The Economy is Thriving on Trump’s Reforms

by Newt Gingrich: President Trump’s positive impact on the U.S. economy and markets is unassailable.

Except for a short disruption in February, the major stock market indices have been on a steady ascent since Donald Trump’s formal selection as the Republican nominee for president. The Nasdaq Composite Index has sailed from 5036.37 on July 19, 2016 to 7637.86 at the closing bell on Tuesday – continuously meeting and exceeding record highs along the way.

We have seen similar market trends in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500, which have climbed from 18559.01 and 2163.78 on the day Trump was nominated to 24799.98 and 2748.8 by Tuesday, respectively.

This market strength (especially the Nasdaq’s) is a really big deal. We are in an age of massive technological advancement and innovation that could potentially catapult our society into a new era of global leadership. Advancements in driverless cars, artificial intelligence, computing power, and helpful uses for big data will bring about changes in virtually every aspect of our lives, including health care, transportation, communication, and commerce. The Nasdaq tracks almost 3,000 mostly technology-focused companies which are working on these dramatic innovations. This includes America’s five largest big tech companies – Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB), and Microsoft (MSFT).

I had a great Facebook Live conversation Tuesday with Terry Campbell, Nasdaq’s vice president and head of government relations. We talked about the amazing comeback that the American economy has been seeing under President Trump and the Republican leadership.
As I wrote in my new book, Trump’s America: The Truth About Our Nation’s Great Comeback, our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been on the rise. Despite a summer of devastating hurricanes that caused billions of dollars in damage and job losses in at least three states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the U.S. GDP grew by 2.6 percent in the last quarter of 2017. This is lower than the 3-to-4 percent growth for which President Trump has aimed, but as I wrote in the book, 2.6 percent was still a welcome change from nearly a decade of slow growth.

“These growth numbers were still astounding considering President Trump inherited Obama’s lethargic economy. In fact, the first quarter’s weak growth was the last holdover from the Obama years because Trump’s policies were just beginning to go into effect. In fact, the average growth for the last three quarters in 2017 was 2.97. Even with the first quarter included, Trump’s first year ended less than half a percentage point away from his goal, which the media had declared impossible.”

And as I mentioned to Terry on Tuesday, some economists are anticipating second quarter GDP growth this year to exceed 4 percent. In fact, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is estimating more than 4.5 percent growth in the second quarter.

The remarkable success in our markets and economy are directly related to the Trump agenda. As I said at Nasdaq, the three major drivers are deregulation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and innovation.

First, President Trump’s massive effort to cut government red tape has allow companies to focus on their businesses rather than paperwork and federal rules. As I wrote in Trump’s America, the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that the total economic impact of federal regulatory compliance is about $1.9 trillion a year. Between the Trump administration’s ability to repeal 22 rules every one it has created and the Republican Congress’s ability to scrap 15 expensive Obama-era regulations through the Congressional Review Act, American companies have saved billions.

These businesses have been using these savings to expand their companies, increase hiring, and boost wages. This has helped lead us to the lowest unemployment rate in 18 years. In fact, the latest Bureau of Labor statistics indicate there are more open jobs than there are people looking for work in America. This is a wonderful problem to have.

Similarly, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act significantly lowered the corporate tax rate (as well as personal income taxes for most Americans), and this has led nearly 600 companies to give bonuses, raises, and better retirement benefits to their employees. In fact, the tax cuts have made the United States so competitive, more and more international companies are seeking to move into the United States.

In addition to boosting employment and wages, the Trump agenda has allowed companies – especially the ones Nasdaq tracks – to focus on innovations that will further grow the economy and help make life better for Americans.

Finally, along with creating more jobs, higher wages, and greater productivity, our strong economy has allowed us to use our economic strength to influence countries such as North Korea and China. This is exactly why President Trump integrated the economy and trade into his National Security Strategy.

As I mentioned to Terry at Nasdaq, the continued success of the economy and markets under the Trump-Republican agenda will be a decisive issue in the 2018 elections – and I believe it will start a “red wave” in the Senate and allow Republicans to keep control of the House of Representatives.

The reason is simple: The number one thing you can say about President Trump and Republicans is that their agenda works.
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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. Originally shared on Nasdaq.

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How Families Contribute to the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

by Allan C. Carlson: With regard to the family, Carle Zimmerman was the most important American sociologist of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. His only rival for this label would be his friend, occasional coauthor, and colleague Pitirim Sorokin. Zimmerman was born to German-American parents and grew up in a Cass County, Missouri, village. Sorokin grew up in Russia, became a peasant revolutionary and a young minister in the brief Kerensky government, and barely survived the Bosheviks, choosing banishment in 1921 over a death sentence. They were teamed up at the University of Minnesota in 1924 to teach a seminar on rural sociology. Five years later, this collaboration resulted in the volume Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology, and a few years thereafter in the multivolume A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology. These books directly launched the Rural Sociological Section of the American Sociological Association and the new journal Rural Sociology. In all this activity, Zimmerman focused on the family virtues of farm people. “Rural people have greater vital indices than urban people,” he reported. Farm people had earlier and stronger marriages, more children, fewer divorces, and “more unity and mutual attachment and engulfment of the personalit[ies]” of its members than did their urban counterparts.

Zimmerman’s thought ran sharply counter to the primary thrust of American sociology in this era. The so-called Chicago School dominated American social science, led by figures such as William F. Ogburn and Joseph K. Folsom. They focused on the family’s steady loss of functions under industrialization to both governments and corporations. As Ogburn explained, many American homes had already become “merely ‘parking places’ for parents and children who spend their active hours elsewhere.”

Up to this point, Zimmerman would not have disagreed. But the Chicago School went on to argue that such changes were inevitable and that the state should help complete the process. Mothers should be mobilized for full-time employment, small children should be put into collective day care, and other measures should be adopted to effect “the individualization of the members of society.”

Where the Chicago School was neo-Marxist in orientation, Zimmerman looked to a different sociological tradition. He drew heavily on the insights of the mid-nineteenth-century French social investigator Frederic Le Play. The Frenchman had used detailed case studies, rather than vast statistical constructs, to explore the “stem family” as the social structure best adapted to insure adequate fertility under modern economic conditions. Le Play had also stressed the value of noncash “home production” to a family’s life and health. Zimmerman’s book from 1935, Family and Society, represented a broad application of Le Play’s techniques to modern America. Zimmerman claimed to find the “stem family” alivand well in America’s heartland: in the Appalachian-Ozark region and among the German- and Scandinavian-Americans in the Wheat Belt. More importantly, Le Play had held to an unapologetically normative view of the family as the necessary center of critical human experiences, an orientation readily embraced by Zimmerman.

This mooring explains his frequent denunciations of American sociology in the pages of Family and Civilization. “Most of family sociology,” he asserts, “is the work of amateurs” who utterly fail to comprehend the “inner meaning of their subject.” Zimmerman mocks the Chicago School’s new definition of the family as “a group of interacting personalities.”

He lashes out at Ogburn for failing to understand that “the basis of familism is the birth rate.” He denounces Folsom for labeling Le Play’s “stem” family model as “fascistic” and for giving new modifiers—such as “democratic,” “liberal,” or “humane”—to the “individualistic” family model favored in the Chicago School’s theory. Zimmerman explains that the modern “intellectual . . . cannot see or understand” familism because he is commonly “a non-participant in the family system.” As Zimmerman concludes on the last page of the book: “There is a greater disparity between the actual, documented, historical truth and the theories taught in the family sociology courses than exists in any other scientific field.”

Three Family Types
Zimmerman wrote Family and Civilization to recover that “actual, documented, historical truth.” The book stands as an extraordinary feat of research and interpretation. It sweeps across the millennia and burrows into the nature of otherwise disparate civilizations to reveal deeper and universal social traits. To guide his investigation, Zimmerman asks: “Of the total power in [a] society, how much belongs to the family? Of the total amount of control of action in [a] society, how much is left for the family?”

By analyzing these levels of family autonomy, Zimmerman identifies three basic family types:

(1) the trustee family, with extensive power rooted in extended family and clan;

(2) the atomistic family, which has virtually no power and little field of action; and

(3) the domestic family (a variant of Le Play’s “stem” family), in which a balance exists between the power of the family and that of other agencies.

He traces the dynamics as civilizations, or nations, move from one type to another. Zimmerman’s central thesis is that the “domestic family” is the system found in all civilizations at their peak of creativity and progress, for it “possesses a certain amount of mobility and freedom and still keeps up the minimum amount of familism necessary for carrying on the society.”

So-called social history has exploded as a discipline since the early 1960s, stimulated at first by the French Annales school of interpretation and then by the new feminist historiography. Thousands upon thousands of detailed studies on marriage law, family consumption patterns, premarital sex, “gay culture,” and gender power relations now exist, material that Zimmerman never saw (and some of which he probably never even could have imagined). All the same, this mass of data has done little to undermine his basic argument.

Zimmerman focuses on hard, albeit enduring truths. He affirms, for example, the virtue of early marriage: “Persons who do not start families when reasonably young often find that they are emotionally, physically, and psychologically unable to conceive, bear, and rear children at later ages.” The author emphasizes the intimate connection between voluntary and involuntary sterility, suggesting that they arise from a common mindset that rejects familism. He rejects the common argument that the widespread use of contraceptives would have the beneficial effect of eliminating human abortion. In actual practice, “the population which wishes to reduce its birth rate . . . seems to find the need for more abortions as well as more birth control.”

Indeed, the primary theme of Family and Civilization is fertility. Zimmerman underscores the three functions of familism as articulated by historic Christianity: fides, proles, and sacramentum; or “fidelity, childbearing, and indissoluble unity.” While describing at length the social value of premarital chastity, the health-giving effects of marriage, the costs of adultery, and the social devastation of divorce, Zimmerman zeros in on the birth rate. He concludes that “we see [ever] more clearly the role of proles or childbearing as the main stem of the family.” The very act of childbearing, he notes, “creates resistances to the breaking-up of the marriage.” In short, “the basis of familism is the birth rate. Societies that have numerous children have to have familism. Other societies (those with few children) do not have it.” This gives Zimmerman one easy measure of social success or decline: the marital fertility rate. A familistic society, he says, would average at least four children born per household.

Given current American debates, we should note that Zimmerman was also pro-immigration. In his era Anglo-Saxon populations around the globe had turned against familism, rejecting children. Familism survived in 1948 only on the borders of the Anglo-Saxon world—in “South Ireland, French Canada, and Mexico”—and in the American regions settled by 40 million non-English immigrants, mainly Celts and Germans. However, “when the doors of immigration were closed (first by war, later by law [1924], and finally by the disruption of familistic attitudes in the European sources themselves), the antifamilism of the old cultured classes . . . finally began to have effect.” In short, “within the same generation America became a world power and lost her fundamental familistic future.”

Rejecting the Marxist dialectic, Zimmerman asserts that the “domestic family” would not be the agent of its own decay. When trade increased or migration occurred, the domestic family could in fact grow stronger. Instead, decay came from external factors such as changes in religious or moral sentiments. The domestic family was also vulnerable to intellectual challenges by advocates for the atomistic family.

Zimmerman was not optimistic in 1947 about America’s or, more broadly, Western civilization’s future. Drawing on his work from the 1920s and ’30s, he finds signs of continued family health in rural America: “Our farm and rural families are still to a large extent the domestic type”; their “birthrates are relatively higher.” All the same, he knew from the historical record that the pace of change could be rapid. Once familism had weakened among elites, “all the cultural elements take on an anti-family tinge.” He continues:

The advertisements, the radio, the movies, housing construction, leasing of apartments, jobs—everything is individualized. . . . [T]he advertisers depict and appeal to the fashionably small family. . . . In the motion pictures, the family seems to be motivated by little more than self-love. . . . Dining rooms are reduced in size. . . . Children’s toys are cheaply made; they seldom last through the interest period of one child, much less several. . . . The whole system is unfamilistic.A Violent First Sickness
Near the end of Family and Civilization, Zimmerman predicts that “the family of the immediate future will move further toward atomism,” that “unless some unforeseen renaissance occurs, the family system will continue headlong its present trend toward nihilism.” Indeed, he predicts that the United States, along with the other lands born of Western Christendom, would “reach the final phases of a great family crisis between now and the last of this century.” He adds: “The results will be much more drastic in the United States because, being the most extreme and inexperienced of the aggregates of Western civilization, it will take its first real ‘sickness’ most violently.”

In the short run, Zimmerman was wrong. Like every other observer writing in the mid-1940s, he failed to see the “marriage boom” and “the baby boom” already stirring in the United States (and with equal drama in a few other places, such as Australia). As early as 1949, two of his students reported that, for the first time in U.S. demographic history, “rural non-farm” (read “suburban”) women had higher fertility than in either urban or rural-farm regions. By 1960, Zimmerman concluded in his book Successful American Families that nothing short of a social miracle had occurred in the suburbs:

This Twentieth Century . . . has produced an entirely new class of people, neither rural nor urban. They live in the country but have nothing to do with agriculture. . . . Never before in history have a free urban and sophisticated people made a positive change in the birth rate as have our American people this generation.By 1967, near the end of his career, Zimmerman even abandoned his agrarian ideals. The American rural community had “lost its place as a home for a folk.” Old images of “rural goodness and urban badness” were now properly forgotten. The demographic future lay with the renewed “domestic families” replicating in the suburbs.

In the long run, however, the pessimism of Family and Civilization over the family in America in the second half of the twentieth century was fully justified. Even as Zimmerman wrote the elegy for rural familism noted above, the peculiar circumstances that had forged the suburban “family miracle” were rapidly crumbling. Old foes of the “domestic family” and friends of “atomism” came storming back: feminists, sexual libertines, neo-Malthusians, the “new” Left. By the 1970s, a massive retreat from marriage was in full swing, the marital birthrate was in free fall, illegitimacy was soaring, and nonmarital cohabitation was spreading among young adults. While some of these trends moderated during the late 1990s, the statistics have all worsened again since 2000. Zimmerman was right: America is taking its first real “sickness” most violently.
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Allan C. Carlson is President Emeritus of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, Director of the Family in America Studies Center, and Editor of The Family in America. H/T Intercollegiate Review (IR) who shared this article with the ARRA News Service editor. IR is published by the Intercollegiate Review (ISI) and is dedicated to advancing the principles that make America free, virtuous, and prosperous.

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Tags: Allan C. Carlson, Intercollegiate Review, Intercollegiate Review, Families Contribute, Rise and Fall,Civilizations To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Comey And Mueller Should Be Incarcerated – Not Emulated

by Seton Motley, Contributing Author: Yesterday the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s Inspector General (IG) released his nearly-600 page report – analyzing the ridiculously unprofessional and Democrat-partisan behavior of the Barack Obama-James Comey-led Bureau during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Despite the Deep State’s best efforts, we had managed to learn some of what was put together in said report. But there was revealed therein a whole lot more ridiculous unprofessionalism and Democrat-partisanship.

In short, the Comey FBI was a hack arm of the Democrat National Committee. It had nothing to do with actual, impartial law enforcement – you know, its actual gig

The FBI’s lead agent – on both the Hillary Clinton illegal private email server and the Donald Trump-Russia investigations – was a clownish man by the name Peter Strozk.

Who was sleeping with married FBI lawyer Lisa Page. And when Strozk and Page weren’t sleeping together – they were incessantly texting each other about their mutual loathing of Trump.

One new wrinkle revealed yesterday – was a text previously withheld from the Congressional oversight folks. We had seen Page’s preceding text – just not Strozk’s response:

Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”

Strozk: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Who’s “we?” The entirety of FBI leadership – up to and including Comey.

And Attorney General Loretta Lynch – and almost certainly her henchmen and women.

Who’s “we?” The entirety of FBI leadership – up to and including Comey.

And Attorney General Loretta Lynch – and almost certainly her henchmen and women.

Lynch Used Email Alias ‘Elizabeth Carlisle’ to Write about Clinton Tarmac Meeting

Lynch asked for Clinton Investigation to Be Called a ‘Matter’

And lest we forget – President Obama his own self:

FBI Lovers’ Latest Text Messages: Obama ‘Wants to Know Everything’

Many, many members of Comey’s staff – were running amok in a heinously partisan fashion….

Inspector General Blasts Comey and Also Says Others at FBI Showed ‘Willingness to Take Official Action’ to Hurt Trump

Meanwhile, as Comey’s staff ran amuck in a heinously partisan fashion,….

FBI Agreed to Destroy Laptops of Clinton Aides with Immunity Deal

Why, that doesn’t sound like an agency interested in seeking the truth…wherever it leads. It sounds like a gaggle of anti-Trump partisan hacks.

Meanwhile….

Comey Drafted Clinton Exoneration Months Before Finishing Investigation

Why, that doesn’t sound like a man interested in seeking the truth…wherever it leads. It sounds like an anti-Trump partisan hack.

Speaking of anti-Trump….

Baier to Comey: If Dossier Was ‘Salacious,’ Why Did You Use It To Get FISA Warrant?

A warrant – to spy on the Trump campaign. What is this Dossier of which they speak?

Clinton Campaign, (Democrat National Committee) DNC Paid for Research that Led to Russia Dossier

Ahh. Clinton campaign dirty tricks – used to secure a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. In fact….

No FISA Warrant Would Have Been Sought from the Court without the Dossier

Get that? Comey couldn’t have secured a warrant – without the Dossier.

But how did a political campaign document – secure a court warrant?

Because Comey was a big fan of withholding inordinately pertinent facts….

Five Things the FBI Never Told the FISA Court about the Trump Dossier

Comey was, in fact, a serial fan of withholding inordinately pertinent facts….

Comey Didn’t Tell Trump the Infamous Dossier Was Financed By Hillary Clinton

So let’s summarize.

Comey wrote Clinton’s get-out-of-everything-free pass – months before his just-for-show “investigation” was concluded.

Meanwhile, Comey used the completely-unproven Clinton campaign dirty tricks Dossier – as the only way he could get a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.

Which means…there was zero actual evidence of any Trump-Russia collusion. Just garbage concocted by Trump’s political opponent.

But since Comey is also a Trump political opponent….

Comey Admits to Leaking a Trump Memo to Help Get Special Prosecutor Appointed

Enter Robert Mueller. You know, Comey’s old boss – Mueller preceded Comey as head of the FBI.

The Deep State – has a very deep bench.

And how’d Mueller handle the FBI gig when he had it?

Robert Mueller’s FBI Repeatedly Abused Prosecutorial Discretion

Outstanding. And Abusive Mueller – has remained true to form….

Hmmm: Special Counsel Mueller’s Team Sure is Stacked With Democrat Donors, Including a Hillary Supporter

Mueller was handed an investigation – predicated upon zero actual evidence. More than a year later – he still has zero actual evidence.

He’s brow-beaten Mike Flynn into bankruptcy – and then a plea to a process-perjury-charge so as to end his cash hemorrhaging. Perjury?

Comey: FBI Agents (Including Peter Strzok) Didn’t Think Flynn Lied

Even Mueller’s fellow Deep Staters said Flynn was innocent.

Oh – and….

Did Mueller Withhold Evidence From Michael Flynn?

Short answer: Yes.

Mueller filed totally-unrelated-to-his-Russia-charge charges against Paul Manafort. And executed a completely obnoxious and unnecessary early morning raid on Manafort’s house.

Mueller than filed a bunch of indictments against thirteen Russia troll farms. Except….

Mueller Indicted A Russian Company That Didn’t Even Exist

Oops. Mueller charged foreign companies – because he thought they’d never respond…and thus he’d never have to actually make a case. Except…..

Russian Company Charged in Mueller Probe Seeks Grand Jury Materials

Oops – one of Mueller’s victims is demanding their speedy trial.

Keep in mind – a prosecutor isn’t supposed to file an indictment…unless and until he is ready to argue in court the case behind the indictment.

Except Mueller doesn’t have an actual case against this company, so….

Mueller Team Seeks Delay in Russia Indictments Case

Except….

Judge Rejects Mueller’s Request for Delay in Russian Troll Farm Case

Oops. Mueller – having withheld evidence exonerating Flynn – returned yet again to that corrupt well….

Mueller Is Trying to Keep Evidence from Defendants in Russian Trolls Case

And since Mueller is a man so callous about committing mass illegalities in the persecution of his enemies….

Does FBI Raid On Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen Mean Attorney-Client Privilege Is ‘Dead’?

Short answer: Attorney-client privilege…has been healthier than it is currently.

Mueller Team Made a Grab for Paul Manafort’s ‘Privileged’ Docs Before Michael Cohen Raid

Someone give attorney-client privilege CPR. It’s dying….

So let’s summarize:

Comey and Mueller aren’t people who should be investigating crimes – they should be charged with them.

If you are a prosecutor – anywhere on the planet – these are not people you should be emulating.

But when it comes to persecuting – oops, I mean prosecuting – political opponents…Comey and Mueller are, most unfortunately, the fathers of thousands of emulators.

Behold a corrupt prosecutorial mess in Arizona….

Key Prosecution Witness in Corruption Case says She Cut a Deal to Avoid Prison:

“Kelly Norton, a key witness for the government in a bribery trial involving the Arizona Corporation Commission, testified on Wednesday that she agreed to cooperate with the FBI’s investigation of the case in order to stay out of prison.

“Her testimony came on day four of the bribery trial of former Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) Chairman Gary Pierce. In addition to Pierce, there are three other defendants in the case. They are George Johnson, the owner of Johnson Utilities in Pinal County; Sherry Pierce, the wife of Gary Pierce; and Jim Norton, a lobbyist and former husband of Kelly Norton….”

Get that last defendant? The key witness’…ex-husband. That could be…a little problematic:

“(D)efense attorneys argued that she had another motive in testifying against her ex-husband: that she invented the story about her ex-husband’s alleged misdeeds as revenge for their divorce just before Christmas 2015….

“(D)efense attorneys argued in their opening statements that Sherry Pierce was, in fact, an actual employee of Kelley Norton’s firm and that the salary she was paid was not a bribe to sway her husband, former Arizona Corporation Commission Chairman Gary Pierce….

“(D)efense attorneys sought to punch other holes in the case brought by prosecutors, arguing that the timeline of the alleged pay-to-play scheme that prosecutors presented did not coincide with any vote Gary Pierce cast….”

All of that sounds…troubling from the prosecutor’s perspective. But wait…:

“(D)efense attorneys on Tuesday showed the jury several email exchanges that Norton had failed to turn over to prosecutors. The emails not only showed Kelly Norton’s involvement in the business, but also indicated that Sherry Pierce was an active employee of her consulting firm.

“That contention is a key part of the defense’s case, given the prosecution’s claim that Sherry Pierce effectively had a no-show job as part of the pay-to-play scheme prosecutors allege took place.

“In one such email, Kelly Norton appeared to give Sherry Pierce a to-do list, saying, ‘I need your help’ getting lists of donors. Yet another email contained a list of Democratic clubs that Pierce compiled and sent to Kelly Norton.”

Oh look – a prosecutor withholding exculpatory evidence. How very Comey-Mueller of them.

This Arizona nonsense is but one of the very many problems that arise when rogue, law-breaking law-enforcement-officials – get away with being rogue, law-breaking law-enforcement-officials.

They think they can keep doing it. And do more of it.

And law enforcement agents everywhere – think they can do it too.

The Deep State – has green-lit this lawlessness for decades.

And – of course – the lawlessness has spread.
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Seton Motley is the President of Less Government and he contributes to ARRA News Service. Please feel free to follow him him on Twitter   /   Facebook.

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Trump's 5 Rules For Ruling The World . . .

. . . Trump isn’t reacting to the world. The world is reacting to him.

by Daniel Greenfield: Politics has a way of turning everything upside down.

Flit over to Twitter and the same government media echo chamber that was loudly defending the Iran deal is concern trolling about strong inspections of North Korea’s nuclear program and worrying that President Trump’s suspension of military exercises is far too great of a concession to the tiny tyrant.

The clever ones ask, “What’s the difference between the Iran deal and the North Korean negotiations”? Isn’t Trump’s stated willingness to meet with dictators a lot like Obama’s no preconditions pledge?

And then there are the trade wars. What is he thinking by upsetting the Chinese and the Europeans?

It’s 2018. And after spilling several small rivers of black ink (digital and virtual) analyzing, smearing, belaboring, insulting and fact checking President Trump, the media still doesn’t understand him.

That’s not surprising. The media has been writing about America for much longer than that and has even less of a clue about how people live outside its preciously hip urban and suburban bubbles.

But there are 5 simple rules for understanding President Trump. They define how he’s lived his life until now. And what still drives him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If you understand them, you will get what he’s doing. If you don’t, there’s always a job waiting at the New York Times.

1. Act, Don’t React
Trump hates reacting, he loves taking the initiative and forcing others, rivals, competitors, media syndicates or foreign dictators, to react to him. That’s the essence of strategy and he nails it the way few have.

When UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson muttered that there was a “method to his madness”, that was it.

The method is becoming the driving force in an escalating conflict. Instead of reacting to attacks, Trump forces his attackers to react to him. He takes the initiative and leaves his opponents sputtering.

That’s how he became the President of the United States. It’s what he’s doing internationally.

By acting, Trump takes control of each encounter. What happens next may not be ideal, but Trump cares more about maintaining the initiative than about forcing a specific outcome. He doesn’t see politics as a chess match, but as a boxing match. He doesn’t get locked into predetermined goals. Instead he lets the kinetic confrontation create opportunities by exploiting his opponent’s reactions.

Picking a fight with the North Korean dictator, led to a peace summit. A trade war with China has already led to some serious concessions. A trade shoving match with Europe and Canada offers potential wins.

Unlike previous administrations, Trump isn’t satisfied with the status quo. And that means that he tries a lot of things.

That takes us to Rule 2.

2. Try Everything
Critics have poked fun at Trump’s failed business ventures. But you don’t succeed without trying and failing.

Trump is comfortable with failure. He knows that if you’re willing to knock on 100 doors, you might get 1 sale. His approach to politics is trying a lot of different approaches and policies to get to a win.

When Obama expressed a willingness to meet with dictators and terrorists, it’s because he was already sympathetic to them. The seeds of the Iran deal were always in him. The negotiations just took him where he already wanted to be. Trump however isn’t meeting with Kim Jong-un because he likes him. He’s doing it because it might pay off. Or it won’t and then he’ll try something else.

Obama needed Iran. Trump doesn’t need North Korea. He can take it or leave it. He’s hungry for wins, but he also sees the potential for them everywhere so he doesn’t overcommit to any individual deal.

Political professionals scoff at that scrappy attitude. They insist on the importance of posture and position. Trump knows all about posture and position, but he refuses to be its prisoner. He can insult Kim one day and flatter him the next. Politics is just business with countries instead of companies.

Trump’s approach is the same to both politics and business. Do whatever it takes to get the deal. And then decide if the deal is worth taking.

3. Chaos is Power
Most people want to minimize chaos. Countries and companies spend fortunes, fight wars and dedicate decades to reducing chaos. Trump however thrives on chaos. Instead of trying to control chaos, he generates it, causing uncertainty and then offering a sense of security in exchange for a good deal.

That’s what Trump is doing with trade. It’s what he did to China and North Korea.

Trump tries everything (Rule 2) and escalates confrontations (Rule 1) so that his opponents have no way to counter him except by escalating the confrontation and creating more chaos. And then Trump forces them to negotiate by proving he can function in a chaotic and uncertain situation better than they can.

That’s how he got North Korea to the table. After decades of the Norks intimidating previous administrations by creating chaos with their threats, Trump topped those threats. The media warned that a nuclear war would break out. Instead China and North Korea chose a peace summit.

The summit may come to nothing, but Trump had already broken the Nork ability to intimidate us.

China, Europe and Canada don’t want a trade war. They have nothing to gain and plenty to lose. By creating economic chaos, Trump also became the only man who can end the chaos and restore security.

Chaos is power.

When the United States became a world power, its administrations emphasized stability over everything. Trump welcomes chaos because it’s a much more effective negotiating strategy. Entities that seek order can be intimidated with chaos. But politicians who seek chaos can’t be intimidated.

Trump doesn’t seek order. He wants victory.

4. Never Show Your Hand
Conventional politicians have a narrow window of agenda items. They’re very clear on what they want, what they don’t want, what they’re willing to do and what they’re willing to give up to get it.

Trump has always been ambiguous. Parse his sentences and you can read them three different ways. Each assertion eventually uncovers a contradiction. That’s confusion. Tactical confusion.

As Trump has mentioned plenty of times, he loves being unpredictable.

Trump is the only president in a century who is able to go into negotiations with a completely unpredictable outcome. And the roster of competing figures around him only creates more chaos.

To truly create chaos (Rule 3), you have to be unpredictable. That creates insecurity. It forces your opponents to read things into every move you make. And then to be stymied by the futility of it.

Ambiguity leaves the other side unable to assess what the United States would actually settle for. Instead it ends up offering far more than we would settle for just to restore that sense of security.

Trump is the most famous man in the world. And yet his decision-making remains mysterious.

5. Don’t Be Afraid to be the Bad Guy
If Americans have a fatal flaw, a weakness that undermines our domestic and international politics, it’s a need to be liked. Most other countries don’t wonder whether the rest of the world likes them.

Blame Hollywood, dime novels or comic books, but as Americans we see ourselves as the heroes. And our enemies, foreign and domestic, know that they can break us by making us question our goodness.

It’s how they did it in Vietnam, in Iraq and too many foreign policy debates to count.

One of Trump’s great strengths is that he’s not afraid to be the bully, the heavy and the jerk. He can flatter Kim Jong-un, Trudeau and any other leader. Or call them names.

He can say shocking things and take unacceptable positions if it gets him what he wants.

That’s the attribute that upsets and infuriates Never Trumpers. But it also gives the United States far more negotiating leverage and freedom than it ever had before. And that’s why the people chose him.

Trump embodied all the things that had been going unsaid and all the truths that needed telling.

Past presidents valued their personal relationships with foreign leaders. But Trump is willing to throw a punch at the boy band leader of Canada if it gets a farmer in Wisconsin a better deal for his dairy.

On the global stage, President Trump has forced North Korea, China, Europe and Canada to react to him. He’s trying everything. He’s creating chaos. He’s hiding his hand and he’s winning.

The media shouts that Trump is isolated. If he were isolated, the world wouldn’t be revolving around him. The world doesn’t stop when Putin or China’s Jinping issue a statement. But a single Trump tweet can upend the priorities of international diplomacy for days, weeks and even months.

Trump isn’t reacting to the world. The world is reacting to him.

And as long as he can keep the world reacting to him, he’s the one setting the agenda for the world.
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Daniel Greenfield is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a New York writer focuses on Islamic terrorism and the radical left. David Horowitz is a Contributing Author of the ARRA News Service

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Democracy Dies In Darkness

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: "Democracy Dies In Darkness" - I hope that headline grabbed your attention because we are facing some very dark days. After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, the left-wing Washington Post adopted that slogan as its motto.

Of course, the reporters at the Post thought they were the ones who were going to bring sunlight and transparency to the darkness and defeat Donald Trump. But after yesterday's report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Donald Trump's mission to drain the swamp is more urgent than ever.

We spent a lot of time last night poring through the report and talking to knowledgeable people on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. As we write, new details are still emerging. But we wanted to give you an update as early as possible on some of the most salient points.

Here's my summary, in case you don't have time to read anything else.

Two Huge Things - Two huge things happened in the 2016 election. First, as one would expect from an enemy, Russia tried to interfere in the election and sow division. There have been multiple investigations of this, including the ongoing Mueller investigation.

The other huge event, one I believe to be much more dangerous, was that multiple powerful people within the FBI demonstrated a "'willingness to take official action' to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president."

Other than this report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, no one is seriously investigating that. I know Senator Grassley and Rep. Nunes are trying, but their efforts are being blocked at every turn by deep state bureaucrats. Yet the implications are chilling for the future of the American republic.

Comey's Credibility - This report totally destroys whatever credibility James Comey had left. He was "insubordinate," exercised "poor judgment" and was occasionally clueless.

For example, the report reveals that he had his own private Gmail account on which he conducted official business while he was investigating Hillary Clinton for using a private server. No wonder he didn't prosecute her.

We also discovered that Comey had no idea Anthony Weiner was married to Huma Abedin. Sorry, but I'm not buying it.

Donald Trump, who was roundly condemned at the time, was absolutely right to have fired Comey.

Some analysts today are conceding that the exposure of Comey in this report taints the entire Robert Mueller investigation. Mueller mentored Comey when he served as FBI director. Comey intentionally leaked FBI information to the media in a plot to get Mueller appointed as a special counsel to investigate Trump.

Is this the "insurance policy" that Strzok and Page referred to? (See next item.)

Peter Strzok - I want to revisit something that we reported yesterday. FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, had this text exchange:

PAGE: [Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!

STRZOK: "No. No he's not. We'll stop it."

Why did we only see this yesterday? Even now FBI officials are still hiding things from the public, and not for the national security reasons they claim. They are trying to cover up their own scandal.

Just to be clear, Strzok was not some low-level investigator. He was the Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division. He was the lead investigator on both the Clinton and Trump/Russia investigations. And he was clearly biased in favor of Hillary and against Donald Trump.

And who is the "we" he refers to when he said "We'll stop it"? Is "we" the counterintelligence division at the FBI? Is "we" the Justice Department?

Shortly after this message, Strzok and Page had the infamous exchange about needing an "insurance policy" in case all else fails.

No Bias? Not Exactly - The media are claiming that Inspector General Horowitz did not find any evidence of political bias. That is a gross distortion. Horowitz found widespread political bias, but he simply could not prove how it impacted the individual decisions that were made.

Think about this: If someone was being tried in a federal courtroom and jurors were found to have exchanged messages before the trial similar to those exchanged by Strzok and Page, any judge would declare a mistrial.

Moreover, the inspector general had serious questions as to why Strzok chose to prioritize the Russia investigation over the Clinton emails discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop. Horowitz wrote, "We did not have confidence that Strzok's decision . . . was free from bias."

Here's something else we did not know before yesterday: Another FBI agent was kicked off the Mueller team just a few months ago due to . . . anti-Trump bias. In a message to one of his colleagues he wrote: "Viva le Resistance."

In fact, five FBI agents have been referred for additional investigation and/or disciplinary measures due to their bias. The Horowitz report declares:

"We found that the conduct of these five FBI employees brought discredit to themselves, sowed doubt about the FBI's handling of the [Clinton] investigation, and impacted the reputation of the FBI. Moreover, the damage caused by their actions extends far beyond the scope of the [Clinton] investigation and goes to the heart of the FBI's reputation for neutral fact-finding and political independence."

Media Bribes - The inspector general discovered that numerous FBI officials were regularly accepting gifts (bribes) from liberal reporters. Members of Congress who did this would (ironically) be investigated by the FBI.

But it makes sense. Liberals in the media were footing the bill for liberals in the FBI to obtain leaks embarrassing to the Trump Administration.

"A Dark Day" - Rep. Trey Gowdy was on Fox News last night. As you know, he has rushed to defend the FBI in recent days. But last night he was apoplectic.

"Once [Trump] won, [Strzok] got on the Mueller probe and wanted to impeach him," Gowdy said. "What a dark day it is for the FBI and for the DOJ."

But the key questions he raised, and one we have been asking for months, was this: How do you remove the taint of such animus? How do we restore the American people's confidence in one of our most important law enforcement agencies?

I believe it is far worse than Rep. Gowdy suggests. We are still on a path with the Mueller investigation that may lead to punishing the victims of the FBI's bad actions rather than the perpetrators of these bad actions.

There will be more congressional hearings next week featuring Inspector General Horowitz. Presumably people implicated in the report will be required to testify at some point.

Meanwhile, we are still waiting for the IG's report on the FBI's handling of the Trump/Russia investigation. And over the horizon is the Mueller report being written by another group of liberals, many of whom without a doubt are dreaming of going down in history as part of the resistance that destroyed the Trump presidency.
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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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If Tough Anti-Drug Laws Are ‘Racist,’ Blame Black Leaders

Larry Elder

by Larry Elder: Why did Alice Marie Johnson, a first-time nonviolent drug offender, get a life sentence? She and her husband divorced in 1989. The next year, she lost her job as a FedEx manager, followed by bankruptcy and home foreclosure in 1991. The following year, the mother of five lost her youngest child in a tragic motorcycle accident. She says the emotional and financial pressure caused her to make the “biggest mistake of (her) life.” By her own admission, she “became what is called a telephone mule … passing messages between the distributors and sellers … in a drug conspiracy.” She and 15 others were arrested in 1993 for drug trafficking and money laundering.

While many of her co-defendants were given reduced or dropped charges for cooperating with prosecutors, Johnson was convicted for cocaine conspiracy and money laundering in 1996, and sentenced to mandatory life in prison without parole, plus an additional 25 years.

In the ’80s and ’90s, many black leaders supported tough anti-drug laws. Facing an inner-city explosion of gang activity, violent crime and a crack epidemic, black politicians pressured Congress to pass these laws. The Rev. George McMurray was pastor of Harlem’s Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in the ’70s, a time when New York City faced a major heroin epidemic. He favored life sentences for convicted drug dealers. “When you send a few men to prison for life, someone’s going to pass the word down, ‘It’s not too good over here,'” McMurray said. “So instead of robbery and selling dope, (they’ll think) ‘I want to go to school and live a good life.'”

When President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law — the law that punished crack cocaine dealers far more harshly than powder cocaine dealers — Harlem’s Rep. Charlie Rangel stood right behind Reagan. Crack dealers, many of whom were black, got harsher sentences than those who dealt powder cocaine, many of whom were white. And Congressional Black Caucus members pushed Reagan to create the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Then came the massive 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which included longer sentences for first-time offenders. An influential group of black pastors wrote to the Congressional Black Caucus, “While we do not agree with every provision in the crime bill, we do believe and emphatically support the bill’s goal to save our communities, and most importantly, our children.”

The black mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, said: “I believe the crime bill … is part of the answer, and the crime bill should be supported by us. We do need to send a signal throughout our communities that certain types of activities will not be tolerated, that people will be held accountable and that if there is evil manifested by actions taken by individuals who choose to prey upon our residents that that evil will be responded to quickly and correctly.” The majority of the Congressional Black Caucus supported Congress’ final bill. President Bill Clinton signed it. Hillary Clinton defended the crime bill a couple years later, saying that these laws were necessary to combat “superpredators” — a comment that came back to haunt her during the 2016 presidential campaign.

But after black crack dealers received longer sentences than whites who dealt powder, the 1986 law became “racist.” The CBC later asked President Bill Clinton to fix the disparity. His sentencing commission also advised him to narrow the disparity. Clinton, who wanted to appear “tough on drugs,” refused. So when Clinton signed his own tough anti-drug law in 1995, it preserved the crack-powder disparity. The Los Angeles Times wrote: “One week after President Clinton decried the ‘disproportionate percentage’ of young black men going to prison, he has decided to sign into law a bill that would maintain stiff prison sentences for those caught with small amounts of crack cocaine.”

President Donald Trump challenged the kneeling NFL players to give him names of those who have been “unfairly treated” by our criminal justice system. He promised to set up a process to review their cases and either pardon them or commute their sentences. It’s a heck of an offer and should be a no-brainer. Given Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players’ assertions of institutional/systemic/structural racism, Trump should soon be deluged with names of worthy candidates. If, as alleged, cops bust blacks for reasons of “racial profiling” and if, as alleged, blacks are wrongfully convicted and sentenced, how can the NFL players turn down Trump’s offer?

But to assert that black convicts like Alice Johnson are victims of a “racist” criminal justice system ignores the role played by black members of Congress to pass the very laws later denounced as racist.
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Larry Elder (@larryelder) is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host, an American lawyer, writer and radio and television personality who is also known as the "Sage From South Central." To find out more about Larry Elder. Visit his website at LarryElder.com for list of other articles.

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Will We Get Tired of So Much Winning?

Michael Barone

by Michael Baronee: It has been a week full of wins for President Donald Trump -- at least for those who share Trump's view of the way the world works, and perhaps even for some who don't.

Exhibit A is Trump's summit meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore. In their self-congratulatory joint statement, they said that North Korea committed to "work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" and the United States agreed to "provide security guarantees" to North Korea.

Critics said that that's not airtight language and argued that Kim came out better than the author of "The Art of the Deal." He got Trump to call for the cancelation of U.S.-South Korea military exercises in August in return for promises that his regime has repeatedly broken.

Trump was having none of this. In place of the "fire and fury" he threatened not so long ago, he rhapsodized about new condominium developments. And unlike previous U.S. negotiators, his diplomacy was very personal: The president who began his Manhattan real estate career at 25 noted that Kim took power at 27.

Similarly personal was the appeal in the four-minute video created by the National Security Council. Of 7 billion people on Earth, only a few can make a difference, the narrator said, adding that history need not be repeated but can evolve. That's hokey, critics said, but "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams, who famously predicted Trump's election based on his persuasive powers, said his "first reaction" to the video was that "it might be the best thing that anybody ever did in a negotiation. Period."

The personal touch, by the way, distinguishes Trump's outreach to North Korea from former President Barack Obama's to Iran. The Iranian regime is a group project with many leaders who have ideological and economic interests in continuing hostility toward the United States. Obama's hope that he could change its outlook clearly went unrealized.

Kim's regime, in contrast, appears highly personal, one in which the leader can order the sudden deposition and death of an uncle who is a key official. That regime's behavior, Trump is betting, will change if he can change the mind of one man.

Of course this may not work out. The argument is that nothing else has, and with North Korean nukes now poised to hit the West Coast, it's worth trying. "The world is safer than it was a week ago," writes veteran Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius, "and Trump is getting some deserved global applause."

"In expected value terms, this is the biggest triumph of the Trump presidency," blogs contrarian economist Tyler Cowen. "The negative commentary I am seeing is mostly sour grapes, misplaced frustration, and it is weak in the quality of its argumentation."

Trump's almost-affectionate treatment of Kim is something like the relationship -- making friends with supposed enemies -- that he's cultivated with rapper Kanye West. In this case, the obvious goal is that he and his party will improve on the 8 percent he won from blacks in 2016.

And make no mistake; it's his party -- something that seemed highly unlikely when he rode down that escalator three years ago this month. Trump has near-unanimous job approval among self-described Republicans, and his clout in Republican primaries was demonstrated in one of his smaller victories this week.

Just three hours before polls closed in South Carolina on Tuesday, Trump tweeted his endorsement of Katie Arrington against 1st District incumbent and frequent Trump critic Rep. Mark Sanford. The challenger got 50.6 percent and avoided a runoff by just 366 votes. Did the tweet make the difference?

Another apparent Trump victory came without much notice, as House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy blocked the efforts of some moderate Republicans and all House Democrats to get the 218 signatures required to trigger a roll call on a bill that would legalize the so-called "Dreamers," young immigrants in the country illegally who were brought here as children, without strengthening immigration law enforcement.

That was not the deal Trump had in mind when he promised to sign a bill legalizing recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and strengthening enforcement. Ryan and McCarthy promised roll-call votes next week on such a bill sponsored by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte and another as yet to be drafted by Republican moderates.

These developments may not turn out to be Trump wins. The immigration bills probably won't pass and will fall short of Trump goals; Trump endorsement tweets may produce unelectable nominees; negotiations with North Korea may go nowhere. But maybe, as Trump has predicted, we're going to get tired of so much winning.
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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 Channel and Washington Examiner contributor and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

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Trump’s Bold Historic Gamble

by Patrick Buchanan: President Donald Trump appears to belong to what might be called the Benjamin Disraeli school of diplomacy.

The British prime minister once counseled, “Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”

At his Singapore summit, Trump smartly saluted a North Korean general and then lavished praise on Kim Jong Un as a “strong guy” with a “good personality” and a “great negotiator.” “He’s funny, and … very, very smart … and a very strategic kind of a guy. … His country does love him.”

Predictably, Trump is being scourged for this.

Yet, during his trip to Peking in 1972, Richard Nixon did not confront Chairman Mao on his history of massacres and murder, though Nixon’s visit came in the midst of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a nationwide pogrom.

Nor did Churchill or FDR at their wartime summits confront their ally Stalin for his legendary crimes against humanity. Both gushed over “Uncle Joe.”

Still, if the Trump-Kim camaraderie goes south and the crisis of 2017, when war seemed possible, returns, Trump, as he concedes, will be charged with naivety for having placed his trust in such a tyrant.

Yet, to Trump’s credit, we are surely at a better place than we were a year ago when Kim was testing hydrogen bombs and ICBMs, and he and Trump were trading threats and insults in what seemed the prelude to a new Korean War.

Whatever one may think of his diplomacy, Trump has, for now, lifted the specter of nuclear war from the Korean peninsula and begun a negotiating process that could lead to tolerable coexistence.

The central questions to emerge from the summit are these: What does Kim want, and what is he willing to pay for it?

Transparently, he does not want a war with the United States. That black cloud has passed over. Second, Kim and North Korea have emerged from their isolation in as dramatic a fashion as did Mao’s China in 1972.

In 2018, the North was invited to the Seoul Olympics. Kim met twice with South Korea’s president and twice with China’s Xi Jinping. Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister stopped by. And Kim had a face-to-face summit with a U.S. president, something his grandfather and father never came close to achieving.

It is unlikely Kim will be retreating back into the cloisters of the Hermit Kingdom after being courted by the world’s foremost powers.

What does Trump have on offer to induce Kim to end the lifetime of hostility? It is a long menu of what Kim can expect if he will surrender his nuclear weapons and dismantle the factories and facilities that produce them.

Among the benefits proffered: recognition of his dynasty and U.S. security guarantees, an end of sanctions, foreign investment, a peace treaty signed by the United States to replace the 65-year-old armistice and the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula.

Trump has already attended to one of Kim’s complaints. The joint military exercises we have conducted annually with South Korea for decades have been declared by Trump to be “war games” and “very provocative” and have been suspended.

What is being asked of Kim in return?

He must provide an inventory of all nuclear weapons and where they are hidden, surrender them all, dismantle his plutonium and uranium production plants, and shut down his testing sites, all under the watch of U.S.-approved inspectors.

He must renounce any and all nuclear weapons forever, and accept a regime of international inspections that would guarantee he never cheats on that commitment.

Here is where the crunch comes. Kim is being told that he must give up the weapons whose very possession by him are the reason why the world powers are paying him heed.

As leader of a country with a per capita income smaller than Haiti’s, Kim is being told he must surrender the weapons that placed him and North Korea in the world’s most exclusive club, to which only eight other nations belong: the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel.

Will Kim, whose nuclear weapons have enabled him to strut on the world stage and trade insults with the president of the United States, give them up to become the leader of a poor backward nation, with half the population of South Korea and not even 4 percent of the economy of the South?

Will he give up his most reliable deterrent against an attack by the United States or China?

In the Kim-Trump relationship, this is where the rubber meets the road. Kim has seen how Americans treat nations — like Gadhafi’s Libya, Saddam’s Iraq, and Iran — that decline to develop or surrender the kind of weapons his country took decades to plan, test, produce and deploy.

Should Kim give up his nukes, what U.S. president would fly halfway around the world to meet him one-to-one?

Hence the crucial question: Will he ever really give them up?
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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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Capitalism and Socialism

by Kerby Anderson, Contributing Author: A number of recent polls document that young people are more likely to support socialism rather than capitalism. This is no doubt due to the popularity of Senator Bernie Sanders, as well as the lack of understanding of what free market capitalism provides in terms of freedom and economic development. That is one of the reasons I put together a Point of View booklet on A Biblical View on Capitalism and Socialism.

In a recent column, Professor Walter Williams explains why he believes so many young people prefer socialism over capitalism. He believes it “is a result of their ignorance and indoctrination during their school years, from kindergarten through college. For the most part, neither they nor many of their teachers and professors know what free market capitalism is.”

He also believes that free market capitalism is disfavored by many Americans not because of its failure, but because of its success. “Free market capitalism in America has been so successful in eliminating the traditional problems of mankind — such as diseases, pestilence, hunger, and gross poverty — that all other human problems appear both unbearable and inexcusable.”

He also adds another factor that I have discussed in previous commentaries. The younger generation is less likely to identify socialism with the brutality of communist regimes in the 20thcentury and instead think of the socialism in European democracies.

In my free booklet on capitalism and socialism, I take the time to define the terms since so many misunderstand what these two economic systems entail. I also talk about the current ideological battle taking place within our political systems over capitalism versus socialism. And I also answer the oft-asked question, “Doesn’t the Bible teach socialism?”
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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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Blocks Abortion at G7 & Organization of American States

Part 1: U.S. Slaps Down Abortion Language at G7 Negotiations- by Rebecca Oas, Ph.D.: In the lead-up to this year’s G7 summit in Quebec, Canadian officials were explicit: women and children were going to be central, and an essential component of their health and empowerment is abortion. But when the final declarations were released, all language about “reproductive rights” was removed, and, according to Devex, “the U.S. delegation…was responsible for the softer official language.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, following the famous example of Sweden, has characterized his government and its foreign policy as “feminist.” He employs quotas to ensure that half his cabinet members are women and imposes regulations on his party to support only pro-abortion policies and candidates. For the first time, as G7 host, Canada established a Gender Equality Advisory Council which submitted its recommendations to integrate gender into the G7’s work. Other inputs included a statement from more than sixty feminists that included a call for an end to the “criminalization or restrictive regulation of abortion.”

The Gender Equality Advisory Council also included abortion in its recommendations, which called for the withdrawal of the U.S. Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy (also called the Mexico City Policy), the provision of abortion as a component of humanitarian assistance, and funding for abortion advocacy, and government-subsidized coverage of abortion.

According to the chairman’s summaries of the discussions, several leaders called for the inclusion of “reproductive rights” language in the official declarations, but this proved impossible without U.S. agreement.

One member of the council is Katja Iversen, president of Women Deliver, which will host its next conference in Canada next year. After the conference ended, Iversen and Canadian foreign minister Marie-Claude Bibeau co-authored an editorial framing the formation of the Gender Equality council as the major outcome of the G7, omitting any mention of the official outcome documents.

One of the council’s two co-chairs was philanthropist Melinda Gates, whose willingness to attach her name to a document with such an extreme pro-abortion message stands in sharp contrast to her prior insistence that her promotion of family planning would be separate from abortion. Using the tagline “no controversy,” Gates drew criticism from feminist groups for “stigmatizing” abortion. Meanwhile, pro-life groups noted her willingness to partner with and fund family planning organizations that are outspoken abortion proponents. Recently, Gates has also been critical of the U.S. Mexico City Policy.

The last time Canada hosted the G7 (then the G8) was in 2010, where then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched the Muskoka Initiative, a global effort to improve maternal and child health around the world—without reference to abortion. This was criticized by then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who served under President Barack Obama, and Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Following elections in both the U.S. and Canada, their administrations’ positions on abortion have effectively reversed.

When Harper renewed funding for the Muskoka Initiative in 2014, the backlash over the exclusion of abortion flared up again. At the time, Melinda Gates defended him: “Maternal and child health is on the global health agenda, in part, really, thanks to what Canada did.”

Regarding the abortion controversy, Gates repeated her intention to sidestep it: “I’ve decided not to engage on it publicly—and the Gates Foundation has decided not to fund abortion.”

If the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council’s recommendations are any indication, her reticence to engage on abortion publicly is now a thing of the past.

Part 2: Abortion Lose at Organization of American States - by Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.: Diplomats from the Trump administration intervened at a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) last week to reverse a trend toward liberalizing abortion laws throughout the region.

At the 48thGeneral Assembly of the OAS, the United States and Canada are the most influential nations. The United States and Canada were at odds over a passage in the draft resolution referring to “sexual and reproductive health.” Canada tried to make it more explicit in favor of abortion, seeking to add “sexual and reproductive rights” to the resolution under negotiation. Bureaucrats from the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights also lobbied for the rights language.

The American Convention on Human Rights says, “Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception.” The treaty also says that every human being is a person. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has in recent years used the phrase “in general” to widen the cases in which abortion should be made legal in the region.

In the negotiations underway Paraguay had successfully gotten reference to “sexual and reproductive rights” deleted in the draft document before formal negotiations began last week. Peru said it could accept the term “sexual and reproductive health” however, and so did Argentina, pointing out that the term had appeared in a previous OAS document.

The United States, on the other hand, insisted on deletion of the divisive phrase altogether. On the last day of the two-day negotiation the U.S. delegation added a footnote to the resolution which was in effect a reservation on the section.

In the end, the entire reference to sexual and reproductive health was deleted.

“This is a huge victory for the pro-life movement,” said Neydy Casillas, “It reverses five years’ momentum for the pro-abortion side.” Casillas, an attorney for the public interest law firm ADF International, said another surprise was the deletion of any reference to a controversial advisory opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that would include reference to sexual orientation and gender identity as a category of non-discrimination for the first time in an OAS document.

Paraguay, Guatemala, and St. Lucia opposed the inclusion of the reference and stood firm to the very end despite strong pressure from the Core Group of nations, including Canada, which promoted it. Casillas said the defeat of the Core Group was due to the influence of the United States. This too represented a setback on an agenda that has been making quick progress in the last five years.

Mexico and Canada introduced a new resolution on inclusion and diversity which Casillas says must be monitored in future negotiations to make sure it does not evolve into another divisive document promoting social policies which nations cannot accept.

Marlene Gillette-Ibern, an attorney with Human Life International says that after years of work, the pro-life and pro-family civil society organizations have established a solid presence at the OAS. They are well respected by OAS officials and member State ambassadors, she says. “Our seriousness and arguments in addressing the issues, will continue to open doors for us at the OAS. The kindness and respect we have shown towards members of the anti-life and anti-family organizations have earned us our respect from them in turn, for the most part.”
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Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. is the Associate Director of Research & Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. is Senior Vice President for Research and Director of the International Organizations Research Group at the Center for Family & Human Rights.

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Tags: Blocks Abortion at G7, Organization of American States, Rebecca Oas, Rebecca Oas, Center for Family & Human Rights To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!