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”
_____________________________________________________________________
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”
_____________________________________________________________________
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
___________________________________________________________________
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
posted by gary at
10:16 AM
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