Gantz & Lapid’s “Blue and White” — A fragile, directionless, ad hoc political concoction

The purported electoral appeal of the Blue & White line-up is that it includes 3 former IDF Chiefs-of-Staff, yet virtually invariably when top military figures have departed from their field of expertise (security) & ventured into one where they have none (politics), they have been disastrously wrong.

The greatest tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that everyone knows how it will end. We will divide up the region. Israel will return most of the West Bank, and the Palestinian flag will fly on public buildings in east Jerusalem…The only unanswered question is how many more people will have to die along the way. And so we will fight against the extremists on both sides, including our extremists, the settlers. – Yair Lapid, Der Spiegel, May 8, 2008.

We should not be disheartened by AssadIsrael has a strategic interest in disassociating Syria from the extremist axis that Iran is leading. Syria is not lost, Assad is western educated and is not a religious man. He can still join a moderate grouping. – Lt-Gen. (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi, IDF Chief of Staff, Haaretz, Nov. 13, 2009—the latest recruit for the Gantz-Lapid “Blue & White” front

. …the fact that Gantz feels he needs to join up with Lapid in order to ‘beat’ Netanyahu shows that neither one of them holds a candle to Netanyahu. If you can’t beat Netanyahu on your own, just go home. You can’t just add poll numbers from two parties….this [is a]n admission that Gantz is not confident enough alone to beat Netanyahu… If Gantz can’t face Netanyahu in an election, how will he face the world in diplomacy and Israel’s enemies?A talkback response to the news of the Gantz-Lapid union, Feb. 21, 2019

On Thursday morning (Feb. 21, 2019), Israel awoke to sensational breaking political news—Benny Gantz’s Israeli Resilience and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid parties will run as a united faction, under the name of “Blue & White”.

“Blue & White”: A peculiar political party

Likewise, it was announced that a third former IDF Chief of Staff, Gabi Askenazi, will join Moshe (Bogey) Yaalon and Gantz himself, in the ranks of the newly formed political alliance.

Even a quick glance at the composition of the Gantz-Lapid union reveals it to be a highly anomalous—the less charitable might say “perverse” — political entity.

For rather than being a body that coalesced around some ideo-intellectual credo or some consensus—however remote—on some socio-political or strategic agenda, it would appear that the centripetal forces that brought Blue & White’s disparate components together, comprised little more than an anti-Netanyahu sentiment: Some bear him a grudge because of a past affront they felt he had inflicted on them; others appear to harbor an aversion to him, on a personal basis rather than due to any substantive disagreement over policy.

Thus, within the same political framework, we find a Labor Union leader alongside a champion of free market competition; hardline hawks as well as left-leaning doves. Accordingly, it is not easy to envisage great cohesion and sense of purpose in the party ranks regarding multiple issues that are bound to arise after the elections–whether in the security, diplomatic or socio-economic spheres—and whether the Blue & Whites find themselves in government or opposition.

Comparing combat experience: Netanyahu vs. Lapid

With the establishment of the united Gantz-Lapid front, it was also announced that, should the party head the governing coalition, the premiership will be rotated between Gantz (until Nov. 2021) and Lapid thereafter.

In this regard, Gantz may well come to rue his recent—and rather incongruous—attack on Netanyahu’s military record. After all, Netanyahu served in one of the IDF’s most illustrious special units, the famed Sayeret Matkal, taking part in many daring operations behind enemy lines—even being wounded himself. Unsurprisingly, Netanyahu’s comrades-in-arms, like Avi Dichter, former head of internal security, Shin Bet, who served with Netanyahu in the unit, came his defense, robustly rebuffing Gantz’s inappropriate attempt to malign the Prime Minister.

But perhaps more to the point, given Gantz’s ill-advised derision of Netanyahu’s rich combat history, he has left his appointed successor, Lapid, wide open to far more pertinent censure.

After all, despite being physically fit enough to engage in regular martial arts training, he elected to avoid service in a combat unit, choosing to “share the burden” of military service as a reporter for the IDF journal, “Bamahne”– hardly the most arduous or hazardous “tour of duty”– which laid the foundation, at the taxpayers’ expense, for his subsequent successful journalistic career.

Accordingly, Lapid’s personal history clearly undercuts his moral authority and imparts a rather hollow – some might say, hypocritical – ring to his shrill and ongoing castigation of Haredi avoidance of “sharing the burden”—which has often been his rallying call since entering politics in 2013.

Moreover, in the context of Blue & White’s electoral endeavor, it would make the party’s co-candidate for the post of Prime Minister totally devoid of any experience in military and security matters—and far more vulnerable to the kind of criticism Gantz leveled at Netanyahu.

Complete lack of credibility

However, the equitable sharing of the burden of military service is not the only issue on which Lapid has revealed his total lack of credibility.

For example, consider his diametrically contradictory public positions on Jerusalem. Thus, just prior to his entering politics—while trying to shape his political image and generate a strong Left-wing following,  he expressed categorical support for dividing Jerusalem , predicting approvingly  that, “the Palestinian flag will fly on public buildings in east Jerusalem”- (see opening excerpt).  

However, after entering politics, Lapid found this perspective to be an electoral liability and made strenuous efforts to downplay his Left-wing credential.

Suddenly, his views on Jerusalem underwent a hawkish metamorphosis–with its indivisible unity becoming more important than any resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians. Accordingly, several years later, he declared: “Jerusalem is not a place, it is the constitutive concept of Israeli identity and our most fundamental ethos… We will not divide Jerusalem. No matter what happens. If that eventually means there will be no resolution [of the conflict] then there will be no resolution. Countries do not conduct negotiations over their own capital…”

So who are we to trust? Lapid A or Lapid B?

Duplicity and deception

Likewise, Lapid’s attitude to the unilateral Disengagement from Gaza underwent dramatic changes—and on which he unabashedly admitted his own unscrupulous deceit.

Thus, just prior to the 2005 Disengagement, in his widely read Friday column in the mass circulation daily, Yediot Aharonot, the vehicle with which he built much of his political stature, he expressed unbounded enthusiasm for the move. In a piece (24.6.2005) entitled, “To the opponents of Disengagement”, he wrote: “This [the Disengagement] seems the only prospect fora normal life here”, going so far as to brandish the specter of civil war with its opponents, were they to succeed in thwarting it.

But merely a year later (13.10.2006), when the disastrous failure of the unilateral evacuation became appalling apparent, he published “Things that could not be said at the time of the Disengagment”. In it, he admitted –with breath-taking audacity — that what he had written previously was in fact a giant hoax: “[The Disengagement] was never about the Palestinians, demography, the desire for a peace agreement, or the burden on the IDF.”.No! According to Lapid’s revised assessment of the real rationale behind the Disengagement, it was merely a measure designed to put the religious settlers “in their place” and to show that it was the secular population who called the shots in the county.

You have to read to believe!

Generals as an electoral asset?

Of course, the purported electoral appeal of the Blue & White line up is that it included three former IDF Chiefs-of-Staff (Gantz, Yaalon and Ashkenazi). However, there is great doubt as to both how much of a political asset former generals really are; and just how much political acumen they display once elected.

As for being a political asset, the record is at best dubious. Thus, Moshe Yaalon was compelled to join up with Gantz, as his own party Telem was polling consistently under the minimal threshold for election to the Knesset. Moreover, Israel’s political history is replete with former generals who proved to lack any lasting electoral appeal—such as former IDF Chief-of-Staff and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who was forced into humiliating political retirement when it was clear that his Kadima list (once the largest in the Knesset) would not get enough votes to pass the threshold for election, while no other party was prepared to offer him a realistic spot on its list.

Other names that spring to mind in the lengthy list of unimpressive performances by the top brass as effective vote getters include Maj.-Gen. (res.) Danny Yatom, former head of the Mossad; V-Adm. (res.) Ami Ayalon, former commander of the navy and head of the Shin Bet; former Chief-of-Staff, the late Lt.-Gen. (res.) Amnon Lipkin-Shahak; Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amram Mitzna, former head of Central Command; and the hapless Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Mordechai, former head of Southern Command and later defense minister.

Generals and political acumen

When it comes to political acumen the historical record is unequivocally clear. Virtually every time top military figures have departed from their field of expertise (security) and ventured into one where they have none (politics); virtually every time they strayed from evaluating the military parameters to speculating as to political outcomes; virtually every time they have subordinated their professional discipline to their political ambitions, they have been disastrously wrong.

Thus, Yitzhak Rabin, despite reported grave misgivings, capitulated to pressures from his party’s Left wing, and ushered in the Oslo Accords, that left Israel’s streets, cafes and buses awash in blood and body parts; allowed the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat and his cronies to return triumphantly to Gaza; and for hostile armed militias to deploy within mortar range of the nation’s parliament. 

Ariel Sharon abandoned the Gaza Strip, a measure he once vehemently opposed, precipitating all the perils he foresaw and of which he warned, while forcefully expelling thousands of productive, loyal Israeli citizens, and turning their homes over to savage hordes, who ravaged everything and anything left behind.

Then, of course, came Ehud Barak, heralded as the great “white hope” of Israeli politics—a hope that was soon to be dashed. Swept along by the halo of his military glory, Barak was quickly elected prime minister—and disaster soon followed hard on the heels of disaster. Thankfully, he was forced out of office after little more than a year-and-a-half, but not before ordering the ignominious, unilateral flight of the IDF from South Lebanon in 2000; surrendering the area to Hezbollah; consenting – or rather capitulating – to the far-reaching concessions of the Clinton Parameters; and failing to contain the violence of the Second Intifada—that erupted despite his willingness to accept virtually all Palestinian demands.

(Mis) assessing Assad: A somber caveat for the voters?

But, returning to Blue & White and the party’s latest recruit, former IDF Chief of Staff   , Lt.-Gen. (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi.

In November 2009, Ashkenazi assessed that by ceding the Golan to Assad, Syria could be coaxed away from its alliance with Iran and affiliate itself with a moderate grouping of nations. He was quoted in Haaretz as stating: “Syria is not lost. Assad is Western educated and is not a religious man. He can still join a moderate grouping.” (See introductory excerpt).

Askhenazi’s appallingly inaccurate assessment of the developments in Syria and its strategic attachment to Iran is particularly disturbing.

After all, before his appointment as Chief-of -Staff, much of his 40-year military career was spent in the IDF’s Northern Command, including a stint as its commander. One must, therefore, presume that a large portion of his time was devoted to evaluating the Syrian threat, and to familiarizing himself with the nature of the Syrian military dictatorship and its ties to Iran.

The fact that his appraisal was so wildly erroneous should serve as a salutary warning to anyone who feels that a military background bestows any inherent advantage in assessing political developments.

Together with preceding analysis of the nature of the party, the credibility of its leadership and its rumored support for the perilous and pernicious plan for unilateral concessions in Judea Samaria, presently being assertively promoted by the copiously funded Institute for National Security Studies , it should also serve as a somber caveat for anyone considering casting their ballot for the brand new phenomenon of Blue & White.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by edu_castro27 on Pixabay.

“Restaurant Recession” Hits NYC Following $15 Minimum Wage

This will be a rough year for full-service NYC restaurants as they try to navigate a future with significant economic headwinds and significantly higher labor costs from the city’s $15 an hour minimum wage.

An article in the New York Eater (“Restaurateurs Are Scrambling to Cut Service and Raise Prices After Minimum Wage Hike“) highlights some of the suffering New York City’s full-service restaurants are experiencing following the December 31, 2018 hike in the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, which is 15.4% higher than the $13 minimum wage a year earlier and 36.4% higher than the $11 an hour two years ago. For example, Rosa Mexicana operates four restaurants in Manhattan and estimates the $15 mandated wage will increase their labor costs by $600,000 this year. Here’s a slice:

Now, across the city, restaurant owners and operators are reworking their budgets and operations to come up with those extra funds. Some restaurants, like Rosa Mexicano, are changing scheduling. Other restaurateurs are cutting hours and staffers, raising menu prices, and otherwise nixing costs wherever they can.

And though the new regulations are intended to benefit employees, some restaurateurs and staffers say that take home pay ends up being less due to fewer hours — or that employees face more work because there are fewer staffers per shift. “The bottom line is, we have to reduce the number of hours we spend,” says Chris Westcott, Rosa Mexicano’s president and CEO. “And unfortunately that means that, in many cases, employees are earning less even though they’re making more.”

In a survey conducted by New York City Hospitality Alliance late last year, about 75% of the more than 300 respondents operating full-service restaurants reported they’ll reduce employee hours this year because of the new wage increases, while 47% said they’ll eliminate jobs in 2019.

Note also that the survey also reported that “76.50% of respondents report reducing employee hours and 36.30% eliminated jobs in 2018 in response to mandated wage increases.” Those staff reductions are showing up in the NYC full-service restaurant employee series from the BLS, see chart above. December 2018 restaurant jobs were down by almost 3,000 (and by 1.64%) from the previous December, and the 2.5% annual decline in March 2018 was the worst annual decline since the sharp collapse in restaurant jobs following 9/11 in 2001.

As the chart shows, it usually takes an economic recession to cause year-over-year job losses at NYC’s full-service restaurants, so it’s likely that this is a “restaurant recession” tied to the annual series of minimum wage hikes that brought the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour at the end of last year. And the NYC restaurant recession is happening even as the national economy hums along in the 117th month of the second-longest economic expansion in history and just short of the 120-month record expansion from March 1991 to March 2001.

Here’s more of the article:

“There’s a lot of concern and anxiety happening within the city’s restaurant industry,” says Andrew Rigie, executive director of the restaurant advocacy group. Most restaurant owners want to pay employees more, he says, but are challenged by “the financial realities of running a restaurant in New York City.” Merelyn Bucio, a server at a restaurant in Soho that she declined to name, says her hours were cut and her workload increased when wage rates rose. Server assistants and bussers now work fewer shifts, so she and other servers take on side work like polishing silverware and glasses. “We have large sections, and there are large groups, so it’s more difficult,” she says. “You need your server assistant in order to give guests a better experience.”

At Lalito, a small restaurant in Chinatown, they used to roster two servers on the floor, but post wage increases, there’s only one, who is armed with a handheld POS (point of sale) system, according to co-owner Mateusz Lilpop. Having fewer people working was the only way for him to reduce costs, he says. Since the hike, labor costs at Lalito have risen about 10 percent — from 30 to 35 percent to 40 to 45 percent of sales, he says.

These changes get passed onto the diner, some restaurateurs argue. Service can suffer due to fewer people on the floor, or more and more restaurateurs will explore the fast-casual format over full-service ones. Some restaurants are also raising prices for customers. According to the NYC Hospitality Alliance’s survey, close to 90 percent of respondents expect to raise menu prices this year. Lalito’s menu prices have increased by 10 to 15 percent. Lilpop says, and it’s not just the cost of paying his staff driving prices up — it’s a ripple effect from New York-based food purveyors’ own labor cost increases.

“If you have a farmer that has employees that are picking fruit, he has to increase his labor costs, which means he has to increase his fruit prices,” Lilpop says. “I have to buy that fruit from him at a higher rate, and it goes down the chain.”

A few economic lessons here.

  1. A reduction in restaurant staffing that results in a decline in customer service (e.g., longer wait times, less attentive wait staff, etc.) is equivalent to a price increase for customers.
  2. The increases in the city minimum wage to $15 an hour, in addition to directly increasing labor costs for restaurants, also affects the labor costs of companies that supply food, liquor, restaurant supplies, menus, etc. and causes a ripple effect of indirect higher operational costs throughout the entire restaurant supply chain as described above.
  3. Even for workers who keep their jobs, a higher minimum wage per hour doesn’t necessarily translate into higher weekly earnings, if the reduction in hours is greater than the increase in hourly wages. For example, 40 hours per week at $13 an hour generates higher weekly pre-tax earnings ($520) than 33 hours per week at the higher $15 an hour ($495).

Prediction: This will be a rough year for full-service NYC restaurants as they try to navigate a future with significant economic headwinds and significantly higher labor costs from the city’s $15 an hour minimum wage.

This article was reprinted from the American Enterprise Institute.

COLUMN BY

Mark J. Perry

Mark J. Perry

Mark J. Perry is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column with images is republished with permission. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 2.0

VIDEO: Vatican Sex Summit Report – Day 2

Day one of the summit, Feb. 21, was the feast day of St. Peter Damian, a Doctor of the Church who fought against rampant homosexuality in the Church here in Rome almost 1,000 years ago.

Feb. 21 was also the 171st anniversary of the publishing of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

The convergence of these two anniversaries provides a jumping off point to talk about the convergence of these two themes here in Rome — homosexuality and communism.

For the record, though communism and socialism have some different approaches to economic philosophy, from a Catholic perspective, these ideologies are essentially the same. Where they slightly diverge from each other economically and politically, they are twins in their relationship to Catholicism.

Each derides religion in general and Catholicism specifically. The Church has, in fact, returned the favor, condemning both systems for their hatred of God and mutual destruction of man and His essential identity. Likewise, homosexuality, when accepted, also carries with it a hatred for God and destruction of man and his essential identity.

So it is beyond curious — in fact, it’s downright disturbing — that these two evils are experiencing a rehabilitation in Rome these days. For example, Abp. Charles Scicluna made a devastating comment yesterday in response to a reporter’s question denying any essential differences between heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Responding to the inquiry why the word homosexuality has not appeared anywhere in the summit’s official documents, here was his answer: “These are human conditions (heterosexuality and homosexuality) that we recognize, that exist. But they aren’t something that really predisposes to sin.”

Why is the archbishop denying Church teaching in this matter? In case he hasn’t brushed up on the catechism lately, which he should, it says that homosexual inclination is objectively disordered.

But the archbishop speaks as though the natural attraction to marital sex and the disordered attraction to homosexual sex are essentially the same. He is flat-out wrong.  

Switching over to the question of communism, an endorsement “in practice” is the new standard as move after move by the Pope and multiple subordinates seeks to restore communism — cleverly discussed as socialism.

Multiple liberation theologians, condemned by Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict, are all of a sudden back in good graces in Rome these days. Liberation theology was little else than Marxist principles with a very thin veneer of Christianity. It was, in fact, imported to South America by the KGB.

Rome’s constant support of socialist policies and ambitions, as well as its non-stop refusal to condemn active homosexuality — and even some cardinals’ actual support of it — lends much support to the notion that communists and homosexuals have operational control of the Church — temporarily.

The constant bad-mouthing and downplaying of tradition, the near non-stop slamming of capitalism — both approached as bad things from the past that must be eradicated is a disturbing trend because they are being presented as Church teaching.

If McCarrick was, in fact, a Communist agent in the Church — as evidence Church Militant uncovered strongly implies — he would be the perfect example of how these two evils converge in one man.

In a statement that he may not have fully understood the import of himself, Abp. Scicluna said last week that there may be other McCarricks out there.

Given the current dimensions of what’s going on, that’s almost a guarantee. And what is really a troublesome revelation is that, given the degree of McCarrick’s involvement and participation in every level of the Church, that officials here in Rome are perfectly content to let him slip out of the limelight.

McCarrick is the key to everything wrong in the Church these days — from his predatory homosexuality, which brought him down, to his socialist vision of the world, yet no one here in Rome wants that story being looked at.

McCarrick has been sacrificed on the altar of convenience by his fellow travelers to protect themselves from any further scrutiny. And true to form, with him out of the way, they have instantly reverted to their old ways of denying Church teaching and promoting anti-Catholic ideologies.

So it is fitting that yesterday was the day of two important anniversaries — one revolving around homosexuality and the other around communism.

As the saying goes, “The more things change…”

The battle is real. The intensity has ramped up to never-before-imagined levels, and it is no exaggeration to say the fate of the world is in the balance.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column with video and images is republished with permission.

How The Media Can Fix Itself. And…CNN Is?

I can’t even pretend to know what CNN is really thinking by hiring as political editor for their 2020 election coverage Sarah Isgur Flores, a former spokeswoman for the Trump Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions and campaign operative for Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz.

Of course, the DoJ has been one of the leakier Deep State departments undermining Trump. There is that. So for the conspiracists, she might already have a close relationship there. And if you like your conspiracies really toasty warm, you might suspect that she’s told CNN that she just has a lot of dirt from her time in connection with the Mueller investigation and knows how to get information out of the DoJ.

But I can say that if the media were serious about actually fixing itself, it would be doing a lot more hiring of conservatives. A LOT.

While recently seeing some modest increases, CNN suffered serious, almost debilitating ratings declines in the two years following President Trump’s election. They fell well behind known liberal network MSNBC and out-of-sight behind well-known conservative network Fox News. They had long wanted themselves to be seen as the most trusted name in news, but consistently ranked below Fox News and sometimes behind MSNBC.

Of course, they jettisoned all that talk of being trusted in the age of Trump and went full-bore partisan hack, often sprinting over to outright propaganda machine.

But if they really want to regain broad-based trust, CNN like every other mainstream media organization, needs to trash diversity based on skin color and gender — which leads to a rainbow of RightThink liberals and horribly partisan content — and seek a diversity of worldview.

Here’s how it could work.

First and foremost, approach it at the start like an addiction — in this case, an addiction to one worldview that supposes it is the one really true truth and all others are fake news.

Admit you have a problem.

Between 85-90 percent of the working media admit to being registered Democrat. I suspect the number of left-of-center journalists is actually higher than based on my own 25 years of experience in newspaper newsrooms.

Admit that because of human nature, that reality causes a deep leftist bias in the resulting product. No waving around the magic wand of “we’re professionals” makes that bias go away. Everyone has these biases, which is why diversity of worldview is critical.

Admit also that since Trump’s presidency, the bias has become blatant and damaging to credibility and driven many Americans to turn off the media for good.

In President Trump’s recent State of the Union speech, there was an amazing diversity of coverage and headlines — but one hundred percent predictable if you align them with worldviews and politics. Here are a few next day headlines of the speech that garnered 76 percent positive response from those who watched it:

  • (conservative reporters) Washington Examiner: With pitch for unity, Trump urges Congress to ‘choose greatness’
  • (conservative reporters) NY Post: Congresswomen clad in ‘suffragette white’ give Trump a standing ovation
  • (“mainstream” reporters) Washington Post: In dissonant speech, Trump seeks unity while depicting ruin
  • (“mainstream reporters) New York Times head: Trump Presses Hard Line on Immigration in State of the Union Speech

So the mainstream media, filled with leftists reporters and editors puts out leftist content and everyone not a leftist distrusts them — and they think it is because they get facts wrong, or conservatives just don’t like the truth. This is what they tell themselves.

This is not a new development under Trump; it’s been going on for decades. CNN was referred to as the Clinton News Network in the 1990s because of course its reporters were sympathetic to the Democrat President — because virtually all of them voted for him and supported his agenda.

That completely explains what opened the door for Fox News, which when it launched tapped into the biases obvious by the 1990s. Fox News started with the slogan Fair and Balanced and then moved on to We Report You Decide. Now it runs with Most Watched, Most Trusted — because it is both in many polls.

Meanwhile, oblivious to what they were openly communicating 64 million American who voted Trump into office and saw hope for a brighter America without the Clinton corruption machine in power again, the Washington Post changed their slogan to the dark, ominous and utterly self-absorbed “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Well, they are totally in the dark about their problems, sitting right there in their newsroom. About 90 percent of all news coverage regarding President Trump has been negative. No wonder they are mostly only getting anti-Trump and liberal consumers — and losing everyone else.

But WaPo and CNN are simply representative of virtually all newspapers aside from a few small, newer conservative ones, and all networks except Fox News.

If the media actually wants to reform itself, it must admit to the problem and the solution: fill newsrooms with reporters and editors that mirror the worldview of Americans. This is easily the biggest key to their trustworthiness is journalists, and why so many of us don’t trust them.

They cannot have every shade of only one worldview and expect balance and fairness — or expect that Americans will turn back to them. They will remain discredited and end up just being shrunken leftist silo media organs while the right has its own silo of media organs.

It might be too late. I’ve been blowing this horn for decades to no avail. But it might not be. And if it is not, then what CNN has done by hiring the conservative Flores — not just as a commentator people can ignore but as a news decision-maker — is the only way out of the silo.

It just needs to be repeated dozens, and then hundreds of times, until there is balance among those creating the content.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission. The featured image is by mohamed_hassan on Pixabay.

Michigan Attorney General: Church Failed Victims [+Video]

Packed press conference reveals enormity of sex abuse investigation.

The Michigan attorney general is accusing Catholic Church leaders of failing to protect victims.

At a packed press conference here in Lansing today, state attorney general Dana Nessel announced the findings so far of her ongoing investigation into clergy sex abuse and cover-up, making clear the Catholic Church cannot be trusted to police itself.

Dana Nessel:

If an investigator comes to your door and asks to speak with you, please ask to see their badge and not their Rosary. And here’s why that matters: because many churches and dioceses appear to be self-policing, and encouraging parishioners to report abuse to them so they can conduct their own internal investigations. … And victims may believe that they cannot or should not report abuse to us because the Church is going to handle it. And simply put, that’s just not true. … 

Nessel also said the scope of the investigation is far bigger than most know, involving not only all seven dioceses, where priests were shuffled from one diocese to another, but multiple states as well, since abusive clergy were also moved out of state.

Dana Nessel:

Our team seized and is now continuing to review hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, including procedures for receiving and investigating allegations of abuse by the Church. … Now, as of this date, we’ve received more than 300 tips through our clergy abuse hotline, an online tip forum, and there are tips being investigated right now for potential criminal prosecutions. … Priests have been moved from one diocese to the next, protecting the priests in the parish, and we’re also going to be cooperating with other states — I believe it’s 12 other states — that now have similar ongoing investigations, because we know that there have been priests that have been moved from state to state to state.

Michigan chief of police Col. Joseph Gasper echoed the need for victims not to go to the Church first, but to law enforcement.

Col. Joseph Gasper: “I also want to echo your comments regarding the importance of reporting tips directly to law enforcement. We take all leads seriously, and it’s critically important that we hear directly from you when you have information to provide.”

Nessel confirmed the surprise statewide raids her office conducted on all seven Catholic dioceses in October, involving 70 officers and special agents as well as 15 assistant attorneys general on the scene.

The raids were prompted by the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report published in August, which exposed 301 alleged predator priests accused of abusing at least a thousand minors. Some of those priests moved to Michigan.

At the time of the raids the Detroit archdiocese, considered the mother diocese in Michigan, tried to downplay the events, the rector of Sacred Heart Major Seminary sending an email to faculty saying such raids were “a normal part of these types of investigations.”

In light of the attorney general’s remarks today, it will be difficult for Detroit to minimize the investigation, which Nessel said could involve more than a thousand victims and take up to two years to complete.

Nessel had a message for the Catholic church.

Dana Nessel:

If the Catholic Church really wants to stand up to its pledge to assist in our investigation, I would like to say this. Here’s how they can actually help: Firstly, stop self-policing. Our office is conducting a thorough investigation and it’s important we be able to talk with any and all victims harmed by these egregious acts without the intervention of the Church.

Church Militant asked if, in addition to predator priests the attorney general would also go after Church officials, including bishops who covered up sex abuse. Nessel said, “Nothing is off the table.”

Have a news tip? Submit news to our tip line.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column with video and images is republished with permission.

America’s Historical Ignorance

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the darling of the new socialist Democrats in this country, recently referred to the three branches of government. She said, they are the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. John Roberts, call your office.

Ocasio-Cortez is not alone in a great misunderstanding of our history. Many Americans have an abysmal knowledge of our history and some of the basics of American civics.

The results of a recently-released survey (2/15/19) are not encouraging. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation reports that, “in the highest-performing state, only 53 percent of the people were able to earn a passing grade for U.S. history. People in every other state failed; in the lowest-performing state, only 27 percent were able to pass.” [Emphasis theirs.]

The states that did the best were Vermont, Wyoming, and South Dakota. The states that did the worst were Louisiana, Kentucky, and Arkansas. When I first read that, I thought, “Then, what are those Vermonters doing, voting for Senator Bernie Sanders again and again?” As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Some examples of the common ignorance of Americans uncovered by the survey:

  • 57% did not know that Woodrow Wilson was the Commander in Chief during World War I.
  • 85% could not identify the correct year the Constitution was written (1787).
  • 75% could not identify how many amendments have been added to the document (27).
  • 25% did not know that freedom of speech was guaranteed under the First Amendment.

The Foundation concluded: “[A] waning knowledge of American history may be one of the greatest educational challenges facing the U.S.”

This survey is consistent with other findings through the years. We have dumbed down our schools.

Our loss of the knowledge of basic history and civics is a tragedy. We suffer from what I call, American Amnesia. I even wrote a whole book about it. God is the source of our freedom, but we forget this to our peril. As John F. Kennedy put it, “[T]he rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.”

I once interviewed the late Mel and Norma Gabler of Longview, Texas, who reviewed textbooks, from a Christian and conservative perspective. They told me of a textbook which dedicated seven pages to Marilyn Monroe, but only a paragraph to George Washington—and in that paragraph it mentioned that he had false teeth.

Our young people today know more about the trivia of today’s celebrities than they do the men and women who sacrificed everything to bequeath our freedoms to us.

Karl Marx once said, “Take away a people’s roots, and they can easily be moved.” Dr. Peter Lillback, with whom I had the privilege to write a book on the faith of George Washington, said in his book on church/state relations, Wall of Misconception, “One of our great national dangers is ignorance of America’s profound legacy of freedom. I firmly believe that ignorance is a threat to freedom.”

Lillback compiled the following quotes on the link between education and freedom:

  • Thomas Jefferson said, “A nation has never been ignorant and free; that has never been and will never be.”
  • James Madison observed, “The diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty….It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”
  • Samuel Adams pointed out the importance “of inculcating in the minds of the youth the fear and love of the Deity and universal philanthropy, and, in subordination to these great principles, the love of their country.” God and charity first, said the Lightning Rod of the American Revolution, country second.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, says the Bible, which was in the first 200 years of America the chief textbook in one way or another. That includes the small but powerful New England Primer, which trained whole generations in Christian theology (in the Calvinist tradition), while teaching them even the basics of reading and writing.

Even their ABC’s were based on Biblical truths. Says the New England Primer: “A, In Adam’s Fall, We Sinned All. B, Thy Life to Mend, the Bible Tend. C, Christ Crucif’ed, For Sinners Died,” and so on.

Back then, with a Bible-based education, literacy was so high that John Adams said that to find an illiterate man in New England was as rare as a comet. It is too bad that as a society we continue to forget God, and we continue to reap the consequences, including the loss of our history and heritage of liberty.

Why does this matter? George Orwell, a former British Marxist, told us why in his classic novel, 1984: “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by geralt on Pixabay.

Is AOC a Clear & Present Danger to America?

There is little doubt that the Democrat Party is now being run by the likes of Ocasio-Cortez a Socialist along with a large number of the moderates in the Democrat Party. She along with Bernie Sanders have a huge following among young millennials who call themselves Democrat Socialists.

Unfortunately for America Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders and their followers are economic illiterates.

Read the analysis in the opinion piece below that appeared in the Washington Post . By following her advice the loss to New York was estimated by the Governor to be $27 Billion. The actual loss is far far greater.  So far each of the Democrats running for President have embraced the absurd Green New Deal created by this economic illiterate. No one can doubt New York Democrats have already marched off the cliff under the tutelage of Ocasio-Cortez and her followers.

America will be in serious trouble if it follows the advice of Ocasio-Cortez and her entourage. It is not an exaggeration to say this economic illiterate and her followers could destroy America.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an economic illiterate — and that’s a danger to America

By Marc A. Thiessen

The left complains that conservatives are “obsessing” over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Well, there is a reason for that: Ocasio-Cortez is driving the agenda of today’s Democratic Party — and her economic illiteracy is dangerous.

Case in point: Last week, Ocasio-Cortez celebrated the tanking of a deal negotiated by her fellow Democrats in which Amazon promised to build a new headquarters in Long Island City, New York, right next to her congressional district. Amazon’s departure cost the city between 25,000 and 40,000 new jobs. Forget the tech workers whom Amazon would have employed. Gone are all the unionized construction jobs to build the headquarters, as well as thousands of jobs created by all the small businesses — restaurants, bodegas, dry cleaners and food carts — that were preparing to open or expand to serve Amazon employees. They are devastated by Amazon’s withdrawal. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, also owns The Post.)

READ MORE.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by TheDigitalArtist on Pixabay Pixabay.

Picking up the Pieces of a Broken Venezuela

Nicholas Casey has lived in Caracas for three years, but the stories are still jarring. The Andes bureau chief for the New York Times, Casey has had a front-row seat for the unraveling of Venezuela – but even he probably wasn’t prepared for the desperation he’s seen these past several months. Men and women of what was once Latin America’s richest country eating rotten food to survive. Mothers so poor and malnourished that they’re giving birth to stillborn babies – or miscarrying them altogether. Millions of people leaving what’s left of their homes to set out on foot over the mountains for a chance to survive.

“The walking,” Casey writes, “will begin before dawn — before the clouds broke against the mountaintops, before the trucks took over the highway, even before anyone in the town woke up to check the vacant lot where scores of Venezuelan refugees had been huddling through the night… Rolling suitcases behind them, some trudge along highways their salaries so obliterated by Venezuela’s hyperinflation that bus tickets are out of reach. Others try to hitchhike for thousands of miles until they reach Ecuador or Peru.”

Driven by fear, hunger, violence, the Venezuelans are fleeing by the tens of thousands every day in one of the worst refugee crises of the modern century. The 125-mile journey over the two-mile-high Andes Mountain pass is treacherous and cold – but to many, their only chance. Columbia, if they can make it, is where they can start over – far away from the political unrest so many years in the making.

Once the home of oil reserves as large as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela has become a nightmare of corruption and mismanagement coming to an ugly head under President Nicolás Maduro. Inflation, now at a jaw-dropping 833,997 percent, sent the country spiraling. “Customers are standing in hours-long lines at banks to take out a daily limit, set so low that it barely covers the price of a cup of coffee.” The wave of poverty is sweeping Venezuelan children under, killing them at a shocking rate as store shelves sit empty, and food scarcely exists. Even as early as 2017, the country’s people were losing weight at a frightening rate, an average of 24 pounds when things were much better than they are today.

Now, the people who remain are spilling into the streets of Caracas, demanding that Maduro let the shipping containers of U.S. and foreign aid into the country – a decision he refuses to make. In a sick show of force, Maduro refuses to ease his people’s suffering, ordering the military to turn away thousands of pounds of food, medicine, hygiene kits, and humanitarian aid at the border. Trucks, filled with life-saving supplies, are being blocked on bridges, while boxes — piled sky-high – sit unopened on the Columbian side. With his country on the brink, opposition leader Juan Guaido continues to plead with world leaders for help. President Trump has helped lead that charge, building the international pressure for Maduro to step down.

“I ask every member of the Maduro regime: End this nightmare of poverty, hunger and death. LET YOUR PEOPLE GO. Set your country free! Now is the time for all Venezuelan Patriots to act together, as one united people. Nothing could be better for the future of Venezuela!” the president tweeted. “We are here to proclaim that a new day is coming in Latin America. In Venezuela and across the Western Hemisphere, Socialism is DYING – and liberty, prosperity, and democracy are being REBORN…”

Across the border in Columbia, impromptu refugee camps are popping up everywhere, as locals rally to do what they can. “I put myself in their situation, and as a mother of two children, I have to do something,” one woman said in a parking lot where Columbians offer the travelers showers, oatmeal, and jackets. “People came arriving with their shoes totally broken and destroyed,” Martha Duque told Casey. “But the hardest wasn’t seeing their shoes, it was seeing their feet: the lacerations, the blisters that were filled with blood.” She, too, has heard the heartbreaking stories. Mothers leaving their children behind. Wives offering their bodies to other men so their families can eat. “He would give her 20,000 pesos,” one explained — the equivalent of $6.

This is the legacy of a broken Venezuela, where there is no freedom, no hope, and no future for the people without help. President Trump is doing everything he can, while others call the church to urgent prayer. Pray, Vice President Mike Pence has asked Americans, for a spiritual and physical breakthrough. Pray for the military to let the supplies through to the starving. Pray for the suffering of the Venezuelan people to end. In a country of boundless opportunity and blessing like ours, very few of us have an inkling of the pain and hurt outside these borders. May it drive us to our knees in gratitude — and compassion for those who go without.


Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.


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How Cuba’s Infant Mortality Rank Fell from 13th to 49th in the World

Cuba has made less progress in health care and life expectancy than most of Latin America in recent years due to its decrepit health care system.

It has never been a safer world in which to be a child. According to the UN, in 1950, most of the world had a child death rate (by age five) of over 20 percent, while only a few countries, such as the United States, Cuba, Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand had child death rates of below 5 percent. By 2015, most of the world had a child death rate of below 5 percent, and every country on Earth had a child death rate below 20 percent (even war-torn Yemen, whose child death rate fell from 50 percent in 1950 to 4.8 percent in 2015, the first year of its current civil war).

For many developed countries, the child mortality rate is now below 1 percent. It’s less than 1 percent in the United States; all but two countries in the European Union; Japan, Korea, and Malaysia; Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; and parts of Arabia. (See “Child Mortality in 1800, 1950 and 2015,” three maps from Our World in Data).

And world hunger and poverty have diminished enormously. As the Cato Institute’s Marian Tupy pointed out, in 1981, “44.3 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty.” But in 2015, only “9.6 percent” did. The last 40 years have seen a “massive and historically unprecedented decline in global poverty.”

Cuba in 1950 had a lower child mortality rate than all but a handful of the world’s countries—lower than Canada and on par with the United States. That was long before the Communists took over in Cuba in 1959. The Communists did not give Cuba its unusually good world health ranking. Cuba had already achieved it long before the Marxist dictator Fidel Castro seized power.

Yet Castro’s regime took credit for the prior achievement of his non-communist predecessors, and many progressives have gullibly swallowed that propaganda. In 2016, The Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, debunked such claims. He gave “three Pinocchios” to Canadian Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for claiming that Castro made “significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.” He pointed to data about how Cuba already had well-developed health and education systems by world standards.

But similar claims have been made by many other gullible progressive politicians. They depict the dictator Castro as the savior of Cuba. Bernie Sanders claimed it was Castro who “educated their kids, gave their kids healthcare.” Jimmy Carter claimed that Castro gave Cuba “superb systems of health care and universal education.” Obama also promoted the myth of excellent Cuban health care, saying, “The United States recognizes progress that Cuba has made as a nation, its enormous achievements in education and in health care.”

In reality, Cuba has made less progress in health care and life expectancy than most of Latin America in recent years due to its decrepit health care system. “Hospitals in the island’s capital are literally falling apart.” Sometimes, patients “have to bring everything with them, because the hospital provides nothing. Pillows, sheets, medicine: everything.”

As Townhall notes, in 1958, the year before the Communists took over Cuba:

Cuba ranked 13th from the top, worldwide with the lowest infant-mortality rate. This meant that robustly capitalist and immigrant-swamped pre-Castro Cuba had the 13th lowest infant-mortality rate in the world. This put her not only at the top in Latin America but atop most of Western Europe, ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Today all of these countries leave Communist Cuba in the dust, with much lower infant mortality rates.

Today Cuba is ravaged by diseases that had been long-eradicated in pre-Castro Cuba (dengue, cholera, for a few examples.) And of Cuba’s “doctors” fortunate enough to escape their indentured servitude to the Castro-Family-Plantation, the overwhelmingly majority flunk the exam given in the U.S. for licensing as doctors assistants.

And even plummeting from 13th (Capitalist) to 49th (Communist), Cuba’s “impressive” infant mortality rate is kept artificially low by Communist chicanery with statistics and by an appalling abortion rate of 0.71 abortions per live birth. This is the hemisphere’s highest, by far. Any Cuban pregnancy that even hints at trouble gets “terminated.”

A few years ago Dr. Juan Felipe García, MD, of Jacksonville, Fla., interviewed several recent doctor defectors from Cuba. Based on what he heard, he reported the following:

“The official Cuban infant-mortality figure is a farce. Cuban pediatricians constantly falsify figures for the regime. If an infant dies during its first year, the doctors often report he was older. Otherwise, such lapses could cost him severe penalties and his job.”

It should be noted that the official Cuban infant mortality rate is still quite low compared to most of the world. But relatively speaking, it has lost ground, especially compared to capitalist countries in Asia like South Korea.

Cuba also lost the big edge in life expectancy it once enjoyed. Prior to communism, it led virtually all countries in Latin America in life expectancy. But by 2012, Chileans and Costa Ricans lived slightly longer than Cubans. Back in 1960, Chileans had a life span seven years shorter than Cubans, and Costa Ricans lived more than two years less than Cubans on average. In 1960, Mexicans lived seven years shorter than Cubans; by 2012, the gap had shrunk to just two years.

In celebrating Communist Cuba’s non-existent achievements, progressive politicians don’t even listen to fellow progressives who have actually studied Cuba’s record under communism, to their chagrin. As the progressive economist Brad DeLong points out (he calls it “hideously depressing”):

Cuba in 1957—was a developed country. Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. Cuba in 1957 had as many vehicles per capita as Uruguay, Italy, or Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had 45 TVs per 1000 people—fifth highest in the world …Today? Today the UN puts Cuba’s HDI [Human Development indicators] in the range of … Mexico. (And Carmelo Mesa-Lago thinks the UN’s calculations are seriously flawed: that Cuba’s right HDI peers today are places like China, Tunisia, Iran, and South Africa.) Thus I don’t understand lefties who talk about the achievements of the Cuban Revolution: “…to have better health care, housing, education.”

Cuba’s outmoded Marxist education system also does not deserve praise. Obama mistakenly called Cuba’s “system of education” an “extraordinary resource” that “values every boy and every girl.”

But there’s nothing “extraordinary” about Cuba’s educational system. Children are taught by poorly paid teachers in dilapidated schools. Cuba has made less educational progress than most Latin American countries over the last 60 years. According to UNESCO, Cuba had about the same literacy rate as Costa Rica and Chile in 1950 (close to 80 percent) before Cuba was taken over by the communists. And it has almost the same literacy rate as they do today (close to 100 percent).

Meanwhile, Latin American countries that were largely illiterate in 1950—such as Peru, Brazil, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic—are largely literate today, closing much of the gap with Cuba. El Salvador had a less than 40 percent literacy rate in 1950 but has an 88 percent literacy rate today. Brazil and Peru had a less than 50 percent literacy rate in 1950, but today, Peru has a 94.5 percent literacy rate, and Brazil a 92.6 percent literacy rate. The Dominican Republic’s rate rose from a little over 40 percent to 91.8 percent. While Cuba made substantial progress in reducing illiteracy in Castro’s first years in power, its educational system has stagnated since, even as much of Latin America improved.

The child mortality statistics above are from the United States Population Division (2017) for 1950 and 2015 and Gapminder for 1800. The maps depicting that data are by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser. The child death rate discussed above refers to the percentage of kids dying by age 5, not just in the first year of their life.

This article was reprinted from Liberty Unyielding.

COLUMN BY

Hans Bader

Hans Bader

Hans Bader practices law in Washington, D.C. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column with images is republished with permission. The featured image is by joffi on Pixabay Pixabay.

New Jersey Lawmakers Are Trying to Tax the Rain

This gives new life to the saying, “when it rains, it pours.”

Sometimes life mimics fiction. And sometimes life is so much stranger than fiction you have to double check the headlines to ensure they aren’t satire. The latest double take comes from New Jersey, where, under the guise of environmentalism, local legislators have passed a new tax on—wait for it— the rain.

Governments are known for a lack of creativity and an uncanny ability to think only inside the box. However, when it comes to getting creative with inventing new forms of taxation, they never disappoint. Chicago, for example, recently implemented a “PlayStation” tax on its residents as part of the city’s previously existing “amusement tax,” which, just as it sounds, taxes individuals on almost all forms of entertainment.

California, on the other hand, recently tried to get away with unprecedented levels of extortion when it tried to tax residents for their drinking water and text messages. The water tax is still on the table, but luckily, the Golden State did not succumb to the new ridiculous texting tax. New Jersey, though, might not be so lucky.

To be perfectly clear, while the new tax is being referred to as the “rain tax,” it doesn’t actually tax the rain itself, but that doesn’t make the context of the legislation any less absurd.

Bill S-1073 seeks to penalize businesses and homeowners whose property contains paved surfaces, like a driveway or a parking lot. When it rains, the rain acts as a medium, transporting any pollutants it picks up from paved surfaces, like brine and rock salt, and then depositing it into sewers and drains. And since the pollutants are thought to have originated from paved surfaces, the state has determined that property owners are responsible for any negative environmental impacts that result therein and should be penalized accordingly.

The legislation itself does not actually allow the state to collect any taxes, however. Instead, it allows each of its 565 different municipalities to create their own stormwater utility systems to minimize the runoff problem. Each locality will then charge each homeowner and business based on what the bill calls “a fair and equitable approximation” of how much runoff is generated from their property.

The legislation states:

Under the bill, a county, municipality, or authority (local unit) that establishes a stormwater utility is authorized to charge and collect reasonable fees and other charges to recover the stormwater utility’s costs for stormwater management.

As is the trend these days, supporters are praising the bill as a heroic move to protect the environment, though there is no real evidence that any significant harm is being done. Yet, legislators would have you believe there is a crisis at hand.

Senate President Steve Sweeney tried to convey the seriousness of the problem, saying, “With all the salt we’ve had on roads recently, that’s all running into the sewer systems, so you don’t ignore the problems because they don’t go away.” However, this winter has actually been mild for the state, with fewer snow falls than usual, meaning there has not been any sudden influx of rock salt pouring into the sewer systems this season.

A local writer, E.W. Boyle, highlighted the true idiocy of this proposed tax, writing:

Now, since our roads have been treated during winter storm events for over 80 years, with no apparent environmental impact, one wonders what took them so long to notice that there is salt runoff into creeks, streams and estuary rivers during subsequent rain events. No, rather what they noticed was the potential for yet another tax levy.

Boyle hits the nail on the head, and he is not alone in his opposition to the new tax. Republican state senator Tom Kean Jr. also criticized this proposal for the burden it places on New Jersey residents. Since each municipality is in charge of setting its own rules regarding the collection of this tax with very little oversight from any other governing entity, it is ripe for potential abuse. Keane said, “We all want to protect our environment. We all want to preserve it for future generations, but this is a weighted tax.” He continued, “The citizens of New Jersey…really [have] no way to defend themselves against tax increases at local levels.”

Since the bill gives local governments carte blanche to set the rates and collect the revenue, it makes it harder for residents to voice their concern if they believe they are being asked to pay too much. Keane later added:

…you shouldn’t create unfair authorities with uneven taxing practices…You’re creating a new layer of government that will not be regulated. The concern is uneven enforcement.

While uneven enforcement is certainly a concern, it is not the only problem the new rain tax inflicts on New Jersey residents. The legislation also comes with a hefty price tag that property owners will be responsible for footing.

New Jersey is currently one of the most heavily taxed states in the country. And yet, it is going to burden its residents even further with the passing of this bill. According to the EPA, it will cost the state of New Jersey $15.6 billion to upgrade its storm drain system. However, the cost to Garden State taxpayers could end up being significantly higher.

New Jersey’s Office of Legislative Services, which usually determines the fiscal impact of state policies, could not shed any light on what this might actually cost residents. Since each local municipality is in charge of setting its own rates for each property owner, there is really no way of estimating the projected costs at this time. And given the nature of government, it is highly probable that taxpayers will end up paying more than their “fair” share of the burden.

Chris Sturm, a supporter of the bill and a water policy “expert” at the nonprofit organization New Jersey Future, attempted to downplay the impact this will have on homeowners. Sturm commented, “This will be negligible for the vast majority of homeowners. This is for properties that have large impervious surfaces.” While no one, including state officials, is sure of the fiscal impact this will have on residents, there is something else quite disturbing about his statement.

These properties with “large impervious surfaces” are places of business. They are the very institutions responsible for creating jobs, wealth, and prosperity within the state. And yet, rather than celebrating these titans of industry for their contributions, state lawmakers are attempting to impose onerous taxes on them. This is yet another example of governments using their taxing powers to turn private businesses into their personal coffers.

To make matters worse, any individual or business who does not pay their “rain tax” will be charged interest and have a tax lien imposed on them by the state, the very same type of action taken against those who fail to pay their property taxes.

New Jersey is, unfortunately, not the first state to attempt to inflict this type of tax on its residents. In 2012, Maryland instituted its own version of the rain tax, but it was not received well by the taxpayers. In 2014, Republican Governor Larry Hogan altered the law and allowed nine counties and the city of Baltimore to opt out of the state’s rain tax, so long as each municipality promised to address the Chesapeake Bay runoff issue on their own.

Hogan commented, “Passing a state law that forces counties to raise taxes on their citizens against their will is not the best way to address the issue.”

New Jersey does not feel the same way.

New Jersey legislators have done their constituents a great disservice by passing this bill. And now, the legislation is currently sitting on the desk of Governor Phil Murphy. It is expected that it will be signed any day now. This gives new life to the saying, “when it rains, it pours.”

COLUMN BY

Brittany Hunter

Brittany Hunter

Brittany is a senior writer for the Foundation for Economic Education. Additionally, she is a co-host of Beltway Banthas, a podcast that combines Star Wars and politics. Brittany believes that the most effective way to promote individual liberty and free-market economics is by telling timely stories that highlight timeless principles.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column with images is republished with permission. The feature image by Pexels on Pixabay.

30-Foot Border Wall Begins Construction In California

Several days after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, construction began on the fifth border wall project of his administration.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced Tuesday that work has started on replacing 14 miles of a steel-mesh fence along the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego, The Associated Press reported. The fence is being replaced with 30-foot high steel bollards. It is actually the second layer of barrier to be put up in the area, with the first layer nearly complete.

SLSCO Ltd., a company located in Galveston, Texas, scored the $101 million contract in December 2018. The Trump administration has already awarded around $1 billion in contracts to cover 97 miles of the southern border, with the project in San Diego being one of the latest.

Trump touted the construction Wednesday of a border wall in New Mexico.

WATCH:

Progress continues after the president secured billions more in funding for border wall construction.

Trump signed into law an appropriations bill earlier in February that doles out $1.375 billion for 55 miles of new wall, an amount immigration hardliners said was not enough. However, the president then took the controversial step on Feb. 15 of declaring a national emergency, which allowed him to allocate a total of about $8 billion in federal funds.

The emergency order has been adamantly opposed by Democrats and progressive groups.

A coalition of 16 states, led by California, filed suit against the president on Monday in an attempt to strike down the crisis declaration. A number of liberal organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Biological Diversity, have also leveled suits against the administration.

COLUMN BY

Jason Hopkins

Jason Hopkins


Energy and Immigration reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation. Follow Jason on Twitter

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column with images is republished with permission. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Liberals See Truth as Subservient to Doctrine, Feelings

Truth is not a left-wing value.

I first discovered this as a graduate student studying the Soviet Union and left-wing ideologies at the Russian Institute of Columbia University School of International Affairs. Everything I have learned since has confirmed this view.

Individuals on both the left and right lie. Individuals on both the left and right tell the truth. And liberalism, unlike leftism, does value truth. But the further left one goes, the more one enters the world of the lie.

Why does the left lie?

There are two main reasons.

One is that leftists deem their goals more important than telling the truth. For example, every honest economist knows women do not earn 20 percent less money than men for the same work done for the same amount of hours under the same conditions. Yet leftists repeat the lie that women earn 78 cents for every dollar men earn.

Why any employers would hire men when they could hire women and get the same amount of work done at the same level of excellence for the same number of hours while saving 20 cents on the dollar is a question only God or the sphinx could answer.

So, when New York Times columnists write this nonsense, do they believe it? The answer is they don’t ask themselves, “Is it true?” They ask themselves, “Does the claim help promote the left-wing doctrine that women are oppressed?”

 Whatever serves that end is morally justified.

The second reason is leftism is rooted in feelings, not reason or truth. From Karl Marx to Bernie Sanders, left-wing preference for socialism over capitalism is entirely rooted in emotion. Only capitalism creates wealth. Socialism merely spends what capitalism creates.

Do leftists not know this? Even if they know it, the emotional pull of socialism prevails.

Do leftists believe there are more than two sexes? Of course not. That’s why they renamed “sex” “gender”—and then redefined “gender” to mean whatever one wants it to mean.

So then, on the left, truth is subservient to two higher values: doctrine and emotion.

This leads to the question of this column: Do those on the left believe their lies?

Do leftists believe global warming will destroy the world as we know it in 12 years, as recently suggested by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.? I don’t know. They seem to talk themselves into believing their hysterias. But they don’t act on them.

Here’s a simple proof that the left is lying about the imminent threat of global warming to civilization: Leftists don’t support nuclear power. It is simply not possible to believe fossil fuel emissions will destroy the world and, at the same time, oppose nuclear power. Nuclear power is clean and safe. Sweden, a model country for leftists, meets 40 percent of its energy needs with nuclear power.

If you were certain you were terminally ill yet decline a medicine that is guaranteed to cure you, the rest of us would have every reason to assume you didn’t really believe you were terminally ill.

Here’s more evidence the left doesn’t believe its global warming hysteria: How many leftists with beachfront property anywhere in the world have sold it? If leftists really believe global warming will cause the oceans to rise and soon inundate the world’s coastal areas, why would any leftist not sell his beachfront home while he could not only make all his money back but make a profit as well?

Another example of left-wing rhetoric leftists don’t act on: The left tells us that colleges are permeated by a “rape culture,” yet virtually all left-wing parents send their daughters to college. If you were to believe any place has a culture of rape, where 1 in 4 or 5 women is raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, would you send your 18-year-old daughter there? Of course not.

So how do any left-wing mothers or fathers send their daughters to college? The answer would seem to be they know it’s a lie—but that doesn’t matter, since the left views telling the truth as incomparably less significant than combating sexism, sexual assault, misogyny, toxic masculinity, and patriarchy.

One more example: “Walls don’t work.”

It is inconceivable that people who say this—especially those with walls around their home—believe it. Yet leftists say it with the same degree of ease Stalin labeled Trotsky a fascist, even though Trotsky and Lenin were the fathers of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The question is not whether truth is a left-wing value. The only question is whether leftists believe their lies. And, believe it or not, I still don’t know.

So, conduct the following tests and decide for yourself:

Ask anyone you know who says global warming will destroy most life on Earth in 12 years why they don’t advocate nuclear power. If they tell you it’s too dangerous, you know they are hysterics, not followers of science.

Ask anyone you know who believes the global warming threat is an existential one and owns beachfront property why they aren’t selling their beachfront property.

Ask anyone who believes colleges have rape culture why they sent (or are sending) their daughter to college.

It is possible to love truth and be liberal, conservative, libertarian, an atheist, a believer, a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, or a Hindu. But you cannot be a leftist.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager is a columnist for The Daily Signal, nationally syndicated radio host, and creator of PragerU. Twitter:
@DennisPrager.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal Column with images is republished with permission. The featured image by OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay Pixabay.

Trump Weighs in on Jussie Smollett’s Arrest

President Donald Trump weighed in on Twitter after actor Jussie Smollett was arrested Thursday and charged with felony disorderly conduct for filing a false police report following an alleged hate crime hoax.

“[Jussie Smollett]—what about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments!? #MAGA,” Trump wrote on Twitter Thursday.

Smollett, known for his role on the show “Empire,” is accused of orchestrating a fake hate crime against himself in Chicago in January. He claimed that two white men attacked him while he was walking home from a restaurant late at night. Smollett, who is gay, told police that the men poured a bleach-like substance on him and tied a rope around his neck like a noose while shouting racist and homophobic slurs.

Some media outlets reported that Smollett said the alleged attackers wore “Make America Great Again” hats popularized by Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, but Smollett said during a “Good Morning America” interview on Feb. 14 that he never said that.

That interview took place before Smollett’s story began to crumble. Two brothers, Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo, were arrested for allegedly attacking Smollett before being released Friday without charges. Smollett allegedly paid the brothers to carry out the attack.

The Chicago Police Department addressed the Smollett controversy during a press conference Thursday.

“This announcement today recognizes that ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” Chicago PD Superintendent Eddie Johnson said. “I am left hanging my head and asking why? Why would anyone, especially an African-American man, use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusations?”

RELATED VIDEO: Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Jackson on Jussie Smollett. NOTE: YouTube took down this video. Wonder why?

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column with images is republished with permission. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. The featured image by geralt on Pixabay.

VIDEO: Vatican Sex Summit Report — Day 1

This summit has been assailed as a phony sideshow by homosexual clerics attempting to hide their own homosexual network, chief of which had been Theodore McCarrick, who the network protected for decades and in many ways is the entire reason for this meeting.

But there now appears to be much more to this story than just the homosexual angle, as large as that still looms.

Beyond his horrendous evil of homosexual predation for decades, Church Militant has learned exclusively that McCarrick may also have been clandestinely trained by Soviet Communists here in Europe during his younger years, making him effectively a Communist plant in the heart of the Church.

Through a back channel, Church Militant has obtained information from former Communist personnel who were instrumental in setting up a secret network of indoctrination and training centers throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War II, and their information directly implicates the involvement of Theodore McCarrick.

A little history to set the stage first: When Stalin gained control of the former Soviet Union in the early 1920s, he set about plans to cripple the influence of the Catholic Church in the West, if not completely destroy the Church — all part of communism’s plan for world domination and warned about by Our Lady in Fatima in 1917.

A key component of the plans involved infiltrating seminaries with young men who would work to undermine the Church’s teaching in the area of morality.

This was testified to on multiple occasions by Bella Dodd, a high-ranking member of the U.S. Communist Party. She herself claims to have orchestrated the placement of 1,100 men into U.S. seminaries.

These men, she said, following the dictates of Stalin, were immoral men, a large number homosexual. Dodd’s testimony is important because not only is part of the infiltration plan revealed, but the nexus between communism and homosexuality in the plan. The plan, however, was not contained to the United States.

As the Iron Curtain was collapsing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, press reports began circulating about how Polish seminaries had been infiltrated by hundreds of Communist agents with the information coming from KGB records.

The reality that the Church had been under siege from within for decades shook Polish Catholics to the core. And Poland was not alone. Catholic Lithuania as well saw its hierarchy penetrated by Soviet agents.

And liberation theology was sneaked into Latin America by KGB agents to undermine the Catholic Church through the Jesuit order.

So that covert Communist activity happened in the U.S. as well is no surprise. Particular to the operation was that young men native to their respective countries be recruited so there would be no suspicion about them. This is why various training centers were established in multiple countries.

According to Church Militant’s sources, one of those European centers was St. Gallen, Switzerland, where Theodore McCarrick had resided right about 1950. McCarrick was a poor kid whose father had died when he was very young and whose mother slaved away doing menial work to make ends meet.

In a 2001 New York Times profile, McCarrick spoke briefly about his time in Europe immediately following high school in New York City, a hotbed of the Communist Party USA at that time.

Admitting he didn’t have any plans for his life at the time, he says “a friend” invited him to Switzerland where he stayed for a year. He gave no details about how a poor kid from New York with no money happened to travel to Europe and remain here for a year with no visible means of support.

International travel in the day was essentially the domain of the well-to-do and was very expensive.

It is from McCarrick’s longtime sex abuse victim James Grein that we know the exact location in Switzerland was St. Gallen, and it is from Church Militant’s former Communist sources we know that St. Gallen was one of the Communist training centers to recruit young men to go into seminaries and begin eroding the Church.

McCarrick told the New York Times that it was during his year in Europe that he discovered his vocation, pointing to how the history of the Church in Europe to which he had been exposed had been a motivating factor.

McCarrick would have been the ideal candidate for Soviet recruiting: a fatherless young man with homosexual proclivities with no particular ambition in life. He fit the pattern perfectly, especially the homosexual dynamic whereby he could easily be controlled by blackmail.

McCarrick returned from Europe and enrolled in seminary for the New York archdiocese where he was ordained in 1958. If McCarrick was indeed recruited as a Soviet agent to undermine the Church, he fulfilled the wishes of his overlords perfectly.

Quickly ascending up the ranks, he sewed moral, doctrinal and spiritual confusion and harm on every level — not just his seminarian victims and other young men.

Interestingly, the high-profile book by the French gay activist which was just released today here in Rome and has caused quite a stir concentrates a good deal of attention on McCarrick. That’s noteworthy because the author worked on the book for four years, most of which was long before McCarrick became the household name he has come to be since last summer.

That means many of the author’s contacts in the Roman Curia and the 40 cardinals he interviewed pointed to McCarrick in one way or another as being a key figure.

Presuming that McCarrick was a Communist agent, imbued with Marxist thinking and a socialist world view from his earliest days, it would explain a lot regarding the direction the Church in the U.S. took during his rise to power.

The so-called “social justice” wing of the Church in the United States became dominant under McCarrick, who was a key player in helping form and guide it.

Beyond the Church itself, McCarrick was able to use his influence to secure U.S. government work for three years on the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad in 1996 under Democrat Bill Clinton.

From 1999 to 2001, McCarrick was also on the U.S. Commission for International Freedom — both positions taking him on a dizzying array of foreign trips.

During an award ceremony, Clinton said that the “litany of countries” visited by McCarrick was more suited to a diplomat than an archbishop, a comment made in jest during a speech, but revealing nonetheless.

McCarrick secured the role of Vatican envoy to Communist China a couple of years before his fall from grace and was the man credited for hammering out the Vatican-China deal that many insist was a total sellout of the Church in China.

While these assertions might never be able to be proven, for such is the nature of cover-ups and clandestine operations, they cannot be ignored. There are too many crossovers and points of convergence, the results of which are happening all over the Church and the culture at large to dismiss.

McCarrick routinely bribed and bought favor with multiple curial officials in Rome. He was a predatory homosexual and this was well-known going back years.

He strongly advanced the cause of the social justice propaganda which has dominated the life of the Church in the United States for decades — a movement cloaked in language of love of neighbor, but one which routinely is exposed for its left-leaning politics and association with socialist organizations many of which are spin-offs from Saul Alinsky.

A couple years after Pope Francis was elected, Cdl. Danneels of Belgium, a protector of homosexual predation himself, bragged in public about how a group of socialist-minded clerics had convened in St. Gallen over the years and plotted how to get a socialism-friendly pope elected.

As it turns out, St. Gallen appears to have much deeper roots in socialism than first thought and may have developed into the headquarters for the plot to destroy the Church by co-opting it through the use of active homosexual clergy trained to try and bring about a communist utopia on earth by means of the Church’s far-flung influence.

If this is true, and it all rings true given the facts, the McCarrick case must be much explored much deeper than just the superficial treatment of him being reduced to the lay state.

He may very well have been the point man for a Communist infiltration into the Church in the United States and extending to control of even the Vatican itself.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column with images is republished with permission.