John Kerry, who?

This guy has been as effective as Hillary... which is an embarrassment. The same one-world, uni-socialistic view and all of their actions have supported this view. Just like Barry, we'll see them for who they are and where their allegiances lay as they fade and their media shields drop.

U.S. scrambling to explain support for anti-Israel UN resolution

John Sexton, Hot Air

As I noted yesterday, Israel has not backed away from its claim to have “ironclad” evidence that the U.S. supported and pushed a UN resolution condemning Israel. Today, Adam Kredo at the Free Beacon has a follow up story saying the Obama administration is struggling to explain reports that they played a bigger role in the resolution than simply refusing to veto it:

Jonathan Schanzer, a Middle East expert and vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Free Beacon that he spoke with U.S. officials in September who admitted that “a U.N. measure of some shape or form was actively considered,” a charge that runs counter the White House’s official narrative. 

“We know that this administration was at a minimum helping to shape a final resolution at the United Nations and had been working on this for months,” Schanzer said…

“The fact is, the administration has been flagged as being an active participant in this U.N. resolution,” Schanzer said. “Now they wish to try to spin this as inconsequential. This was an attempt by the administration to lead from behind, as they have done countless times in the past and which has failed countless times in the past.”

Schanzer’s claim is backed up by a Washington Post report which says the first inkling of a UN resolution aimed at preserving the two-state solution was being considered by President Obama himself back in September:

The first public hint of the move came in the heat of the U.S. presidential campaign in September, just after nominees Trump and Hillary Clinton held meetings with Netanyahu in New York. In an Israeli television interview, Dan Shapiro, U.S. ambassador to Israel, said Obama was “asking himself” about the best way to promote a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“This could be a statement we make or a resolution or an initiative at the U.N. . . . which contributes to an effort to be continued by the next administration,” he said.

Shapiro clearly anticipated a Clinton victory, reflecting thinking within the administration that if Obama took the heat for a critical statement or resolution, she would be in a better position to play the “good cop” and move Israel toward substantive negotiations.

So this was part of a plan predicated on Hillary winning the election. When that didn’t happen it seems no one thought to pull back on the administration’s “bad cop” routine. Instead, as noted yesterday, there are reports the U.S. discussed a “balanced” resolution with the Palestinians and that Vice President Biden urged Ukraine to vote for it. Both of those reports have been denied by the Obama administration. After similar denials about the transfer of $400 million in cash to Iran, which was linked to a release of U.S. prisoners, it’s difficult to take those claims at face value.

The best response to the Obama administration’s claims regarding the UN resolution comes at the end of the Free Beacon story:

One veteran foreign policy insider and former government official who requested anonymity in order to speak freely described senior Obama administration officials as “lying sacks of s**t” who routinely feed the press disinformation.

Another anonymous source, described only as a senior congressional aide, tells the Free Beacon the administration, “got caught red handed, and now they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth.” The echo chamber used to manufacture support for the Iran deal doesn’t seem to working as well this time around.


More on this traitorous buffoon.... here

OBAMA’S PARTING SHOT AT ISRAEL

Finally a lasting legacy, an attempt to unwind Israel's right to exist. (Update) I have read in several places that members of Barry's UN team were the originators of the resolution and helped configure.

TOM COTTON ON OBAMA’S PARTING SHOT AT ISRAEL

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

Our friend Sen. Tom Cotton issued this statement about President Obama’s decision to “abstain” from voting on the U.N. Security Council’s anti-Israel resolution — a decision that enabled the resolution to pass:

President Obama is personally responsible for this anti-Israel resolution. His diplomats secretly coordinated the vote, yet he doesn’t even have the courage of his own convictions to vote for it. This cowardly, disgraceful action cements President Obama’s richly deserved legacy as the most anti-Israel president in American history. 

This resolution hurts the prospects for a secure and just peace by targeting Israel for building homes in Jerusalem, its own capital, while not specifically addressing Palestinian incitement of and financial support for terrorism. That’s why President Obama vetoed a similar, but less anti-Israel resolution in 2011—back when he still needed pro-Israel voters for his reelection. Moreover, as a Security Council resolution with the imprimatur of the United States, this resolution surpasses even the infamous “Zionism is Racism” General Assembly resolution in its irrational obsession with the Jewish state.

The United States provides considerable financial assistance to the United Nations and Security Council members. The UN and nations supporting this resolution have now imperiled all forms of U.S. assistance. I look forward to working with President-elect Trump and members of both parties in Congress to decide what the consequences for this action will be.

If the consequences include ending all financial assistance to the U.N., that would be a nice coda to the Obama presidency.

OBAMA AGONISTES

Trully Nixonian pose!

OBAMA AGONISTES

Scott Johnson, Powerline

Reader Martin Karo is a Philadelphia attorney. As President Obama prepares to depart office, Mr. Karo offers optimistic thoughts on what he believes to be Obama’s ultimate failure:

Watching Hillary Clinton’s sad soiree, and the shrinking Obama persona displayed in his latest PBS interview, make the Democratic titans seem enmeshed in a sort of Greek tragedy. Hillary’s self-destruction is all too obvious; but Obama’s strikes me as equally tragic, and equally apparent on reflection. And it reminded me of parallels from another tragic self-defeating President. But his is over; Hillary’s is almost over; Obama’s is just beginning its third act. One could title the play:

Obama Agonistes

Barack Obama will be the first President ever to not literally depart the scene after his successor is sworn in. It is a powerful image and metaphor, the act of the former President boarding the helicopter (think Nixon and his defiant “V”s) or the Presidential jet to leave Washington, to literally leave the scene to his successor. Even the perennial gadfly, Jimmy Carter, took that one last ride on the Presidential jet to return to Georgia. Washington belongs to the elected President, not the retired one.

But Obama will not do that. He will drive (well, be driven) a few scant miles to a house in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, where he can watch at close range as his legacy is revealed not to be one. From his front-row seat, he will watch his eponymous healthcare plan be gutted, watch his foreign policy be repudiated, watch his bureaucratic overreaches be reeled in (please God!), watch conservative judges take the bench, watch his immigration policy melt, watch the military cheer his successor as they never cheered him, watch infrastructure funds build highways and bridges (that will not be named after him) instead of disappearing into the pockets of government union members, watch the American energy revival kick into high gear.

As he watches all this, one wonders whether Obama will appreciate the curious posture he has imposed on the Democratic Party. It is too much to expect Obama to blame himself for the decline in the Party’s presence, at every level of government; but unless he is delusional, he must at least see it. He probably does, given his remarks in his Friday NPR interview that his organizing work “didn’t translate to” Congressional candidates. In the same interview he noted the future of the Democratic Party is the unnamed mass of young people who helped his campaign, omitting reference to any current politician.

Indeed, there are very few Democrats in power at any level who have any plausible claim to be up-and-coming party leaders. The current crop are septuagenarians, and uninspiring ones at that (who would follow Nancy Pelosi into a foxhole? who would fall on a grenade to save Elizabeth Warren? who would be pushed to a microphone by Chuck Schumer?).

With the dismantling of Obama’s signature initiatives, what does the Democratic Party stand for, other than to pine for Obamaism? Numerous Republicans plausibly champion the GOP position on any issue that matters; there are dozens of party leaders on immigration, energy, foreign affairs, national defense, sane budgeting, tax reform, education reform, who are not named Trump. Other than Warren’s identification with big bank harassment, the Democrats have no counterparts. Après moi, le vacuum.

The other curious thing about Obama’s remaining on the scene is that he has no visible friends on it, despite his dominance of his party. He has many toadies. He has his entourage. He even has many sincere admirers. But friends? Name three. Name one.

And in that characteristic, he is very much like the Democratic Antichrist, Richard Nixon. The quintessential Nixon photograph is of him walking on the beach in San Clemente, in a full suit and tie and wingtip shoes, alone except for his dog. Nixon’s post-presidential isolation derived mainly from the political disgrace that led to his resignation; no doubt Obama will have acolytes inviting him to events and interviewing him and basking in his presence. But who will come just to have a drink and talk about the old days or the White Sox? Every visit will be business, every caller seeking something rather than bringing something.

Obama is like Nixon in other ways as well, probably in more ways than the Democrats would ever admit. Both Nixon and Obama were self-made men. Nixon started as an obscure Congressman, Obama was an obscure community organizer (whatever THAT is). Both thrust themselves into the spotlight and into power, and ironically both by allegedly playing dirty (Nixon dubbed “Tricky Dick” by “the Pink Lady,” Helen Gahagan Douglas; Obama escaping criticism altogether despite having his state senate opponents disqualified and having his Republican opponent Jack Ryan’s divorce records mysteriously unsealed in his US Senate race).

Both relied far more on their ability to operate the levers of power than their ability to persuade others to follow them. Both were heavily criticized during their first terms, yet easily won re-election. Both depended far more on the personal loyalty of their staff, less on their experience or counsel. Both reveled in the trappings of the office. Both were very expensive to send on vacation, though to be fair Nixon barely knew the meaning of the word.

Ultimately Obama suffers from the Nixon comparison, for the reasons he will see at close range. Nixon was sought out post-retirement for his counsel; Obama will be asked for his presence, not his wisdom. Nixon’s electoral success was a general one, regionally and culturally, and very much set the scene for the Age of Reagan; Obama’s politics of division manifestly fail for anyone not named Obama. Nixon´s policies, domestic (e.g., creation of OSHA and the EPA, ending gold-backing of Dollars, the Endangered Species Act) and foreign (e.g., the SALT treaty, rapprochement with China, backing Israel) are still with us forty years later. Obama´s will be gone forty weeks later.

And that is where the Agonist tragedy lies. Obama is staying in Washington for two reasons: because he doesn’t truly have friends elsewhere, or any other place he considers home; and because if he doesn’t stay in DC he descends into obscurity. The latter is a struggle he is likely to lose anyway; if ever there were a personality suited to dominate the stage and put his predecessor in the shade, it is Trump.

But Obama will continue the struggle. He will help raise funds, in a social environment where funding matters less. He has no appointment power, so he will have few toadies. Any emerging Democratic leader will be wary of him, as he will only draw attention to himself. He still considers himself the smartest man in any room, despite abundant proof to the contrary. He will never improve in his ability to persuade people to his viewpoint, because he lacks introspection; a man who suffers as many failures as he has in eight years, yet still can’t think of any serious errors he has made, is by definition not learning from his mistakes. And absent holding the levers of power himself, persuasion is the only tool Obama has.

So Obama will soldier on, speaking to any reporter or power player who seeks (or will accept) an audience, pressing his increasingly chimerical policies in a political and legal landscape increasingly tilted against them, sucking the air and vitality away from any of his successors who actually have a chance of implementing them. Due to his own ego, Obama’s struggles will ultimately be self-defeating.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH IN ONE PARAGRAPH

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH IN ONE PARAGRAPH

Steven Hayward, Powerline

Paul Light of New York University passes along this interesting tidbit about the growth of the executive branch in his Wall Street Journal op-ed today:

In 1961, according to my analysis, John F. Kennedy oversaw 450 political and career executives who occupied 17 bureaucratic layers at the top of government. Mr. Trump will soon oversee more than 3,000 executives in 63 layers. This leads to a Washington hallmark: titles like chief of staff to the deputy assistant secretary. Such complexity distorts information as it travels up the chain of command, and then thwarts guidance on the way down.

If you don’t think this state of affairs favors the bureaucracy you’re not paying attention in class.

Obama’s Precisely-Worded Boasts

Obama’s Precisely-Worded Boasts about Stopping Terrorists

by Jim Geraghty, National Review

President Obama, yesterday, contending his administration has been quite successful in fighting terrorism and protecting Americans.

We should take great pride in the progress that we’ve made over the last eight years.  That’s the bottom line. 

No foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland.  (Applause.)  And it’s not because they didn’t try.  Plots have been disrupted.

Foreign terrorist organizations haven’t executed an attack on our homeland, but far too many terrorists have. I’m not sure Obama’s words will be so reassuring to the students at Ohio State University who were attacked late last month, the 29 people injured in the Chelsea bombing in September, the ten people stabbed in a shopping mall in Minnesota in September, the 50 killed and 53 injured in the attack on the Orlando nightclub, the 16 killed and 23 injured in San Bernardino, California, the 6 killed and 2 injured on the attacks on servicemen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the 3 killed and 264 injured at the Boston Marathon, the 13 killed and 44 injured at Fort Hood, Texas…

 Kudos and applause to everyone involved in disrupting attempted terrorist attacks and investigating, targeting, and taking out the perpetrators, whether it’s through arrests, raids, or drone strikes. But stopping terrorist organizations is only part of the fight. Once a bomb goes off, it doesn’t matter that much if the perpetrator was one person or a group.

Efforts to fight ISIS the organization mean a lot less when ISIS-inspired lone wolves kill innocent Americans with any regularity. No counterterrorism policy is going to be perfect; as many have said since 9/11, the good guys have to prevent an attack every day to have a great success; the bad guys just have to succeed once to have a great success.

Put the BUTT out...

That is about 60 years too late...

OBAMA’S BLAME GAME SHIFTS

OBAMA’S BLAME GAME SHIFTS, Patriot Headquarters

Following more than six years of failed domestic policies and embarrassing foreign relations maneuvers, President Obama has found a new target for blame. Even he realizes that he can’t keep blaming former President George W. Bush for all the problems the nation is now facing and so his new target is…drum roll, please…Fox News.

That’s right. The media is to blame. Or, more specifically, Fox News. Failing to take into consideration that approximately 85 percent of mainstream media are liberal – by their own admission – he picks on one of the few news outlets that refuses to toe the line when it comes to sucking up to him and reporting whatever he wants reported in whatever way he wants it presented.

Obama said that if he’s going to be able to change the way people like Representative John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell think (good luck with that, by the way), then he’s going to have to change how the media reports on things. Then he singled out Fox News for its biased coverage.

I guess when you have a vast majority of the news media in your back pocket, it must be infuriating to have one popular news outlet willing to tell the truth about you and your failures.

Currently, it’s just talk. Right now he’s only “saying” that Fox News should change the way it reports. But if he decides to start following in the footsteps of other dictators, don’t be surprised to see his people try to enact laws that control how and what the media reports. And if it’s not Obama, it will be the next president from the Democratic Party.

Laura Ingraham writes...

Obama Infantile... Foxnews

Fox News contributor and LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham blasted President Obama Wednesday night for refusing to take any responsibility for Democrats losses in the November elections.

"Almost seven in 10 people routinely say the country's going in the wrong direction, wages have basically been flat since 1999, and yet this president comes out and in a very infantile manner blames cable news without any sense of personal responsibility," Ingraham said during a panel discussion on Fox News' "Special Report."

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine published on Tuesday, Obama did indeed have plenty of blame to lay at the feet of Fox News and the Clinton campaign's ground game for Trump's win, but apparently felt that his own record had absolutely nothing to do with Trump's stunning election victory and the Republicans' success in maintaining control of Congress.

"In this election, [voters] turned out in huge numbers for Trump. And I think that part of it has to do with our inability, our failure, to reach those voters effectively. Part of it is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country, but part of it is also Democrats not working at a grassroots level, being in there, showing up, making arguments," Obama said.

"They say Trump can be immature at times, [but] what was that?" Ingraham asked. "And he goes over to Europe and he goes, "well you know I'm actually very popular, look at the polls, my policies are actually very popular," [but he] just got shellacked, [his] party just got shellacked," she said. "At least do what Bill Clinton did and say you know, that was a drubbing, we really took it."

Of course, Obama has spent his entire time in office blaming other people -- President Bush, closet racists, Fox News, conservative talk radio -- for his own failures and unpopularity, so it's hardly surprising that with less than two months left in office his blame-everyone-but-himself game is still going strong.

Laura Ingraham joined FOX News Channel in 2007 and currently serves as a contributor, providing political analysis and commentary to FNC's daytime and primetime programming. She is the Editor-in-Chief of LifeZette.com.  In addition to her role as a contributor, Ingraham is a frequent substitute host on FNC's "The O'Reilly Factor." As the host of the radio program "The Laura Ingraham Show," she is also the most listened-to woman in political talk radio in the United States, heard by hundreds of radio stations nationwide. Ingraham previously served as a litigator and Supreme Court law clerk.

Snowflake power...

Snowflake power, a vague view of what can and should be done efficiently.

WHAT IF TRUMP ENFORCES THE LAW?!

POLITICO: WHAT IF TRUMP ENFORCES THE LAW?!

John Hinderaker, Powerline

I have been saying for a long time that, while our current legal immigration system poses intractable problems, illegal immigration is relatively easy to solve: we only need to enforce our existing laws. Donald Trump’s appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General signals that he intends to do just that. Politico belatedly tumbles, apparently, to what is going on: “Immigration-hardliner Sessions could execute crackdown as AG.”

If confirmed as Trump’s attorney general, the Alabama senator would instantly become one of the most powerful people overseeing the nation’s immigration policy, with wide latitude over the kinds of immigration violations to prosecute and who would be deported.

As the nation’s top cop, Sessions would be able to direct limited department resources to pursuing immigration cases. He could launch federal investigations into what he perceives as discrimination against U.S. citizens caused by immigration. He would be in charge of drafting legal rationales for immigration policies under the Trump administration.

And Sessions, as attorney general, could find ways to choke off funding for “sanctuary cities,” where local officials decline to help federal officials identify undocumented immigrants so they can be deported.

Doesn’t that sound great? And it’s not all, either. But first, this:

Some immigrant advocates are alarmed by the idea of a Justice Department led by someone they see as far outside the mainstream.

It can’t be “far outside the mainstream” to enforce existing federal law. On the contrary, it is the president’s most fundamental constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Barack Obama violated this duty, to his everlasting shame. It also can’t be “far outside the mainstream” for Trump and Sessions to carry out the policies on which Trump campaigned and was elected.

Politico adds much more about the powers Sessions will wield as Attorney General. Strangely, however, the most important point comes near the end:

Sessions would have similarly expansive powers when it comes to enforcing immigration law. The attorney general sets guidelines for the types of violations federal prosecutors should pursue.

Von Spakovksy said a Sessions-led Justice Department could, for example, ramp up enforcement of a current ban on employers hiring those who are here illegally.

“If the employer provision is enforced and the news gets out that the Justice Department is finally enforcing that provision … that will lead to large numbers of individuals self-deporting,” said von Spakovsky, now a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

That is exactly right. The long-promised wall along the Mexican border, already mandated by federal law, may be a good idea but is mostly a distraction. If the executive branch finally carries out its duty to enforce the immigration laws against employers by sending a few farmers, owners of roofing companies, executives of meat packing plants and hotel managers to prison, the job market for illegal aliens will rapidly disappear. The vast majority will then self-deport, to use Mitt Romney’s perfectly appropriate phrase. 

All of this is devoutly hoped for by most Americans. In the first days of the new administration, it looks as though 1) Congress will pass a bill repealing Obamacare, 2) Sessions will start to move against illegal immigration, and 3) President Trump will appoint a conservative to the still-vacant Supreme Court seat. This is a trifecta the likes of which we conservatives have not seen in a long, long time.

MARK FALCOFF: CASTRO’S DEMISE

Scott Johnson, Powerline

I invited our occasional contributor Mark Falcoff to comment on the death of Fidel Castro. Mark writes:

The demise of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had been predicted for so long (and so wrongly) that it is difficult to believe that he is finally gone at last. What can one say about this man and his country?

Castro always saw himself as a world-historical figure, defying the United States and converting his island (known principally for rum, beaches the rhumba) into “a small country with a big country’s foreign policy”, to quote my college Jorge Dominguez. In retrospect what Castro did was to play two cards skillfully–the card of the Soviets and the card of the hate-America. Let me take each of this points in turn.

The Soviet card. Cuba under Castro was virtually unique among the nations of the world in that it alone voluntarily entered what might be called the Russian Commonwealth of Nations. No other self-respecting country would be caught dead with these losers–the Poles always wanted out, the Baltics wanted out, the Georgians and the Ukranians wanted out. Hell, even the Kazakhs wanted out. 

And here was this little island just off the coast of Florida, practically a state of the United States, that opted to stake its all on Moscow’s game. What a delicious irony that the Soviet empire collapsed first! Nonetheless, during all the years of the alliance with the Soviets, the Cuban state benefited not just from a financial subsidy (ten Marshall plans in constant dollars) but all of the political, diplomatic and military benefits associated with such membership.

But that was nothing compared to the cultural dimension of the Cuban revolution. It was the first and most dramatic revolt against the American Century, and America-haters (not necessarily people on the Left or revolutionary in any way, many of whom by the way were actually Americans) could find in Cuba cheap inspiration. It was the Cubans who went hungry, not the denizens of the Left Bank in Paris or in the smarter precincts of Upper West Side New York, or professors at the University of Dry Gulch (or Harvard) who thrilled to Castro’s speeches and always called him affectionately by his first name.

Indeed, as time went on even people on the Left in Europe and the United States ceased to talk about the revolution’s “achievements in health and education” at all, preferring rather to admit the regime’s failures but assign them entirely to the trade embargo (which they and the Cuban government always called “the blockade”) and regard its very survival as a ratification of its historicity.

The inconvenient truth of Cuban history now stands revealed. A tropical island, it can only survive through dependence on an outside power. During the colonial period and up to 1898 it was Spain. Between 1989 and 1959 it was the United States. From 1959 to 1991 it was the Soviet Union. Since then the Cubans have had to depend on the generosity of the squalid regime in Caracas, a regime which, like the Soviet, seems destined to disappear before the Castro family’s rule in Cuba. Thanks to a combination of emigration, low birthrate (and legalized and subsidized abortion), and a high suicide index, in another dozen years Cuba will have one of the oldest populations in the world. An impoverished country disproportionately old, without friends or patrons, with few possibilities of recovery or rebirth–this is the achievement of Fidel Castro, this and none other.

Mark Falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. His books include Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro’s Legacy and Small Countries, Large Issues.

Safe space....

Thanksgiving message...

Why the Dems are Hysterical About Jeff Sessions, and Why They Don't Mean it

Why the Dems are Hysterical About Jeff Sessions, and Why They Don't Mean it

John Hinderaker, Powerline

The Democrats say that they will oppose confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, and will smear him with discredited race allegations from 30 years ago. This is rather pathetic: if they can’t come up with anything within the last 30 years, they don’t have much of a case, to say the least. So why are they hysterical about Sessions?

Byron York supplies much of the answer:

Sessions is the Senate’s highest-profile, most determined, and most knowledgeable opponent of comprehensive immigration reform. Democrats are particularly anxious about immigration because of the unusually tenuous nature of President Obama’s policies on the issue. Those policies can be undone unilaterally, by the new president in some cases, and by the attorney general and head of homeland security in other cases. There’s no need for congressional action — and no way for House or Senate Democrats to slow or stop it.

That is correct. As Byron points out, all President Trump and Attorney General Sessions need to do is start enforcing the law–discharging Trump’s Constitutional duty, in other words.

The Democrats’ fanatical commitment to preserving illegal immigration is a big part of the reason why they are demoralized at the thought of Jeff Sessions as AG. I think we can add this, too: Under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, the Department of Justice became the epicenter of Obama administration corruption. Legions of left-wing ideologues were brought in as DOJ lawyers. The Civil Rights Division became a partisan tool of the Democrats. Holder adopted racist policies, with enforcement of the law depending on the skin color of the victims. Cover-ups abounded, and corruption in other branches of the Obama administration was never prosecuted. Loretta Lynch had her famous tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton.

There are a great many skeletons in Barack Obama’s closet, and many of the bodies are buried–to mix a metaphor–at the Department of Justice. For eight years, Obama and his Justice Department shamelessly stiff-armed Congressional investigations, FOIA requests and court orders. So it is no wonder that Democrats blanch at the thought of the Department of Justice in the hands of a conservative as able and as incorruptible as Jeff Sessions.

So the Democrats have pulled out their old reliable, the race card. Which causes me to wonder: has the race card ever actually worked? The Democrats obviously think that false accusations of racism are political dynamite, but if that were true, why don’t they win more elections?

In the case of Jeff Sessions, we know that the Democrats’ racism charges are insincere. They don’t believe what they are saying about Sessions, they are just trying to smear him in a desperate attempt to deny him confirmation, or else diminish his effectiveness as Attorney General. How do we know that? Because when Sessions ran for re-election to the Senate in 2014, the Democrats didn’t run a candidate against him. They let him win, unopposed. Surely if the Democrats actually believed that Sessions was a racist, they would have tried to prevent his re-election to the Senate. Right? At a minimum, they would have run a candidate against him and tried to explain to the people of Alabama that Sessions is a racist and therefore unfit to be a senator. But they didn’t do this, because they know their smears are baseless. And, of course, the people of Alabama, whom Sessions has served for so long, wouldn’t have been easy to fool.

I don’t think the American people will be fooled, either.

Deaf, blind and dumb....

Finally we will see a common sense approach to the 3rd Caliphate....

Mr President, your legacy... AFTER OBAMACARE

Add caption

What legacy? Half-baked ideas, indifference and platitudes....

AFTER OBAMACARE

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

Our friend Tevi Troy, the author of outstanding books about the presidency, is also CEO of the American Health Policy Institute. During the George W. Bush administration, he served as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services.

Tevi, along with Lanhee Chen of the Hoover Institution, has written an op-ed on Obamacare for the Wall Street Journal (it’s behind the Journal’s pay wall). Their piece has two parts — a look back at the fight waged by the Republican Congress against Obamacare and a look forward at how to replace it.

The two parts of the op-ed are tied together by the fact that the Republican Congress didn’t just vote to repeal Obamacare — it offered plans to replace the legislation. Such plans include House Speaker Paul Ryan’s “A Better Way,” as well as plans from Sens. Richard Burr and Orrin Hatch and Rep. Fred Upton; Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. Bill Cassidy; Rep. Tom Price, Sens. John McCain and David Perdue; Rep. Phil Roe and the Republican Study Committee; and Sen. Ben Sasse. In addition, conservative scholars and analysts have written “Improving Health and Health Care: An Agenda for Reform.”

Clearly, the GOP does not lack for plans.

What is the nature of these plans? According to Tevi and Chen, most of them “focus first on driving the cost of health care, expanding access to consumer-directed health arrangements like health-savings accounts, and replacing Obamacare exchange subsidies with a refundable tax credit or some other tax benefit to help lower-income Americans afford health insurance.”

Tevi and Chen recommend a four-step approach to the repeal and replace process:

First, states should be given greater latitude through executive action to pursue aggressive reforms to Medicaid.

Second, Republicans in Congress should move immediately to craft a budget resolution and pass it, thereby enabling the use of budget reconciliation legislation to repeal the law — as they did in 2015. 

Third, they should implement transitional reforms that would prevent potential disruptions in coverage gained under [Obamacare], such as for those who benefit from subsidies for marketplace coverage.

Finally, a more extensive replacement bill can then follow.

I’m far from an expert in this field, but nonetheless offer two observations. First, other than people with “pre-existing conditions,” no one would be denied health insurance by virtue of an Obamacare repeal (with no replacement). Many would be denied free health insurance and many others would be denied subsidized health insurance, but that’s not the same thing as being denied health insurance.

Second, Obamacare replacement proposals shouldn’t be evaluated in terms of whether all those who have health insurance as a result of Obamacare will continue to have it. Obamacare has induced some who didn’t want to buy health insurance to purchase it anyway. If these consumers conclude in a post-Obamacare regime that they don’t want to keep paying for insurance, their lack of coverage shouldn’t be deemed a mark against that regime.

In addition, it is highly debatable whether everyone who got free or subsidized health insurance thanks to Obamacare ought to have received it. A Democratic Congress, without support from Republicans, picked the monetary cutoffs for the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies. By no means should these decisions be the benchmark for judging plans that might replace Obamacare.

Everything should be on the table (though I agree with Donald Trump that provisions regarding pre-existing conditions ought to be retained). Thanks to the tireless, and widely derided, efforts of Republican legislators to keep Obamacare on the political and policy agenda for the past six years, I trust that almost everything will be.

Donald Trump’s Astounding Victory: How and Why

Donald Trump’s Astounding Victory: How and Why

Michael Barone, National Review

Many white voters who fill the heartland have dropped their allegiance to the Democratic party.

Astounding. That’s the best word to describe the tumultuous election night and the (to most people) surprise victory of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton hoped to win with votes of Northeasterners, including those who have moved south along Interstate 95 to North Carolina and Florida (44 electoral votes). Instead, Trump won with votes along the I-94 and I-80 corridors, from Pennsylvania through Ohio and Michigan to Wisconsin and Iowa (70 electoral votes).

This approach was foreseen by RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende in his “Case of the Missing White Voters” article series in 2013. Non-college-educated whites in this northern tier, once strong for Ross Perot, gave Barack Obama relatively high percentages in 2008 and 2012. Many grew up in Democratic union households and were willing to vote for the first black president.

Now they seem to have sloughed off their ancestral Democratic allegiance, much as white Southerners did in 1980s presidential and 1990s congressional elections. National Democrats no longer had anything to offer them then. Hillary Clinton didn’t have anything to offer northern-tier non-college-educated whites this year.

It didn’t help that Clinton called half of Trump supporters “irredeemable” and “deplorables” and infected with “implicit racism.” They may have been shy in responding to telephone or exit polls, but they voted in unanticipatedly large numbers, at a time when turnout generally sagged.

At the same time, Clinton was unable to reassemble Obama’s 2012 51 percent coalition. Turnout fell in heavily black Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Millennial generation turnout was tepid, and Trump carried white Millennials by 5 points. Unexpectedly, Trump won higher percentages of Hispanics and Asians than Mitt Romney did in 2012.

Trump’s surprise victory, owing much to differential turnout, resembles the surprise defeats, defying most polls, of establishment positions in 2016 referendums in Britain and Colombia. In June, 52 percent of Britons voted to leave the European Union — the so-called Brexit, opposed by most major-party leaders and financial elites. In October, 50.2 percent of Colombia’s voters rejected the peace plan with FARC terrorists negotiated by their president.

In both cases, the capital city’s metro area and distinctive peripheries — Scotland, the Caribbean coast — voted with the establishment. But the historical and cultural hearts of these nations — England outside London, the central Andes cordillera in Colombia — rejected and defeated the establishment position.

Something like that seems to have happened here. If you take the pro-establishment coasts — the Northeast except Pennsylvania, the West Coast — the vote as currently tabulated was 58-38 percent for Clinton. That’s similar to Obama’s 60-38 percent margin in these states in 2012.

But the heartland — roughly the area from the Appalachian ridges to the Rocky Mountains, with about two-thirds of the national vote — went 52-44 percent for Trump. Trump didn’t do much better than Romney, who got 51 percent there. But Clinton got only 44 percent of heartland votes, down from Obama’s 47 percent. The Republican margin doubled, from 4 to 8 percent.

British elites responded to Brexit with scorn for their heartland’s voters. Those voting for Brexit were “poorly educated, nativist, unsophisticated, racist, and unfashionable.” You can hear similar invective hurled by American coastal elites (though not, to their credit, Clinton and Obama) at their fellow citizens beyond the Hudson River and the Capital Beltway. “Deplorable” is the least of their insults.

They take glee in noting that Trump ran behind previous Republican nominees among college graduates but well ahead among non-college-educated whites. There’s an echo here of Rush Limbaugh’s scorn for “low-information voters.” But the people who complain about less educated whites voting as a bloc have no complaints about the even larger percentages received by the candidates they favor from black voters. The better approach is to show respect for each voter’s decision, however unenlightened you may consider it.

Trump’s victory undercuts crude projections based on the sophisticated analysis of journalist Ron Brownstein and Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg — namely, that increasing percentages of nonwhites and millennial generation voters will result in an “ascendant” majority producing inevitably Democratic victories. In a closely divided country, election victories are contingent on issues, events, and candidates’ characteristics.

It would be a mistake also to suppose that Trump’s Electoral College victory means that Democrats are doomed to defeat because they lost their hold on non-college-educated whites this year. That depends on decisions and events that have not yet occurred.

— Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. © 2016 Creators.com

A ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ Lesson for the Digital Age

A ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ Lesson for the Digital Age

Jim Rutenberg, Mediator, The New York Times

All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country.

The news media by and large missed what was happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime. The numbers weren’t just a poor guide for election night — they were an off-ramp away from what was actually happening.

No one predicted a night like this — that Donald J. Trump would pull off a stunning upset over Hillary Clinton and win the presidency.

The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media.

Journalists didn’t question the polling data when it confirmed their gut feeling that Mr. Trump could never in a million years pull it off. They portrayed Trump supporters who still believed he had a shot as being out of touch with reality. In the end, it was the other way around.

It was just a few months ago that so much of the European media failed to foresee the vote in Britain to leave the European Union. Election 2016, thy name is Brexit.

Election Day had been preceded by more than a month of declarations that the race was close but essentially over. And that assessment held even after the late-October news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reviewing a new batch of emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mrs. Clinton’s victory would be “substantial but not overwhelming,” The Huffington Post had reported, after assuring its readers that “she’s got this.” That more or less comported with The New York Times’s Upshot projection early Tuesday evening that Mrs. Clinton was an 84 percent favorite to win the presidency.

Then came a profound shift, as mainstream media organizations scrambled to catch the bus that had just run them over. By 10:30 p.m., the Upshot projection had switched around, remarkably, to 93 percent in favor of Mr. Trump.

Other major sites also flipped from a likely Clinton victory to a likely Trump victory. John King of CNN proclaimed to his huge election night audience that during the previous couple of weeks, “We were not having a reality-based conversation” given the map he had before him, showing Mr. Trump with a clear opportunity to reach the White House.

That was an extraordinary admission; if the news media failed to present a reality-based political scenario, then it failed in performing its most fundamental function.

The unexpected turn in the election tallies immediately raised questions about the value of modern polling: Can it accurately capture public opinion when so many people are now so hard to reach on their unlisted cellphones?

“I think the polling was a mess,” Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, told me Tuesday night. “But I think a lot of it was interpretation of the polls.”

Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist, said on MSNBC, “My crystal ball has been shattered into atoms’’ because he predicted the opposite outcome. “Tonight data died,’’ he added.

Regardless of the outcome, it was clear that the polls, and the projections, had underestimated the strength of Mr. Trump’s vote, and the movement he built, which has defied all predictions and expectations since he announced his candidacy last year.

And that’s why the problem that surfaced on Tuesday night was much bigger than polling. It was clear that something was fundamentally broken in journalism, which has been unable to keep up with the anti-establishment mood that is turning the world upside down.

Politics is not just about numbers; data can’t always capture the human condition that is the blood of American politics. And it is not the sole function of political reporting to tell you who will win or who will lose. But that question — the horse race — has too often shadowed everything else, and inevitably colors other reporting, too.

You have to wonder how different the coverage might have been had the polls, and the data crunching, not forecast an almost certain Clinton victory. Perhaps there would have been a deeper exploration of the forces that were propelling Mr. Trump toward victory, given that so much of his behavior would have torpedoed any candidate who came before him.

Maybe we’d know a lot more about how Mr. Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southern border would fare in Congress, or what his proposal to make it easier to sue journalists might actually look like. How about his plan to block people from countries with links to terrorism?

Then there was the drop in the global stock market on Tuesday night, which wasn’t just figures on a screen but wealth being erased. The expectations were out of whack, and Wall Street doesn’t do out-of-whack well.

What’s amazing is how many times the news media has missed the populist movements that have been rocking national politics since at least 2008. It failed to initially see the rise of the Tea Party, which led to the Republican wave of elections of 2010 and 2014, which was supposed to be the year the so-called Republican establishment regained control over its intraparty insurgency.

Then, of course, there was Mr. Trump’s own unexpected rise to the nomination. And after each failure came a vow to learn lessons, and not ever allow it to happen again. And yet the lessons did not come fast enough to get it right when it most mattered.

In an earlier column, I quoted the conservative writer Rod Dreher as saying that most journalists were blind to their own “bigotry against conservative religion, bigotry against rural folks, and bigotry against working class and poor white people.”

Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.

But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.

They think something is so wrong that all the fact-checking of Mr. Trump this year, the countless reports of his lies — which he uttered more than Mrs. Clinton did — and the vigorous investigation of his business and personal transgressions, bothered them far less than the perceived national ills Mr. Trump was pointing to and promising to fix.

In their view the government was broken, the economic system was broken, and, we heard so often, the news media was broken, too. Well, something surely is broken. It can be fixed, but let’s get to it once and for all.