed by Francisco Franco.
Join the forum discussion on this postTHE HOAX OF OBAMA
The revelation making the rounds again about Obama, how he sneaked through $221 million to his Palestinian terrorist friends during the last hours of his presidency, makes it elaborately clear that he was always in it for himself and for his pals.
For eight years Israel was betrayed and America was duped by a charmer.
There are movies about such men -- Tony Curtis in “The Great Impostor,” or Matt Damon in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” -- about men skilled in the art of deception. Through guile, a ready smile, a quick tongue, they charm their way up the ladder from one bamboozled household to the next.
Their papers are never in order, but they manage. They manage to reach the top. Both Curtis (whose film was based on a true story) and Damon did not know a thing about medicine or airplanes but they managed to run hospitals and to fake it as pilots. They got caught. But before that they had everybody fooled.
Sound familiar? Surely not to Progressives who wanted to be fooled or didn’t really care. So long as Obama was their choice he could do no wrong.
But to the rest of America, and the world, the damage bitterly lives on.
THE CIA VS THE PRESIDENT – WHO WILL WIN?
The CIA has denied a security clearance to Trump National Security Council (NSC) official Robin Townley without any allegation, much less evidence of disloyalty to the United States.
Quite simply, it is because the CIA disapproves of Mr. Townley’s attitude toward the agency, and this is unprecedented. President Trump appointed Mr. Townley to coordinate Africa policy at the NSC. The CIA did not want to deal with him. Hence, it used the power to grant security clearances to tell the president to choose someone acceptable to the agency, though not so much to him.
This opens a larger issue: Since no one can take part in the formulation or execution of foreign or defense policy without a high-level security clearance, vetoing the president’s people by denying them clearances trumps the president.
Simply put, the CIA has declared war upon the President of the United States. Who will win this war?
HOW WE KNOW TRUMP MEANS BUSINESS
Donald Trump really is going to make America great again. It wasn’t just a campaign slogan: Trump is for real—and one of the great pleasures in the coming years is going to be the joy of watching all those pundits who think he’s going to be a disaster being proved wrong again and again.
Nowhere will this be more evident than in his policies on energy and the environment.
I made a trip to Washington just before Christmas to check out the lie of the land. What I wanted to find out was just how serious Trump is about slaying the Green Blob which has caused so much misery and expense in the U.S. and across the world for the last thirty or forty years.
And after a series of private briefings with administration insiders and members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I came back heartened.
Here’s how one of them put it:
“Trump is going to send his tanks into the swamp from Day One. He knows there isn’t time to lose and he knows that every day that passes those tanks are going to get sucked deeper into the slime…” [by ‘the slime’ my anonymous informant meant, of course, the liberal/DC establishment which will do everything in its power to frustrate Trump] “…We’re going to go in fast and we’re going to go in hard. They won’t know what hit them.”
AN ELECTION THERAPY GUIDE FOR LIBERALS
A bottle of Trump champagne at the Dowd Thanksgiving dinner table
Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest political feats in modern history by defeating Hillary Clinton and the vaunted Clinton machine.
The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms.
Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships.
The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The Dems’ answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust.
Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion.
This did not go down well in the Midwest, where Trump flipped three blue states and 44 electoral votes.
Here is a short primer for the young protesters.
If your preferred candidate loses, there is no need for mass hysteria, canceled midterms, safe spaces, crying rooms or group primal screams. You might understand this better if you had not received participation trophies, undeserved grades to protect your feelings or even if you had a proper understanding of civics.
The Democrats are now crying that Hillary had more popular votes. That can be her participation trophy.
THE LEFT EMBRACES APARTHEID
1866 Democrat Party campaign poster
The home page of Hillary Clinton’s campaign website (still up: https://www.hillaryclinton.com) has links to “African Americans for Hillary, Latinos for Hillary, Asian Americans and Pacific islanders for Hillary, Women for Hillary, Millennials for Hillary,” but none to “Men for Hillary,” let alone “White Americans for Hillary.”
Given the history of such stereotyping, it is baffling that politicians on the left cannot see where this leads. The prime exponents of identity politics in the past were the advocates of apartheid, of anti-semitism, and of treating women as the legal chattels of men. “We are sleepwalking our way to segregation,” Trevor Phillips says.
Identity politics is thus very old-fashioned. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism, says equality feminism — fair treatment, respect and dignity — is being eclipsed in universities by a Victorian “fainting couch feminism,” which views women as “fragile flowers who require safe spaces, trigger warnings and special protection from micro-invalidations.”
Sure enough, when she said this at Oberlin College, Ohio, 35 students and a “therapy dog” sought refuge in a safe room.
WHY THE ICY SILENCE FROM CLIMATE ALARMISTS?
La Nina
Global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year – the biggest and steepest fall on record.
But the news has been greeted with an eerie silence by the world’s alarmist community. When temperatures shoot up it’s catastrophic climate change which requires dramatic headlines across the mainstream media and demands for urgent action.
But that when they fall even more precipitously it’s just a case of “nothing to see here”.
The cause of the fall is a La Niña event following in the wake of an unusual strong El Niño.
As David Rose reports:
Big El Niños always have an immense impact on world weather, triggering higher than normal temperatures over huge swathes of the world. The 2015-16 El Niño was probably the strongest since accurate measurements began, with the water up to 3C warmer than usual.
It has now been replaced by a La Niña event – when the water in the same Pacific region turns colder than normal.
This also has worldwide impacts, driving temperatures down rather than up.
PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP’S THANKSGIVING MESSAGE TO AMERICA
We are very blessed to call this nation our home. And that is what America is: it is our home. It’s where we raise our families, care for our loved ones, look out for our neighbors, and live out our dreams.
It is my prayer, that on this Thanksgiving, we begin to heal our divisions and move forward as one country, strengthened by a shared purpose and very, very common resolve.
In declaring this national holiday, President Lincoln called upon Americans to speak with “one voice and one heart.” That’s just what we have to do.
ARE DEMOCRATS ABOUT TO BECOME ANTI-SEMITIC?
Rep. Keith Ellison taking oath of office on the Koran Jan 03 2007
The Democrat Party stands at a crossroads today. And so do the Jewish Democrats.
Out of power in the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats must decide what sort of party they will be in the post-Obama world.
They have two basic options.
They can move to the center and try to rebuild their blue collar voter base that President-elect Donald Trump captivated with his populist message. To do so they will need to loosen the reins of the political correctness and weaken their racialism, their radical environmentalism and their support for open borders.
The second option is to go still further along the leftist trajectory that President Barack Obama set the party off on eight years ago. This is the favored option of the Bernie Sanders’ wing of the party. Sanders’ supporters refer to this option as the populist course.
For the Democrats, such a populist course will require them to become more racialist, more authoritarian in their political correctness, angrier and more doctrinaire.
It will also require them to become an anti-Semitic party.
MEDIA SCHIZOPHRENIA
Every quantum leap in mass communications also made possible a vast improvement in propaganda techniques. Nazi and Soviet propaganda looks as crude to us as a Babbage calculating machine.
Virtual reality isn't something that's coming. It's here. It's been here for a while. The potent combination of media budgets and crowdsourced social media distribution has allowed for a previously unparalleled level of propaganda that creates and inhabits its own virtual reality. There's a name for that sort of thing. Schizophrenia. What happens when the schizophrenic media reality collapses after it comes into too sharp of a conflict with reality is the same behavior that schizophrenics exhibit when their perceptions of the world conflict with the real world. The people venting and rioting and screaming were living in a cozy reality. Everyone in their social media bubble, except a few crazy uncles agreed with them. All the celebrities were on board. And then the holodeck got switched off. It wasn't a unique experience. Most Nazis didn't understand what was happening when the tanks broke through to Berlin. The average Russian wasn't prepared for the fall of the USSR.
TEARS OF SNOWFLAKES
Cheer up, American Millennials!
I mean, seriously, CHEER UP!
Oh, I know you’ve had a rough week ever since Donald Trump won the election.
Now it’s time to get a grip.
STOP crying.
STOP taking personal days off work to ‘process’ what happened.
STOP huddling with your equally distraught buddies in Starbucks over your Venti Iced White Chocolate Mocha.
STOP howling away on social media about how unfair life is and how it’s the end of the planet as we know it.
STOP retweeting all your favorite celebrities’ own outbursts of pique, rage and anguish.
STOP demanding the Electoral College reverse the decision in December.
In short, STOP being such a faux-tormented bunch of absolutely deluded cretins.
Want to know why Trump is going to be your next president? It’s because he is what’s called a ‘winner’.
TRUMP’S WAR ON THE GREEN BLOB
Gosh, do I wish I’d taken my own advice and gone long on fossil fuels, short on renewables in the run up to the U.S. presidential election. I would have even bigger a reason to celebrate the Donald Trump victory than I do already.
Make no mistake, the Donald Trump presidency represents the biggest blow yet to the Great Global Warming Swindle.
Climategate was merely an amuse-gueule. This is the main event because it won’t just involve cross words in the blogosphere but actual deeds.
Specifically, those deeds will involve:
*the U.S. withdrawing from the COP21 climate agreement (aka “Clexit”);
*the effective dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency by the able and sensible Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute;
*much laxer federal regulations on matters like fracking, oil pipelines, and fossil fuels generally;
*an end to the massive subsidies paid to renewables such as the bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes which the President-elect is so right to hate.
For the Greenies, all this must seem like Armageddon come early. But wait, there’s more!
HALF-FULL REPORT 11/11/16
The Winner
This is a significantly more than half-full kind of week, perhaps “cup runneth over” even.
Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States this Tuesday, along with Senate and House majorities, and absolute blowout numbers at the state level all across America.
He defeated the most corrupt candidate in American history, a woman whom the FBI now tells us allowed classified information to fall into the hands of at least five foreign enemies, and a woman who would have used the Supreme Court to annihilate the First Amendment as well as the Second. As her warm-up act.
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Yes, Donald Trump did exactly what he said he’d do from the beginning: he won legions of Rust Belt working class Democrats.
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By the way, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney with blacks and Hispanics (so much for the RINOs “superiority” in this vein).
And yes, Trump was right: the polls were rigged.
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The inevitable leftist meltdown has been nothing if not entertaining.
It started with Hillary’s refusal to thank her assembled supporters, people who’d worked for years for her, at a packed Javits Center Tuesday night.
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The irony of rioting by people who just told us Donald Trump was “threatening democracy” by not pre-accepting the results is pretty rich, of course.
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As I keep telling you, personnel is policy. What Trump – or any politician – says is a lot less important than who he hires.
The early reports are great.
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Here we go with this week's MORE THAN Half-Full Report!!! Let's Roll! 🙂
TRUMP IS ELECTED 45TH PRESIDENT OF THE US
The impossible became possible. Donald Trump has defeated Hillary Clinton and will be the 45th President of the United States.
Saying Trump’s campaign was unconventional is a severe understatement. Every piece of conventional wisdom, every shred of data, ultimately proved to be wrong as we came into Election Day. As the sun rose today, America will face this strange, new reality, and questions will ultimately have to be answered.
After a long and hard fought two-year long campaign the 2016 presidential election finally came to an end with the election of Donald J. Trump as the next president of the United States.
WHY TRUMP WON
Jerusalem, Israel. The most unhappy person in America as Donald Trump won a remarkable historic presidential election victory was the man on the second floor of the White House. His legacy is about to lie in shatters.
Obama’s presidency will go down in history as a domestic and foreign policy disaster.
Under Obama, we have witnessed an America too progressively concentrating on changing society for the worse.
Safe spaces got preference over a safe America. Toilets for people who don’t know if they are male or female make the headlines rather than forty million Americans on food stamps. When petty criminals get shot the police are accused of criminality, but murderous illegal immigrants are protected in sanctuary cities.
Trump got it right. The people want to get America back on track, a track based on traditional values, common sense, hard work, security and patriotism. It’s a society based on the same values we love and need in Israel for our welfare and safety.
OBAMA ERA IS OVER
Obama and his supporters loved talking about history. His victory was historic. They were on the right side of history. History was an inevitable arc that bent their way.
The tidal force of demographics had made the old America irrelevant. Any progressive policy agenda was now possible because we were no longer America. We Were Obamerica. A hip, happening place full of smiling gay couples, Muslim women in hijabs and transgender actors. We were all going to live in a New York City coffee house and work at Green Jobs and live in the post-national future.
This was Obama's America. And there was no going back.But there is no right side of history. There is only the side we choose. The Obama era was permanent. It was history. Now it is history.
HALF-FULL REPORT 11/04/16
"It ain't over till it's over."
How long have we heard that Donald Trump was not only doomed, but 30-points-down doomed? Done deal. Hopeless. Not even worth talking about. I'm not telling you he'll win today. But I am telling you he can win.
In a race between the two most hated people in the history of major party nominees, the one who can drive the other's negatives higher is going to win.
******* Comey's bombshell re-opening of the FBI's case against Hillary Clinton -- as a result of the discovery of over 650,000 previously undisclosed emails on a computer owned by Huma Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner, under investigation for child porn -- is, of course, the impetus for the transformation in Trump’s fortunes.
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So let’s come full circle and look at the polls. Trump is now beating Clinton 53-43 among voters who’ve made up their minds. That’s a very, very big deal
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This is the week's HFR leading up to the Presidential Elections! You can't miss this!!!
CHECKMATING OBAMA AT THE UN
In one of the immortal lines of Godfather 2, mafia boss Michael Corleone discusses the fate of his brother, who betrayed him, with his enforcer.
“I don’t want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive,” Corleone said.
Message received. The brother was murdered after their mother’s funeral.
Last week it was reported that the Obama administration has delivered a message to the Palestinian Authority. The administration has warned the PA that the US will veto any anti-Israel resolution brought before the UN Security Council before the US presidential elections on November 8.
Message received. Open season on Israel at the Security Council will commence November 9. The Palestinians are planning appropriately.
Israel needs to plan, too. Israel’s most urgent diplomatic mission today is to develop and implement a strategy that will outflank President Barack Obama in his final eight weeks in power.