POTUS's Stars and Stripes Finale

by Tony Perkins: In many ways, the closing night of the RNC is exactly what people would expect from this president: a grand, unprecedented spectacle. From the striking White House backdrop to a fireworks display that rivaled every Fourth of July, Thursday wasn't just vintage Donald Trump. It was vintage America. The sense of national pride -- that embarrassing sentiment Democrats have been trying to stash in the back of everyone's closets -- washed over the night like a wave. And after so many months of chaos, fear, and despair, there was one overriding feeling: relief.

If anything can disarm a torn and hurting nation, it's the power of patriotism. And despite a long speech, that's what spoke loudest. No one watching this star-spangled finale could have possibly gone to bed thinking this president doesn't love his country. Or that he, for all of his short-comings, hadn't done over the course of these three and a half years what he promised to do. While the media rolled its eyes through the 6,000-word trip through his first term, the fact is, President Trump wouldn't have needed so much time if he hadn't lived up to his end of the 2016 bargain. He did. And every sentence of his nomination acceptance reminded us.

As Ivanka Trump pointed out in her introduction, "My father has strong convictions. He knows what he believes and says what he thinks. Whether you agree with him or not, you always know where he stands. I recognize that my dad's communication style is not to everyone's taste, and I know that his tweets can feel a bit unfiltered, but the results -- the results speak for themselves." And in the end, for all of the flags and the stunning White House façade, that was the most impressive backdrop of Thursday night -- this president's accomplishments.

His reflections wound through the economy, taxes, jobs, trade, and his decisive action on the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate treaty. He looked back on rebuilding the military, opportunity zones, historic wage and employment gains for minority communities. There were the highlights from his unprecedented progress in Israel, his commitment to police and community order, but it was the stark contrast on basic questions of humanity between the two parties that might resonate most. After almost four years of the most pro-life administration in history, the president made it clear what -- and who -- would be lost under the Democratic nominee."Joe Biden claims he has empathy for the vulnerable, yet the party he leads supports the extreme late-term abortion of defenseless babies, right up until the moment of birth. Democrat leaders talk about moral decency, but they have no problem with stopping a baby's beating heart in the ninth month of pregnancy. Democrat politicians refuse to protect innocent life, and then they lecture us about morality and saving America's soul. Tonight, we proudly declare that all children, born and unborn, have a God-given right to life."

The president was right when he said, "everything we have achieved is now in danger." And not just everything, but based on the Democrats' abortion radicalism, everyone. "At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies or two agendas... This election will decide whether we will defend the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny."As he's done since day one, President Trump vowed to "uphold your religious liberty" -- a fact no American doubts after the sincerity he and his administration have shown on our First Freedom here and abroad. But don't expect that same commitment under Obama's vice president, he warned. Despite all the tire-pumping on the former VP's Catholic roots, his party couldn't keep the act up long enough to even recite the Pledge of Allegiance. "During the Democrat convention, the words 'under God' were removed from the Pledge... Not once, but twice. We will never do that. But the fact is, this is where they are coming from. Like it or not, this is where they are coming from."

Under Biden, freedom isn't safe, the president insisted, and neither are families. While rioters harassed people outside the White House gates, the president underscored the point: "If you give power to Joe Biden, the radical left will defund police departments all across America... They will make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon." The message of 2020, Michael Dougherty writes, unlike so many other years, "is that the threat to America comes from within..."

And sadly, the violence, rioting, and destruction are only part of that story. The burning of American cities has been a literal smoke screen for the Democrats' real agenda, which the president spelled out in no uncertain terms. "Joe Biden is a Trojan horse for socialism," he warned. He "may claim to be an ally of the light," Trump said, but the reality "is that when it comes to his agenda, Biden wants to keep us completely in the dark." But America, he insisted, "is not a land cloaked in darkness. America is the torch that enlightens the entire world... and "over the next four years, we will prove worthy of this magnificent legacy. Together, we are unstoppable. Together, we are unbeatable. Because together, we are the proud citizens of the United States of America."
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Tony Perkins (@tperkins) is President of the Family Research Council . Article on Tony Perkins' Washington Update and written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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The Political Parties and America's Assisted Economic Suicide

by Ralph Benko: "It ain't so much men's ignorance that does the harm as their knowing so much that ain't so." G.K. Chesterton was characteristically perceptive in calling this indictment of dogmatism "one of the two or three wisest sayings uttered on this ancient earth."

Now, my noble fellow conservatives are locked in an epic struggle with our arch-enemies, the perfidious progressives. The struggle is not what it pretends to be.

The real struggle? Who can dig their heels more deeply into "knowing so much that ain't so."

President Trump is digging in his heels to defer, maybe waive, the 6.2% payroll tax that funds Social Security for four, maybe 16, months. How depressingly different from the glorious Reagan years.

We intrepid Supply Siders fought to cut marginal income tax rates bigly. With bipartisan support we cut the top rate from 70% to 28%. Hey Pachyderms? Leave neo-Keynesian stimulus packages to the Dems!

Candidate Biden is digging his heels into whopping tax increases on capital, corporations and wealth to pay for expensive new goodies. Hey! I like a good handout almost as much as defense contractors do! I'm disgusted by economic inequities wherein goodies keep going to the rich and powerful (instead of me)! But hey, Donkeys? Economic policies that stifle growth make fewer goodies to dole out!

Both parties descend into dogma, the worst equitable prosperity killer, rather than keeping their eye on the ball. Equitable prosperity comes from smart economic policies. It's not partisan. Equitable prosperity was wonderful under Reagan … and Clinton. And mediocre under Bush (both!) and Obama.

What prosperity-recipes are Washington neglecting? Many. Today let's focus on just one big one: We can only get richer by learning to do more with less. This takes tools. Tools take investment.

Example? An average car packs the same power as 120 horses. The University of Maine estimates the average annual cost of a horse at $3,876. It would cost you slightly less than half a million dollars a year to get the same power from horses as from your horseless carriage. Then, there's your housing, food, medical care and other necessities and amenities. Technology lets middle class people live a 19th century's millionaire lifestyle!

One of America's most respected technology thought leaders, Norman Augustine, has observed that new tools originate in research and development. While not cheap, the return on investment is astronomical. The Internet cost Uncle Sam $124.5 million. It generated many trillions in value. Apple, alone, recently exceeded $2 trillion in value.

As The Washington Post recently reported "Along with Apple, the overachievers — Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and Google's parent, Alphabet — are household names that have leveraged digital expertise to prosper amid the new, socially distanced reality. Through Tuesday, these six stocks collectively were up more than 43 percent this year, while the rest of the companies in the index together lost about 4 percent."

The prosperity that tech generates is the good news. The bad news? Uncle Sam (yes, I'm talking to you, Sen. Josh Hawley!) lusts to crush America's greatest tech companies.

Even worse? Malign neglect.The technologies that enrich our daily lives and pocketbooks were not conjured out of thin air. As I have previously written:

"Christopher Mims writing recently in the Wall Street Journal:'Taxpayer-funded basic scientific research has again and again paid huge dividends to society, both in improving our quality of life and boosting our economy. Indeed, many of the industries the U.S. dominates these days, like software, were seeded in a Silicon Valley where the U.S. government was the area's first and most important venture capitalist. Since the mid 1960s, the proportion of U.S. gross domestic product spent on public R&D has gone from a peak of 2% to the present figure of 0.6%, and the U.S. went from first in the world in terms of such spending to 13th. China rocketed ahead…."

Supply-Side icon David Goldman recently told Law and Liberty: "The Chinese People's Congress, at the end of May, just approved a $2.2 trillion five-year technology budget for any number of things. I mean, 5G itself, the Chinese are spending, according to a study by Deloitte, three times what we spend per capita on 5G. They'll have the fastest rollout."

And there's worse to come. Both parties are bashing China for its successes. Meanwhile, both parties are actively forfeiting the tech race. They're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The political parties are squabbling about masks, lockdowns, how to redress systemic racism. Important? Sure. Yet meanwhile, the Republicans and the Democrats both are attacking and neglecting the at least equally important roots of America's equitable prosperity and world leadership, technology.

"It ain't so much men's ignorance that does the harm as their knowing so much that ain't so."
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Ralph Benko is Chairman, The Capitalist League and contributor to the ARRA News Service and Newsmax.com.

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The Best Is Yet To Come, The Swamp Strikes Back, Taking On The Mob

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer: The Best Is Yet To Come
President Trump's address last night was certainly the most unconventional convention speech in the history of American politics! 

 If you missed the president's address, I urge you to watch it here.

I was honored to be among the roughly 2,000 people gathered on the White House lawn for the president's remarks. I wish all of you could have been there!

The atmosphere was festive, and ended with a tremendous fireworks display. It harkened back to the early days of our history when the White House was opened to the public during presidential inaugurations.

A significant portion of the crowd consisted of Catholic and evangelical leaders because the president made a special effort to ensure they were included.

Some in the media have commented on how long the president's address was. It was certainly longer than Joe Biden's acceptance speech, which was unusually short.

I think the reason is obvious: Biden said virtually nothing about how he would grow the economy because he had nothing to say. The Obama/Biden years weren't exactly "the best of times."

President Trump reminded Americans about what he accomplished during his first three years -- historic tax reform, renegotiated trade deals, reshoring manufacturing jobs, higher wages, record low unemployment -- all leading to a robust and growing economy.

Yes, it was interrupted by the coronavirus. But do you want to go back to the Obama/Biden malaise or go forward with Trump's proven record of success? That's the choice before us this November.

Going Forward
Several recent polls all show measurable movement toward the president. There was no bounce for Biden from the Democrat convention. If anything, Trump got a bounce from Biden's convention last week!

Democrats know the gap has closed. CNN's Jake Tapper said after Trump's address that he expects a "narrowing of the polls." Democrat pollster Doug Schoen said Trump's speech was "highly effective," adding that "the race for the White House will be much closer than most people are predicting."

And here's more proof: "Hidin' Biden" is coming out of the basement. He will be holding in-person campaign events after Labor Day.

I can tell you that campaign insiders, who readily admitted several weeks ago that things looked precarious, now say every swing state is leaning toward Trump.

A final thought: Past conventions have always featured non-politicians and attempted to spotlight average Americans. Usually those "unknown" or non-celebrity speakers were quickly forgotten. But this week was very different.

Some of the most stirring, poignant and powerful addresses came from regular Americans – a fisherman, parents, police officers, former athletes, former prisoners, former Sanders supporters, a grieving widow.

President Trump is remaking the Republican Party in much the same way Ronald Reagan did. But not everyone is happy about it.

The Swamp Strikes Back
Yesterday, there was a coordinated preemptive strike by the Swamp against Donald Trump. Former aides to George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney released a series of letters attacking Trump and endorsing Joe Biden.

A lot of them are "neo-cons," and I know many of them. They believe in a strong America, as I do. But I must say that I would often get into arguments with them about goals and strategy.

If we're going to war, we go to war to win. Not to turn Iraq into some version of Iowa. They never got that.

Under their direction, the Republican Party was becoming known as the "perpetual war party," and Donald Trump is changing that, and much more.

The reason they are attacking him and lining up behind Joe Biden is because it turns out that a foreign policy where you never actually win wars, and coddle communist China, was the central reason they made their home in the Republican Party.

They obviously don't care about lower taxes, smaller government, conservative judges, the Second Amendment or the sanctity of life.

Law & Order
A major theme of the president's remarks last night was that the left's attack on the rule of law cannot continue. These mobs are unquestionably linked to the political left – Antifa, Revolutionary Communists, the Black Lives Matter organizations, etc.

Donald Trump pointed out that they are wreaking havoc in Democrat dominated cities. Left-wing politicians are putting their own citizens and businesses in jeopardy because they either do not have the courage to stop the lawlessness or they are team players with the mob.

It should be obvious to everyone that not one of the individuals breaking windows, assaulting people, pulling down memorials, burning businesses, Bibles, and American flags is a Trump/Pence voter.

Broadly speaking, what we are seeing in the streets of Chicago, Kenosha, Minneapolis, Oakland, Seattle and Washington, D.C., are Democrat Party riots. That's why Democrat politicians are so hesitant to stop them.

Taking On The Mob
While the media have mocked the president for making law and order a major campaign theme, all they had to do was leave the White House grounds last night to understand why Trump is talking about it.

I had to walk several blocks to get to my car last night. I was with a number of other evangelical leaders (names you would recognize) who were going the same way. It was like running the gauntlet.

The people on the streets appeared drug-crazed. The threat of violence hung in the air. Sen. Rand Paul and his wife could have been seriously harmed. Fortunately, a couple of police officers rescued them.

Sadly, I still hear well-meaning people ask, "Why is this happening?" But we know why.

The left says we are "deplorable," that we're "fascists." The left continues to lie about Charlottesville, insisting that Trump called neo-Nazis "really fine people." Nancy Pelosi says we are "enemies of the state."

They say conservative Christians are "the American Taliban." They say conservatives "wage war on women." The so-called "moderate," the "decent man" Joe Biden said that Mitt Romney would put blacks "back in chains."

How many more churches have to be burned? Believe it or not, last night a mob gathered outside the historic St. John's Church and chanted, "Burn it down!"

This is the barbarism we are fighting, my friends.

Totalitarian movements always demonize and dehumanize their political opponents. Eventually, the rhetorical attacks lead to physical attacks. And once the totalitarians gain power, the real trouble starts as they attempt to erase those they have decried for years as subhuman.

When the president says this election will determine the future of America, he's right. Anybody who would vote against Donald Trump because they don't like his tweets is sleepwalking through life.

Standing With Israel
As we have reported, the Trump Administration is taking serious steps to contain the threat from the radical mullahs of Iran, which threatens every nation in the Middle East and vows to annihilate the Jewish state of Israel.

But our feckless allies in Europe and useless U.N. bureaucrats are standing in the way. The U.N. Security Council recently rejected a measure to reimpose sanctions on Iran.

Ambassador Kelly Craft, America's representative at the United Nations, denounced the U.N.'s appeasement of Iran. She said:

"Let me just make it really, really clear: The Trump Administration has no fear in standing in limited company on this matter. I only regret that other members of this council have lost their way and now find themselves standing in the company of terrorists."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the Security Council's action as "outrageous" and "absurd." Netanyahu added:

"Today we hear countries in the Gulf speak out as forcefully as I am doing now. I would suggest to our friends, especially our European friends, . . . that when Arabs and Israelis agree on something [the threat from Iran] it makes sense to pay attention."

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was in Jerusalem this week, reaffirmed America's commitment to a strong and safe Israel, saying, "The United States has a legal requirement with respect to qualitative military edge. We will continue to honor that."
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Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer)  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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Pandemic v. Protestors

by Star Parker: Decent Americans who are feeling perplexed today shouldn't be ashamed about it. There is good reason to be perplexed.

On the one hand, in the name of health and safety, we are being asked by government to compromise personal freedoms that we have always taken for granted: going to work, going to church, sending our children off to school, meeting our friends in our favorite restaurant.

We walk around wearing annoying masks and try to respect social distancing limits.

But decent Americans are perplexed because we would expect that allowing more government into our personal space would happen uniformly, that in allowing more government, we are all sacrificing together for some greater good, some greater necessity.

But instead, we look around and see chaos. We see no uniformity.

Protests, often violent, are sweeping our cities. The same public officials who tell us to keep our kids at home; who tell us to not pray in church, as we have always prayed; who limit our places of work and livelihood look the other way, often with approval, as hooligans tear apart our cities.

Greater demands from government should mean increasing respect for the law.

But we're seeing the opposite: government making more demands while disrespect for the law increases across the nation.

We just saw a decision in the nation's Supreme Court where a Nevada church petition to be treated equally to Nevada's casinos regarding COVID-19 attendance limits was rejected with no explanation.

Justice Samuel Alito got to the heart of the matter in his dissenting opinion, saying: "For months now, States and their subdivisions, have responded to the pandemic by imposing unprecedented restrictions on personal liberty, including free exercise of religion. ... Now four months have passed since the original declaration. The problem is no longer one of exigency, but one of considered yet discriminatory treatment of places of worship."

"Calvary Chapel has also brought to our attention," continued Alito, "evidence that the Governor has favored certain speakers over others. When large numbers of protestors openly violated provisions of the Directive, such as the rule against groups of more than 50 people, the Governor not only declined to enforce the directive but publicly supported and participated in a protest."

I am looking at a photograph of a mass of protestors marching, shoulder to shoulder, through the streets of Oakland, California, this in the same state that is limiting church attendance to 25% capacity and prohibiting singing in church.

In May, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge by South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista, California, to the state's restrictions on church attendance. Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his dissent that secular businesses like supermarkets, restaurants and hair salons are not subject to the same restrictions as houses of worship.

A group of Orthodox Jewish Americans sued the New York governor and New York City mayor for lack of uniformity in gathering limits between houses of worship, and secular business activity, protests and demonstrations.

Going hand in hand with the rioting and violence is a nationwide surge in crime.

The Wall Street Journal reports increases in homicides in Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Kansas City.

At the same time, there is violence and damage from protesters in Seattle, Portland and Louisville.

We can't have a free and civil society without law. And law means nothing if we can't agree on what the law is and if it is not applied uniformly. Politics needs to follow law. Today's chaos is symptomatic of law following politics.

Well-intentioned citizens cannot sacrifice their freedom in an environment like this.

We must take the initiative to open our schools, our churches and our businesses.

Amidst the chaos, citizens need to take control of their own lives. They have a civic duty to do it. It will help the nation and its recovery.
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Star Parker (@UrbanCURE) is an author at and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. CURE is a non-profit think tank that addresses issues of race and poverty through principles of faith, freedom and personal responsibility. H/T article: Pandemic v. Protestors.

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U.S. Marshals Find Dozen of Missing Children in Georgia

US Marshals Service missing Child Unit

Washington, DC: The U.S. Marshals Service Missing Child Unit, in conjunction with the agency’s Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Georgia state and local agencies, led a two-week operation in August in Atlanta and Macon, Georgia, to rescue endangered missing children.

“Operation Not Forgotten” resulted in the rescue of 26 children, the safe location of 13 children and the arrest of nine criminal associates. Additionally, investigators cleared 26 arrest warrants and filed additional charges for alleged crimes related to sex trafficking, parental kidnapping, registered sex offender violations, drugs and weapons possession, and custodial interference. The 26 warrants cleared included 19 arrest warrants for a total of nine individuals arrested, some of whom had multiple warrants.

“The U.S. Marshals Service is fully committed to assisting federal, state, and local agencies with locating and recovering endangered missing children, in addition to their primary fugitive apprehension mission,” said Director of the Marshals Service Donald Washington. “The message to missing children and their families is that we will never stop looking for you.”

These missing children were considered to be some of the most at-risk and challenging recovery cases in the area, based on indications of high-risk factors such as victimization of child sex trafficking, child exploitation, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and medical or mental health conditions. Other children were located at the request of law enforcement to ensure their wellbeing. USMS investigators were able to confirm each child’s location in person and assure their safety and welfare.


The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015 enhanced the U.S. Marshals’ authority to assist federal, state, and local law enforcement with the recovery of missing, endangered or abducted children, regardless of whether a fugitive or sex offender was involved. The Marshals established a Missing Child Unit to oversee and manage the implementation of its enhanced authority under the act.

In 2019, the USMS helped recover 295 missing children based on requests for assistance from law enforcement and has contributed to the recovery of a missing child in 75 percent of cases received. Additionally, of the missing children recovered, 66 percent were recovered within seven days of the USMS assisting with the case. Since its partnership with NCMEC began in 2005, the agency has recovered more than 1,800 missing children.

“When we track down fugitives, it’s a good feeling to know that we’re putting the bad guy behind bars. But that sense of accomplishment is nothing compared to finding a missing child,” said Darby Kirby, Chief of the Missing Child Unit. “It’s hard to put into words what we feel when we rescue a missing child, but I can tell you that this operation has impacted every single one of us out here. We are working to protect them and get them the help they need.”

This initiative was the culmination of several months of planning and coordination between the USMS, NCMEC, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Georgia Office of the Attorney General, Georgia Department of Family and Children Services, Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
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H/T Breaking911.

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Trump's Republicans Scoring on Issues Democrats Wouldn't Mention

Michael Barone

by Michael Barone: You know the first two nights of the Republicans' virtual national convention have gone well when you see that Politico's morning Playbook leads with a lame joke about the U.S. Postal Service hiring a new lobbyist, aimed at reviving the post office non-scandal. Ho, ho, ho!

The more pertinent news is that both parties have adapted deftly to the virtual format. Democrats invented an amusing roll call procedure -- showing people from each state touting the party's virtues -- and Republicans even improved on it a little.

Democrats did a good job of highlighting Joe Biden's attractive personal qualities by showing people he's helped and comforted. Republicans showed President Donald Trump's attractive qualities -- he actually has some -- by showing him interacting with people, as he pardoned one reformed bank robber and swore in five new citizens.

The Republicans had the advantage of coming second, as the incumbent presidential party traditionally has, and they capitalized on it. The Democrats confidently assumed everyone shares their confidence that Trump is a racist and xenophobe, but his convention spotlighted Sen. Tim Scott, whose family "went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime," and former Gov. Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India.

The message is that America is not permeated with "systemic racism," as The New York Times' 1619 Project would have you believe, but rather is a land of opportunity, even Haley's and Scott's South Carolina. And progress is possible -- and happening. Scott holds the seat held for 35 years by segregationist "Cotton Ed" Smith.

Another contrast: Democrats had their virtual sessions introduced by Hollywood figures, one of whom somehow got the idea it would be funny to mispronounce the vice president's one-syllable surname. Republicans interspersed their first two sessions with ordinary people from target states who have come to strongly support Trump.

There may be some demographic groups who value the insights of Hollywood figures with multimillion-dollar mansions in Bel Air or Brentwood. But probably more voters will be swayed by the pro-Trump testimony of lobsterman Jason Joyce of Swan's Island; dairy farmer Cris Peterson of Grantsburg, Wisconsin; and trucker Geno DiFabio of Youngstown, Ohio.

What goes unmentioned is sometimes as important as what's mentioned. Viewers of the Democrats' virtual proceedings heard much less about abortion than viewers of the Democrats' more conventional conventions, even though it's an issue that, according to dial groups, helped Democrats in previous presidential and VP debates.

One reason is Democrats have moved way left on the issue. Joe Biden has abandoned four decades of opposing government-funded abortions. And Democratic legislators have delighted in passing laws authorizing abortions in all nine months of pregnancy.

Republicans' Tuesday speakers included former Planned Parenthood clinic head Abby Johnson, who provided "pretty graphic" descriptions of abortion procedures. The best a squirming Washington Post "fact-checker" could do, as National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru noted, was to argue that there aren't that many (actually, several thousand yearly) post-viability abortions.

Left utterly unmentioned by the Democrats was the continued violence and the sharp increase of murders in major cities across the country -- Portland and Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington, Chicago and New York -- and in smaller places such as Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Democrats may hope that friends in the "mainstream media" (libeled MAGA hat-wearing teen Nicholas Sandmann's term) will continue to shield viewers from uncomfortable footage of rioting, assaults and arson, as it's been doing. They may hope people won't notice that reports describing "mostly peaceful" demonstrations are given standing in front of raging fires, or that CNN yanked a chyron from the screen and deleted the adjective "violent" before the noun "protest," or that The New York Times wrote that peaceful marches "gave way to fires and destruction."

The broadcast networks and cable also-rans MSNBC and CNN obviously hope that viewers won't notice horrifying damage that reflects badly on the partly Marxist-led Black Lives Matter movement or the Biden-Harris campaign. They had some basis for believing that covering up the news would work when, in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's May 25 death, polls showed most voters supporting Black Lives Matter and being sympathetic to its argument that American policing is "systemically racist." But current polling, after nearly three months of violence and destruction, and rising murder rates, shows less support for de-policing cities large and small.

In 2016, Democrats were smugly confident, until 9 p.m. Eastern on election night, that demographics would guarantee them victory. This year, they've been confident that Donald Trump's low job approval and COVID-19 and the lockdown's economic devastation will do the same, even with extreme stands Bill Clinton in his prime would have shunned.

Maybe so. But maybe not. This week, Trump's Republicans are having their say.
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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. H /T Rasmussen Reports.

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Is Biden Ceding the Law-and-Order Issue?

by Patrick Buchanan: Eventually, the country is going to go with law and order, for, no matter how the liberals’ recoil from the phrase and its associations with Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, without law and order there is no justice and there is no peace. What Nixon said in ’68 remains true: “The first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.”

Is Joe Biden forfeiting the law-and-order issue to Donald Trump?

So it would seem.

“Republicans Use Law and Order As Rallying Cry” was the top headline on The New York Times’ front-page story on Vice President Mike Pence’s acceptance speech at Fort McHenry Wednesday night.

The Wall Street Journal Page One headline echoed the Times: “Pence Accepts Nomination as GOP Puts Focus on Police.”

In his address, Pence charged Biden with sinning by silence in failing to denounce the rioters, looters and arsonists who have for months attacked police and pillaged Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Kenosha and other cities.

Said Pence: “Last week, Joe Biden did not say one word about the violence and chaos engulfing cities across this country.

“Joe Biden says that America is systemically racist, and that law enforcement in America has… ‘implicit bias against minorities.’ When asked whether he’d support cutting funding to law enforcement, Joe Biden replied, ‘Yes, absolutely.’

“Joe Biden would double down on the very policies that are leading to unsafe streets and violence in American cities. … You will not be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Now, it is inexact to say Biden would “defund” the police. When the big agenda item of Black Lives Matter was first raised, Biden rushed to say he would reform the police and increase spending.

And, late Wednesday afternoon, probably after seeing an advance of Pence’s speech, Biden tweeted from Delaware about the chaos that has engulfed Kenosha since Sunday night’s police shooting of Jacob Blake:

“Needless violence won’t heal us. We need to end the violence.”

Biden’s belated and tepid condemnations of the riots and pillaging of America’s cities by “peaceful protesters” gone rogue night after night testifies to the dilemma in which he finds himself.

It is three months since George Floyd ceased to breathe under the knee of that Minneapolis cop. But it is also three months to the election. And the political tide is turning, visibly and hard, against the arsonists and anarchists conducting the nightly rampages against cops across America.

The weariness of the public with the riots is palpable. The claim that these are but the understandable excesses of “peaceful protests” is getting stale. And the reaction against the riots and ruin in the Black communities, for whom they are allegedly being conducted, is growing.

Black leaders in urban areas are saying we want good cops, but we also want more cops to protect our people from gun-toting gangbangers who are running up rising weekly kill rates.

Tuesday, video surfaced of a mob of radicals surrounding, berating, cursing and threatening a woman at a D.C. diner. Her crime? She had refused to submit to demands she raise her fist in a Black Power salute and proclaim, “Black Lives Matter!”

“White silence is violence!” screamed the mob.

It looked like a training exercise for aspiring Nazi Brown Shirts.

We are beginning to see how this all unfolds. And from here, it looks like the Democratic left is going to be the loser on all counts.

First, the big mandate — “Defund the police!” — has backfired.

The Biden media daily testify to its unpopularity by insisting Biden never endorsed it. Where police department budgets have been cut, shooting and homicide rates have soared. And Biden’s refusal to endorse the mandate tells you what Democrats’ polls are telling them.

The police bill passed by Nancy Pelosi’s House featuring restrictions on chokeholds has been ignored by the Senate, and Republicans do not appear to be suffering for having ignored it.

The smashing of statues, which has escalated from Columbus to Catholic missionaries and saints, to Confederate generals and statesmen like Lee, Jackson and Jefferson Davis, to the four presidents on Mount Rushmore — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, TR — is now seen even by liberal elites as excessive.

Eventually, the country is going to go with law and order, for, no matter how the liberals’ recoil from the phrase and its associations with Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, without law and order there is no justice and there is no peace. What Nixon said in ’68 remains true: “The first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.”

The mega-demand of BLM and its collaborators — reparations for slavery and segregation — is not wildly popular. Yet, reparations, which ultimately involves trillions in wealth transfers, is an issue on which Biden will have to choose between the Bernie-BLM-AOC wing of his party and the Scranton Democrats among whom he was raised.

The decisive question:

Are the nation’s police forces shot through with systemic racism and overpopulated by white cops who relish using violence on Black folks? Or are our police the first of the first responders, the thin blue line standing between America and anarchy?

The Republicans have chosen. They stand with the cops.

And if and when Biden comes out of the basement again, he is going to have to take a stand. Declaring evenhanded neutrality won’t cut it.
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Patrick Buchanan (@PatrickBuchanan) is currently a blogger, conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior adviser to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

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Tags: Patrick Buchanan, conservative, commentary, Is Biden, Ceding, Law-and-Order Issue? To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Twilight of American Cities

by Kerby Anderson: Some American cities may never recover. First, there was the coronavirus pandemic, then the lockdowns, and now the protests and riots. Joel Kotkin writes about “The Twilight of Great American Cities” and wonders if we can reverse this downward trend. James Altucher is more pessimistic and declares that “New York City is Dead Forever.”

The pandemic has exposed the danger of densely packed urban life. City dwellers find themselves in constant contact with people in crowded, unventilated places like subways, small apartments, elevators, and offices. According to the New York Times, “420,000 people left New York City between March 1 to May 1. This nearly equals the city’s total population increase from 1950 to 2019.”

More and more people are telecommuting and don’t anticipate returning to their pre-pandemic lives. A Stanford economist predicts that once the pandemic ends the online workforce will have increased from six percent to closer to 20 percent. A University of Chicago study suggests that could grow to as much as one-third of the workforce.

Rising disorder in the cities, along with a shocking rise in homicides (in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York) are forcing many to reconsider where they live. The head of Site Selectors Guild reports that few companies want to locate in a big city and are choosing suburbs, smaller cities, or rural areas.

Politics is another reason cited for leaving cities. The “progressive rule” in cities like Seattle is why Amazon is moving to the suburbs and other locations. When cities want to significantly raise taxes and yet lessen police protection, companies and even small businesses will try to move.

In the next few years, many of these cities will be a shadow of their former selves.
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Kerby Anderson @KerbyAnderson) is an author, lecturer, visiting professor and radio host and contributor on nationally syndicated Point of View and the "Probe" radio programs.

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Sen. Cotton's Contrast Highlights Foreign Policy

Political Editors, The Patriot Post: Sen. Tom Cotton: Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), who in his speech before the RNC four years ago encouraged Americans to support Republicans by supporting Donald Trump, this time contrasted Trump's impressive foreign policy successes with Joe Biden's myriad foreign policy failures. Here's the transcript of Cotton's remarks as prepared for delivery.

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Good evening. I'm Senator Tom Cotton. A lot's changed in four years. Back then, we gathered in a rowdy arena. Tonight, you're probably at home, while I stand alone. Stands Alone, that was the motto of my old army unit, the 506th Infantry, the original Band of Brothers. From the Normandy beaches to the Iraqi desert, we fought alongside each other, but we were always prepared to stand alone. And so it is with our nation, we lead the free world, but we'll stand alone if we must to defend America.

Donald Trump understands this. He puts America first. That's why America is safer now than four years ago. But Joe Biden would return us to a weak and dangerous past. Barack Obama's own Secretary of Defense said Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every major national security decision over the past four decades. So let's compare the records of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Joe Biden slashed defense spending again and again. President Trump rebuilt our military and added the Space Force. Joe Biden let ISIS terrorists rampage across the Middle East. President Trump eliminated ISIS' leader and destroyed its caliphate. Joe Biden opposed the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. President Trump avenged the murder of hundreds of Americans by killing Iran's terrorists mastermind, Qasem Soleimani.

Joe Biden sent pallets of cash to the Ayatollahs. President Trump ripped up the dangerous Iran nuclear deal. Joe Biden treated Israel like a nuisance. President trump moved our embassy to Jerusalem and brokered peace deals in the Middle East. Joe Biden coddled socialist dictators in Cuba and Venezuela. President Trump fights against communism in America's backyard and around the world.

And on the Communist Party of China, there is no comparison. Joe Biden aided and abetted China's rise for 50 years with terrible trade deals that closed our factories and laid off our workers. President Trump stands up the China's cheating and stealing and lying. Joe Biden allowed Chinese fentanyl to flood across our southern border. President Trump sanctioned Chinese drug dealers for poisoning our kids. Joe Biden said Chinese communist aren't even our competitor, aren't bad folks, just months before they unleashed this plague on the world. President Trump is clear-eyed about the Chinese threat and he is making China pay, but China's not giving up. In fact, they're rooting for Joe Biden.

America's other enemies won't give up either, but Joe Biden would be as wrong and weak over the next four years as he has been for the last 50. We need a president who stands up for America, not one who takes a knee strong. A strong and proud America is a safe America, safe from our enemies and safe from war. No one who's seen the face of war desires to see it again. Too many of our fellow Americans are already honored at the hallowed grounds of Arlington. But if we want peace, we must be strong. Weakness is provocative. President Trump's strength has kept us out of war. Joe Biden won't stand up for America. Donald Trump will. So this November, let's stand with the president and vote to keep America great.

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The JCPOA and the Demise of the Post-Cold War “Order”

by Caroline B. Glick: Many eulogies of Brent Scowcroft, president George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor who died on August 6, have referred to him as a foreign policy realist. Whereas the question of his putative realism boils down to how you define the term, it is very clear that Scowcroft was an institutionalist.

His institutionalism passed away at the UN Security Council last Thursday.

As one of the chief architects of the United States’ post-Cold War foreign policy, Scowcroft believed the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry ushered in a new period of great power comity that would enable international institutions—first and foremost, the United Nations—to replace states as the primary actors on the world stage.

In a 1999 interview, Scowcroft explained that he reached this conclusion after the Soviets supported U.S. condemnations of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

In his words, “I hypothesized that the fact of the Soviets standing up beside us and denouncing [Iraq’s] aggression in Kuwait was a seminal event in the world. We had set up the United Nations in ’45 with the notion that the Great Powers would really have responsibility for security around the world. It had never worked. We [the U.S. and the USSR] came up on the opposite sides of every crisis. Maybe that was ending. If that was ending, could we look forward to a world where the kind of naked aggression that had been the bane of mankind could be ended, that the Great Powers could actually act as the framers of the U.N. had in mind?”

The Soviet support for the U.S. at the UN in the lead-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf War fed the hopes of Scowcroft and his colleagues that we were indeed witness to the UN’s emergence as the central instrument of a cooperative post-Cold War “New World Order.”

But far from a seminal event in world history, the Kremlin’s support was an expression of profound, albeit momentary, weakness. Months after the Gulf War, the Soviet Union collapsed and was replaced by the Russian Federation. As Russia emerged on the world stage, like the Soviet Union before it, it built its power and position as a superpower in opposition to the U.S.

Scowcroft’s institutionalist legacy of U.S. action in the framework of the UN Security Council died last Thursday, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that in light of Iran’s substantive breaches of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, (JCPOA, i.e., the Iran nuclear deal), the U.S. is triggering the so-called “snapback” clauses of UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

Resolution 2231, passed in 2015, serves as the legal anchor to the JCPOA, which was itself an informal, unsigned agreement between Iran, the U.S., the EU, Russia, China, France, the U.K. and Germany.

Resolution 2231 empowers parties to the resolution to inform the Security Council if Iran is in breach of the limitations it accepted on its nuclear activities in the JCPOA. Iran began openly breaching the deal’s limits last year.

Under the so-called snapback clauses of Resolution 2231, 30 days after a party to the resolution informs the Security Council of Iranian breaches, Security Council sanctions that were suspended with the implementation of the JCPOA are automatically reinstated.

Rather than respect 2231’s snapback clauses that the U.S. triggered last Thursday, Russia, China, the EU, the U.K., France and Germany responded to Pompeo’s announcement by claiming that the U.S. lacks the power to trigger the snapback sanctions because the Trump administration abandoned the JCPOA in 2018.

We now face the prospect of the UN breaching its own binding resolution to block the U.S. from using the power the resolution unambiguously granted it. Washington is likely to ignore the Security Council’s action and enforce the UN sanctions with assistance from allies. To this end, Pompeo is traveling through the Middle East this week to expand the alliance initiated by Israel and the United Arab Emirates two weeks ago to include other regional actors and neighbors of Iran, including Sudan, Bahrain and Oman.

Administration critics claim that Pompeo’s action at the UN undercut U.S. veto power and weakened the U.S. going forward, because a precedent of ignoring U.S action at the Security Council has now been set. Consequently, future U.S. vetoes may be ignored.

It may be true that the Security Council will repeat its rogue action. But it will be the UN and the states that use the UN to leverage their power against the U.S. that will themselves be harmed.

The three presidential administrations that followed George H.W. Bush shared Scowcroft’s foreign policy institutionalism. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all aspired to carry out U.S. foreign policy in the framework of the UN, which they accorded vast legitimacy and prestige. Clinton and Bush’s efforts were both met with failure.

As Russia rose from the ashes of the Soviet Union, in 1998 it blocked Clinton administration efforts to pass a Security Council resolution authorizing the bombing of Serbia. The second Bush administration expended massive efforts and prestige in its failed bid to secure Security Council support for its invasion of Iraq.

The Clinton administration was compelled to operate in Serbia under the NATO umbrella.

With its Iraq plans blocked at the UN, George W. Bush formed a “coalition of the willing” to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

These rejections didn’t temper either administration’s desire for UN approval. For instance, instead of supporting Israel in its war against Hezbollah in 2006, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice worked with France and the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government to negotiate a ceasefire deal through the Security Council. Resolution 1701 enabled Hezbollah’s takeover of Lebanon in the 2008 coup by treating the Iranian terror proxy as a legitimate geopolitical actor. The resolution expanded UNIFIL, the UN force in Lebanon, in a manner that ensured it would serve as a cover for Hezbollah’s rearmament and control over the border with Israel.

Rather than ditch the ceasefire talks as they led to a resolution that strengthened U.S. enemies Iran and Hezbollah at Israel’s expense, Rice put process before substance and hailed 1701 as a triumph of U.S. diplomacy.

For its part, the Obama administration viewed the Security Council as a means to weaken its political opponents. The purpose of Resolution 2231 was to subvert the Senate’s constitutional power to ratify treaties. As Henry Kissinger noted at the time, the JCPOA, which legitimized the greatest state sponsor of terrorism’s illicit nuclear weapons program, upended 70 years of U.S. nuclear non-proliferation efforts. By presenting it as an informal agreement, and then giving it the force of a Security Council resolution, Obama effectively compelled Congress to treat the JCPOA as if it were a ratified treaty.

The Trump administration is the first post-Cold War U.S. administration that has forthrightly and consistently rejected Scowcroft’s international institutionalism, preferring instead President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

Trump’s foreign policy has been condemned by its critics as immoral for its preference of transactional partnerships based on common interests over permanent, treaty-based alliances. But as the Security Council members’ responses to Pompeo’s triggering of the snapback sanctions last Thursday makes clear, the opposite is the case.

China and Russia wish to give Iran a pass for its illicit nuclear activities because they want to make money on weapons deals with Tehran. Unlike the U.S., they are not concerned about Iran’s support for terrorism or pursuit of nuclear weapons because they don’t believe Iran threatens them.

The Europeans side with Russia, China and Iran against the U.S. for many reasons. None are moral. Chief among them is their certainty that the U.S. will block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons regardless of what they do. Operating as free-riders, the Europeans feel safe appeasing Tehran at Washington’s expense.

In contrast, both the Trump administration’s decision to walk away from the JCPOA and reimpose U.S. sanctions on Iran and its efforts to reimpose UN sanctions against Iran under Resolution 2231’s snapback clauses reflect the administration’s deep-seated commitment to preventing a rogue regime, which has pledged to annihilate Israel and aspires to destroy the United States, from acquiring the means to build a nuclear arsenal. Obviously, it is not the Trump administration that is behaving immorally.

The Trump administration’s contempt for international institutionalism doesn’t translate into sanctifying unilateralism. To the contrary, by strengthening foreign partners that share its interest in blocking Iran’s nuclear project rather than tying itself to an institution that supports Iran’s nuclear program, the administration is employing multilateralism effectively.

Scowcroft is remembered as a foreign policy realist, but his institutionalism bound the U.S. to international bodies that did not share its real national interests. The Security Council’s rejection of America’s self-evident right to trigger the snapback clauses in Resolution 2231 has triggered the end of Scowcroft’s institutionalist post-Cold War foreign policy. Its demise is not a blow to the U.S. Rather, it is a blow to the prestige of the experts who preferred UN action that harmed U.S. interests and undermined its goals over the transactional partnerships that advance them.
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Caroline B. Glick is a senior columnist at Israel Hayom and the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, (Crown Forum, 2014). From 1994 to 1996, she served as a core member of Israel's negotiating team with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

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Tags: Caroline B. Glick, JCPOA, demise of, post-cold war, order To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Made in China

. . . Biden, the Democrat Party, and the mainstream media find it hard to criticize their master communist China.

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Kamala Harris: ‘There is No Vaccine Against Racism’

by Larry Elder: A few years ago, a political cartoon depicted Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton looking wistfully into the night sky as they make a wish “for an end to racial strife and bigotry.” In the next panel, both suddenly evaporate, indicating that the eradication of racism would leave these two “leaders” with nothing to do and that their race-hustling would come to an end.

This brings us to Sen. Kamala Harris’ Democratic National Convention speech, where she accepted her nomination as vice president and quickly whipped out the race card. Harris said: “And let’s be clear — there is no vaccine for racism. We’ve gotta do the work.”

A vaccine against racism would be the worst possible nightmare for Democrats such as Harris and her running mate, Joe Biden. A vaccine would produce the mother of all the emperor-wears-no-clothes moments.

As with the Jackson/Sharpton cartoon, the elimination of racism would deprive Harris of liberals’ go-to excuse: Blame racism. Whether the disintegration of the Black family, urban crime, or support for public schools with high dropout rates and where those who remain in school often cannot read, write and compute at grade level, the left blames racism.

During the convention, former President Barack Obama, as he did during the eight years of his presidency, pushed the America-is-a-racist-nation narrative: “Americans of all races joining together to declare, in the face of injustice and brutality at the hands of the state, that Black Lives Matter, no more, but no less, so that no child in this country feels the continuing sting of racism.” He, of course, provided no definition of what he means by “the continuing sting of racism.”

When in private practice, young attorney Obama was on an eight-member legal team representing one of the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Citibank. The plaintiffs argued that Citibank turned them down for loans because of racism. The lawsuit claimed Citibank “rejected loan applications of minority applicants while approving loan applications filed by white applicants with similar financial characteristics and credit histories.”

Despite denying any racial discrimination in denying their mortgage applications, the bank settled, giving some plaintiffs cash payments and others mortgages. According to a 2012 piece in the Daily Caller: “Roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in (Obama’s) landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.

“As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings.”

Given the plaintiffs’ post-loan approval track record, had there been a vaccine against racism in the ’90s, would it have made it any more likely that their loans would have been approved?

Arguably, a vaccine against racism would disproportionately impact Blacks, but not in the way Harris likely thinks. Question: Who is racist? A recent Rasmussen survey of Americans found: “Eighteen percent (18%) say most white Americans are racist. But 25% believe most black Americans are racist. Fifteen percent (15%) think most Hispanic-Americans are racist, while nearly as many (13%) say the same of most Asian-Americans.” As to anti-Semitism, it is higher among Blacks compared with the general population, 23% versus 14%, respectively, according to a 2016 survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League. The survey found, “In the past four years, anti-Semitic views among the African American population have remained steady and are higher than the general population.”

An example just occurred in the National Basketball Association, a league that takes pride in its “wokeness.” A Black player got into an on-court scuffle, and the Black player, who later apologized, called the white player “b—- a– white boy.” One can imagine the Category 5 storm had a white player used a slur against a Black player. Would an apology from the white player have sufficed? The big “woke” names in the NBA — LeBron James, coach Steve Kerr and coach Gregg Popovich — never shy about pointing out racism against Blacks, went social media silent on this issue.

We would likely obtain a greater benefit with a vaccine against white guilt, a paternalism that leads to counterproductive policies. These policies include the welfare state that encourages the non-formation of a nuclear family; the minimum wage that reduces jobs and hours for unskilled American workers; race-based preferences that create college-student mismatches that increase the dropout rate of the supposed beneficiaries of the racial preference; and refusal of Democrats to support school choice, something that Black urban parents want but white Democrats do not.
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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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Tags: Larry Elder, commentary, Kamala Harris, No Vaccine, Against Racism To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

California’s Green Energy Dark Age

by Daniel Greenfield: The Bay Area has the single largest concentration of ‘green’ businesses in the country. It was also the first to feel California’s rolling outages caused by the state’s messy infrastructure of solar panels and wind turbines, faulty and erratic, tied together by ‘virtual power plants’.

The real color of ‘green energy’ is black.

The Bay Area and surrounding areas are ground zero for the massive graft and grift of ‘green energy’ businesses with companies selling, reselling, manufacturing, consulting, certifying and investing in the bubble crowded in skyscrapers and office parks next to each other. And some of those ‘green’ businesses went dark when a wind farm failed and the power outages rolled out.

The real victims of the evening outages in northern California were senior citizens tethered to breathing machines who sat in the dark, watching the remaining battery power and hoping they would survive, families taking the elevator down only to be trapped inside, restaurants, already battered by lockdowns and riots, losing power and watching food go bad and customers leave.

Why is a region associated with the tech industry suffering from third world problems?

The California Independent System Operator, a state-controlled non-profit that defines the flow of power to most of the state, blamed, among other problems, a wind farm going dark.

The ‘renewables’ around which Democrat ‘green energy’ is based aren’t so renewable after all.

ISO board members, appointed by Governor Newsom, had warned that moving to 33% renewable power had left the state's power supply in a precarious position. The logjam was the solar grid. And during a weekday heat wave, power demands rise as people come home and the sun begins to set. That's why the outages had happened in the evening. No sun, no power.

As the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant gets shut down and gas plants are closed to meet renewable targets, there will be no power to supplement the overloaded ‘green’ power grid.

Green advocates insist that their ‘virtual power plants’ can still handle everything, routing power from the solar panels on Bob’s roof in Marin to compensate for a wind farm going offline. This power shell game looks very futuristic in presentations, but the energy grid isn’t data. Power can’t just be treated like file sharing no matter how much energy consultants insist that it can.

The Democrats and their media allies who caused this mess are pretending to be baffled.

Governor Newsom promised another investigation which this time really will "get to the bottom of it.” The inept Democrat fumed that, “people should have been told sooner and that is exactly the purpose of this investigation.” Which people? His own appointees had been warning him.

An investigation delving into who knew what and when is a face-saving exercise meant to divert attention from the role of the corrupt and cultish Democrat obsession with ‘green energy’.

"Rolling Blackouts in California Have Power Experts Stumped," the New York Times wondered.

There’s nothing to be stumped by and the view to the bottom is as clear as it is at Lake Tahoe.

California, along with other states, is playing musical chairs across a vast grid that ties together a diminishing number of reliable power generating systems and an increasing number of unreliable power systems. There’s still enough reliable ‘brown energy’, as green grifters call it, to offset the unreliable ‘green energy’ most of the time and most times of the day. And the game of musical chairs moves enough of it around that there isn’t a problem, until there’s a problem.

Like the Titanic, it looks great on the press releases and seems to work until it hits an iceberg.

The metaphorical iceberg sinking California’s energy grid is its heat waves. The ‘virtual power plants’ with their scalable vision of making the power supply of entire cities dependent on ephemeral natural phenomena, like the wind, water and sunlight, not to mention the solar panels awkwardly poking out over Bob’s garage, sound like the future until all the lights go out.

And then there isn’t enough wind speed, enough sunlight, or enough water in the dams.

Virtual power plants, like so much of Democrat governance, are a scam in which ideological boondoggles are credited for the hard work being done by a diminishing productive population. The scam only falls apart when the productive element is overshadowed by the unproductive.

Criminal justice reform wasn’t actually compatible with low crime rates. The overworked police forces were keeping crime rates low. Once Black Lives Matter and its police defunding riots took off, policing collapsed and crime rates went through the roof. Social justice policies weren’t compatible with higher property values. They just looked like they were until the homeless and the thugs overwhelmed neighborhoods and the bubble of the upper middle class began to burst.

The power outages are a taste of the South African blackouts that are coming to California.

Governor Newsom admitted that moving away from fossil fuels had made the energy grid unreliable, even as he insisted that the state would go on "moving away from fossil fuels toward solar and wind."

And that means that it will go on having power shortages.

These are the reasons why our distant ancestors switched from ‘green energy’ to gathering and burning fuel to keep their tribe warm, cook their food, and light the night. Embracing green energy barbarism under the banner of Big Tech buzzwords inevitably leads to Burning Man.

Newsom called the outages, "unbefitting of the nation’s largest and most innovative state.”

That's the problem.

Innovation means moving from less advanced to more advanced, and to more reliable from less reliable, technologies. Putting up windmills and swapping out nuclear for solar isn't innovation, it's like replacing your car with a horse and calling it a renewable smart car powered by nature..

More advanced and innovative technology does more. When it does less, it’s backward.

‘Green energy’ produces less power, less reliably, and more expensively. That makes it backward. Renewables are as innovative as the green ethos of moving to a 19th century Vermont farmhouse and buying fruit at a market stand while pretending to live like farmers. It’s a charming way for a small upper class population to live, but it’s not, as greens say, sustainable.

The real cost of renewables is not having a reliable power supply.

If the green lobby had any integrity, it would admit that switching to wind and solar means living in a world in which your power can and will fail at any time. And that’s the price of environmentalism. Instead, like the criminal justice reformers, who failed to tell the public until last month that the price of their policies would mean the end of public safety, they’re lying.

Governor Newsom falsely claims that California won’t sacrifice reliability for green energy.

Too late.

California now has more people and less power generating capacity. As the state gets closer to the mythical 100% renewables target, it will have more people and even less capacity. A 100% renewable energy grid is a 100% unreliable grid that will be going down on a regular basis.

None of that will be fixed. Instead there will be slogans to make the blackouts seem progressive.

PG&E is already describing its outages as "sharing the challenge." That sounds progressive and empowering. Especially for seniors on breathing machines or children trapped in elevators.

After some noise about investigations, California Democrats will ask the public to recognize that power is finite and go about the job of deciding who deserves to have power and who doesn’t.

The troubling interconnectedness between power and government allowed Mayor Garcetti to cut off water and power to Los Angeles businesses that wanted to remain open during the lockdown and then more recently to homes hosting parties. Companies can treat customers abusively, but a government water empire can cut off power and water for political reasons.

The ‘green energy’ regime will “share the challenge” by creating affirmative action for blackouts, determining which areas lose power and for how long based on racial and economic criteria. The wealthy will buy their own power, while anyone on the grid will be subject to the whims of Democrat political appointees dividing the spoils of a dying energy grid in a collapsing state.

The resource shortages of the green energy dark age will turn its practitioners into barbarians.

California will finally reach its 100% renewables target when its population has learned to cook in wood stoves, read by candlelight, and live in the darkness of ‘green energy’.

And then every day in this bright new dark age can be Earth Day.
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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Tags: Daniel Greenfield, California, environmentalism, green energy, Dark Age To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Once I Was Among The ‘Pro-Choice’ (Unthinkingly). But Then I Became Firmly Pro-Life. This Is Why

by Mark Tapscott: It comes back to me at the most unexpected moments, as it did a couple of days ago, but always as an uncomfortable recollection from a brief, regretted moment in a college classroom long past.

“It” is the memory of something I said as a sophomore or junior at Oklahoma State University in 1970 or 1971 (yes, I am that old!). Odd how certain scenes in your life stay with you, isn’t it? I have since come to believe that such memories are not coincidental.

Anyway, it was during an Economics 101 course and somehow the class discussion had turned to the issue of abortion. A couple of my fellow students were making the case that life begins at conception and is sacred, therefore abortion is wrong.

It’s what I said in response to them that haunts me to this day: “But it’s just a glob of cells.” So, it was understood, it’s ok to “kill” it because it’s not yet a baby, a living human being. That phrase, “a glob of cells,” has stuck with me, not unlike those “damned spots” that plagued Lady MacBeth.

I was surprised by what I said then and have been perplexed by it ever since because at the time I had never previously thought seriously about abortion except as one of those odd topics that some people talked about constantly.

The glob analogy reflected the conventional wisdom of the day as the country steadily moved toward the landmark Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973 that legalized abortion.

To this day, the memory is a painful and perplexing one. It was a thoughtless comment, the one time I can ever recall myself succumbing to the pressure of prevailing opinion.

So why do I share this memory with you today? Two reasons.

First, a few years later, in graduate school, I came across a passage from, I believe, Shelby Foote’s masterful three-volume “The Civil War” in which he was quoting somebody from the time who, having stumbled upon an old battlefield littered with the bones of the unburied dead, began meditating on the horror and the loss.

The thoughtful observer looked upon a jawbone glistening in the sun and wondered what that young man might have done had he lived? Would he have discovered a cure for cancer? Become a statesman who earnestly sought peace? Maybe he “merely” would have fed a hungry homeless person?

But we would never know because in man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, the dead soldier’s lifetime of potential was taken from him, and us, by a bullet fired in anger and fear. That passage stuck with me, too. There have been so many wars since then.

But here’s the point I am getting at, a point that is especially relevant to every person who works on Capitol Hill for a senator, a representative or a congressional committee:

As much as we rightfully mourn those lost in war and wonder what their lives might have become, we ought also ask ourselves and our nation as a whole, what about those more than 50 million unborn babies we’ve killed since 1973?

That’s an even more important question we should all be asking in this Black Lives Matter era, since many, if not most, of those aborted babies were Black. The others were Hispanic, Caucasian, Asian, Native Americans. They were all us.

What have we lost because we killed 50 million defenseless, voice-less, entirely innocent, unborn babies? It’s not just the good works they would have done that we’ve lost. We’ve become like the desperate men-turned-butchers on a battlefield. At least they could claim it was kill, or be killed. In the vast majority of cases, we did it for our convenience.

Second, so many of our cities are in flames. Our nation is torn apart, bitterly divided, perpetually distracted, doubting itself. Apocalyptic fears for America’s future are heard with ever-increasing frequency.

Consider this passage from the Old Testament in which the Lord warned Israel to never be like the pagans around them who worshipped the Molech pantheon of idols crafted of silver and gold and blood:

You shall not worship the Lord Your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.” — Deuteronomy 12:31.

In the 47 years since Roe v Wade, we’ve killed vastly more unborn babies than all the losses we’ve suffered in all of America’s wars since 1776.

Today, it’s sadly true that liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, disagree on so much. But surely, in our heart of hearts, the one thing we should agree on is that all lives matter, born and unborn, and there will never be true justice as long as even one innocent child is slaughtered while still in its mother’s womb or a few minutes after being delivered into our world.

It’s not too late for us to change.
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Mark Tapscott is HillFaith’s editor, author, IT jockey, spiritual guide, chief bottle washer and overall Jack-of-All-Trades.

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