And
And more:
Did you know that the U.S. federal government collects more than $3 trillion in taxes each year? Where does all that money come from? The biggest source is the individual income tax—seems simple enough, but it’s more complex than it appears. Who pays, and how much do they pay? What’s the impact on jobs and the economy? Watch this week’s video to learn five things you didn’t know about the individual income tax.
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Have the Palestinians finally boxed themselves into the corner? (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Kim on tax reform.
We are on the same page. The mass media will never get what is happening i the real world when they remain on their own cloud! (See 2 below.)
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Can progressive claims of global warming melt college snowflakes. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Twilight over the "Palestinian Cause"
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- Reports from the West Bank after the Six Day War show that the Arabs interviewed defined themselves as "Arabs" or "Jordanians", and evidently did not yet know that they were "the Palestinian people". Since then, they were taught it. They were also taught that it is their duty is to "liberate Palestine" by killing Jews. The Palestinians are the first people invented to serve as a weapon of mass destruction of another people.
- "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese." — PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen, interview in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 1977.
- Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the European Union has become the main financier of the "Palestinian cause", including its terrorism. They are also contributing to war.
- Iran, strengthened enormously by the agreement passed in July 2015 and the massive US funding that accompanied it, has been showing its desire to become a hegemonic power in the Middle East.
- The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh, recently issued a fatwa saying that "fighting the Jews" is "against the will" of Allah and that Hamas is a terrorist organization.
For many years, "Palestine" has not stopped aspiring to new heights in the so called "international community". "Palestine" has been present at the Olympic Games since 1996, and, later, became a permanent observer to UNESCO and the United Nations. The vast majority of the 95 "embassies" of "Palestine" are in the Muslim world; many others are in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. In 2014, the Spanish Parliament voted in favor of full recognition of "Palestine." A few weeks later, the French Parliament did the same.
There is no other instance in the history of the world where a state that does not exist can have missions and embassies presumed to function as if that state did exist.
Now the time has probably come for the "Palestinians" to realize that they have lost and fall back to earth, as noted by the scholar Daniel Pipes.
Have "Palestinian" leaders been showing by their speeches and actions that they are ready to rule a state living in peace with their neighbors and with the rest of the world? All "Palestinian" leaders have incessantly incited terrorism, and do not hide their wish to wipe Israel off the map.
Is there a long-standing aspiration by the "Palestinian people" to have a state and to live peacefully within that state? The answer is actually no. The "Palestinian people" were invented in the late 1960s by the Arab and Soviet propaganda services. As PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen told the Dutch newspaper Trouw in March 1977:
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese."
Reports from the West Bank after the Six Day War show that the Arabs defined themselves in interviews as "Arabs" or "Jordanians"; they evidently did not know that they were the "Palestinian people". Since then, they were taught it. They were also taught that it is their duty to "liberate Palestine" by killing Jews. The Palestinians are the first people invented to serve as a weapon of mass destruction of another people.
Is there at least a historic past that gives legitimacy to the aspiration to create a "Palestinian state"? The answer again is actually no. There is no Palestinian culture distinct from the cultures of the Muslim Arab world, no monument that can be defined as a "Palestinian" historic monument, except by falsifying history.
More basically, would a hypothetical "Palestinian state" be economically viable? Again, the answer is actually no. Territories occupied by the Palestinian movements survive only thanks to international financial assistance from the West.
How then could so many countries wish for so long to create a state whose rulers would likely be regressive, corrupt "Palestinian" leaders; whose inhabitants would be used as killing machines, whose history is non-existent-to-falsified and whose economic potential seems zero?
The answer is simple.
Behind their support for the creation of a "Palestinian state", those countries have been pursuing other goals. For decades, countries of the Muslim world obsessively wanted one thing: the destruction of Israel.
They tried to reach their goal through conventional warfare, then terrorism, then diplomacy, then propaganda. They blamed only Israel for all the evils of the Middle East.
All the while, they know who the "Palestinian" leaders are and what they do. They know that the "Palestinian people" were invented. They know why the "Palestinian" people were invented. They know that a "Palestinian state" will not have a viable economy. Yet they have been committed to a strategy of destabilizing and demonizing a non-Muslim nation, Israel.
They call the "Palestinians" "victims"; terrorism, "militancy"; and incitement to kill, "resisting occupation". They have been trampling rightful history and replacing it with myth.
They press "Palestinian" leaders to "negotiate", knowing perfectly well that no agreement will ever be signed and that negotiations will end in bloodshed.
They propose only "peace plans" they know Israel must reject – those which include the "'49 'Auschwitz' armistice lines" or the "right of return" for "Palestinian refugees", who numbered half a million in 1949, but near five million today.
They recognize a "Palestinian state" while knowing that the "state" they recognize is not a state, but rather a terrorist entity without defined borders or territory, and imbued with a will to spill more blood and create more mayhem.
They have relied on turmoil, blackmail and lies to encourage the rest of the world to think the situation requires drastic international intervention.
They have been saying they want a "Palestinian state", but never that they want this state to renounce terrorism and end the conflict.
Instead, they have been waging a vicious war they have long hoped to win.
For more than thirty years, they benefited from the support of the Soviet Union. It financed wars (1967, 1973), terrorism, diplomacy and propaganda. The Soviet Union made the "Palestinian" enterprise an "anti-imperialist" cause -- a means of strengthening Soviet positions and galvanizing the enemies of the West. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but the effects of its support for the "Palestinian cause" for a time remained. Many countries hostile to the West still support and recognize the "Palestinians" while pretending to ignore that they are recognizing a terrorist entity. They are contributing to war.
Countries of the Western world, subjected to the pressures of the Muslim world and the Soviet Union for many years, have gradually given way, some even before any pressure was applied.
France chose its camp in 1967, when General Charles de Gaulle launched what he called an "Arab policy" after its defeat in Algeria. French foreign policy become resolutely "pro-Palestinian" -– in an apparent effort to deflect terrorism, obtain inexpensive oil and compete with the US -- and has remained so to this day. Western European countries have gradually adopted positions close to those of France. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the European Union has become the main financier of the "Palestinian cause", including its terrorism. Western European leaders know what the real goals are, yet they repeat without respite that creating a "Palestinian state" is "essential". They are also contributing to war.
Although a long-time ally of Israel, the United States changed its Middle East policy in the beginning of the 1990s to positions closer to those of the Muslim world. American politicians and diplomats pressured Israelis to negotiate with "Palestinian" leaders and seemed to have lost sight of what the "Palestinian cause" was secretly about. Wishful Israeli leaders agreed to negotiate. The tragic result was the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It quickly became a new base of anti-Israeli terrorism. A wave of lethal, anti-Israel attacks started immediately, with a stepped-up anti-Israel diplomatic and propaganda offensive right after. A "two-state solution" was invoked. American leaders, as if they had slept through several years, started to say that a "Palestinian state" had to exist. Three American Presidents proposed "peace plans", also contributing to war.
An additional "peace plan" is expected soon, but the parameters will be profoundly different. President Donald Trump appears to wish to break with the past.
He recently told Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that "Palestinian" leaders were liars. None of the American negotiators he chose seems to have the slightest illusion about the "Palestinian" leadership or the "Palestinian cause".
The Taylor Force Act, passed on December 5 by the US House of Representatives, plans to condition US aid to the "West Bank and Gaza" on "the actions taken by the Palestinian Authority to end violence and terrorism against Israeli citizens"; the Act could be adopted soon by the Senate. The PA rejected all the requirements in the Act.
The Muslim world is also undergoing change. Iran, strengthened enormously by the agreement passed in July 2015 and the massive US funding that accompanied it, has been showing its desire to become a hegemonic power in the Middle East. The mullahs' regime now holds three capital cities in addition to Teheran: Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut. Iran attacks Saudi Arabia and supports the war led by the Houthi militia in Yemen; it intends to seize Sanaa and take control of Bab El Mandeb, the gateway to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Qatar and Turkey have established close ties with Iran.
Saudi leaders appear aware of the danger. King Salman chose his son, Mohamed bin Salman, as heir to the throne, and gave him broad powers. "MBS", as he is known, seems intent on leading a real revolution. Militarily, he is head of the 40-member Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition, and has declared his desire to "end terrorism". Economically, he is in charge of an ambitious reform project aimed at making his country less dependent on oil: Saudi Vision 2030. All Saudi leaders in disagreement with the new orientations of the country were placed under arrest and their assets confiscated. Mohamed bin Salman has identified Iran as the main enemy, and recently described its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, as a "new Hitler." Qatar and Turkey have been subjected to intense Saudi pressure to distance themselves from the Iranian regime. The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh, recently issued a fatwa saying that "fighting the Jews" is "against the will" of Allah and that Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Mohamed bin Salman has the support of the Trump administration; Vladimir Putin who, while being allied to Iran, may want a balance of power in the Middle East, and Xi Jinping, who is facing the risk of a Sunni Islamic upheaval in China's autonomous territory, Xinjiang.
"Palestinian" leader, Mahmoud Abbas was reportedly summoned to Riyadh, where King Salman and Mohammed bin Salman told him that he had to accept the plan proposed by the Trump administration or resign, and that it would "risky" for him to consider launching an uprising – which he has anyway, although being careful to keep it lukewarm.
During the month of October, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a close ally of Mohamed bin Salman, invited the leaders of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to come to Cairo for a "reconciliation". He apparently demanded control of the Gaza Strip to be handed to the Palestinian Authority. It also seems that the Trump administration and President Sisi told Hamas leaders that they had to approve the terms of the "reconciliation" agreement, and that if they carried out any attacks against Israel, they risked complete destruction.
The "peace plan" evidently to be presented by the Trump administration is provoking the extreme anger of "Palestinian" leaders. The goal of the "plan" seems to be to revive an open ended "peace process", allowing Saudi Arabia and the members of the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition to move closer to Israel and push the "Palestinian cause" toward the back burner.
On November 19, an Arab League emergency meeting held in Cairo strongly condemned Hezbollah and Iran. Moreover, for the first time in fifty years, a meeting of the Arab League did not even mention the "Palestinian" question.
President Trump's recognition on December 6 of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has led to restlessness and acrimony both in the Muslim world and among Western European leaders. Sunni leaders allied to Saudi Arabia, however, as well as Saudi Arabia itself, seem too concerned about the Iranian threat to quarrel with Israel, the United States or really anyone. Western Europe has almost no weight in what is taking shape; all it has shown is cowardice, fear, and continued contempt for a fellow Western democracy: Israel.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, now in the twelfth year of his four year term -- and apparently seeing that he is getting little support -- appeared to seek divine intervention: he asked the Pope for help. There would be "no Palestinian state without East Jerusalem as its capital," Abbas said. He sounded as if he had begun to understand that the "Palestinian cause" could be fading, and, with other "Palestinian" leaders, called for "three days of rage". A few protesters burned tires and American flags – the usual.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to convene in Istanbul on December 13, and urged leaders of Muslim countries to recognize Jerusalem as the "occupied capital of the Palestinian state". Saudi King Salman stayed well away as did almost all other Sunni leaders. He only sent a message saying that he calls for "a political solution to resolve regional crises". He added that "Palestinians have right to East Jerusalem" – the least he could do; he did no more. Erdogan is mainly supported by Iran, today's foremost enemy of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries.
"It will not be the end of the war against Israel," said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "but it could be the beginning of the end of the "Palestinian cause".
It now seems a good time for Western European leaders who still blindly support the "Palestinian cause" to cut their losses, both politically and economically. Taking the side of Erdogan and the mullahs in order to support a terrorist entity that will never be a "state" will do nothing to help them fight either terrorism or the increasing Islamization of Europe.
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
1a) Israel No Longer The Problem?
US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley glared at her colleagues at the UN Security Council Monday as she cast the lone nay vote against a draft resolution presented by Egypt to nullify US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Haley then berated her UN colleagues for their assault against US sovereignty and for their prolonged efforts to delegitimize Israel and blame the Jewish state for the absence of peace. In her words, “The United States refuses to accept the double standard that says we are not impartial when we stand by the will of the American people by moving our US embassy, but somehow the United Nations is a neutral party when it consistently singles out Israel for condemnation.”
The liberal media, led by The New York Times chastised her.
“Punctuating America’s increasing international isolation, the United Nations Security Council demanded on Monday that the Trump administration rescind its decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to put the United States Embassy there,” the Times wrote in a purported news article.
While attacking Trump and Haley for isolating the US, the Times and its colleagues failed to explain what an international community-aligned US foreign policy looks like.
Notably, just such a policy and its consequences were the subject of a 15,000-word investigative report published Monday morning by Politico.
“The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook,” by Josh Meyer, detailed how in the interest of advancing a policy supported by the international community, then president Barack Obama imperiled US public health, national security and its allies.
As Meyer recalled, Obama entered office in 2009 promising to turn over a new leaf with Iran.
By promising to turn over a new leaf in US-Iran relations, Obama signaled his belief that the sorry state of those relations was America’s fault. Because if it wasn’t America’s fault, then no American president could change the situation.
Obama’s assumption was entirely wrong.
The Iranian regime declared war on the US shortly after it seized power. Months later, the regime’s shock troops stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held US diplomats hostage for 444 days.
Despite an uninterrupted record of Iranian aggression, since 1979 every US administration tried to convince the ayatollahs to abandon their hostility to America. Iran pocketed every presidential concession and redoubled its hostile actions against America and its allies and interests.
Ignoring the record, Obama argued he had the Midas touch. Obama made his case for uniqueness to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood in his speech at Cairo University in June 2009.
There Obama legitimized Iran’s grievances against the US. He invited Iran’s leaders and their Sunni jihadist counterparts in the Muslim Brotherhood to work with him.
At the same time, he attacked Israel and the US’s Sunni Muslim allies.
By attacking the US’s allies and embracing its enemies, Obama signaled Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood that he was interested in a strategic realignment of America’s Middle East posture.
In its editorial following Obama’s speech, the Times’ editors gushed, “After eight years of [American] arrogance and bullying that has turned even close friends against the United States, it takes a strong president to acknowledge the mistakes of the past.”
IN THE months and years that followed his Cairo speech, Obama’s primary goal in the Middle East was to persuade Iran’s regime to reach a nuclear accord with him. Although Obama and his advisers insisted that his nuclear diplomacy didn’t affect their willingness to confront and punish Iran for its other rogue behavior, their actions showed the opposite was true.
From his earliest days in office, Obama turned a blind eye to all of Iran’s bad behavior.
For instance, just days after his Cairo speech, the regime stole the presidential elections. Then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of the poll against his two chief opponents Mir Hossain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. The public, which came out in the millions for Mousavi and Karroubi, rejected the official results. Millions took to the streets in what became known as the Green Revolution.
Instead of standing with the Iranians in the streets demanding freedom, Obama stood on the sidelines and so effectively sided with the anti-American regime against the Iranian people begging for American support.
In his report, Meyer showed another casualty of Obama’s obsessive desire to reach a nuclear accord with Tehran. Meyer chronicled the shocking fate of Project Cassandra, a multi-year investigation led by the US’s Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA probe involved 30 US and foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It was directed against Hezbollah’s worldwide narco-terrorist empire, which netted Iran’s foreign legion up to $1 billion annually.
Project Cassandra investigators “followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.”
Rather than support the investigation, which showed that Hezbollah was importing thousands of tons of cocaine to the US and using US used car dealerships to launder their drug money, the Obama administration quashed it.
“As Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way…. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.”
Meyer reports that Hezbollah used its drug profits to supply Syrian President Bashar Assad with chemical and conventional weapons he used against his own people. It used its drug money to provide tank-destroying roadside bombs to Iranian-controlled Shi’ite militias in Iraq which killed hundreds of US soldiers. It used its drug money to build apartment blocks in south Lebanon which, as the IDF has documented, double as missile launch pads and storage facilities in preparation for its next war against Israel.
And it used the money to turn a slew of Latin American countries into US enemies and Iranian allies in Tehran’s war to destroy America.
As Obama Treasury Department official Katherine Bauer claimed in written testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs last February, “under the Obama administration… these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”
THIS THEN brings us back to Haley at the UN on Monday, and the US liberal media’s condemnation of her defense of Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
In November 2015, the UN Security Council unanimously approved Obama’s nuclear deal. The resolution was submitted by Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power.
The EU, the Russians and the Chinese all happily partnered with the Obama administration in concluding a nuclear deal. That vaunted, unanimously supported deal paved the way for Iran to become a nuclear armed state within a decade.
The international community – along with the US liberal media – cheered as Obama attacked Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for daring to warn of the consequences of his nuclear pact.
At the same time, the international community, the Times and its liberal media counterparts all hid the news of Hezbollah’s narco-terrorism empire and its responsibility for thousands of cocaine-related deaths each year in America. Indeed, as of Tuesday, neither the Times’ nor The Washington Post’s websites mentioned Meyer’s report.
In her statement Monday, Haley said, “This is the first time I have exercised the American right to veto a resolution in the Security Council. The exercise of the veto is not something the United States does often…. We do it with no joy, but we do it with no reluctance.”
She added, “The fact that this veto is being done in defense of American sovereignty and in defense of America’s role in the Middle East peace process is not a source of embarrassment for us; it should be an embarrassment to the remainder of the Security Council.”
And it should be an embarrassment to the New York Times and its colleagues that they have refused to report why Haley and Trump are demonstrably right to stand alone and why Obama was catastrophically wrong to believe that the US should stand with the “international community” against itself.
The Donald Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy has made waves for its unexpected emphasis on alliances, tough talk on trade, and focus on homeland protection. But few have noticed, buried on page 49, a paragraph that marks a sea change in decades of American strategic thinking about the Middle East:
For generations the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been understood as the prime irritant preventing peace and prosperity in the region. Today, the threats from radical jihadist terrorist organizations and the threat from Iran are creating the realization that Israel is not the cause of the region’s problems.
Along with last week’s declaration that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, Trump has stuck a blow for realism in the sometimes upside-down world of U.S. foreign-policy thinking. He’s also taken a swipe at two of his predecessors: Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
Neither of those former presidents actually came out and said that Israel was the cause of all the Middle East’s problems. But they both based their regional diplomacy on the assumption.
In 2006, while promoting a book that likened Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with South African apartheid, Carter opened a window on his real thoughts. "The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by whether or not the Israel-Palestine issue is dealt with fairly,” he told an interviewer. He added that the U.S. is hated by "former close friends" such as Egypt and Jordan, "because we won’t do anything about the Palestinian plight."
This is what the American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer calls “linkage” -- the myopic tendency to see Israel as a wrench in the wheel of America’s Arab policy. In that interview, Carter even called it the "linkage fact." But, to be fair, the concept didn’t originate with him.
It goes back at least to the end of World War II. In 1945, the State Department sent newly inaugurated President Harry Truman a memo warning of “continual tenseness in the situation in the Near East largely as a result of the Palestine question.” State’s recommendation was to avoid Zionist activists and think about America’s long-term interests.
Truman (like Trump) had a low opinion of expert advice. In 1947, he ordered a reluctant U.S. ambassador vote “yes” in the United Nations General Assembly on the creation of the Jewish state. The contrary assessment among the diplomats Truman derided as the “striped pants boys” was, I think it is fair to say, misguided.
And Jimmy Carter wasn’t a better prophet. Even though there is no Palestinian state, the U.S. is not hated by Jordan and Egypt; on the contrary, it is allied with their governments -- and Israel -- in the fight against Iran.
Carter also overestimated the Muslim commitment to Palestine. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey called an emergency summit of the Organization of Islamic States to protest Trump’s Jerusalem decision, more than half of the invited heads of state and prime ministers didn’t bother to show up.
While Carter’s successors tended to have a more nuanced view of the region, Obama was a true Carterite. In 2008, in the midst of his first presidential campaign, he traveled to the Middle East and met with Jordan’s King Abdullah. “If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process, then that will make it easier for Arab states and Gulf States to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said upon returning. “We’ve got to have an overarching strategy recognizing that all these issues are connected.”
King Abdullah had a vested interest in saying such things -- more than half his citizens are themselves Palestinians, and he wouldn’t mind if many of them returned to the other side of the Jordan River. Obama was not necessarily naive. The king told him what he wanted to hear, and he left the region as he arrived, a believer that peace and war in the Middle East form a matrix whose epicenter is the holy land.
After taking office, Obama took linkage to a whole new level. In an appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was asked if reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions was a necessary precursor to reviving the peace process. “If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way,” he replied. “To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians -- between the Palestinians and the Israelis -- then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”
There is no point in dwelling on Obama’s Middle Eastern missteps. But even after turning Iraq over to the tender mercies of the Islamic State, embracing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, poisoning relations with Saudi Arabia, and stepping back from his Red Line to watch Syria disintegrate, he continued to imply that only Netanyahu’s stubbornness foiled his “overarching strategy.”
I doubt anyone would say that Trump is smarter than Carter or Obama. But he is far more realistic than either. He understands that there is no “Arab World” pining for justice, just a region of sovereign nations pursuing what they regard as their self-interest. As the new strategy says, the Arab states “have increasingly found common interests with Israel in confronting common threats.”
This assessment is followed by a plan of action: countering (unspecified) violent ideologies, buoying up the Gulf states, strengthening the U.S. strategic partnership with Iraq, seeking a settlement of the Syrian civil war that sets the conditions for refugees to return, neutralizing Iranian aggression, and, last on the list, “helping to facilitate a comprehensive peace agreement that is acceptable to both Israelis and Palestinians.”
Trump’s actual plan for what he calls “the ultimate deal” in the Holy Land is still a secret. But it is not likely that be any more generous to the Palestinians than what they have rejected in the past. As far as America is concerned, we in the Middle East are living in a new, unlinked generation.
2) Now, Tax Reform Gets Real
The left and the press foretold disaster for the middle class. Such claims will be tested.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
In the wake of last year’s election, a humiliated press corps was forced to reassess, to explain how it had gotten the presidential race so monumentally wrong. Conclusions: It had been too blinded by its own biases, too sheltered from Middle America. It apologized. It promised to do better.
Or not.
Yahoo News: “Meet some victims of the Trump tax bill.” Washington Post: “10 Reasons Democrats think the tax bill will be a political loser for Trump’s GOP.” New York Times: “In Tax Overhaul, Trump Tries to Defy Economic Odds.” Business Insider: “Americans have already made up their minds about the tax bill—and it looks brutal for the GOP.”
To read all this coverage, you’d be justified in believing that the entire Republican Party had been hit with a stupid stick. Its members united to jack up the taxes of millions of middle-income voters, throw the country into recession, and saddle today’s toddlers with a future debt crisis—all to enable the transfer of tax plunder to fat-cat donors. And not only did it pass this colossally idiotic policy, it did so enthusiastically, in full view of the public—guaranteeing a 2018 GOP midterm wipeout. What dimwits!
This is the Democratic line, and the media is embracing it. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi bet that the GOP would fail to enact tax reform, so they pressed their members to boycott negotiations. Instead, Republicans are delivering bigger paychecks and the prospect of accelerated economic growth, and not a single Democrat can take credit. The Democratic Party’s only path is therefore to spin an obvious GOP victory into a disaster. The press, with all its biases and insularity, once again is all in, with another attack on reality.
Nearly every story quotes a variation of Mrs. Pelosi’s line that the bill is “wholesale robbery of the middle class.” Mr. Schumer continues to claim the reform helps “only the wealthiest few.” These are Trumpian-size whoppers, which the media eagerly repeats. Yet even the liberal Tax Policy Center has acknowledged that 90% of the middle class will get a tax cut in 2018, and that the average cut will be $1,600.
USA Today was so desperate to depict the bill as a tax hike that its analysis of “5 household situations” included a childless single renter earning $1 million a year, paying $50,000 in state and local taxes, and claiming $40,000 in charitable deductions. The paper triumphantly pointed out that this downtrodden soul would pay $1,887 more in taxes. And therefore have to forgo a bottle of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild.
Democrats spent months insisting that corporations would pocket their tax cuts rather than invest in their workers. The press continues to parrot this line—even as AT&T, Comcast, Wells Fargo and others immediately announced bonuses, pay hikes, higher starting wages, better benefits and plans for new hiring. Democrats call these PR stunts, but so what? Workers are benefiting.
The left and the press claim the bill—which abolishes ObamaCare’s individual mandate starting in 2019—will throw 13 million people off health care. They don’t seem to know any of the millions of Americans who will be relieved from paying a tax that can run more than $2,000 a family for being uninsured. The left and the press belittle the average cut as “only” $100 a month. They are out of touch with millions of solidly middle-income Americans who follow tight budgets. A hundred dollars can be enough for piano lessons, a family night out or new winter coats. The left and the press are suggesting the reform will primarily benefit Donald Trump’s empire—as if the Republican caucus, including Sens. Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, love Mr. Trump so much that they were willing to spend all fall on a bill for his personal enrichment.
They are running with these upside-down-world stories because so far they’ve gotten away with it. The tax bill has been but a theoretical proposition up to now, defined by press coverage. A recent Monmouth poll showed that 50% of Americans think their taxes will go up under this reform (the actual proportion is estimated at 5%). No wonder approximately 50% of Americans disapprove of the reform.
The left and its media enablers got away with their Hillary fictions, too—until they had to report Donald Trump’s victory. The risk for the GOP here is that the early impression that this tax cut is “bad” could remain stuck in American minds.
Then again, those $1,000 AT&T and Comcast bonuses—destined for hundreds of thousands of workers—are quite real. By February, the Internal Revenue Service should have recalculated its withholding formulas so millions of workers will be taking home larger paychecks. In the months that follow, the country should begin to see the early benefits of new U.S. investment—in jobs, benefits, and opportunity.
Whatever happens, the anti-tax-reform campaign is a reminder to Republicans of the unprecedented hostility they face in the age of Trump. The best way to triumph in this war of spin is to produce real policy results that help real people—as they just did with tax reform, no matter what you read to the contrary.
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3)Of Snowflakes and Tyrants:
College students’ behavior must
be stopped
How many conversations have we had with our friends, family and co-workers wondering what happened to the millennials? We expect a new generation to have new ideas and new ways of approaching the world. So how do we explain when a new generation is steeped in bullying, complaining about hurt feelings, demanding “safe spaces,” and using pride in fragile egos and weakened emotional states as the excuse to condemn free speech?
There’s more than one swamp eating away at this nation. The ignorant and intolerant meltdown of students is brought to us by a “liberal” education system determined to replace teaching with propaganda and logic and reason with unmoored emotion.
One of the more recent examples comes from last week. College students in New York were thrown out of a student-run coffee shop because their “Make America Great Again” caps violated the “safe space” rules. The offending students were accused of being fascists and given three minutes to leave the premises.
More results are now knocking at our doors. The Federalist reports, “Nearly half of American millennials (44 percent) would rather live in a socialist society than a capitalist one, according to a report from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), which relied on YouGov polling data. Even so, there’s widespread ignorance among millennials about socialism and communism.”
They also remind us of a New York Times/CBS poll in 2016 in which 23 percent of those between the ages of 21 and 29 said Joseph Stalin, the genocidal Soviet tyrant, was a “hero.”
This is ignorance, bred by an education system with a political agenda. After all, if your students are functionally illiterate and unable to read at any critical level, then what a teacher says is the only thing that prevails. Arguments made by “the others” are, literally, not understood.
Today’s mindless ignorance manifesting in demands for “safe spaces,” and speech control isn’t surprising. We saw the dangers of illiteracy emerging in 2006. The American Institute of Research, in a study funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, reported, “More than 75 percent of students at two-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials.”
Fast-forward to California 2017 where a Fresno Bee headline blares, “Lawyers sue California because too many children can’t read.” California touts how it has funneled $10 billion into the poorest performing districts in the state. Because, you know, throwing money at a problem always solves it.
Or, apparently not.
“Assessments found less than half of California students from third grade to fifth grade have met statewide literacy standards since 2015. Both traditional and charter schools are failing. … Of the 26 lowest-performing districts in the nation, 11 are in California, according to the lawsuit. Texas, the largest state after California, has only one district among the 26.”
California’s education department insists they have “one of the most ambitious programs in the nation to serve low-income students.” It has also failed.
Kids are the same everywhere, including those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. As many of us know, growing up poor doesn’t make you dumb. The ability to learn is innate, so isn’t it time to focus on who is doing the teaching, or in California’s case, those not teaching?
In the California lawsuit, it appears good teachers are trying to take a stand. “State assessments found 96 percent of students [at a plaintiff’s school] were not proficient in English or math, according to the lawsuit. Only eight of the school’s 179 students were found to be proficient when tested last year. David Moch, another plaintiff, is a retired teacher who taught at La Salle for 18 years. Moch said he had fifth graders in his kindergarten class.”
After years of sowing the education abandonment of our children, columnist Walter Williams offered up what we have reaped, via an American Council of Trustees and Alumni report on what college students know.
“Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II,” he said.
Just last year, the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus survey, which “measures things like critical thinking, analytical reasoning, document literacy, writing and communication,” according to The Wall Street Journal, found “40 percent of students tested who didn’t meet a standard deemed ‘proficient’ were unable to distinguish the quality of evidence in building an argument or express the appropriate level of conviction in their conclusion.”
The good news is this confirms the tyrannical and intolerant behavior of today’s college students is not, in fact, some sort of natural result of today’s modern world and can be reversed and rejected. But if we are to have the leaders we need for business, society and politics, we better start draining the academic swamp as soon as possible.
• Tammy Bruce, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk show host.
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