Saturday, December 31, 2016

op ed review 1/1/17



Happy New Year!  No OER next week

THIS WEEK’S NEWS
President elect Trump announces 8,000 new jobs for Americans - 5,000 for telecom giant Sprint that had outsourced roles overseas

When Donald Trump enters the White House on Inauguration Day, he will be able to fill more seats on the courts of appeals than President Obama did when he took office eight years ago, which could give him the chance to transform the judiciary into a more conservative branch of government.

Donald Trump urges Israel to "stay strong" until he takes office, says cannot allow it to be "treated with disdain"
UK Government issues unprecedented attack on the US after Secretary of State John Kerry branded Israeli regime the ´most right-wing in history´
Leaked Document: Obama & Kerry Colluded with Palestinians 10 Days Before UN Settlements Vote

Cybersecurity tycoon John McAfee has blasted claims Moscow was involved in hacking the US presidential election, insisting it was “not the Russians”. He called the FBI’s claims of the Kremlin hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta a “fallacy”.
Washington Post Publishes False News Story About Russians Hacking Electrical Grid
Even the Rolling Stone magazine is skeptical: “Something About This Russia Story Stinks”

Lame duck Obama unleashes 3,853 new federal regulations, record 97,110 pages of red tape.
President Obama says he won't retire quietly once Donald Trump is sworn in as president. “…he intends to be a thorn in President Trump's side after the official handover of power on Jan. 20.”
Obama’s Secretary of the Navy warns Trump: “if (social change) gets rolled back, you’re weakening the United States military.”

China wants to put an aircraft carrier off US coast...
China also planning space domination.

Every 33 seconds, a new international immigrant - legal or otherwise - will be added to the population of the US of A.
In the last two years, California has issued an estimated 806,000 driver’s licenses to illegal residents.
Huh?  “Trump’s Border Wall, Deportation Plans Face Pushback From GOP”

Venezuela, which was once Latin America’s richest country, has become an unwilling test site for how much economic and social stress a modern nation can tolerate before it descends into pure anarchy.
Jacoby:  As socialism shattered Venezuela, the useful idiots applauded

EPA Tells Alaskans In Sub-Zero Temps: Stop Burning Wood To Keep Warm, because you are in “serious noncompliance of the Clean Air Act”.

The New York Times’ Christmas Day editorial scolds Senate Republicans for “stealing” a seat on the Supreme Court that should have been filled by President Obama.
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COLUMN OF THE WEEK
New York Post, 12/29
In his waning days in the White House, President Obama is desperately trying to make his policies as permanent as possible by tying the hands of his successor — and far more than other presidents have done on their way out.

From his dramatic and disastrous change of US policy on Israel to his executive order restricting 1.65 million acres of land from development despite local objections, Obama is trying to make it impossible for Donald Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress to govern.

Even Thursday’s announcement of wide-ranging sanctions against Russia presents Trump with a foreign-policy crisis immediately upon taking office. By contrast, many of Obama’s predecessors have stood back in their final days in office and refrained from any dramatic shifts, in deference to the agenda of the man voters sent to succeed them.

But Obama won’t accept the election results. As he suggested the other day, Trump’s election was a fluke — and he himself would have easily been re-elected if allowed to stand for a third term. He believes this not just because he’s an effective campaigner, but because he thinks his “vision” and policies continue to be backed by “a majority of the American people.”

But Obama, like many Democrats, fails to understand what happened in the election: Voters were calling for real change from the status quo — from his policies. Indeed, before the vote, he himself said it was a referendum on him and his policies. Memo to the president: You lost.

Whether it was the lackluster economy, ObamaCare, trade, the sweeping failure of his foreign policy or illegal immigration, voters sought something very different. Trump, on the other hand, did more than just energize his base: He flipped six states that voted for Obama in 2012.

The results, as many have since come to realize, is that the Democratic Party now caters to a hard-left, elite core located on the two coasts — and has abandoned the working-class Americans in the heartland it so loudly claims to champion. Which is why Democrats have also been losing seats, especially at the state level. Voters are fed up with Democratic failures — to the point where they were willing to take a chance on an untested novice like Trump.

Obama’s failure to follow tradition and respect voters is par for the course. He spent much of his tenure pushing the bounds and overstepping his constitutional authority — through regulatory edicts and executive actions. So his latest power grab should come as no surprise. But it’s one thing for Obama to have delusions about the popularity of his agenda. It’s quite another to try to preserve a discredited legacy by handcuffing America’s next democratically elected president.


Another good read:  The Illogic of Russian Hacking
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OTHER COLUMNS
“The fallacy of believing that the way to reduce shootings is to disarm peaceful people extends from domestic gun control laws to international disarmament agreements. If disarmament agreements reduced the dangers of war, there would never have been a World War II. The decades leading up to that war were filled with international disarmament agreements. As with domestic gun control laws, the agreements were followed by peaceful countries and ignored by belligerent countries that built up huge war machines, such as in Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The net result was that the belligerent countries had every incentive to start wars, and that they inflicted devastating losses on the peaceful countries that had drastically curtailed their own military forces. … [T]here was hysteria when President Ronald Reagan began building up American military forces in the 1980s. Cries were heard that he was leading us toward nuclear war. In reality, he led us toward an end of the Cold War, without a shot being fired at the Soviet Union. But who reads history these days, or checks facts before leading the charge to keep law-abiding people disarmed?”
                 -Thomas Sowell
(Dr. Sowell has retired from writing his column, we will miss his wisdom and insight….)

Thomas Sowell:  “My Farwell Column”
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LEFTIST WATCH

In the latest slap at deplorable supporters of President-elect Trump, the popular liberal news site Slate has declared that the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton revealed America to be "unjust, racist, sexist."

Sociology professor: “Liberals are Suffering from ‘Personal Trauma’ after Trump Wins the White House”

That’ll show ‘em: European Lefties Plan to March on ISIS While Waving White Flags
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ARTICLES
Important article, the original “fundamental transformation” of America was driven by LBJ:  “This syndrome had perhaps its most profound impact in some of America’s most difficult neighborhoods, where unparalleled family breakdown is, in part, the sad result of Lyndon Johnson’s well-meaning miscalculations. We are living through the collapse of the traditional family and marriage as the norm and expectation for millions of Americans, especially in low-income communities.”

The future of Europe?  Eerie photos show abandoned churches which have been left to crumble with graffiti- covered walls, decaying pews, and BONES littering the floor

“Ten Gay Lords A Leaping: A List Of Taxpayer-Funded Art Projects”

New trend in publishing?  “The other day, I happened to click on to Amazon and read their top 100 best-selling books for that hour. As I read the list, I was shocked to note—fully understanding that as a conservative, time has passed me by—that 5 of the top 100 books had the f-word in the title.”

The same liberal media that tout women’s rights, gender equality, equal pay, the freedom for a woman to express herself by choosing how to dress, is the same media now pushing the narrative that "modest" Islamic fashion is the hottest style to hit the catwalks.

Top Ten Most Under Reported Stories of 2016…
#10 – Jeb’s failure to launch. When you think about the years of strategic planning that went into a Jeb Bush presidential campaign, well, the scope Jeb’s failure to launch just exemplifies how disconnected the professional republican apparatus was from the average voter
#09 – The number of grassroots voters who donated to the Donald Trump campaign.  After a decade of the republican party surviving only from the mega-donors and bundlers, the era of the small donor returned.
#07 – The inability of multi-million republican Super-PAC’s to defeat the grass roots voters.  That’s a major under reported story, also connected to #9: the size of the Trump coalition.
#05 – The failure of the false prosecutions. The media have never taken a full accounting of how the insufferable false narratives spurred by anti-police, and anti-law-and-order social justice movements have collapsed when faced with sunlight of actual evidence.
#04 – The final defeat of the Bush Clinton legacies.  Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, and Bush.  That’s 20 years of presidential valuation wiped out by the overwhelming support evidenced by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
#02 – The wipe-out of the corporate media apparatus. It is understandable why the media would choose not to report on their own irrelevance; yet that doesn’t mean their irrelevance is any less a story.
#01 – The New Economy. In my opinion the inability of media, business media, economic or financial forecasters to understand the concept of the new Trump “America-first” economy is not only the least reported story in 2016, but will also be the biggest under-reported story of 2017 and beyond.
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WISE WORDS
“The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power.”
                       -Albert Jay Nock

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