Senators Graham & Durbin Introduce DREAM Amnesty

Dick Durbin (D-IL) & Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

by NumbersUSA: Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced a new version of the DREAM Act on Thursday that would grant amnesty and work permits to approximately 2 million illegal aliens. The bill would impact many of the illegal aliens who received Pres. Obama's unconstitutional DACA executive amnesty that could face a court challenge from several states in September unless the program is ended by Pres. Trump before then.

The actual text of the bill has yet to be released, but according to section-by-section analysis posted on Sen. Durbin's website, the Graham-Durbin DREAM Amnesty is similar to past versions of the legislation that were voted down by Congresses but with a few noticeable changes.

First, it shortens the requirement that illegal aliens must have be continuously present in the U.S. from 5 years to 4 years. Second, it mirrors the DACA executive amnesty by excluding any illegal alien who has been convicted of three or more misdemeanor crimes as long as the charges occurred on different days or for one or more felony offenses; prior versions of the DREAM Act allowed any illegal alien who was of "good moral character" to receive the amnesty. Third, it expands eligibility beyond those who attend school or serve in the military. The measure allows illegal aliens who worked in the U.S. for three years to qualify. Forth, it repeals a 1996 law banning state from offering illegal aliens lower in-state tuition rates unless all students nationwide are eligible as well. Lastly, there doesn't appear to be a maximum age limit (prior versions only applied to illegal aliens under the age of 35) or end date after which no further illegal aliens will qualify.

"I first introduced the Dream Act 16 years ago and I’ll continue fighting until it becomes the law of the land," Sen. Durbin said. "I thank Senator Graham for partnering with me in this bipartisan effort."

While the DREAM Act is not new for Sen. Durbin, it is uncharted waters for Sen. Graham. Sen. Graham has voted against the DREAM Act each time it came to the Senate floor and called the DACA executive amnesty "unconstitutional" in Dec. 2016.

"These young people have lived in America since they were children and built their lives here," said Graham. "There is support across the country for allowing Dreamers -- who have records of achievement -- to stay, work, and reach their full potential."

For more on the DREAM Act, see Sen. Durbin's website.

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Creating Jobs and Growth: Tax Cuts Part 2

by Newt Gingrich: At the end of last month, I launched a multi-part series on the 2017 Republican tax cut bill. My first piece focused on the importance of making the tax cut bill deficit neutral rather than revenue neutral in order to achieve real economic growth.

Today, I would like to continue the series by detailing the second critical piece of legislation needed in the bill: Cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent down to 15 percent.

Over the last several decades, the United States has built one of the most anti-business tax systems in the developed world. As I explain in my #1 New York Times bestselling book, Understanding Trump, this has resulted, in historically slow growth for our country. The first three months of 2017, the U.S. economy saw only 1.4 percent in annualized growth.

A main driver of this sluggish growth is the unusually high rate at which the American government taxes business. When you combine the 35 percent federal business tax with the average state tax rates, the United States business tax rate is 38.92 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. This is the highest business tax rate in the developed world – and the third-highest overall.

To put this in perspective, the average business tax for 188 tax jurisdictions analyzed by the Foundation is 22.5 percent. This puts us at a serious disadvantage for attracting new businesses to our country – especially manufacturers.

Why would a business come to the United States and pay the third-highest corporate tax in the world, when it could go somewhere in Europe, where the average corporate tax is even lower, at 18.8 percent?

On the same note, why would a manufacturer stay in the United States, when it could move its operations to a place like Macao, in Southeast Asia, where it will be taxed 12 percent for business profits?

Traditionally, placing an exorbitantly high tax on something is the government’s way of convincing people not to buy or produce it – think cigarettes, sugary soft drinks, or air pollution. This technique is typically called a “sin tax.” In the case of a high corporate tax rate, the United States is effectively trying to dissuade business and economic growth. It is lunacy.

Bringing the corporate tax rate down to 15 percent is the simplest, fastest way to jumpstart business activity in the United States – which will also create and protect millions of jobs.

Critics of this plan – mainly the Left and Washington elites – say cutting business taxes by more than half of what they are currently will force the federal government to increase taxes elsewhere or cut supposedly vital programs to make up for the loss of revenue.

This is simply false.

Cutting the tax on business will create more businesses, which will create more jobs and higher wages and drastically improve growth. All of this economic activity will generate more revenue for the government, not less.

When we passed the Reagan tax cuts, which were the backbone of the growth of the Reagan era, federal revenue increased from $517 billion in 1980 to a staggering $909 billion in 1988. This effect is explained by the Laffer Curve, which was named for Reagan’s economic advisor, Art Laffer.

The Laffer Curve shows that there is an optimum point for tax rates and production. If taxes are too high, fewer businesses will be able to make profits, impacting their ability to grow, and causing economic activity to decrease. Businesses that do not make big profits pay far fewer – or zero – taxes. But if tax rates are set at a level that encourages businesses to thrive, government revenues can also grow, creating a virtuous cycle of success.

Cutting the tax on American businesses is clearly a necessary step to pull our country out of economic malaise, and it’s also necessary, politically, for Congressional Republicans.

If, in 2018, America has drastically more jobs, workers are earning higher wages, and economic growth is approaching 3 to 4 percent levels, Republicans will make huge gains in the House and the Senate. If this strong American economy continues into 2020, then Republicans will keep the White House, too.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions. 

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Tags: Newt Gingrich, commentary, Creating Jobs and Growth, Tax Cuts\ To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

“She Persisted” – Gun Owner Fights Unlawful “No Return” Gun Policy

NRA-ILA: On July 17, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit confirmed that law enforcement officials in New York acted unlawfully with respect to guns confiscated from a Nassau County woman in 2012.

We had previously written about the legal battle to recover the guns and the initial court decision, Panzella v. Nassau County, No. 13-cv-05640 (E.D. N.Y. Aug. 26, 2015), where the federal court ruled that the Nassau County Sheriff’s Department could not rely on a “retention policy” to retain the confiscated guns without providing the owner with a due process hearing.

To recap, in June 2012, Christine Panzella alleged that her ex-husband was in arrears on his court-ordered child support. The day after she sent a letter to the support collection authorities, her ex-husband (a former police officer) applied for and obtained a temporary order of protection against her. That order, in effect until December 2012, was issued ex parte (where the affected person has no notice or opportunity to appear) and without a court hearing.

Such orders are authorized by the New York Family Court Act. The family court may include, as part of the order, a requirement that the person subject to the order surrender firearms in their possession to law enforcement. This order, though, had no surrender directive or order that would allow officers to seize or confiscate any guns. And although the order listed a generic warning regarding the federal law (“It is a federal crime to . . . buy, possess or transfer a handgun, rifle, shotgun or other firearm while this Order remains in effect…”), that law had no application because ex parte protection orders are not firearm-disqualifying under federal law.

Nonetheless, when deputies from Nassau County arrived at Ms. Panzella’s home a few days later, they demanded that she surrender the guns in the home. The deputies confiscated several long guns, including a shotgun that belonged to her then fiancé.

Ms. Panzella maintained that the order of protection was groundless and indeed, it was ultimately withdrawn by her ex-husband and dismissed by the court. Once the order terminated, Ms. Panzella made several fruitless requests that Nassau County law enforcement return her guns. Officials refused, citing their “retention policy” that required lawful gun owners to first obtain a court order compelling the return of their property.

Once Ms. Panzella initiated legal proceedings, Nassau County sought to dismiss her complaint and raised a “legislative glitch” in New York State laws, where the Family Court had the authority to order the surrender of guns without a corresponding authority to compel their return once confiscated. While this “glitch” allegedly left the County “powerless” to return the guns, it apparently didn’t prevent it from allowing confiscated guns to be sold or transferred to a third party pursuant to N.Y. Penal Law § 400.05(6), or impede the return of the fiancé’s shotgun without a court order (it seems a sheriff’s department official simply handed his gun back to him in a parking lot).

The court hearing the case at first instance ruled that due process under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution required that persons whose guns were confiscated, like Ms. Panzella, be provided with a prompt “post-deprivation” hearing once the Family Court order expired or was terminated. In such hearings, the County would have the legal burden of establishing that it was likely to succeed in any proceedings to maintain possession of the confiscated guns. A failure to meet this standard meant the guns would have to be returned. As for the County’s “legislative glitch” argument, this was not relevant because the Family Court did not expressly order Ms. Panzella to surrender (or law enforcement to confiscate) her long guns. The court declined to address any other claims until after the required hearing occurred.

On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed, addressing only the question of appropriate due process. The continued retention of the confiscated guns mandated a hearing. Requiring gun owners like Ms. Panzella to initiate legal proceedings to recover their property did not provide a satisfactory alternative to a post-deprivation hearing because litigation placed the burden on the person whose property was taken, and required a significant investment of both time and money.

Christine Panzella is likely all too well aware of the time and money associated with legal proceedings. For her and other Nassau County gun owners, the “retention policy” meant a choice between expensive, time-consuming litigation or abandoning their lawful property. It’s been five years and counting since her guns were confiscated, and the litigation is far from concluded.

Much has been written about the dedication of female civil rights activists and fighters for justice who battle on, no matter what. We’re not sure how Christine Panzella’s saga will end, but we applaud her and other Second Amendment persisters in fighting the hard fight for what’s right.

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Tags: NRA, ILA, New York, no return, gun policy, acted unlawfully, guns confiscated, U.S. Court of Appeals, Christine Panzella, Panzella v. Nassau County, Second Amendment, gun ownership To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

What Flannery O'Connor's Timeless Stories Reveal about American Politics Today

Flannery O’Connor

by Jessica Hooten Wilson: In 2014 I spoke at the American Embassy in Prague at a symposium on the civil rights movement in America. I made the mistake of offering Flannery O’Connor’s story “Everything that Rises Must Converge” as a reminder that we are all to blame for the mess we’re in. O’Connor says of her own story, “I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.” However, the primarily Czech audience did not buy O’Connor’s point of view. One young man raised his hand following my presentation and asked, “Why are Americans so obsessed with race?” I had to bite my tongue from responding, “Why are the Czechs anti-German, anti-Russian, anti-Roma, and anti-Jew?” Our inability to see our own problems is a universal failing. O’Connor can provide a balm to political and racial tensions if we humble ourselves and seek to discern her way of seeing.

A Political Companion to Flannery O’Connor invites O’Connor into the political arena. For most of the author’s fans, this seems an unlikely pairing—politics with the dowager of Catholic and Southern letters? Many critics ostracize O’Connor from political discussions because she rarely addressed contemporary issues, only explicitly dealing with race in a few stories and always subjugating the bane of racism to the sin of pride. Yet Hank Edmondson points out in his introduction to the volume that O’Connor’s insistence on grace and redemption speaks in turn to at least two themes critical to politics: one, it provides a contemporary perspective on the Aristotelian-Thomistic insistence that individual virtue precede social change. . . . Second, O’Connor’s principles speak to the twentieth-century collectivist political heresies that have brought disaster upon the world. The fundamental problems of the world must be diagnosed, in the first instance, on a person-by-person basis. That personal reformation must be voluntary.

Edmondson’s analysis explains why O’Connor’s stories retain timeless importance, whereas those stories that aim directly at current events, such as Eudora Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?,” are rarely read today. The political is often ephemeral, while the spiritual is eternal.

The essays in A Political Companion attest to the necessity of reading literature to gain proper perspective regarding contemporary politics. While headlines change rapidly, the issues remain the same: pride, selfishness, and blindness to the needs of others. Stories such as O’Connor’s allow readers to see through the eyes of the other, and they offer revelations about the faults in our own character. When I taught “Everything Rises” this past semester at my small Christian college, one student was changed by the story. At one point during the term, she argued that America had no class system, to which I tersely responded, “Perhaps when we cannot see a class system, it is because we are on the top of it.” By the time we reached our oral final, she admitted in tears before the whole class that she was much more like the arrogant and racist Julian from O’Connor’s story than she desired to admit. The revelation opened her up to examining preconceived notions about race, class, and her position in the world.

Not that O’Connor was wise beyond her time and place. As many of the essays in this new volume recognize, O’Connor had a blind spot when it came to matters of race. Although it can be argued that she was an integrationist, O’Connor defined “Southern” identity primarily in terms of “white” identity and did little to crusade in her fiction for the cause of civil rights. However, in her third unpublished novel, O’Connor did begin to approach the issue more explicitly than she had previously. In the last year of her life, O’Connor confessed to Sister Mariella Gable, “I’ve been writing eighteen years and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.” These “larger things” seem to include a preoccupation with how to move characters from their contemplative love of God to an active love of neighbor (I’ve argued this thesis more fully in a chapter in the book Revelation and Convergence).

In her last novel in progress Why Do the Heathen Rage?, O’Connor follows the correspondence between a civil rights activist Oona Gibbs and a Southern white loafer Walter Tilman. The former tries to love her neighbor with good deeds, yet the reasoning and motivation behind her actions lacks the knowledge of Christ’s love that O’Connor would find necessary for a good result, whereas the latter converts to Christianity early in the novel but struggles to put his faith into action. This can be seen as a picture of O’Connor struggling with how to approach her current political situation. She read theology and the Bible daily, but she could not discern the best course of action when it came to the issue of race in her local community. When Dorothy Day, the Catholic social activist, came under fire for visiting Koinonia Farm, an interracial community in Georgia, O’Connor responded both uncharitably and with admiration: “That’s a mighty long way to come to get shot at.” She was also open to examining her own ambivalence: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.”

Perhaps O’Connor’s two minds present a good model for twenty-first-century readers. As much as we like to portray ourselves as possessing the answer to correcting political ills, this certainty may be blinding us to better solutions. Through the writing of stories, O’Connor grapples with multiple sides to issues. She does not demonize one perspective in relation to another. She erases the “us” and “them” categories. If we can learn anything about politics from O’Connor’s fiction, it should be the need for charity toward other points of view, our personal tendency toward blindness, and the benefit of stories to enhance our vision.
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Jessica Hooten Wilson is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at John Brown University, where she also serves as the Associate Director for the Honors Scholars Program and the Director of Giving Voice. The Intercollegiate Review (IR) is published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and is dedicated to advancing the principles that make America free, virtuous, and prosperous. ISI shared this article with the editor of ARRA News Service.

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Tags: Flannery O'Connor, Timeless Stories, American Politics Today, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Intercollegiate Review, Intercollegiate, Studies Institute To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Stop Blaming Israel, The Left Embraces Hitler, Trump Defends The West

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Stop Blaming Israel -  The State Department's latest report on terrorism incredibly attempts to blame Israel for growing tensions while whitewashing the Palestinian Authority's responsibility for violence. Consider this excerpt:"The PA [Palestinian Authority] has taken significant steps during President Abbas' tenure (2005 to date) to ensure that official institutions . . . under its control do not create or disseminate content that incites violence. . . Explicit calls for violence . . . are rare and the leadership does not generally tolerate it."That statement is disgusting and obscene. There isn't enough space to list the many instances of official Palestinian incitement. But trust me, it is anything but "rare." Here, here, here and here.

Moreover, there is another form of official Palestinian incitement -- the PA actually subsidizes terrorism against Israelis. It just increased its budget for its so-called "martyr's fund payments" by 12% to more than $330 million a year.

The president, vice president and every major West Wing figure disagrees with the State Department's analysis. But outrages like this will continue until the stonewalling of confirmations is overcome and competent political appointees are in charge of the bureaucracy.

In the meantime, the individuals who produced this report, knowing it was at odds with administration policy, should be fired if possible or reprimanded and reassigned at a minimum.

Meanwhile, In Jerusalem. . .  If you need another example of Palestinian incitement, look at what is taking place on the Temple Mount, a compound that also houses the Dome of the Rock mosque.

Last week, three Palestinians smuggled weapons onto what they claim is one of their holy sites. Days later, they shot two Israeli police officers in the back. There have been numerous terrorist attacks in Jerusalem and near the Temple Mount, but last week's brazen murders on the site itself were extremely evil acts.

In response, Israel set up metal detectors to prevent the smuggling of weapons and additional attacks. All week long, imams and Palestinian officials have been inciting violence. They declared a "Day of Rage." They have accused Israel of upsetting the status quo on the Temple Mount.

Saudi Arabia does not allow people to wander freely at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. There are thousands of cameras and security officers. The Vatican uses metal detectors, as do mosques all over the world.

Only Israeli Jews are condemned for attempting to guarantee the security of a holy site. Not surprisingly, CAIR is trying to get in on the act.

And while jihadis do the dirty work on the ground, U.N. bureaucrats in tailored suits are doing their best to "ethnically cleanse" Jewish and Christian history in Israel.

UNESCO, a major U.N. body, has rejected Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem's Old City and declared Hebron, with the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a Palestinian World Heritage Site.

Israel's ambassador to UNESCO denounced the biased organization as "a full partner to the false incitement by Palestinians and radical Islam."

Long before there were Muslims or Palestinians in Hebron, the Jews were there. The real estate transaction when Abraham purchased that land is recorded in the Book of Genesis.

The Left Embraces Hitler -  University of Chicago Professor Jerry Coyne recently posed this question:"If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect . . . then why aren't you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it's born? After all, newborn babies aren't aware of death, aren't nearly as sentient as an older child or adult. . . It makes little sense to keep alive a suffering child. . ."He goes on to suggest that evolving opinions about euthanasia are "the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world."

Murdering babies is the furthest thing from "increasing morality." It is a sign of growing decadence.

This is what happens when Judeo-Christian ethics are shoved out of the public square and society starts down the slippery slope of abortion on demand. Apparently, Professor Coyne would like to extend the culture of death beyond the abortionist's clinic and into the pediatrician's office.

But why stop there? How much more aware or sentient is an Alzheimer's patient? If suffering is the standard, why not euthanize the severely disabled or critically ill?

There is great irony here. The left accuses people who want to protect innocent life of being "Nazis." Well, the original Nazi, Adolf Hitler, fully embraced Professor Coyne's reasoning. Long before he went after the Jews, Hitler set out to eliminate people with disabilities and lower IQs.

The origins of the Nazi death camps can be traced to a September 1939 memo by Adolf Hitler in which he wrote that "after the most careful assessment . . . those suffering from illnesses deemed to be incurable may be granted a mercy death." He issued that memo after being petitioned by a father who wanted to euthanize his disabled child.

As we are seeing in Great Britain today in the case of Baby Charlie, free health care is not free at all. To paraphrase a famous saying, the benevolent state that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take your freedom and big enough to dictate who lives and who dies.

Trump Defends The West -  The left's irrational, knee-jerk reaction to anything President Trump does was perhaps best displayed by the attacks on his tremendous speech in Warsaw, Poland, defending Western Civilization.

The president's praise for our values and culture and his vow to defeat militant Islamism was attacked as "racist," "religious paranoia" and "white-nationalist dog whistles."

Progressive elites couldn't be more wrong and out-of-touch.

Voters want a president whose foreign policy is more like Ronald Reagan's than Barack Obama's.

And 79% of voters say it is important for schools to teach the values of Western Civilization, but only 27% think they do a good job of it.

Thankfully, we now have a president who is willing to defend Judeo-Christian culture. If you missed President Trump's Warsaw speech, watch this brief video featuring some highlights. Share it with friends and family members. It is a great antidote for the past eight years!
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Gary Bauer is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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Tags: Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families, Stop Blaming Israel, The Left Embraces Hitler, Trump Defends The West To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

The Detroit Riot, 50 Years Later

by Michael Barone: Fifty years ago this weekend, a deadly urban riot began in Detroit. It started around 3:30 a.m., when police arrested 85 patrons of a blind pig -- an illegal after-hours bar -- in the midst of an all-black neighborhood that had been all-white 15 or 20 years before.

The statistics are horrifying. Rioting went on for six nights, with some 2,500 stores looted and burnt, some 400 families displaced and property damage was estimated around $300 million in 2017 dollars. Forty-three people, many of them innocent bystanders, were killed. More than 1,000 people were wounded.

The reality was even more horrifying. That summer, I had wangled a job as an intern in the office of Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, a young, bright and ambitious liberal. Elected with near-unanimous support of black voters, he had aggressively launched anti-poverty programs, trying to make the nation's fifth largest municipality a model of the Great Society's War on Poverty.

He had not succeeded, however, in changing the modus operandi of a police department that was only 5 percent black in a city with a 38 percent black population. In retrospect, this was a tragic consequence of the migration of one-third of American blacks between 1940 and 1965 from the mostly rural South to the big cities of the North.

That meant that Detroit, which had about 150,000 black residents before World War II, had about 600,000 a generation later. At a time when almost no whites would remain in neighborhoods with a significant black population, and when there were significant differences in the mores and culture of blacks and whites, this was inevitably going to be problematic.

Notwithstanding Cavanagh's liberal policies, and those of Michigan's Republican Governor George Romney, the riot should not have been the surprise it was. If it was more destructive than the riots in so many other cities, well, Detroit was bigger than just about all those other cities and had had a larger influx of Southern blacks than all but Chicago and New York.

I arrived at the City County Building on the warm morning of Sunday, July 23, and spent the next six nights at work. Unfortunately, I made no notes at the time and so my vivid memories may not be entirely accurate. But they show how fragile the web of civilization can be, just as what happened to Detroit over the next decades show how difficult they are to repair after they're torn to shreds.

I remember listening after sundown in the police commissioner's office to the police radio, as one officer after another reported abandoning another neighborhood -- whole square miles -- to the rioters. I remember the mayor, concerned about the trigger-happy performance of National Guard troops, trying to persuade the governor to demand federal troops from a reluctant President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

I remember riding around in a (nonpolice) car with Congressman John Conyers, then in his second term and now the senior member of Congress, as he told young black men to cool it and stop the violence.

After several days, the experienced (and not all-white) 101st Airborne came in and calmed the city down. Johnson summoned the Kerner Commission, which blamed the Detroit riot on white racism and called for massive federal spending to somehow overcome it.

What followed was the cycle of vastly increased violent crime and welfare dependency that nearly tripled in the 1965-75 decade and was not reversed until the 1990s. White flight reduced Detroit's population from 1,670,144 in 1960 to 1,027,974 in 1990; black flight reduced it from that to 713,777 in 2010.

It has become the fashion to call the Detroit riot a "rebellion," though it was not premeditated and had no explicit policy goals. It was the product of expectations combined with a certain understandable discontent. People throw bottles, break windows, loot stores and set fires when they think that enough other people will be doing the same as to make them immune from punishment.

Riots in American cities proliferated from Los Angeles's Watts in 1964 to the multiple riots following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. They have been rare in the 49 years since; the 1992 Los Angeles riot ended after 18 hours and the dispatch of 25,000 federal troops -- more than double the number in Detroit.

Lessons learned these last 50 years: Riots hurt, not help, people like the rioters. Riots can be stopped, and prevented, by authorities willing to deploy overwhelming force.
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Michael Barone is a Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

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Is Iran in Our Gun Sights Now?

by Patrick Buchanan: “Iran must be free. The dictatorship must be destroyed. Containment is appeasement and appeasement is surrender.”

Thus does our Churchill, Newt Gingrich, dismiss, in dealing with Iran, the policy of containment crafted by George Kennan and pursued by nine U.S. presidents to bloodless victory in the Cold War.

Why is containment surrender? “Because freedom is threatened everywhere so long as this dictatorship stays in power,” says Gingrich.

But how is our freedom threatened by a regime with 3 percent of our GDP that has been around since Jimmy Carter was president?

Fortunately, Gingrich has found a leader to bring down the Iranian regime and ensure the freedom of mankind. “In our country that was George Washington and … the Marquis de Lafayette. In Italy it was Garibaldi,” says Gingrich.

Whom has he found to rival Washington and Garibaldi? Says Gingrich, “Maryam Rajavi.”

Who is she? The leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, which opposed the Shah, broke with the old Ayatollah, collaborated with Saddam Hussein, and, until 2012, was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State.

At the NCRI conference in Paris in July where Gingrich spoke, and the speaking fees were reportedly excellent, John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani were also on hand.

Calling Iran’s twice-elected President Hassan Rouhani, “a violent, vicious murderer,” Giuliani said, “the time has come for regime change.”

Bolton followed suit. “Tehran is not merely a nuclear weapons threat, it is not merely a terrorist threat, it is a conventional threat to everybody in the region,” he said. Hence, “the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.”

We will all celebrate in Tehran in 2019, Bolton assured the NCRI faithful.

Good luck. Yet, as The New York Times said yesterday, all this talk, echoed all over this capital, is driving us straight toward war. “A drumbeat of provocative words, outright threats and actions — from President Trump and some of his top aides as well as Sunni Arab leaders and American activists — is raising tensions that could lead to armed conflict with Iran.”

Is this what America wants or needs — a new Mideast war against a country three times the size of Iraq?

After Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, would America and the world be well-served by a war with Iran that could explode into a Sunni-Shiite religious war across the Middle East?

Bolton calls Iran “a nuclear weapons threat.”

But in 2007, all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies declared with high confidence Iran had no nuclear weapons program. They stated this again in 2011. Under the nuclear deal, Iran exported almost all of its uranium, stopped enriching to 20 percent, shut down thousands of centrifuges, poured concrete into the core of its heavy water reactor, and allows U.N. inspectors to crawl all over every facility.

Is Iran, despite all this, operating a secret nuclear weapons program? Or is this War Party propaganda meant to drag us into another Mideast war?

To ascertain the truth, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should call the heads of the CIA and DIA, and the Director of National Intelligence, to testify in open session.

We are told we are menaced also by a Shiite Crescent rising and stretching from Beirut to Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.

And who created this Shiite Crescent?

It was George W. Bush who ordered the Sunni regime of Saddam overthrown, delivering Iraq to its Shiite majority. It was Israel whose invasion and occupation of Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 gave birth to the Shiite resistance now known as Hezbollah.

As for Bashar Assad in Syria, his father sent troops to fight alongside Americans in the Gulf War.

The Ayatollah’s regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia are deeply hostile to this country. But Iran does not want war with the United States — for the best of reasons. Iran would be smashed like Iraq, and its inevitable rise, as the largest and most advanced country on the Persian Gulf, would be aborted.

Moreover, we have interests in common: Peace in the Gulf, from which Iran’s oil flows and without which Iran cannot grow, as Rouhani intends, by deepening Iran’s ties to Europe and the advanced world.

And we have enemies in common: ISIS, al-Qaida and all the Sunni terrorists whose wildest dream is to see their American enemies fight their Shiite enemies.

Who else wants a U.S. war with Iran, besides ISIS?

Unfortunately, their number is legion: Saudis, Israelis, neocons and their think tanks, websites and magazines, hawks in both parties on Capitol Hill, democracy crusaders, and many in the Pentagon who want to deliver payback for what the Iranian-backed Shiite militias did to us in Iraq.

President Trump is key. If he does the War Party’s bidding, that will be his legacy, as the Iraq War is the legacy of George W. Bush.
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Patrick Buchanan is currently a conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior advisor to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. He blogs at the Patrick J. Buchanan.

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Tags: Patrick Buchanan, conservative, commentary, Iran, U.S. To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Palestinians Oppose Israeli Metal Detectors At The Temple Mount

. . . When it comes to Islamic justice, prayers are not enough.

by Joseph Klein: Last Friday, three Arabs killed two Israeli police officers who were guarding an entrance to Jerusalem’s holy compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The police officers were shot with arms that had evidently been smuggled into the compound and stashed there. This latest attack was another in an unending series of terrorist murders of Israelis, but this time the attack took place at Old Jerusalem’s sacred site itself. It also may have been orchestrated by a Hezbollah-run cell, acting on orders from Iran, according to a Debkafile report based on its intelligence and counterterrorism sources.

“The pro-Iranian terror group has long been suspected of recruiting networks in some Israeli Arab communities,” the Debkafile report stated. “By striking Temple Mount, Iran and Hizballah targeted both Israel and Jordan, which claims religious custodianship of its mosques.”

If the Debkafile report turns out to be true, Iran may have been trying to set off Palestinian riots, anticipating stern security measures imposed by Israel that would be seen as interfering with access by Muslim worshippers to their third holiest site. For the last five nights, Palestinians have been attacking police. The police appeared to have acted with restraint in dispersing the mobs. On Thursday, a Palestinian terrorist tried to stab a female IDF officer in a town south of Jerusalem. Fortunately, the IDF officer was not hurt. The terrorist was shot dead. The fear is that there will be another surge in terrorist attacks against Israeli soldiers, police and civilians, followed by Israeli reprisals that the so-called “international community” will condemn. This is the vicious cycle that Israel’s enemies within Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and elsewhere are looking to repeat.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to maintain calm in the immediate aftermath of last Friday’s terrorist attack. He told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that Israel would “take all the necessary actions to maintain security on the Temple Mount, without changing the status quo.” Abbas had called Prime Minister Netanyahu to condemn the attack, while seeking assurances that the holy site, which had been closed temporarily for security reasons, would be re-opened promptly.

True to the Israeli prime minister’s word, Israel partially re-opened the compound to worshippers two days after the murders of the Israeli police officers. More gates were opened Monday morning. For understandable security reasons, Israel installed metal detectors at the entrances to detect any arms being smuggled into the compound. That action has set off denunciations by Palestinian government officials and Muslim religious leaders.

Abbas has quickly pivoted away from his momentary condemnation of the terrorist attack. According to Fatah vice chairman Mahmoud al-Aloul, as quoted by the Jerusalem Post, Abbas has been engaging in “intensive phone calls” to line up international pressure on Israel to reverse its latest security measures.

Muslim religious leaders also refused to accept such commonsense security measures and directed their worshippers not to enter the compound as long as there are metal detectors there.

The Waqf Muslim religious trust and other Muslim authorities released the following statement:

“If the metal detectors continue to be imposed on the gates to the blessed al-Aksa Mosque, we call upon our people to pray and worship in front of the gates of the al-Aksa Mosque and in the streets of Jerusalem and its alleys.”

The Mufti of Jerusalem issued a religious edict for Muslims, declaring that the prayers of any Muslim entering the compound through the “Zionist” metal detectors will be “invalid” and will not be received by Allah.

“This is a severe violation of the status quo,” said Sheikh Omar al-Kiswani, the director of al-Aksa Mosque, which is situated on the Temple Mount.

PLO executive committee member Mustafa Barghouti expressed defiance. “We have been under occupation for 50 years, and we will not ‘get used’ to the new injustice,” Barghouti told the Jerusalem Post. “People will try entering in every possible way without going through the electronic devices,” he added. “There is no place in the world that collective punishment is used against the whole population... We feel that their aim and nature is to change the situation at al-Aksa mosque.”

Following Barghouti’s “logic,” all airline passengers are being collectively punished for the acts committed by terrorists, including Palestinians, on board planes and at airports. Following the Mufti’s “logic,” a Muslim flying from a New York airport to Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage, who passes through a metal detector supplied by an Israeli firm, would presumably not have his prayers in Mecca heard by Allah. Barghouti, the Mufti and other like-minded Israel-haters do not denounce the murders and exhort their followers to refrain from all violence. Instead, they condemn Israel for taking measures to protect not only its own citizens, but all worshippers, from violence. Such depravity should be denounced by world leaders. Instead, there is silence.

Nickolay Mladenov, the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, issued a bland statement on Thursday expressing deep concern over “the recent surge in tensions and violence around the holy esplanade in the Old City of Jerusalem.” His statement failed to single out the trigger for the “recent surge” – Islamic terrorism. He called upon all concerned parties “to de-escalate the situation and on moderate voices to speak up against those who try to fuel tensions.” His statement praised President Abbas’s condemnation of the deadly attack last Friday and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s commitment to uphold and respect the status quo at the holy sites. The statement failed to call out specifically the Palestinian officials and Muslim religious leaders who have been fueling the tensions in the streets with inflammatory language against Israel’s measures to prevent more smuggling of arms into the Temple Mount.

Deputy Spokesman for the UN Secretary General, Farhan Haq, punted when he was asked on Thursday if Israel’s use of metal detectors to deter the smuggling of arms into the Temple Mount compound will exacerbate the situation as the Palestinians say, or whether it will actually increase the level of security as the Israelis are saying. The reporter asking the question at the UN’s New York headquarters reminded Mr. Haq that metal detectors are used “in the entrance to this hallowed building.”

Mr. Haq referred the reporter to Nickolay Mladenov’s statement, which sheds no light on the issue. The deputy spokesperson then simply recited the UN’s standard line by declaring, “We believe it's important that the status quo that we've had in place be maintained at all holy sites so that worshipers can freely have access to them.”

Palestinian terrorists have changed the conditions for maintaining the status quo by bringing their slaughter into the immediate vicinity of the Temple Mount holy site. Israel’s use of metal detectors, a common security feature at airports and at so many other venues around the world, will help deter the arms smuggling that threatens peaceful worship by members of all faiths. It is shameful that the UN lacks the common sense, let alone the moral courage, to publicly back such security measures as a restrained means to prevent more carnage and desecration of Jerusalem’s holiest site.
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Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam. His article was in FrontPage.Mag, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

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Tags: Palestinians, Oppose, Israeli Metal Detectors, Temple Mount, Jerusalem, Joseph Klein To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

One for the Road . . .

. . . Obama and the Democrats created the Obamacare mess, and now are trying to blame Republicans for not fixing it.

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Tags: One for the Road, Obama, democrats, created, Obamacare mess, trying to blame, Republicans, for not fixing it To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Summer Jobs

by Kerby Anderson, Contributing Author: If you ask people around you about summer jobs they have held, you will notice a generation gap. The older people will recall some of the jobs they held as teenagers. The younger people may not have had any summer jobs.

Forty years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. teenagers were working or looking for work during the summer months. Last year, that percentage was just 35 percent. Some of that decline is due to the lack of summer jobs, but much of it is due to fewer teenagers looking for a summer job.

Karl Vick writing in Time magazine says that Jenkinson’s Boardwalk went looking for seasonal employees last year. In order to fill some 1200 summer vacancies, they held an Easter-time job fair that drew just 400 people. More and more summer jobs are either going unfilled or being filled by foreign students or family and friends.

If teenagers aren’t working, what are they doing? Of course, some are chilling out in front of television and video games. But many more are busy, but they aren’t working at summer jobs. They may be doing volunteer work or doing an internship. Those activities look good on resumes for students trying to get into the college of their choice.

Many are taking summer school classes. Summer school used to be for the students who did not do well in school and needed enough hours to graduate. Karl Vick explains that many more students are taking courses as an academic accelerator. Last July, 40 percent of 16-to-19-year-olds were enrolled in summer school.

Other students are playing sports. Youth sports have now expanded into a year-round, all-consuming activity for kids and parents. Many simply would not have time for a summer job because their scheduled lives are full of games and tournaments.

Sadly, many students won’t learn the valuable lessons many of us learned in our summer jobs.
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Kerby Anderson is a radio talk show host heard on numerous stations via the Point of View Network endorsed by Dr. Bill Smith, Editor, ARRA News Service

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Tags: Kerby Anderson, Viewpoints, Point of View, summer jobs To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

According to Economics

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: "Everywhere you look, economics is despised,” writes Tom Woods in his Tuesday email letter.

You know what isn’t despised? A daily email letter.*

But I digress; back to economics.

“The gimme-free-stuff people hate it because they don’t like being told that there might be undesirable side effects from seizing other people’s things.”

Well, true enough. But turn it around: many people demand free stuff at least in part because they do not understand the bigger picture . . . which Mr. Woods ably provides in his daily podcast and on his weekly Contra Krugman podcast with economist Bob Murphy.

“Politicians hate it, because it imposes logical constraints on what political activity can accomplish.”

True, but, like many in the general public (from whence they come), politicians’ prior lack of economic knowledge also leads, in part, to their hubris.

“Even some folks in the business world hate it, because (1) they’d rather agitate for special privileges than hear the case for free markets, and (2) they’d rather have low interest rates than be warned about the causes of the business cycle.”

Yes, too true. But, again, business people are generally just people, most of whom haven’t even been exposed to something beyond boring and misleading textbook econ, if that. Mr. Woods knows that, since that’s what his mission is, exposing more folks to ideas beyond what he calls “the index card of allowable opinion.”

Well, I’m all about allowing the unallowable — if it’s right!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Historian Woods is now doing what I’ve been doing since 1999, providing a daily common-sense thought that is short and easy-to-read and dropped into your email box every weekday. Mine goes up online at ThisIsCommonSense.com; I don’t see his on his website . . . but I do see a lot of books and podcasts!
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Paul Jacobs is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacobs is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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Tags: Paul Jacob, Common Sense, economics, economics, Contra Krugman, Tom Woods To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Recent Elections Speak Loud and Clear: Americans Want Regulatory Relief and Pro-Growth Tax Reform

Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kansas)

Rep Ron Estes: Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., often decry Republican policy proposals as “unfair” or as catering exclusively to the rich.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth—and Americans know it. In every post-Trump special election, Democrats are 0 for 4. The American people aren’t buying liberal policies.

This is because the past eight years of liberal leadership led to an incredible increase in Washington regulations that destroyed job growth and hurt the Americans who Democrats so loudly professed to help.

The left’s massive financial bill, known as Dodd-Frank, created over 27,000 regulations. Small businesses have no hope complying with that many rules.

It should come as no surprise why our economy has struggled to grow over the past eight years.

Conservative policy proposals are designed to change this. We’re looking to create jobs by cutting through the complex bureaucratic mess and allowing Americans to be rewarded for their hard work.

Unlike Democrats, who see more government spending as a solution, conservatives are working to get the government out of the way of economic growth. The first major step of this is to update our antiquated tax code.

Simplifying our tax system will help lower prices for consumers and allow companies to create new jobs. The tax code has become so complex that it’s grown to over 74,000 pages.

Most would be shocked to learn that America has the third-highest corporate tax rate out of 188 countries—a fact that you won’t hear Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer mention—or that some American business owners pay a combined tax rate that exceeds 50 percent.

Simply put, our government’s ancient tax code is destroying our economy, and the left seems to be OK with allowing this to continue.

Our current system forces all Americans to pay for those high business taxes through higher prices. The burden of our current tax code also lowers wages and limits potential job opportunities.

This is unfair. Hard working Americans shouldn’t have to pay higher prices for their groceries or struggle to find a job because of their government’s fiscal irresponsibility.

I believe the government should promote and reward small businesses that create jobs, rather than tax them out of existence.

This is why I’m excited to work on commonsense tax reforms that will allow all Americans to prosper. We now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enact conservative policy solutions to fix this problem.
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Rep. Ron Estes is the U.S. representative for Kansas' 4th congressional district. He serves on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the House Committee on Small Business. This first appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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Tags: Representative, Ron Estes, R-KS,  Americans, want regulatory relief, pro-growth, tax reform To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Don't Allow Maxine Waters' Impeachment Crap to Stick

"Despicable" Maxine Walters

by Lloyd Marcus: For our 40th wedding anniversary, Mary and I have been experiencing the grandeur and majestic beauty of God’s creation in Alaska. Did you know bald eagles are brown for 5 or 6 years before their head turns white? I was surprised by Alaska’s bountiful foliage and multicolored flowers. From towering glaciers to skies, mountains and seas painted in gorgeous blues by God, we saw numerous breathtaking beautiful scenes. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward purchased our 49th state for only $7.2 million. It was a Trump-of-a-great-deal. Critics called the deal “Seward’s folly.”

In our cabin, I was jolted back to ugly reality by MSNBC, one of the three available TV news channels. Folks, I continue to be amazed by the level of hate that MSNBC has for Trump and their commitment to removing him from office.

Further blowing my beauty of Alaska high was a press conference in which despicable human being Maxine Waters announced democrats’ plan to impeach Trump for criminal activities. There is not a shred of evidence supporting Waters’ accusations. Watching Maxine Waters stand at the podium lying through her teeth about all of Trump’s supposed crimes was disgusting. Waters and her democrat minions are horrible enemies of the American people and must never be voted back into power again.

Trump has been totally awesome; fulfilling campaign promises and moving the ball forward towards making America great again. In only six months, Trump has dramatically chipped away much of Obama’s mountain of regulatory overreaches; created jobs; opted us out of an anti-American climate deal and restored power back to states and We the People.

Democrats/Leftists are out of their minds with rage, desperate to stop Trump’s swift and steady dismantling of Obama’s legacy of government tyranny.

This is why the democrats and fake news media tag team continue the relentless promotion of their absurd lie that Trump used Russia to steal the election. 1. It is impossible for Russia to tamper with our vote counting. 2. Fake news media either under-reported Hillary’s multiple crimes and breaches of national security or told us they were no big deal. Fake news media thought it had successfully protected Hillary and duped voters, confident she would win in a landslide.

Hillary lost because she was a cold calculating tired old hippie wicked witch Leftist who said it was okay to abort a baby moments before birth. Thank God, this vile woman is not seated in that powerful chair in our Oval Office.

Maxine Waters’ and her minions demanding that Trump be impeached is equivalent to throwing crap against the wall, hoping it will stick. For the Leftists’ impeachment scheme to work, they must destroy Trump’s popularity. Fake news media’s strategy is to flood the airways with empty accusations of criminal activity. They throw character assassination grenades at Trump 24/7. Fake news media bombards us with reports of supposed nationwide protests. Fake news media manipulate polls to create the illusion that Trump’s appeal is sinking. Fake news media is doing everything in its power to sell their lie that Americans regret voting for Trump.

A standard practice of democrats and fake news media is to brand anyone who dares oppose their extreme socialist/progressive agenda a racist, stupid, corrupt or crazy. Leftists claim Trump is obviously crazy and must be impeached. So, because Trump is functioning like a savvy businessman rather that an impotent Republican, Leftists say he must be crazy. Sadly, we cannot count on wimpy Republicans to have our president’s back.

My fellow patriotic Americans, We the People are Trump’s firewall; the only thing blocking Waters’ and her minion’s impeachment crap from sticking. The good news is Waters and her homeys are clueless regarding our rock-solid connection with Trump and why he won our votes in an electoral landslide.

Leftists laughed, mocked and underestimated Ronald Reagan. Fortunately, they are repeating their mistake with Trump as he continues to kick their butts under their upturned noses.
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Lloyd Marcus (@LloydMarcus) is an "Unhyphenated American" and an internationally renowned conservative columnist, singer/songwriter and author. He is Chairman of the Conservative Campaign Committee Political Action Committee. He is a prominent voice of the American Tea Party movement and the singer/songwriter of the ”American Tea Party Anthem.” Marcus has traveled has been seen on FoxNews, CNN, PJTV and more.

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Tags: Lloyd Marcus, impeachment crap, Maxine Walters To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

"Dirty, Difficult, And Dangerous": Why Millennials Won't Work In Oil

by Tsvetana Paraskova: Like many industries today, the oil industry is trying to sell its many job opportunities to the fastest growing portion of the global workforce: Millennials. But unlike any other industry, oil and gas is facing more challenges in persuading the environmentally-conscious Millennials that oil is “cool”.

During the Super Bowl earlier this year, the American Petroleum Institute (API) launched an ad geared toward Millennials, who now make up the largest generation in the U.S. labor force.

“This ain’t your daddy’s oil”, the ad says, in what API described as “a modern look at how oil is integrated into products consumers use now and in the future supported by bold visuals.”

Despite its pitch to speak the Millennials’ language and reach out to the elusive generation, the ad sparked anger with many consumers and viewers.

Millennials continue to have the most negative opinion toward the oil industry compared to all other industries, and they don’t see a career in oil and gas as their top choice of a workplace. The oil industry’s talent scouting and recruiting methods of the past are failing to reach Millennials, who want their work to have a positive impact on society, various studies and polls have found—a rather big ask for the oil industry.

This failure to reach the group that makes up the largest portion of today’s workforce—which now surpasses Generation X—points to a huge problem for the oil sector, as Baby Boomers move into retirement in droves.

Not only are Millennials snubbing oil and gas because of its negative image, they also seek different job perks than previous generations sought, and in this regard, the oil industry will need to do more as it becomes increasingly obvious that Millennials want different things than what oil executives think they want.

A total of 14 percent of Millennials say they would not want to work in the oil and gas industry because of its negative image—the highest percentage of any industry, McKinsey said in September 2016.

Young people see the industry as dirty, difficult, and dangerous, according to an EY survey published last month. EY’s survey polled Millennials—the 20-to-35-year-olds today—as well as Generation Z coming after them, and found that younger generations “question the longevity of the industry as they view natural gas and oil as their parents’ fuels. Further, they primarily see the industry’s careers as unstable, blue-collar, difficult, dangerous and harmful to society.”

In addition, two out of three teens believe the oil and gas industry causes problems rather than solves them, the survey showed.

So ‘not your daddy’s oil’ is not sinking in with Millennials and Generation Z, and with many of them, it never will, despite the oil lobbies’ marketing efforts to try to make it sound like an attractive career path.

According to executives polled by EY, the top three drivers for young people would be salary (72 percent), opportunity to use the latest technology (43 percent), and a good work-life balance (38 percent). But young people—although they are also prioritizing salary—have other views on what they look for in a job. Salary is still the top priority at 56 percent, but a close second comes good work-life balance (49 percent), with job stability and on-the-job happiness equally important at 37 percent.

Executives are underestimating the importance of work-life balance and stability for Millennials, while overestimating the allure of technology as a factor. It’s not surprising that Millennials are not as attracted to the opportunity to use new tech as oil executives believe they are – Millennials generally don’t see technology as a perk, they take it for granted.

Moreover, Millennials don’t see the oil and gas industry as innovative – a major driver of career choice among this generation. According to a recent report by Accenture, “Despite evidence to the contrary, many Millennials believe the sector is lacking innovation, agility and creativity, as well as opportunities to engage in meaningful work. In fact, only 2 percent of U.S. college graduates consider the oil and gas industry their top choice for employment.”

Accenture is warning that ‘the talent well has run dry’ and said:

“We believe the growing workforce deficit will, in fact, be a greater barrier to oil and gas companies’ upturn success than any deficits that might exist in capital, equipment or supplies.”

The oil and gas industry is losing the competition for talent recruitment to industries that are more appealing to Millennials, and U.S. oil and gas firms will face the talent crunch first, according to Accenture.

“Any mature industry has to think about the fact that there’s a new sheriff in town with new values, new spending habits,” Jeff Fromm, an expert in marketing to American Millennials, told Bloomberg.

And if the oil and gas industry wants to get this ‘new sheriff in town’ on board, it needs to profoundly change recruitment strategies and talent sourcing. But with the negative image that is probably set to become even more negative—despite oil organizations’ marketing efforts—oil and gas has a huge workforce problem looming.
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Tsvetana Paraskova authored this article contributed by James Stafford the editor of OilPrice.com, the leading online energy news site, to the ARRA News Service.

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Tags: svetana Paraskova, James Stafford, Oilprice.com, Oil Prices, Millennials, Won’t Work, In Oil To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

President Trump's Voter Fraud Commission Meets, Smeared by Deniers

by J. Christian Adams: Remember a few weeks ago when civility was cool? Or, had you already forgotten?

Remember the days after Rep. Steve Scalise was bleeding out at second base in Alexandria, Virginia?  "Kindness builds communities." Everyone was Mr. Rogers, glad to be your neighbor.

Not anymore. Not with the Four Horsemen of the Voter Suppression Apocalypse on the loose.

All it took to forget that civility was cool was for the President’s Commission on Election Integrity to hold their first meeting. I’m on that Commission, and I get to experience the ugliness and dishonesty directed at it up close.

The President’s Commission on Election Integrity is going to do what no academic, no law professor, and certainly no group funded by George Soros has been willing to do: inventory and catalog the extent of voter fraud using all available data.

Naturally, a smear campaign sprung into action as soon it was clear that the president was serious. The groups that raise money telling Americans there is no voter fraud led the effort. They have a lot to lose, so they have a lot to do. After all, if they’re wrong, their donors were had and their claim that voter fraud is a myth risks being exposed as one big lie.

President Trump flipped the script on this crowd. He inverted the risk calculations. That’s what they hate.

And hate they did.

"This not about voter fraud. This is literally about stripping the right to vote from millions of Americans," Joya Taft-Dick of Washington, D.C., told NPR’s Pam Fessler. To them, Kris Kobach is “one of the country’s foremost architects of voter suppression.” Hans von Spakovsky is “the Dark Prince of voter alarmism” in a story by Leon Neyfakh.

More articles than I can link to say I specialize in "disenfranchising minorities." Never mind that I brought more cases to create minority voting districts and to protect minority language rights while I was at the Justice Department than the DOJ brought in the eight years of President Obama. I never saw any of the groups suing over the Commission helping me fight raw racial discrimination in federal court. They were selectively AWOL -- but are happy to label someone as racist in a pleading.

But the hate was even spicier on Twitter:

“Racist!” is a favorite slander of the Commission foes. Kobach is a racist. Von Spakovsky is a racist. Pence is a racist. I’m a racist. Ken Blackwell is a … oh wait.

But they’ve got other slurs for Ken.

For good measure, @jennycohn1 even published Blackwell’s home address on Twitter. I'm sure Twitter will ban her right away. Oh, be careful there, loons -- Ken is an NRA board member.

I’ll let you in on a secret, Jenny and Joya. None of us are affected by your Rule 12 Alinsky attacks. We are far past the point of caring. In fact, the attacks are great fun. Nothing is quite as reassuring, invigorating and humorous as an unhinged leftist attack, so please keep them coming. It makes all the effort worthwhile.

Twitter graphic posted by @KenBlackwell

But there are also the high-minded slurs. Consider Justin Levitt.

This leftist academic (I repeat myself) is known as the Smartest Man in California. If you didn’t know he was, he’ll remind you.

Levitt is part of the academic crowd that pushes the Voter-Fraud-Is-a-Myth narrative to the legacy media. Levitt doesn’t like anyone talking about aliens getting on the voter rolls. When the Public Interest Legal Foundation documented over 5,500 voter registrations cancelled for citizenship problems, Levitt went to work. See, he was at the Justice Department during the Obama administration and was part of the neglect that led to corrupted rolls. Because some of the people who were removed in Virginia were eventually put back on the rolls, he thinks the whole report can be ignored.

The problem is that governments shouldn’t be removing citizens from the rolls as non-citizens any more than governments should be putting non-citizens on the rolls. In Virginia, they are doing both.

Our report called any improper removal of citizens “a serious problem with list maintenance in the Commonwealth. Legitimate voters should not be removed from the rolls for not being citizens. If this explains the 5,550-plus instances of removal for citizenship defects, then that circumstance is also appalling.”

Honest academics confront both problems -- aliens getting on the rolls or Virginia removing citizens mistakenly. But Levitt isn’t an honest academic, or his version of the report didn’t include the language above.

Then there is former DOJ Civil Rights Division head Vanita Gupta's attacks on the Commission. She’s the one who blamed the Baltimore riots and burnings on slavery. David Steinberg dismantles her “‘moon-landing was faked-level’ attack” on the Commission better than I ever could.

And what effort to deny voter fraud could be complete without the NAACP? They filed a lawsuit that devotes page after page to political smears of the commissioners. For me, they have copious quotes from PJ Media articles, complete with links! In one article, I describe the danger of American's growing impatience with jihadist attacks at home, and how that circumstance creates a dangerous situation that risks a backlash. In other words, I borrowed the same narrative that CAIR and Gupta have been pushing, and warned of the danger. They missed the point, but thanks for quoting the article.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla joined in, chirping personal attacks at me through government servers using government employees. That’s no surprise. California was the last state to finally implement anti-voter fraud database mandates in the Help America Vote Act of 2002 -- over a decade after the law passed. Padilla may be sitting on top of a big rotten batch of mess in his voter rolls. I can understand his worry.

One thing the foes of the Commission have in common: they have something to lose.

Whether it is clout, or face, or donations, the truth about vulnerabilities in our elections threatens their position. Why let civility get in the way of self-preservation?

Here’s my written statement from the Commission’s first meeting:


I would like to thank President Trump for initiating this long overdue effort. I would like to also like to thank the other members of the commission for their willingness to examine the integrity of our electoral systems, seek the truth about vulnerabilities in our systems and contemplate ways to improve the process.Most Americans value truth, and value elections systems deserving of our faith. It’s been said that “truth enlightens our intelligence and helps shape our freedom.” Clean elections protect our freedom. Elections tainted by fraud disrupt the consent of the governed.

I believe all of the Commissioners are dedicated to an inquisitive and robust search for the data and for the truth about vulnerabilities in and ways to improve our election system.

There are areas of serious concern. For example, people are getting registered to vote even though they mark the voter registration forms “NO” to the question, are you a United States citizen. Again, they checked the box on the registration form that they were not citizens, but were still registered to vote. What fair minded American could support this? What serious, inquisitive American wouldn’t ask: how does this happen? How often does this happen? How can we improve the system?

Yet there are plenty of special interests who would rather that these questions not be asked. They don’t want to seek the truth. They don’t even want anyone to ask any questions.

That’s the wrong approach. Americans have never assumed we couldn’t accomplish the mission, couldn’t improve the way things work.

There are ways to examine the truth about our elections without harming a single legitimate voter registration. I am sure the members of this Commission will do their best, as I will, to improve our election systems. For the first time, we have the tools, the will, and the support of the majority of the American people who are concerned with voter fraud, to document any vulnerabilities in our election systems and suggest improvements. I’m excited to help.-----------------------
J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His New York Times bestselling book is Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department . His website is electionlawcenter.com. ARRA Editor's Note: Ken blackwell is a Contribution Author to the ARRA News Service.

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Tags: 2016 Presidential Election, Activism, Civil Rights, Vote Fraud, Voting Rights, J. Christian Adams, PJ Media, President Trump, Voter Fraud, Commission, Meets, smeared by deniers To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!