A big win for America — terminating al-Baghdadi

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed "caliph" of the Islamic State, is dead after a U.S. military raid of his compound in northwest Syria. Al-Baghdadi was corned in a dead-end tunnel underneath the compound, where he detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and three of his children. There were no serious casualties for Americans, and U.S. forces recovered his remains from the rubble of the collapsed tunnel to confirm his demise. Far from a profile in courage, al-Baghdadi died as the same cowardly thug he played in life.

"He was vicious and violent, and he died in a vicious and violent way, as a coward, running and crying," President Donald Trump declared in a White House speech. "Baghdadi's demise demonstrates America's relentless pursuit of terrorist leaders, and our commitment to the enduring and total defeat of ISIS."

This win substantially answers criticism of his recent decision regarding troop movements in Syria. The Middle East is a chessboard.

The operation that killed al-Baghdadi was named for Kayla Mueller, the American medical-relief worker who was captured by ISIS in 2013 and then spent two years being tortured and raped by al-Baghdadi himself before she was murdered in 2015.

The reason Trump said he did not give any advance notice to the House Intel Committee? "Adam Schiff is the biggest leaker in Washington," he said. "You know that, I know that, we all know that."

Importantly, The Wall Street Journal notes, "The raid also shows the importance of intelligence gathered from prisoners. Iraqi officials say their interrogation of captured ISIS fighters in recent months provided news about Baghdadi's location. The American left has tried to discredit interrogation since the Iraq war, but it remains crucial to preventing future attacks and killing terror leaders."

"Baghdadi's death is significant," says Thomas Joscelyn, an analyst on Islamic terrorism. "He was the supposed caliph, to whom thousands of followers around the globe pledged their allegiance. [But now the] caliphate controls little to no ground, and the self-declared caliph is dead."

That's true, but as the termination of Osama bin Laden proved, however weakened, the Islamic State threat will endure for years as part of the larger asymmetric threat from Jihadistan.

SOURCE 

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President Trump reaches 157 judges appointed, thanks to GOP Senate

With the support of Senate Republicans, President Trump has appointed 157 judges to the federal bench in less than three years. This means that Trump has filled 18 percent of the 870 Article III judgeships in the country. (Article III judges are the ones defined in Article III of the U.S. Constitution and have lifetime appointments.) Furthermore, Trump has now had more judges confirmed than any of his recent predecessors at the same point in their presidencies.

While many are aware that Trump has appointed two fine Supreme Court justices, it is less well-known that Trump has made significant progress in remaking the federal appeals courts, the 13 powerful courts one level beneath the Supreme Court. Of the judges confirmed under Trump, 43 are appeals court judges — a very impressive number. In fact, this is 14 more appeals court judges than George W. Bush, 16 more than Clinton, and 22 more than Obama had confirmed at the same point in their presidencies.

Additionally, Trump has flipped the Third Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands). For those unfamiliar with the term, “flipping a circuit” means creating a majority of judges on a circuit court who were nominated by presidents from the same party. Trump is also on the cusp of flipping the Second Circuit of Appeals (which covers New York, Vermont, and Connecticut) and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Georgia, Florida, and Alabama). Trump has even made notable gains on the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands) where there are now 16 Democrat-appointed judges and 12 Republican-appointed judges with one vacancy.

Nor are these gains just academic; Trump’s appointees are making a difference. For example, Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, provided the key fifth vote in the Janus case, which established that all government workers have the right to work and cannot be compelled to pay union fees. This was a huge victory for conservative government employees who had previously been compelled to support liberal public employee unions. In addition, as Adam Feldman wrote on SCOTUS Blog, “The Supreme Court with Kavanaugh is distinctly different from the court with Kennedy. There is no longer a clear swing vote.” As evidence of this fact, both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined the other conservatives on the Court in a 5-4 decision allowing construction of the border wall to continue.

To try to stop this progress, Senate Democrats continue to obstruct judicial confirmations. They are simply terrified of the thought that they might not be able to use the courts to impose their will on the people as they have done so many times in the past. This fear has even led some Democrats to openly support packing the Supreme Court.

In spite of the great work Senate Republicans have done so far, much work remains to be done. Overall, there is still a small majority of Democrat-appointed judges among all active Article III judges. However, there are 120 current and future judicial vacancies, and nearly 50 judicial nominees are awaiting hearings or confirmation votes. By simply filling current vacancies, Republicans can create a majority of Republican-appointed judges. At the current pace, the Senate would confirm about 70 more judges by the end of Trump’s first term.

Many people voted for President Trump and Senate Republicans because they wanted to see conservatives appointed to the federal bench; and Trump and Senate Republicans have delivered for those voters. Long after the President leaves office, his appointees to the courts should still be working to protect our rights from the leftists who would take them away.

SOURCE 

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Elijah Cummings and the Little Sisters

Peggy Noonan
 
I was writing a rather stern column about the mess in Washington, but I got kind of swept Thursday by the beautiful bipartisan tribute to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, in Congress’s Statuary Hall, a ceremony held just before his burial back in Baltimore.

I want to get beyond the merely sentimental. Everyone seems to have liked him a lot; I knew him slightly and liked him too. I would only add to his enumerated virtues the power of his warmth. I met him at an event five or so years ago and when we were introduced I went to shake his hand. He’d have none of that and enveloped me in a hug. I don’t remember what we talked about but it seemed important to the two of us, in one of those nice moments that sometimes happen, that we show a mutual appreciation for who the other was. We did, and held hands. I just found to my shock that remembering this leaves me a little choked.

There was something not sentimental but poignant and half-grasped in the tribute to him. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke movingly about how Cummings came to Washington not to be a big man but to do big things. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “He was strong, very strong when necessary… . His voice could … stir the most cynical hearts.” Cummings’s friend Republican Rep. Mark Meadows said he had “eyes that would pierce through anybody standing in his way,” and like the others read Scripture. It was nice to hear the Bible read in Statuary Hall; the religiosity had a great sweetness to it. “In my father’s house are many mansions,” Mr. Meadows read, and suggested the Baltimore boy was in a grand new home.

What was poignant was how much the speakers enjoyed being their best selves. Congress knows how hapless it looks, how riven by partisanship and skins-vs.-shirts dumbness. For many of them it takes the tang out of things. They know it lowers their standing in America. They grieve it. It embarrasses them. They’d like to be part of something that works, something respected.

It wouldn’t be lost on the brighter of them that they were enacting in the Cummings ceremony a unity and respect, a shared purpose, that they wish they could sustain but are unable to.

They believe they are forced into their partisan positions by several things, among them that America is badly divided and the politically active on both sides, in their mutual loathing, pull toward the extremes.

As I watched the ceremony I thought of a dinner two weeks ago with a close friend. It was just the two of us and we found ourselves going deep about how we feel about everything. She is a spirited lefty, a longtime Democratic donor, I am a righty, a conservative as I define it, but neither of us has ever cared much about that because the essence of friendship is … essence. Who you are, which fairly enough includes politics but is not limited to politics. We’ve had 30 years of teasing and occasional sparring but this night we went to the thoughts behind our views. She asked me how I see my own political views; am I more lefty than I was? I found myself saying something I’d never said, that all my political thinking comes down to this: I am for whatever will hold America together, full stop. I see it breaking in a million pieces and my every political impulse has to do with wanting it to hold together, to endure, to go forward in history and the world. If that means compromise, fine. She thought about this, nodded and said softly that that makes complete sense right now. “That’s a program.”

But don’t most of us kind of think like this? Even if we haven’t articulated it or even noticed it’s what we think. But isn’t it the right primary intention?

A deep impediment is the air of political maximalism that careless people who never know the implications of things encourage. Years ago Rep. Bella Abzug of New York would point out that her father was a butcher, who owned the Live and Let Live Meat Market. I always liked that. Nobody says that phrase anymore, live and let live, but long ago everybody did. Now it’s part of what’s missing — a sense of give. So many people feel bullied, pushed around by vague and implacable forces. They fear the erosion of central freedoms.

Here is the first example that springs to mind. It reflects my cultural views and indignations, but I ask you to take it on its own terms.

In early October CNN had a town hall on LGBTQ issues for the Democratic presidential candidates. They said the sort of things they say, you can imagine them, you don’t need your neighborhood pundit to tell you. But at one point the essential nature of the new progressivism jumped out.

Don Lemon asked Beto O'Rourke: “Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities, should they lose their tax exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?”

“Yes,” said Mr. O'Rourke, not missing a beat. “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us. So as president we’re going to make that a priority and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

Regular readers know we do not especially admire Mr. O'Rourke, that we believe the past year he has been having not a campaign but a manic episode. But he said what he said because he wanted to please a significant part of the Democratic base, and he received big applause.

Can we agree his is a radical, maximalist stand? Under his standard the Catholic Church would be ruined, and with it a whole world of charities, schools, hospitals, orphanages, other agencies, all of which help those with limited resources. Let’s just posit without bothering to defend the proposition that an America without the Catholic church would be a poorer, sicker, colder place, and one less likely to continue.

At almost the same time as the CNN town hall, the Little Sisters of the Poor, who serve the elderly and impoverished, were again in court asking for protection from the ObamaCare mandate that tells them they must include contraceptive coverage in their employee health plans. It’s been a long legal journey: The Supreme Court has already been involved. So has the Trump administration, whose directives regarding religious protection have been challenged by certain states, which got injunctions, which have been upheld by the appellate courts. The Sisters are forced to appeal to the high court again, which will, please God, affirm, with clarity and force, the constitutional rights without which they cannot exist.

Oh, progressives, if you only had the wisdom to back off, to see your demands as maximalist, extreme, damaging to the fabric, the opposite of live and let live. When you push in this way to control the culture of the country, do you ever ask, “When I win, will there be a country left?” [They don't care, Peggy]

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

OUT OF OPTIONS: Rep. Katie Hill resigns amid allegations of sexual relationships with staffers (The Hill)

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM: Obama judge orders DOJ to turn over Mueller grand-jury material for Democrats' impeachment probe (The Washington Times)

NEWS FROM THE SWAMP: Trump showered with boos, chants of "lock him up" at World Series game in Washington, DC (NBC News)

TOPSY-TURVY: Biologically male NCAA runner named conference "female" athlete of the week (The Daily Caller)

INFERNO: California declares state of emergency as wildfires spread (National Review)

POLICY: Missile defense needs Trump's attention (Hudson Institute)

POLICY: Why Bernie Sanders' universal jobs guarantee is not a worthy goal (Foundation for Economic Education)

LEFTIST LOGIC: Motorcyclist who identifies as a bicyclist sets cycling world record (The Babylon Bee)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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If Elizabeth Warren really understood Native Americans, she'd know socialism doesn’t work

Executive Director of the New Mexico Alliance for Life Elisa Martinez argues socialism is not what America needs

Gallup, N.M., is known as “the heart of Indian country.” It’s sadly one of the poorest areas in the nation and has an important lesson for all Americans about our nation’s future.

My grandparents owned one of the first trading posts in Gallup. I grew up working in my dad’s small business.

I’m a Latina with New Mexico roots over 15 generations deep on dad’s side of the family and on my mother’s side we’re Zuni and Navajo. I’m an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and … I’m a Republican.

My life experience made me a Republican. Growing up I witnessed first-hand the poverty and destruction government policies had on my people and my peoples’ land -- the Indian reservation.

Overlapping, paternalistic federal and state programs, including fully funded and inefficient healthcare, dominate the reservations’ economies. The restrictions the government places on land use, ownership and business development are microcosms of socialist failure in its purest form.

The government “help” has never encouraged financial self-sufficiency. If anything, the programs have been a disincentive to economic freedom and prosperity.

While I firmly believe all Americans should benefit from a safety net, I also know government handouts are never as powerful as a hand up. The federal government set up the reservations more than 100 years ago and, just like liberal democrats today, created these subsidized economies because they think they know what’s best for us.

The result of more than 100 years of government assistance is Indian Reservations drowning in poverty. These well-intended programs have made our people the poorest Americans. Some reservations have unemployment rates close to 85 percent, and 29 percent of employed Native Americans nationwide live below the poverty level.

As a Native American woman, when I heard Sen. Elizabeth Warren speak of her heritage, I was intrigued. Then the tragic irony became apparent. Her policies proved she knew nothing about us.

As a Native American woman, when I heard Sen. Elizabeth Warren speak of her heritage, I was intrigued. Then the tragic irony became apparent. While she claimed to be one of us, her policies proved she knew nothing about us.

She’s never experienced firsthand how big government programs fail our people. In fact, she now advocates those failed policies for all Americans.

Over 10 years "Medicare-for-All" will cost $32 trillion. Green New Deal? $93 trillion. Her Green Manufacturing Deal; $2 trillion. In total about $127 trillion.

Economists say the new taxes she has proposed would generate only $3 trillion over 10 years. So where will she find the missing $124 trillion? Warren doesn’t explain that it will require raising taxes on all Americans.

To improve peoples’ lives we can’t force them to rely on the government.  Tax cuts and the free-market economy foster growth and opportunity, creating jobs and lifting the poor out of poverty.

Is it a perfect system? No, but to see more families prosper and have better opportunities, free-market economic policies, especially tax cuts, are proven to work. Socialist government-controlled economies, with handouts and higher taxes, only lead to poverty and misery.

Today, the U.S. unemployment rate is at its the lowest point in 50 years.  The jobless rate for Hispanics hit a record low of 3.9 percent in September. African Americans maintained their lowest rate ever at 5.5 percent and adult women came in at 3.1 percent.

Our incredibly strong economy came about in no small part from President Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation of business. We need to preserve the working families’ tax cuts and expand them.

That’s what will help all of America’s families and that is one of the biggest reasons I am considering running for U.S. Senate in New Mexico. I’ve seen socialism, up close and personal. It’s not what America needs.

SOURCE 

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In the Heartland, Impeachment Isn't Very Popular

Despite impeachment hysteria suffusing every nook and cranny of the media, despite scare headlines that tell us Trump is on his way out the door, and despite being instructed what to believe by arrogant pundits on TV, it may surprise you to know that in several heartland states, a majority of people don't support impeachment.

CNN:

In the context of the 2020 presidential election, we need to be looking to swing state polling to see how impeachment may play out on the campaign trail. The polls indicate that impeaching and removing Trump in these pivotal states is far from a slam dunk.
Wisconsin, of course, was the most infamous swing state of 2016. It was the tipping point state (i.e. the one that put Trump over the top in the electoral college). When the most accurate pollster in Wisconsin (Marquette) in 2018 reveals that impeaching and removing Trump is not popular, it's a critical finding.

Importantly, it's not just this Marquette poll that show that impeaching and remove Trump could be an electoral loser for Democrats (and potential winner for Trump) in the swing states.

Florida is one of the most important swing states in the nation. Trump won there by only a point in 2016. With 29 electoral votes, Democrats would likely take back the presidency with a win there in 2020. A poll of Florida voters conducted by the University of North Florida out this week shows the divide at 46% in support of impeaching and removing Trump and 48% opposed to it.

It gets worse for Democrats. The same states that helped Trump to a win in the Electoral College in 2016 are resistant to impeaching him.

Indeed, take an examination of the battleground states that Democrats almost certainly need to make inroads into in 2020. The New York Times and Siena College, 2018's  most accurate pollster, took  a poll of voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Arizona. These were  closest states in the country that cast their electoral votes for Trump in 2016.
Just 43% of voters in these six states want to impeach and remove from office at this point. The majority, 53%, do not. This means that the margin for not impeaching and removing Trump in these states (+10 points) is running well ahead of Trump's margin in these states of about 1.5 points. Put another way, impeaching and removing Trump from office in these states is not a popular position.

SOURCE   

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Hey Bernie, it's 'Medicare for all' that would be 'cruel' and 'dysfunctional'

by Sally Pipes

During last week's Democratic presidential debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders called the current U.S. healthcare system "dysfunctional" and "cruel."

Words like that are more appropriate descriptors of the government-run healthcare systems abroad that Sanders would like to import to the United States.

Take Canada, the closest analog to Sanders's vision of "Medicare for all." Canadians face some of the longest waits for medical care on the planet. Last year, the median wait for treatment from a specialist following referral from a general practitioner was nearly 20 weeks. Things were even worse in certain provinces. The median wait in New Brunswick, for example, was 45 weeks — just shy of a year.

Patients in the United Kingdom's government-run system, the National Health Service, also struggle to access timely care. At the end of August, 4.4 million Brits were waiting to start medical treatment after a referral. In September, more than 282,000 people waited longer than 4 hours in the emergency room to be seen.

Britons with cancer have it particularly bad. In 2017, about 115,000 patients received a diagnosis too late to give them the best chance of getting effective treatment, according to Cancer Research UK. Many patients don't receive care fast enough.

That poor care has devastating consequences. Only 81% of breast cancer patients in the U.K. survive five years after diagnosis, compared to 89% in the United States. U.S. lung cancer patients have five-year survival rates that are nearly twice as long as those in the U.K.

Long waits for substandard care — that's the "cruel" and "dysfunctional" reality of government-run healthcare.

SOURCE 

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Capitalism on trial: Profit is a good thing — except to the political left

Businesses thrive by offering people a better deal on goods and services.  That is a huge social benefit, one no government can emulate

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) Accountable Capitalism Act would oblige large corporations to obtain a federal charter requiring directors to consider the interests of all stakeholders — not only shareholders and customers, but also groups representing society as a whole, such as their employees, local communities and civil society, including non-representative, anti-business NGOs.

The chief justice of the supreme court of Delaware – where more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 corporations have their legal home – has written a book arguing that corporations should be run for the benefit of their workers. The Financial Times has launched a “new agenda” campaign that intones: “Capitalism. Time for a reset. Business must make a profit but should serve a purpose too.”

None of this would have come as a surprise to Joseph Schumpeter, one of the 20th century’s great economists. No one understood better the dynamic, propulsive nature of capitalism. But, unlike most economists, Schumpeter also had a deep, subtle appreciation of capitalism’s cultural effects — that, while a system of free enterprise creates successful and prosperous societies, it also plants seeds that can lead to its own demise. “Unlike  any other type of society,” Schumpeter wrote “capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.”

And, as Schumpeter saw it, the publicly traded corporation, lacking the visceral allegiance of private property, was capitalism’s weak point: “Defenseless fortresses invite aggression especially if there is rich booty in them.” It’s a prophecy that we’re seeing come to pass.

Recently, in a letter to the Business Roundtable,181 corporate CEOs disavowed the profit motive and corporate directors’ accountability to shareholders. The CEOs championed a view now widely held: that profit could only be justified for virtuous conduct, that profit should merely be a byproduct of making certain contributions to society. It’s a position that the Business Roundtable already implicitly accepts.

It’s entirely wrong. In fact, the profit that a business earns is a pretty good approximation of its contribution to society. One might think of it in terms of a simple equation:

Revenue (what people will pay in a competitive market) minus cost (the value of resources used to provide a product or service) equals profit (a first-order indicator of a business’s contribution to society).

Profit is one of the most powerful signaling devices in a free market. In their search for profit, businesses create the dynamic for economic growth — and rising living standards. Is this not a contribution to society, of the most dramatic kind imaginable?

The point is beautifully made in Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s “The Prosperity Paradox.” Christensen writes of poor, developing nations: “It may sound counter-intuitive, but enduring prosperity for many countries will not come from fixing poverty. By investing in market-creating innovations, investors and entrepreneurs inadvertently engage in nation-building.” Entrepreneurs and businesses don’t have to set out to improve the world — through their collective efforts of making useful goods and services, an improved world is the outcome.

Yet today, the publicly traded corporation is perhaps under greater threat than at any time since the 1930s. Corporations are blamed for the world’s ills: inequality and stagnant income growth, poverty in poor countries, environmental degradation and, of course, climate change. Using business as tools to tackle these problems highlights a deep confusion about the proper domains of democratic politics and of business. Last year, voters rejected climate initiatives in Arizona, Colorado and, for a second time, Washington State. Failing at politics, activists seek to politicize business — which, so the argument goes, must be accountable to vast networks of “stakeholders.”

American advocates of “stakeholder accountability” miss the implications of their proposals. Shareholders – whatever their nationality – share the same interest in a business’s economic success. In contrast, stakeholders, by definition hugely diverse, have correspondingly diverse and conflicting interests. America has more multinational corporations than any other nation. Around 45 percent of Amazon’s workforce is outside America; 61 percent of Exxon Mobil’s $234 billion operating capital is located outside the United States. Suppose the European Union passes its version of Sen. Warren’s legislation, requiring that American multinationals be held accountable to European stakeholders. Forget trade wars: We could soon have wars over corporate control.

Already, Warren has written to ten CEOs demanding they back her Accountable Capitalism Act. “Commitments are hollow if they are not accompanied by tangible action that provides real benefits to workers and other stakeholders,” she told them.

One of the primary grounds on which those “real benefits” will be evaluated is environmental practices. Though environmentalism has its roots in a wholesale rejection of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, business leaders have a long history of subscribing to its core tenets — including the premise that resource-fueled economic growth is unsustainable. Robert Anderson, chairman of Atlantic Richfield, helped finance the first Earth Day in 1970 and provided the seed funding for Friends of the Earth, which is no friend of capitalism.

In the late 1960s, the Aspen Institute, which Anderson also chaired, ran programs on the threat of climate change and the steps needed to avoid a planetary catastrophe. A two-day workshop in 1970 concluded that business-as-usual threatened the future of a decent, civilized world. “All insist,” the New York Times reported, “that the human family is approaching a historic crisis which will require fundamental revisions in the organization of society.”

Sound familiar? The world managed to survive that purported ecological emergency by ignoring it. We would be well served to ignore the similarly pitched appeals being made now. Otherwise, the attempt to solve global warming by intimidating American corporations could bring about Schumpeter’s grim prognosis of capitalism’s downfall.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Britain's Entrapment by the French: The Triple Anniversary of 2004

Professor Christie Davies sets out some history you are not normally told.  The article is from 2004

2004 is a year of three sad anniversaries in the unhappy relationship between Britain and France. Ninety years ago in August 1914 Britain was dragged into a war between France and Germany for which France was largely to blame. It was that French war that fatally undermined British power and thus Britain's ability and willingness to withstand the Nazi and Soviet threats that were the very consequence of the war that France began.

Not for the first time France had reduced Europe to ruins with her insane and criminal aggression. There ought to be a monument in English in Compiègne pointing this out. Britain's real folly though took place ten years earlier, one hundred years ago in 1904, when we agreed to the Entente Cordiale. The fact that it is always referred to in French tells us exactly who the beneficiary was. Without it Britain might well have prevaricated over and merely blustered about the German decision to send its troops through Belgium to get to France after war had broken out in 1914. More to the point the French might have had the sense not to go to war with their more powerful neighbour, Germany, if they had been fearful of what an unpredictable Britain might do.

France had been determined to go to war with Germany since her humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 when Germany annexed the German speaking provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which had been acquired in France's long creeping expansion on her eastern frontier. Indeed the history of France from the Thirty Years War to Louis XIV to Napoleon consists largely of aggression against her German neighbours . Napoleon III may have been tricked into going to war in 1870 but his bellicose response was entirely consistent with France's tradition of militarism and expansion. Napoleon III was after all the man who had meddled in Mexico during the American Civil War and fought against Austria alongside the Italians in order to acquire Nice and Savoy. He had also tried to obtain Belgium by subterfuge and behaved in a sufficiently threatening way towards Britain to cause us to improve our coastal fortifications. Bismarck merely sought the unification of Germany; there was no limit to Napoleon III's ambitions.

The French defeat in 1870 decisively confirmed France's decline from being the most powerful nation in Continental Europe to that of a feeble and unimportant country rapidly falling behind Germany in population, economic importance and military strength. A decent and sensible country would have accepted that its relegation to the second division was inevitable but the French now tried to drag every country they could find into fighting the Germans. The French threw enormous sums of money into the economic development and thus military strengthening of Russia, then lost it all and nearly ruined themselves. The French shamelessly manipulated the guileless British into thinking they ought to be at the heart of Europe even though they never got further than the Somme. This delusion of an enfeebled France that it somehow had a historic right to dominate Europe, if not by force then by chicanery, is still the source of many of our more recent problems.

The most tangible expression of the French obsession to reassert themselves was their determination to re-conquer Alsace-Lorraine, even though it was clear that this could only be achieved through a war of great destructiveness. The French had become that most dangerous of nations, a dissatisfied power seeking revenge and revanche, too weak to achieve its aims with ease yet strong enough to threaten the peace of Europe. By chance I have in front of me a textbook for French primary schools dated 3st May, 1902 called Mes Premieres Lectures, Historiettes Morales by M. A. Chalamet, member du conseil superieur de l'instruction publique. Much of it consists of fables about animals and sententious stories about bad but subsequently repentant children. It has the feel of a Sunday School prize given for regular attendance except that all reference to religion has been eliminated by the dogmatic state authorities in charge of French education. Sandwiched in the middle is a patriotic account of Alsace-Lorraine concluding, "Les Alsaciens-Lorrains n'ont pas oublie la France. La France ne doit pas les oublier". [The people of Alsace-Lorraine have not forgotten France. France must not forget them]. It is followed by the story of the trial of 'Un Patriote', Jerome Brunner tried by a German court for seditiously flying the French flag in Alsace. A childishly romantic little illustration shows Herr Brunner standing in the dock between two seated uniformed Germans in spiked helmets gesturing defiantly at the judge and boasting that his twenty year old son left Germany last month to join the French army. Here is the road map to the First World War in which many of the school-children fed on this twaddle would have been slaughtered. Even before the war they might well as teenagers during France's three year long period of conscription have been taken on an exercise into the hills above Colmar to look down on the spires of that German town and promise their officer that one day France would seize it back.

It is unfortunate that it has become customary to depict Imperial Germany as the great source of the worship of the uniform to the neglect of the red trousered French militarists who persecuted Dreyfus and coveted Colmar. Kaiser Wilhelm II was so shocked at the fanaticism, injustice and anti-Semitism of the French army in the trials of Captain Dreyfus that he offered to hand over German intelligence documents to prove the man's innocence. There are still historians in the French army who think Dreyfus was guilty. The sheer crackpot irrationality of the anti-Drefusards was the product of a militaristic revenge-seeking society desperate to believe in the infallibility of its anachronistic army.

By contrast the Germans had no designs on French territory. After all it was they who had chosen where the frontier should be. Their ambitions and their fears lay elsewhere. It was the French who sought the western front on which they were to be decimated. It was the British who in the end held the line on this front and the Americans who saved the day. The Anglo-Saxons whom the French so much resent had been manipulated into propping up an ungrateful France. In their simple-minded idealism the British and the Americans thought they had been fighting for democracy in the war to end war. They had not. They had merely been used as an instrument in the cynical power politics of the French. 1904 and 1914 led inevitably to the third anniversary remembered in 2004 , D-Day 1944 when the British, the Canadians and the Americans once again saved the French. This time the Anglo-Saxons really were fighting for democracy. The French were not. A large proportion of them had been enthusiasts for Petain and another massive segment were loyal only to the Soviet Union. It is no wonder that they subsequently both fought vicious colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria and were feeble and unreliable allies in NATO.

"Why ", some readers may ask "are you telling us all these unpleasant truths about the wretched French?" Even those who do not doubt the facts may feel that to deploy these arguments in a modern context will only exacerbate our already difficult and adversary relationship with them. Why then does their argument not apply to the Germans? German political leaders are rightly annoyed at the way history is taught in British schools, what has been termed the Hitlerisation of British history teaching. In Britain German history is taught badly and tendentiously to seventeen year olds who have no knowledge of the German language by concentrating on the twelve quite atypical disaster years of National Socialism, 1933-1945. I have taught such students after they had entered the university where I have been appalled at their lack of analytical skills and their inability to think their way outside the interpretations that they had been fed. Those who designed the school syllabuses should be ashamed of themselves; they went for cheap popularity not true learning and have unfairly villainised an entire people by concentrating on a tiny segment of its history. It verges on Vansittartism. The idea that is put in their heads is one that in its extreme version was propounded by Sir Robert Vansittart in his pamphlet Black Record. German history becomes a tale of almost continuous brutal aggression from Arminius' (Hermann) ambush of Varus' legions in the Teutoburgerwald through to the Teutonic knights and the Prussian army, to blood and iron under Bismarck, to the Schlieffen plan, to the shooting of francs-tireurs and Edith Cavelle in Belgium, to the " unfair" waging of war by U-boats and Zeppelins. Everything that doesn't fit is left out and the aggressive episodes in the history of Germany's neighbours are not mentioned, particularly those that have involved repeated invasions and devastation of Germany. In this way all German history has evolved inevitably towards the Third Reich. In a world where everyone else was becoming benign and democratic, Germany was an "exception" and somehow this is the fault of certain inherent aspects of the German character that constitutes the very essence of the German people. If it were said about anyone else it would be immediately denounced as racist nonsense but it is still open season on the Hun. Vansittartism is alive and well.

National Socialism should be studied as sociology not as history. It is part of a wider set of vicious phenomena that are not limited to Germany - a continent wide anti-Semitism that was to be found from Paris to Odessa, the rise of stratification by militant parties which later became Continental Europe's deadly export to China, Cambodia and Iraq, the worship of force and collectivism as an antidote to Anglo-American "materialism". None of these things are peculiar to Germany. That they triumphed together in a singularly horrible form under National Socialism is due to defeat , reparations, the rise of Communism and the failure of the American economy in 1929 rather than anything specifically German. It could not have happened in Britain because we are not part of that Continental world but it could easily have happened in France if that country had been defeated early on in World War I, crushed with reparations and forced to cede core French-speaking areas of France to Germany along with Morrocco and bits of central Africa. There would soon have arisen a National Socialist French workers party with a screaming anti-semitic fanatic to lead it. All the elements to build a Nazi party in France had long been present.

In particular, we should not forget the anti-Semitism of the condemners of Dreyfus, Action Française and the Croix de Feu (the party Mitterand's first joined) which found in its final expression in the rounding up of Jews for deportation by the Milice. During the second world war, after the French defeat, Marshal Pétain, the legitimate ruler of France, placed in his high office by a free vote of the French parliament and an overwhelming majority of those votes would sit and glumly contemplate the ruin of France. After much thought he would say "C'est les Juifs" to a former President of the Senate from Martinique who would reply "Oui c'est les Juifs". At the end of the war when Charles Maurras the anti-Semitic leader of Action Française was expelled from the Academie Française he commented " Dreyfus has won". Fanatical anti-Semitism was not a German monopoly.

We have also already seen the rage for revanche and the blind militarism of the French after 1870. How much more enraged would they have been if they had been forced to surrender yet again in 1914? "Ancient combatants" and red trousered fascists would have brawled in the streets with treasonable communists taking their orders from the Soviet Union. The guilty men who had stabbed France in the back and signed a demeaning peace treaty would have been execrated and even assassinated. Hyper-inflation would have destroyed the savings under the mattress of every peasant in France. The collapse of the banks would have been blamed on the Jews as it had been before.

If a remilitarised National Socialist France had set out to assert itself in Europe there would have been no lack of atrocities for the heirs of Goya to paint. One of the best hidden scandals of World War II is the way the Free French army raped and pillaged its way through Italy. For the inhabitants of Elba there was only one thing worse than being occupied by the Germans and that was being liberated by the French. The horrors of the Epuration [purification; anti-Nazi purge] in France at the end of the war, the brutal reoccupation of Vietnam, the systematic use of torture in Algeria are all indications that the French would have been quite capable of sustaining a regime of truly Nazi brutality once it had been brought into existence.

The moral of the story is that neither in 1904 nor in 1914 should we have shown or have any sympathy with France's fear of being dominated by Germany , nor should we have any in 2004. A Europe dominated by Hitler would have been horrendous but a Kaiserly Europe would have been better than a war in which over a million British and Imperial troops were killed. What would it have mattered if the Germans had come to dominate the Balkans and run Baghdad for the Turks? As countries like Germany grow in wealth and power they have to be accommodated much as Britain chose to cultivate the growing United States after the Civil War and settle grievances on American terms. For Britain to ally itself with a nation on the way out like France was inane. It was also undemocratic. The conversations and implicit agreements between the British and French General Staffs after the Entente Cordiale were kept secret from the British people because of their traditional distrust and dislike of the French. Edward VII's direct discussions with the French were unconstitutional and his Francophilia was probably based on nothing more than his gratitude to a nation that had invented devices to raise and lower that corpulent king or his two female partners during innovative forms of sexual congress on a specially designed chair. How much better it would have been for the world if Edward VII had been gay! He could have taken his holidays with Krupp in Capri and established a rapport with Wilhelm through the camarilla led by Prince Philip zu Eulenberg, a shrewd, far-sighted and restraining influence on his Kaiser . Better Gomorrah than Armentières [A big battle of WWI]

In recent decades we have gone on making the same mistake. It is taken for granted that the French still have a legitimate interest in reining Germany in, in tying Germany ever tighter in a European Union lest it become too powerful. Many in France opposed and were fearful of German reunification precisely because it recreated a populous and powerful nation in the heart of Europe that will once again overshadow France. Yet why should a democratic and peaceful Germany not dominate Europe and not impose its commercial and agricultural interests on France. It should be Britain's policy to encourage such a development, much as we should have done in 1904-14. It would be better for Britain than the present unnatural Franco-German alliance in which the French, once again struggling to maintain the delusion of their own importance, exercise an influence out of all proportion to their real power. If Germany were to gain her rightful position at the heart of Europe, the French would soon discover the necessity for treating the Americans with a suitable degree of deference or even fawning. It is time for Britain slowly to disentangle itself from Europe and leave the French to their fate and the Germans to their inheritance

SOURCE
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IN BRIEF

DECEMBER TARGET: Democrats set December impeachment target, but obstacles abound — like the fact the whole thing's a charade (Reuters)

ADVERSE SOCIETY: Soros-funded group Open Society Policy Center eclipses $70 million spent on lobbying since Trump took office (The Washington Free Beacon)

COMMON GROUND, PART I: Bipartisan bill would streamline path to citizenship for children of U.S. military (The Washington Times)

COMMON GROUND, PART II: House unanimously passes bipartisan bill to make animal cruelty a federal crime (USA Today)

NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK: State Department says 100+ ISIS prisoners missing after Turkish invasion of Syria (National Review)

IDIOCRACY: Majority of Americans want First Amendment rewritten; 51% of Millennials want fines or jail time for "hate speech" (The Washington Free Beacon)

GOOD RIDDANCE: Florida Senate votes to permanently oust Broward Sheriff Scott Israel (Fox News)

POLICY: Refugee policy reforms — enduring or ephemeral? (National Review)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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'Time to Accept Failure': Why Republicans Are Losing the Battle for America

 BY ROBERT SPENCER

Recently I had an experience that brought home to me why the Left is so decisively winning the culture war. It involved local politics, but the same kind of thing is happening all over the country.

A few weeks ago I spoke up in New Hampshire at the invitation of the Sullivan County Republican Party, and the whole incident showed in microcosm how the far left has gained control of the media, the educational system, and the culture in general, without any significant pushback from those who are supposedly committed to the freedom of speech and a free society.

My appearance led to what has now become the usual firestorm that ensues whenever someone who challenges the prevailing leftist narrative speaks anywhere. I was smeared by "journalists" Kevin Landrigan of the New Hampshire Union Leader and John Gregg of the Valley News, neither of whom bothered to ask me for comment while printing as unquestioned fact defamatory and false charges about me. Raymond Buckley, chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs, and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, called me a "white supremacist," apparently having confused me with Richard Spencer, and refused to retract when repeatedly asked to do so. Democrat State Senator Martha Hennessey, after the manner of Nazi Brownshirts in the early 1930s, led a smear campaign on Twitter.

Two venues, the Eastman Community Center in Grantham and the Elks Club in Claremont, caved in to this and canceled the event; the Elks, at least, were directly pressured to cancel by Hennessey.

The event went on in a third venue. Here is the video. You can see for yourself if it's full of "hate."



Buckley is a liar and Hennessey is a fascist, so neither should be in positions of public service, but they're typical in the Democrat Party these days. What was far worse was the cowardly response on the Republican side. Instead of investigating the false charges being made about me, discovering I wasn't really any of the things that were being said, and standing up for the freedom of speech, all too many Republicans were ready to kowtow and do everything the Democrats wanted.

Sullivan County Republican Committee Chairman Keith Hanson, who invited me in the first place, stood firm and kept finding new venues when one would cancel, but some prominent local Republicans just stood. Hanson picked me up at the airport and drove me to the venue, and on the way told me about how the Democrats had gerrymandered themselves into total control of Vermont and were trying to do the same thing in New Hampshire; in response, Republicans are doing nothing. They don't seem to realize or care what is happening, and have ceded all the initiative and control of the narrative to the Democrats.

In the face of the left’s smear campaign against me, some of the Republicans showed this again, demonstrating that they were totally cowed and ready to surrender, happy to allow the left to dictate what they can do or can’t do. They don’t even seem to realize what is wrong with this.

James “Jim” Beard is the former Sullivan County Republican Committee Chairman and failed candidate for New Hampshire Executive Council. The night before the event, he wrote this in an email to Hanson:

"Time to accept failure....Keith, it is time to send a email blast to everyone who responded, everyone who bought tickets with 100% refunds and accept your mis-management for bringing this event to Sullivan County. Tomorrow evening, you will be alone with 10-20 people inside the VFW Hall in Claremont with a group of maybe 50 protestors outside. This is not how SCGOP candidates wish to be portrayed, nor how they will win elections.

This entire charade is an embarrassment for the SCGOP and I suggest you step aside. Let us return to good ole' [sic] fashioned hot dog roasts on the Newport Common where people came together from all works of life in the community, socialize and build common understanding. That is how we Republicans solicit votes...interaction with the public.

You can write your own resignation..."

Yes, that's right, "let us return to good ole' fashioned hot dog roasts." Facedown the protestors? Stand on principle? Not good ol' James "Jim" Beard. The Democrats are at open war against the freedom of speech. They're stigmatizing and silencing all opposition to jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women and others. They are forcing a radical socialist agenda on the country. And this clown thinks he is going to beat them with hot dog roasts. Or rather, he is happy to lose, as long as he gets his with mustard.

Then there is Representative Steven Smith, senior Republican advisor in the NH House and chairman of the Sullivan County delegation, Sullivan County District 11. Nadir Ahmed, an Islamic apologist whom I bested in debate years ago, wrote to Smith, apparently offering to speak in Sullivan County and spread some soothing lies where I had told uncomfortable truths. Smith's response to him, which Ahmed then gleefully sent to me, couldn't have been friendlier (in sharp contrast to his rude and arrogant tone with me when I wrote him after this), and shows where Smith stands.

"I saw your messages to the SCGOP Facebook page and did not want you to think you were being ignored. Thanks for your offer. I am currently trying to sweep up Mr. Hanson's mess. He may not be with the organization much longer and he is not responding to messages. Your offer is interesting, but the timing is terrible. Let me think about it once this all dies down. I watched the video. The think [sic] is, I am losing faith that minds can be changed these days."

Did Smith attend my event? He did not. Does he have the first foggiest idea of what I actually say? Almost certainly not. But he knows the Democrats and the establishment media don't like it, so he is ready to carry water for them and help further their agenda. Rep. Smith, I'd be glad to come back to New Hampshire at my own expense and debate your friend, or anyone else you choose. But somehow I doubt you have either the courage or the goodwill to sponsor such an event.

Why do jellyfish on the order of Beard and Smith rule in the Republican Party? The Democrats are fighting a war, and the Republicans are playing jacks. Where are the men with spines? Where are people standing up to this totalitarian agenda of the left, and affirming that opposition to jihad terror is not morally wrong or evil, and that such opposition should be allowed a platform? Not, for the most part, in the Republican Party, not just in Sullivan County, New Hampshire, but all over the country. Instead, Republicans keep roasting their hot dogs, and hoping that their leftist masters won't demand too very much of them.

SOURCE 

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Lynching Hypocrisy

"Lynching" is a provocative word, given America's history of an estimated 4,400 blacks murdered in lynchings over a roughly 70-year span. Being provocative is what animates Donald Trump, so it's no surprise that he chose the word to describe what Democrats are doing with impeachment. "So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights," Trump said. "All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. But we will WIN!"

There are times when Trump takes to social media with reactionary, petty, vindictive, and ridiculous things. This is not one of those times.

We're going to go out on a limb and speculate that, before Trump's thumbs got to typing his tweet, he already knew what media outlets were soon forced to report: A slew of Democrats — led by Joe Biden — used the word "lynching" to describe Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998. We don't recall a flood of Leftmedia stories back then slamming Democrats for that deliberate word choice or giving historical lectures about the awful history of lynching. But here we are, swamped with such stories now. Of course, these sanctimonious lectures leave out the inconvenient truth that actual lynchings were perpetrated mostly by Democrats.

Biden provided the most humorous "gotcha" for Trump. "Impeachment is not 'lynching,' it is part of our Constitution," Biden huffed. "Our country has a dark, shameful history with lynching, and to even think about making this comparison is abhorrent. It's despicable."

But then CNN grudgingly went to the 1998 tape of Biden telling Wolf Blitzer, "Even if the president should be impeached, history will question whether or not this was a partisan lynching."

Confronted with his own words, Biden was forced to apologize, saying, "This wasn't the right word to use and I'm sorry about that." But, he insisted, Trump is the real sinner because he "chose his words deliberately" (as if Biden hadn't) and "continues to stoke racial divides in this country daily."

Poppycock. Trump isn't "stoking racial divides"; Democrats are.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board argues, "No President should use the word in the off-hand and self-indulgent way that Mr. Trump did in his tweet." The Journal adds, "The more he forces Republicans to defend words or actions that don't deserve defending, the more their resentment will build and the more political trouble he will be in."

That may be true, but it's also Beltway-New York echo-chamber pablum. Trump was elected precisely because he wouldn't behave like other presidents and because voters were fed up with other Republicans refusing to stand up to Democrats. In any case, his "trolling" consistently provides one important service to the country: revealing the shameless hypocrisy of Democrats and the Leftmedia.

SOURCE   

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Elizabeth Warren's Health Care Pickle
 
From the beginning, the 2020 Democratic race has been a different kind of contest. Candidates aren’t competing to see who can run America the most efficiently. That’s the old politics. Instead, they’re pledging to remake this country entirely: rip out the old America — irredeemably tainted by racism, sexism and free enterprise — and replace it with something completely new and different. At the heart of this effort is the promise of Medicare for All. You may have heard the phrase. The most popular Democratic candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have both endorsed it. But what exactly does “Medicare for All” mean?

You should know. It’s not a tweak to some regulation. It’s not even Obamacare, which, once upon a time, Republicans denounced as “socialism.” Medicare for All is actual socialism. Health care spending amounts to about a fifth of the entire U.S. economy. Warren is demanding total control of all of it immediately. If Medicare for All became law, it would amount to the biggest expansion of government since World War II, by far. So, it’s worth asking how exactly this would work and who would pay for it. Warren has been asked that question repeatedly. Each time, she has refused to answer.

No matter how hard she’s been pressed — and even some fairly strident Democratic partisans have asked her — Warren has refused to explain what it would cost or who would pay for it. We now have a credible estimate.

According to a study by the Urban Institute, in just its first 10 years, Warren’s Medicare for All plan would cost an additional $34 trillion. Keep in mind that the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that the United States will collect just $46 trillion in taxes over the same period. In other words, Warren’s health care plan alone will consume the overwhelming majority of all tax dollars in the United States. That’s before we spend a single dollar on Social Security, education, national defense and everything else.

The Urban Institute has no motive to attack Warren. It’s a progressive think tank. They likely didn’t even account for the cost of Warren’s pledge to give free health care to every illegal alien who sneaks into the country. Who’s going to pay for all this? Divide $3.4 trillion a year by 320 million Americans and you get more than $10,000 per person. Not per taxpayer. Per person. That includes every child, every retiree, every prison inmate. That would be the largest tax ever assessed in American history, by far. It would change everything. An awful lot of people would just leave the country.

How do you pay for Medicare for All? That’s not a minor detail that can be settled later. It’s the single most important question. Under pressure from the other Democrats in the field, Warren has now promised an answer: “I plan over the next few weeks to put out a plan that talks about, specifically, the cost of ‘Medicare for all’ and, specifically, how we pay for it,” she said last week at a town hall event.

At some point in the last few years, Warren stopped functioning as a conventional senator and became a kind of messiah. Details like what things cost, whether something is constitutional, whether the majority of Americans even want it — none of that seems to interest her anymore. Warren has seen the future, and in that future, she has complete and unquestioned control of America; she is the most powerful person in the world. You can almost hear her repeating the phrase to herself: “the most powerful person in the world.” It’s intoxicating. And scary.

Warren is to be commended for issuing highly detailed policy proposals in a number of areas. This ironically makes her refusal to provide details on Medicare for All that much more noteworthy. She details the little stuff but thought she could get away with proposing to fundamentally change our country without explaining who would pay the price. Her bluff has been called, and she’s now on the line to explain her way out of this jam.

She hasn’t provided a date for the new details she’s promising. Given the costs involved, we can’t imagine any funding proposal that wouldn’t destroy our economy. As far as the election goes, it’s also hard to imagine how any honest funding proposal of the scale needed to meet Warren’s ambitions would not destroy her political candidacy, at least in a general election. We’re waiting on the edge of our seats for this one.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

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Elizabeth Warren needs some serious policy repairs

On an issue as significant as health care, vague assurances aren’t enough

Elizabeth Warren didn’t spend long leading the Democratic presidential race before being forced to pull in for a policy pit stop. The serious problem that needs attention: Her adopted health care plan. That is, the single-payer scheme that Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders has offered up.

For Warren, the policy issue right now is, how do you pay for a plan credibly estimated to cost $34 trillion over 10 years? As Sanders himself has acknowledged, that’s exceedingly difficult to do without hitting some members of the middle class with higher taxes.

Warren has tried to steer around that blazing hazard by saying that she won’t sign into law a government-run health care plan that doesn’t lower overall costs for middle class families. That’s another way of saying, yes, your federal taxes may go up, but because you will no longer pay insurance premiums or out-of-pocket health-care expenses, your total costs will be lower.

But on something this significant, vague assurances aren’t enough. So why doesn’t the woman with the plenitude of plans already have a financing framework? Because it’s hard to develop one that doesn’t put an “I’ll-tax-the-middle-class” bullseye on her back.

That’s hardly the only problem with single-payer, or “Medicare for All,” by its folksier name. Another: Voters’ natural preference to choose for themselves rather than be forced off their private insurance and into a government-dictated plan. Running on the latter approach is akin to dressing up as a piñata — and handing the GOP a general election club.

“The Republicans will run ads warning the voters that the Democrats are going to take away their health insurance,” says Phil Johnston, former New England regional administrator of Health and Human Services and a fervent Warren supporter. “We have seen that movie before.”

Johnston is talking about the insurance-industry-funded attack on the health care plan Hillary Clinton designed back during husband Bill’s first term; the Clintons’ effort eventually foundered. We also saw the damage Democrats suffered with President Obama’s assurance that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which didn’t prove to be true for those whose plans failed to meet the Affordable Care Act’s minimum standards.

Political optimists expect voters to sort through the health care financing debate and conclude single-payer will be a better deal overall. Hmm. Remember the poll from 2017 showing that, almost seven years after it became law, 35 percent of Americans didn’t realize Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were the same thing?

Which is to say, health care policy and politics are complex, and many voters don’t do complexity well.

Now consider some Kaiser Family Foundation polling. Adding a Medicare-like public option for the Affordable Care Act is supported by three-quarters of Americans. Medicare for All earns a bare majority of 51 percent — and when people learn it would mean eliminating private insurance, 58 percent then say they would oppose such a plan.

There’s another poorly understood policy matter lurking here. In arguing that single-payer would allow the United States to reduce its health care spending to a European-like percentage of gross domestic product, its advocates are assuming the government would compel doctors and hospitals to accept payments significantly lower than they would otherwise get.

Problem: The prices private insurers pay in effect cross-subsidize Medicare (and Medicaid), whose rates are at least 10 percent lower than provider costs. Using Medicare rates would push some marginal hospitals into financial jeopardy.

And put a squeeze on physicians’ income. No one will weep for highly paid specialists, but primary care physicians aren’t making a killing. Expect single-payer to incur fierce opposition from those who went into serious debt to earn a medical degree.

“Nobody is more lefty than I am, but I think a public option should be the Democrats’ position,” says Johnston. Another highly credentialed lefty, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is essentially arguing the same thing.

SOURCE 

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Acting OMB Director Russ Vought: Trump keeps promise to tame bureaucracy that runs roughshod over Americans

White House Budget Office acting director Russ Vought breaks down President Trump's spending plan

When President Trump took office in 2017, he promised the American people that he would clean up Washington’s regulatory overreach. He pledged to make government accountable to the people. And he has made good on his promises by driving the largest deregulation effort since President Reagan took office over 30 years ago.

This has supported an unprecedented economic comeback—with over 6.4 million jobs created since President Trump’s election, the lowest unemployment rate in half of a century, and nearly 2.5 million people raising themselves out of poverty since 2016.

This week, the president will build on his success by signing two Executive Orders that will level the playing field for American families and small businesses and shine a light on the Federal bureaucracy that runs roughshod over American citizens.

President Trump’s “Transparency and Fairness” Executive Order protects Americans against secret or unlawful bureaucratic interpretations of rules and guards against unfair or unexpected penalties for non-compliance. American families and entrepreneurs are not the enemy, and it is long past time D.C. stopped treating them as such.

Take this example: After one family started construction on a home in a subdivision in Idaho, the Environmental Protection Agency declared their property a federally protected wetland. The government ordered the family to restore the land or face a daily fine of up to $75,000. The family’s request for a hearing was rejected and the agency claimed its order could not even be challenged in court.

They were denied due process and threatened with fines of millions of dollars. This is not only un-American; it just does not make sense. American families and small businesses should not need law degrees to live their daily lives. They should be afforded the opportunity to understand and comply with a rule, and to have their side of the story considered by the agency, not get hauled into court with a costly surprise lawsuit.

Americans should expect that government of, by, and for the people will respect those very same people. This administration is committed to making government agencies transparent and accountable to the taxpayers. It is not only the right thing to do—it is a big boost to the economy, too.

President Trump’s “Bringing Guidance out of the Darkness” Executive Order stops agencies from skirting the laws that let the American public provide input on government rules that can limit their freedom. Too many agencies have found it easier to impose costly and excessive mandates through informal interpretations buried on their websites instead of going through the regular public review process Congress requires for agency rules.

Put simply, large government agencies often allow political agendas to improperly influence their interpretation of the law and how it applies to you. Worse still, they deny you a seat at the table when they do it.

These “guidance” documents and materials bypass the basic rights of Americans to have input into rules that impact their livelihoods. Rogue agencies have for too long used innocuous-sounding “guidance documents” to curtail the freedoms of American farmers, homeowners, and small businesses, to name only a few impacted groups.

In 2015, for example, the Department of Labor issued a blog post that reclassified many independent contractors as employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

This so-called guidance created confusion, raised costs, and drastically multiplied legal liability for businesses. But the agency did not give businesses or the independent contractors with whom they work the opportunity to provide comment. The agency forced them to comply or face serious reprisal. Thankfully, this ill-conceived guidance was rescinded by the Trump Administration in June 2017.

The Trump administration wants to prevent such abuses of authority from happening again. Americans should expect that government of, by, and for the people will respect those very same people. This administration is committed to making government agencies transparent and accountable to the taxpayers. It is not only the right thing to do—it is a big boost to the economy, too.

Deregulation has real-dollar consequences for American families. Government-wide regulatory reform actions will save the average American household $3,100 in coming years. And benefits are already being felt across the economy—the Trump administration reduced regulatory costs by $33 billion in its first two years alone. In stark contrast, the Obama-Biden administration *increased* regulatory costs by more than $245 billion during its first two years.

This is money that entrepreneurs and small businesses can use to create jobs, raise wages, and invest in important capital improvements. It is money that families can use on their priorities, whether that is buying a first home or saving for their children’s education.

Thanks to President Trump’s vision and leadership, this administration has been laser-focused on rolling back the abuses and high cost of the regulatory deep state.

From his first week in office, President Trump challenged the government to roll back two old regulations for every new one. In Fiscal Year 2017, we far surpassed his goal and rolled back 22 regulations for every new one. In FY 2018, we rolled back 12 rules for every new rule.

The impact of these two new Executive Orders will massively multiply the work President Trump has already done to drain the D.C. swamp.

President Trump is not only returning control over the government to the people and state and local governments, he is revitalizing the economy so Americans from all walks of life, and from every state, have the opportunity to prosper. He is making the federal government work for Americans again.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

IRAQ REBUFFS: Iraq says U.S. forces withdrawing from Syria have no approval to stay (Reuters)

TRUDEAU'S POTPOURRI: Canada's Justin Trudeau wins second term but loses majority (Associated Press)

NETANYAHU YIELDS: Israel's long-standing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said he cannot form a government, handing the opportunity to his political rival (BBC News)

DOUBLE STANDARDS: Democrat congresswoman allegedly has affair with young female staffer. Media completely ignores. (The Daily Wire)

HIGH-COURT SHOWDOWN: Manhattan DA, Trump lawyers strike deal to speed fight over Trump tax returns to Supreme Court (NBC News)

PARKLAND SHOOTING FALLOUT: Florida Senate committee upholds Sheriff Scott Israel suspension (The Daily Caller)

POLICY: Why LBJ's Great Society gets a failing grade in improving education (The Daily Signal)

POLICY: A tuition-free, purpose-driven, coat-and-tie trade school (American Enterprise Institute)

MIDDLE EAST PUZZLEMENT: The Associated Press reports that "Defense Secretary Mark Esper says he is discussing an option that would keep a small residual U.S. military force in northeast Syria." Furthermore, "While Trump has insisted he's bringing home Americans from 'endless wars' in the Mideast, Esper said all U.S. troops leaving Syria will go to western Iraq."

HILLARY'S MALFEASANCE: State Department concludes Clinton email review, says it found nearly 600 security violations (The Daily Wire)

ILLEGAL-IMMIGRANT PROSECUTIONS: Record 110,000 illegal border crossers and smugglers prosecuted in 2019 fiscal year (Washington Examiner)

BOEING'S IMBROGLIO WORSENS: FAA asks Boeing why it hid test pilot's discovery of "egregious" 737 Max issues (USA Today)

WICKED BEDFELLOWS: "Russia and Turkey have agreed to ensure Kurdish forces withdraw from areas close to Syria's border with Turkey and to launch joint patrols, in a deal hailed as 'historic' by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan." (Agence France-Presse)

COLLUSION DELUSION: "Do-nothing Congress": Pelosi, Democrats produce more subpoenas than laws (The Washington Times)

NINTH CIRCUS: Ninth Circuit upholds block on birth-control exemption for religious employers (National Review)

NURTURING COMPETITION: Senate Republican Josh Hawley introduces bipartisan bill empowering users to withdraw their data from social-media giants (National Review)

MEANWHILE... For the first time, there are fewer wealthy Americans than Chinese (CBS News)

HOT AIR: California governor who wanted higher gas prices wants investigation of high gas prices (Associated Press)

CONCESSION: "The Hong Kong government on Wednesday withdrew the controversial extradition bill that sparked months of violent protests, but that is only one of the five demands that continue to drive protesters to the streets." (Fox News)

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AOC on the Turkey problem



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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

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The Principles of Conservatism

The Heritage Foundation has issued what it sees as the principles of American conservatism today.  Below is their list of 14  points:

The federal government exists to preserve life, liberty and property, and it is instituted to protect the rights of individuals according to natural law. Among these rights are the sanctity of life; the freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly; the right to bear arms; the right of individuals to be treated equally and justly under the law; and to enjoy the fruits of ones labor.

The federal government’s powers are limited to those named in the Constitution and should be exercised solely to protect the rights of its citizens. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The government closest to the people serves the people best.” Powers not delegated to the federal government, nor prohibited by the Constitution, are reserved to the states or to the people.

Judges should interpret and apply our laws and the Constitution based on their original meaning, not upon judges’ personal and political predispositions.

Individuals and families—not government—make the best decisions regarding their and their children’s health, education, jobs, and welfare.

The family is the essential foundation of civil society, and traditional marriage serves as the cornerstone of the family.
The federal deficit and debt must not place unreasonable financial burdens on future generations.

Tax policies should raise only the minimum revenue necessary to fund constitutionally appropriate functions of government.
America’s economy and the prosperity of individual citizens are best served by a system of free enterprise, with special emphasis on economic freedom, private property rights, and the rule of law. This system is best sustained by policies promoting free trade and deregulation, and opposing government interventions in the economy that distort markets and impair innovation.

Regulations must not breach constitutional principles of limited government and the separation of powers.

America must be a welcoming nation—one that promotes patriotic assimilation and is governed by laws that are fair, humane, and enforced to protect its citizens.

Justice requires an efficient, fair, and effective criminal justice system—one that gives defendants adequate due process and requires an appropriate degree of criminal intent to merit punishment.

International agreements and international organizations should not infringe on American’s constitutional rights, nor should they diminish American sovereignty.

America is strongest when our policies protect our national interests, preserve our alliances of free peoples, vigorously counter threats to our security, and advance prosperity through economic freedom at home and abroad.

The best way to ensure peace is through a strong national defense.

SOURCE 

It seems a fair list but it should be acknowledged that it is an expression of conservatism in a particular time and place.

The idea that one's country MUST welcome immigrants would certainly not get universal assent among conservatives.  Conservatives in Britain and Europe quite commonly claim that their country is "full up".

And conservatives outside America have some ideas that would not be much reflected in America.  British conservatives, for instance, see an important constitutional role for the monarchy, a view with only eccentric support in America.

And conservatives of the fairly recent past saw the gold standard as the proper basis of the currency -- also a view having only eccentric support today.

So rather than the label "principles", it would be more accurate to describe the list above as "current expressions" of conservatism.  Conservatisn is a cautious psychological disposition, not an ideology

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Why the Right Fails to Change Culture

Larry Schweikart Gets it:

No one in conservative circles denies we are getting crushed in the culture wars. Yes, key conservatives have been banned from major social media. Yes, Facebook, Twitter, Google are biased. But the broader question should be, “Why were conservatives relegated to predominantly social media in the first place?” Why are there virtually no conservative television shows? Why is Fox (other than One America News Network—which has trouble getting in major delivery packages) the only “conservative” news network, and even then, one whose “conservatism” is fading rapidly? Why are there no conservative graphic novels?

Of course, Andrew Breitbart was the John the Baptist of this element of our culture. The creation of (at first) Drudge Report, then later Breitbart News, was essential to broadening a conservative alternative. But it wasn’t nearly sufficient.

So what has been the problem? Since A Patriot’s History of the United States came in 2004, I have been working to move that story into video form, which brought me into contact with Andrew, then, through Andrew, to a host of other Hollywood Conservatives. Yes, there are quite a few. One well-known actor told me, “When you go on a production site, at lunch time all the trucks where the stage construction workers and set designers are having lunch have Rush Limbaugh on. But if the director comes by, they turn it down.” Another director told me of a conversation two of his producer friends had with an Amazon Prime executive as they pitched their children’s show. “We don’t take material from white males,” they were instructed. “The era of Aryan supremacy is dead.” Realize these two men had several successes in the field already, and possessed a track record of profits.

Without turning into a “poor me” sob story, I can only report from my own efforts. I think however, they are quite representative of the experiences of others.

When I first began taking the idea of turning Patriot’s History into video form to conservative organizations in 2005, I thought the rationale was obvious. Video was the future for young people, who have essentially stopped reading. Virtually all new learning is occurring on phones and digital devices, not from books. My own theory was that younger people could be hooked on a short video (under four minutes), but that anything longer would, at least initially, turn them off. However, if captivated by a short video, kids will watch a longer (15 minute) video, and if that satisfies then, they will log into one hour videos or longer.

Prager U. caught onto the first part of my formula relatively quickly. Their four-minute videos are masterpieces of hard-hitting, well-scripted commentary with a minimum of production added. Prager’s reach is immense. I have done two videos for Prager U. (“America’s Socialist Origins” and “Religious Toleration”) and each has had over a million views. Bigger name personalities than I, such as Ben Shapiro, can draw over five times that many views.

Prager’s work is incredible and provides key issue discussions for the “skulls full of mush” who are today’s youth. It does suffer, however, from two weaknesses. First, because the videos draw from diverse conservative voices who in general support each other’s fundamental assumptions, the gaps between each are enormous and the small differences between, say, a monetarist and an Art Laffer Trump supporter can be confusing to the point of fraying all commonalities. This is why college classes are usually taught by one professor, and why team teaching tends to break down without rigid control.

The other weakness of Prager U. videos is that they are, by design, focused on a niche market, namely those people interested in short takes on a particular issue. Again, without minimizing in the least the tremendous value of addressing this niche market, it does not take the place of thousands of hours of more subtle brainwashing on the part of what passes for “entertainment.” And it’s not just movies and television, but music and graphic novels as well.

Indeed, I would argue that the single most cost-efficient vehicle for conservatives is graphic novels, because for a couple of hundred thousand dollars, one can fund the storyboard for a movie. Everything from “Watchmen” to “300" came from graphic novels, because they present a visual story for a producer and director -- and they have become easy sources for movies. By financing three to four solid (and popular) graphic novels, conservative money-men would be financing the next generation of film as well.

But beyond that, conservatives must fight their way back into Hollywood. This is where the real struggle begins. As I began my “tour” of conservative think tanks, I was asking for what (in Hollywood terms) was a catering budget—about $450,000 per episode to make a six-hour series based on A Patriot’s History. The intent was to have the impact of Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” series from the 1970s—but with history instead of economics—but with a newer, higher production level product that would be similar to the “Sons of Liberty” or “John Adams,” both of which were considered successes. I had enlisted solid Hollywood talent, from a director who had worked with Tom Selleck and Jon Voight, to the top cameramen in the industry, to casting editors. All were willing to work below scale to meet the budget. Grammy winning Christian artist Michael W. Smith had agreed to provide what turned out to be a powerful and moving score.

I was not surprised at the first response from Heritage Foundation, which was simply, “We don’t do videos.” This pretty much ended all discussion. “What do you fund?” I asked. “We fund panel discussions, speakers, white papers.” “Do you realize,” I countered, “that none of those will reach youths, let alone significantly influence them?” I received a blank stare. Finally, the person I spoke with said again, “Well, we just don’t do videos.” Going in, I had expected that we would not meet with success immediately, but that at last one of the conservative organizations would understand that the print medium and speakers’ series were leaving them behind.

Was I wrong.

Over the next several years, I met with virtually all of the conservative organizations and think tanks. Almost to a word, they repeated the “We-don’t-do-video” response I got at Heritage. By the time I had made the rounds (over several years), I learned that Heritage had in fact started a web-based side that included video, but it still was far from the “John Adams” level of impacting youth. My final, most depressing, meeting, was with the head of student outreach for the Koch Brothers foundation. Once again, I laid out the numbers, the challenge, and our approach. Once again, I heard, “Koch doesn’t do videos.” Again I asked what they did. “Well we are trying to start chapters on every university to bring in speakers like Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro.” “OK,” I replied, “have you watched the news in the past two years? Do you realize that many colleges already won’t even let them speak, or demand such outrageous security deposits that they are effectively banned? Do you know that a Christian college, Grand Canyon College in Phoenix, cancelled Shapiro because of complaints by leftists?” (Later they reversed course on this and he appeared). In exasperation, I asked, “Do you realize that in five years you may not be able to book a conservative on any major campus?” His answer shocked me. “I think you’re right.”

“SO?” I thought I had won.

“We just talked about this at a board meeting,” he said, almost sighing in resignation. “We don’t do videos.”

My little experiences are nothing compared to those in Hollywood who are conservative directors and producers, some of them B-list, some A-list. One acquaintance had five different film projects fail to get sufficient investment to make, all in a period of a few years. He is more or less out of the industry now. In 2016, Clint Eastwood and Tom Hanks—an Academy Award winning director and one of the most bankable stars in the business—told a Sundance audience that “Sully” was turned down by every studio until Ratpack Dune (with Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnunchin) finally funded it. “Sully” was hardly a “conservative” movie. It’s main values were cooperation, heroism, and humility.

So what’s the problem? One of the biggest problems is that “our” monied men see the world in vastly different terms than those on the left with money. Lefitsts are willing to hurl money into project after project, hoping for a profit, but understanding that even if their films don’t make a penny, sooner or later kids watch them. There were no fewer than five anti-Iraq war movies that failed to recover their budgets (in real terms, after accounting for advertising). Yet they kept coming out. In the space of five years, we have had an ongoing series (“Madame Secretary”) offering a Hillary stand-in; had a series slamming Fox’s Roger Ailes; had “The Circus” on the 2016 campaign featuring anti-Trump zealots as “journalists”; “The Post,” where heroic reporters battle Richard Nixon; and had a movie on a villainous Dick Cheney. Yet it is something of a myth that conservative movies don’t sell: “Darkest Hour” grossed $150 million worldwide on a $30 million budget; a badly flawed “Dunkirk” still managed three Academy Awards and a worldwide gross of $526 million, and “Chernobyl,” the 2019 miniseries, was widely praised despite its clear damning depiction of communism.

While a few of these manage to poke through the rock-hard leftist surface, most simply aren’t made. Consider the fact that not one major film depicting the life and/or challenges of Ronald Reagan has been made. A picture about Ronald Reagan, with Dennis Quaid attached to play Reagan, has languished for over a year. Pretty soon, Quaid will be too old to play the Gipper. At least one other Reagan script, somewhat more imaginary—but positive nonetheless—has yet to gain financial traction. Reagan’s life in Hollywood alone would make terrific storytelling, from the threats to have acid thrown in his face for his role as head of SAG to his epic battles with the communists inside the Screen Actor’s Guild (which he won). But from the filmmakers and financiers in Hollywood? Crickets.

It is time our side gets it. Easy for me to say—I’m not a billionaire. But until a number of people of substance make up their minds that no matter what the cost, we need to take back the culture, they will continue to fight delaying actions at the ballot box.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

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