Is Donald Trump ‘profoundly unconservative’?

No. It doesn’t match his shrinking regulations and limiting government

by Allan H. Ryskind   Allan H. Ryskind, a former editor and owner of Human Events, is the author of “Hollywood Traitors” (Regnery, 2015)

December 31, 2019

Prominent liberal Fareed Zakaria insists that Donald Trump “has been profoundly unconservative” because he’s abandoned what “Republicans used to call the core of their agenda — limited government.” But it’s hard to take the charge seriously, even though some conservatives have sent his piece around for comment to see if he’s onto something. Yet no politician in recent memory has restricted the reach of government at both the federal and state level more than the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Mr. Trump’s drastic shrinking of federal economic regulations, opening vast expanses of federal lands for energy exploration, drawing overseas businesses home with tax breaks and passing major tax cuts for corporations and individuals have generated an explosion of well-paying jobs, personal wealth and soaring wages, as well as the lowest level of unemployment for minorities on record. Some 7 million new jobs have been created during Mr. Trump’s presidency and more than 100 million American shareholders have watched the market jump 55 percent since his election.

You’d think Mr. Zakaria would be celebrating Mr. Trump’s low-tax, pro-growth economic agenda as not only core Republicanism but virtually Reaganesque. Increasing prosperity by stimulating market forces without enacting high taxes and big government programs is, of course, how conservatives try to keep government limited.

Mr. Zakaria concedes that Mr. Trump has delivered what conservatives have wanted in the realm of “social and cultural policy,” such as “appointing judges, tightening rules related to abortion and asylum, etc.” but suggests they have little to do with taming the Leviathan.

Really? Stacking the courts with judges steeped in the philosophy of federalism is, of course, precisely the way to limit government on both the economic and cultural fronts. Mr. Zakaria may ignore the threat, but Democratic Party presidential candidates, along with their media support groups, are panicked over the president’s court selections.

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The hypocrisy of the Left when it comes to  protecting Obama or Biden is  simply amazing that  they get away with it.    It is up to the conservative media to expose them.  Nancy

Philadelphia’s Top Prosecutor Pursues ‘Social,’ Not Actual, Justice

Larry Krasner said he wouldn’t prosecute certain offenses and the bad guys got the message.

District Attorney Larry Krasner speaks to the media in Philadelphia, March 6, 2019.PHOTO: MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Michael White didn’t deny killing Sean Schellenger. He admitted to police and at his trial that he plunged a knife several times into Schellenger’s back during a July 2018 scuffle in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. Numerous witnesses and a cellphone video confirmed what happened. Yet in October 2019 a jury acquitted Mr. White, a 22-year-old college student, of voluntary manslaughter. Many, including the victim’s family, blame Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s soft-on-crime district attorney.

Mr. Krasner is one of a new crop of “progressive prosecutors” who have won election in liberal cities. They include San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Weather Underground radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn because his own parents were in prison for participating in the murder of police officers. Mr. Krasner was a virulent critic of law enforcement before running to become the city’s top prosecutor. During a 30-year career as a defense lawyer, Mr. Krasner gained notoriety for filing 75 lawsuits against Philadelphia police. In a 2017 campaign video he said “policing and prosecution are both systematically racist,” and he called poverty and crime consequences of “mass incarceration.”

Mr. Krasner’s candidacy was laughed off until George Soros dumped $1.7 million into the campaign. At his primary election night victory party, Mr. Krasner smiled while his supporters chanted, “No good cops in a racist system!” and “f— the FOP!” (the Fraternal Order of Police). He has refused to prosecute certain gun and drug crimes and ordered the 300 prosecutors in his office to seek lighter sentences. These moves have confirmed the suspicions of many Philadelphians that Mr. Krasner is more interested in coddling the city’s criminals than he is in providing justice to the victims of crimes.

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The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watch

By Lee Smith   Lee Smith is the author of The Consequences of Syria

EXCERPTS FROM THIS ARTICLE:  

JCPOA advocates claim Trump left the U.S. and the entire world vulnerable by leaving the Iran deal. The JCPOA, they say, was working. This is not true and hasn’t been true since the very beginning of the deal, at least not on the terms sold to Congress and the U.S. public. From the start, Iran was given secret loopholes that made it appear they were meeting the publicly stated terms of deal. Among other recent violations: The Iranians have exceeded the amount of uranium they’re allowed to enrich; they’ve exceeded the levels of purity of enriched uranium; they’ve violated the types of centrifuges they were allowed to spin; and injected uranium into centrifuges they were not allowed to use for enrichment.

Perhaps most tellingly, Iran’s nuclear archives, which Israel seized from a Tehran warehouse in January 2018 and made public months later, show that the regime never gave up its intentions to build a military nuclear program, despite promises in the JCPOA to never pursue nuclear weapons……

The most infamous payoff was the $1.7 billion in cash the administration shipped off to the IRGC on wooden pallets in exchange for U.S. citizens held hostage by the regime. The White House said that there was no “quid pro quo,” that it was Iran’s money to begin with—$400 million the pre-revolutionary government had deposited in 1979 to buy U.S. arms, plus interest. But the U.S. had already used the $400 million to compensate terror victims of the Islamic Republic. That was Iran’s money. The $400 million the Obama administration used to “pay back” the Iranians belonged to the U.S. taxpayer.

The administration argued that the U.S. had to pay the ransom in cash because Tehran had been cut off from the financial system and there was no other way to transfer the funds. That was not true. The Obama administration had wired payments to Iran before and after the wooden pallets episode. The Iranians wanted cash so it would be harder to track their terror financing…….

The Obama administration even paid the Iranians when they violated the deal. The Iranians overproduced reactor coolant, (heavy water, a key ingredient in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons) in violation of the JCPOA, and the administration offered to buy it for $10 millionto keep them in compliance. But that wasn’t enough for Tehran—or the White House. In exchange for giving up the nuclear-related material they had promised not to have in the first place—the heavy water—the regime then demanded more nuclear material in exchange. And the American administration agreed: In January 2017, Obama greenlighted the shipment of 130 tons of uranium to Iran.

 BEGINNING OF THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

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What better way to slow the growth of a dynamic country such as ours, than to impose restrictive and time consuming environmental regulations.  Was  that  possibly  the plan of the Green/Globalist/Marxist Movement?   Ya think???   Nancy

Getting Closer to ‘Shovel Ready’

Environmental impact statements shouldn’t take 13 years and more than 16,000 pages.

Traffic backs up on Interstate 70 near Silverthorne, Colo., Jan. 7, 2018. PHOTO: THOMAS PEIPERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  On Thursday the Trump Administration released a proposed rule to streamline NEPA reviews. One highlight is that the process would have presumptive limits: two years and 300 pages for a full environmental impact statement; or a year and 75 pages for a smaller environmental assessment. Thorny cases could go longer with written approval by “a senior agency official of the lead agency.”

If you visit an aging American megaproject—say, the Hoover Dam—you’ll probably see a startling statistic about how quickly it was built. Congress authorized the damming of the Colorado River in 1928, construction started in 1931, and the 726-foot concrete wonder opened in 1936. That’s a “shovel ready” job.

Today even modest public works, including roads, bridges and airport runways, can spend years in limbo, no thanks to the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. That 1970 law requires an environmental study of any major project that involves federal funding or permitting. NEPA hasn’t been overhauled in 40 years, which is why the Trump Administration deserves applause for moving last week to modernize it.

Everybody wants to protect the environment. But NEPA isn’t doing the job sensibly. No single agency has responsibility for its enforcement, unlike the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act. There’s no obligation for the feds to keep a specific timeline. Environmental assessments and impact statements are often monstrously detailed, since agencies and sponsors are trying to make them litigation proof.

The result is a regulatory morass. From 2013 to 2017, the average final impact statement took more than four years and ran 669 pages, the Council on Environmental Quality said last summer. The longest file was for a contentious 12-mile expansion of Interstate 70 in Denver. The final report ran 8,951 pages, plus another 7,307 pages of appendices. The whole rigmarole took 13 years.

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The death of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani is a blow to the theocracy’s efforts to assert its power across the Middle East. By taking out Soleimani, President Trump also did Latin America a big favor.

VIDEO – CLARE LOPEZ – IRAN AND ITS HISTORY OF TERRORISM

Biography

Clare M. Lopez is a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on Middle East, national defense, WMD, and counterterrorism issues. Specific areas of expertise include Islam and Iran. Lopez began her career as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), serving domestically and abroad for 20 years in a variety of assignments, and acquiring extensive expertise in counterintelligence, counternarcotics, and counterproliferation issues with a career regional focus on the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. She has served in or visited over two dozen nations worldwide, and speaks several languages, including Spanish, Bulgarian, French, German, and Russian, and currently is studying Farsi.

Now a private consultant, Lopez also serves as Vice President of the non-profit forum, The Intelligence Summit, and is a Professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre), where she teaches courses on the Iranian Intelligence Services, and the expanding influence of Jihad and Sharia in Europe and the U.S. She is affiliated on a consultant basis with DoD contractors that provide clandestine operations training to military intelligence personnel. Lopez was Executive Director of the Iran Policy Committee, a Washington, DC think tank, from 2005-2006. She has served as a Senior Scientific Researcher at the Battelle Memorial Institute; a Senior Intelligence Analyst, Subject Matter Expert, and Program Manager at HawkEye Systems, LLC.; and previously produced Technical Threat Assessments for U.S. Embassies at the Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, where she worked as a Senior Intelligence Analyst for Chugach Systems Integration.

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Radical changes imposed on our military by progressives, begun in earnest during the Obama administration, are negatively impacting our combat readiness and jeopardizing the lives of our men and women in uniform and, ultimately, our national security.  In Stand Down:  How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military, author James Hasson elucidates how Barack Obama fundamentally changed military culture to make our nation less secure. Hasson, a former Army captain, Army Ranger School graduate, and Afghanistan veteran, argues that military readiness was sacrificed for identity politics and progressive rhetoric. He lists examples such as policies that established “safe spaces,” prohibited “micro-aggressions,” denigrated “hyper-masculine” traits, implemented unwise “green” standards and injected “social justice” guidelines in military operations.

In his revealing book, Captain Hasson describes how Obama’s military appointees, mainly progressive ideologues lacking military experience and hailing from academic, political, and the private sectors, were placed in charge of seasoned combat generals with decades of combat experience.  The priorities, experience, and philosophies of the officers and appointees couldn’t have been more disparate. 

Many senior military staff members suffered in silence at Obama’s attempt to use the military as a “laboratory for progressive social engineering,” according to Hasson.  Exemplifying this shift was the naming of Navy ships after Leftist political heroes. Socialist labor-activist Cesar Chavez and slain gay-rights advocate Harvey Milk — who left the Navy for being gay — were among those who Ray Mabus, Obama’s secretary of the Navy, announced would have ships named after them.  This practice flew in the face of the hallowed Navy tradition of naming ships after presidents and war heroes.  

Obama, who, Hasson says, took pride in his lack of military knowledge and experience, made widespread changes to personnel policy, budgetary expenditures and resource allocations that harmed readiness, training and troop safety.  Obama’s transgender policy of “mixed genitalia in the bathrooms,” took precedence over established military culture.  Soldiers were judged by the gender they wished to be rather than their biological sex.  Obama essentially used the military to lead social change in American society rather than preserving time-honored traditions that emphasized troop cohesiveness and readiness. 

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GUEST EDITORIALS

EDITORIAL: TRUMP – Existential Threat to New World Order

EDITORIAL – The ongoing attacks by the political establishment on President Donald Trump –which began even before he was elected – are without parallel in history. The savagery, frenzy, and outright hysteria displayed by the President’s enemies within the Democrat Party, the media, and the various power centers of the globalist elites have no prior precedent.

This President has been spied on, lied about, made the subject of phony foreign dossiers, insulted, ridiculed, scorned, mocked and threatened. We have witnessed Hollyweird celebrities advocate for blowing up the White House, demand the President be beaten, jailed or even assassinated, and his children tortured and sexually abused.

We have seen politicians in Washington try to convict the President of non-existent crimes, investigate him and his family members for everything from tax returns to guests at his hotels, project on to him crimes that they themselves have committed, and seed his Administration with leakers and double-agents.

No other President in American history has been treated in such a shameful manner. Not Lincoln. Not FDR. Not Nixon. Not Reagan.

What is it about this President that has roused such demons in his political foes?  What is it about this President that drives his opponents to the brink of insanity? What is it about this President that so terrifies and terrorizes the Pelosis, Schiffs, Schumers and the George Soroses?

Is it simply that he is not part of the club, a brash outsider with a different style? Is it merely because he’s outspoken and tramples on political correctness? Is it because he’s sometimes unpresidential in his demeanor ( at least in their minds )?

Not at all. After all, aren’t these the same folks who loved Bill Clinton whose extracurricular activities involved cigars and staining blue dresses in the Oval Office?

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