#333176
If President-elect Donald Trump wanted to show he planned to obliterate President Barack Obama’s approach to Israel, he might have found his man to deliver that message in David Friedman, his pick for U.S. ambassador.
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#333177
The tweet quickly went viral after many conservative websites and individuals spoke out against the tweet.
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#333178
"We have full confidence that the information is accurate."
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#333179
The Israel-hating Obama Administration may not be done trying to eradicate the state of Israel after it let the vicious UN anti-Israel resolution denying Israel’s claim to the sacred Temple Mount pass; on Monday morning the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds reported that Secretary of State John Kerry will present his framework for Israel and the Palestinians in January, stating that Israel return to the suicidal pre-1967 borders and the Palestinians to have sovereignty over east Jerusalem, which will become the Palesti
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#333180
One of the great benefits of Hillary Clinton’s shocking election loss is the full-scale meltdown of the American left. Leading the pack: The New York Times, which had set up a prayer shrine in the editorial board conference room. Now, they’ve been relegated to whining about how the Republican Senate wouldn’t approve Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination to replace the late Antonin Scalia. Get out the world’s tiniest violin. Shed a single tear.
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#333181
(Breitbart) ? Trump Tower is a tourist destination for thousands of people celebrating Donald Trump’s election. Fans of the president-elect are stopping by to eat a taco bowl at the Trump Grill, visit the Trump bar, ride the famous escalators, and purchase Trump gear at the store. Others linger by the golden elevator doors, hoping ?
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#333182
Dermer calls White House spokesman a ‘master of fiction’; PM defends strident campaign, says he ‘will not turn the other cheek’
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#333183
A cafe boss at a Turkish paper is accused of insulting the president by saying he would refuse to serve him tea.
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#333184
It is an amazing sign of the economic progress achieved over the last half century that even a billionaire in 1964 wouldn’t have been able to purchase most of the items above that even a teenager working at the minimum wage can afford today like a laptop computer, iPhone, iPod and Smart TV.
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#333185
Democrats are still in total denial about the election. They’re also still making ridiculous excuses about why they lost. The ...
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#333186
Arguing that Americans still subscribe to his vision of progressive change, President Barack Obama asserted in an interview recently he could have succeeded in this year's election if he was eligible to run.
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#333187
Attorney and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz slammed President Obama for "betraying" Israel by allowing a US abstention in a UN security council vote c...
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#333188
Three Christians were stabbed by the mujahideen in Langeborgne, Switzerland on Christmas morning. The Christians were attempting to go to ...
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#333189
On Friday, President Obama rammed a resolution through the United Nations, with the US technically abstaining, that reshaped the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict on a fundamental level. It’s worth noting, of course, that the UN itself is an immoral body in which human rights violators like China and Russia preach about the morality of states which do not have a UN Security Council seat, in which the UN Human Rights Council offers equal input to terror states like Iran. It’s worth pointing out that the UN has a long history of aiding and abetting terrorism and murder.
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#333190
No vote in the echo chamber of the Security Council can change the fact of Palestinian weakness and Israeli strength at this pivotal moment in world history.
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#333191
"Proves how out of touch they are."
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#333192
It’s been a rough year, for everyone, but these numbers bode really well for the babies.
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#333193
Boeing and Airbus have both signed huge contracts this month to supply airliners to Iran, the first such deals since international sanctions were lifted.
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#333195
Call to 'fight those pigs and crusaders... each according to their ability' follows pattern of terror groups simplifying attacks.
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#333196
Harvard Law School has announced paid fellowships on Islamic law aimed at influencing public discourse and U.S. policy on Sharia.
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#333197
The strange thing about bailouts, such as the one Donald Trump and Mike Pence just organized for the Carrier air-conditioner company, is that they are detested in theory but relatively popular in practice, at least when they are put together by your guy. When Barack Obama boasted of having saved GM, he wasn’t scoffed at as a meddling know-nothing who used other people’s money to save incompetent corporate managers and rapacious union goons from their own stupidity and excesses — he was considered a friend of the working man, or at least a well-intentioned would-be friend. The automaker bailouts were never generally popular. A small majority of Americans disapproved of them, but that majority was lopsided: Sixty-three percent of Democrats approved of the bailouts, while 73 percent of Republicans opposed them. Political tribalism is strong here: The Trump-Pence Carrier handout is supported by 40 percent of Democrats, 54 percent of independents, and a remarkable 87 percent of Republicans, according to a Politico poll. Carrier, it is worth noting, is not a bankrupt, struggling dinosaur manufacturer like GM: It turned a handsome profit of $4 billion last year. United Technologies, a large manufacturing conglomerate that owns Carrier along with Otis elevators and Pratt & Whitney engines, operates a few facilities in Mike Pence’s home state of Indiana. While the presidential campaign was under way, it announced that it was going to relocate one of those facilities, a furnace plant, to Mexico, along with the jobs associated with it. A second facility was to be relocated as well, affecting a total of about 2,000 jobs. That this was happening in his vice-presidential nominee’s backyard was embarrassing for Trump. Trump likes to talk tough about trade and outsourcing, but his actual strategy with Carrier was the usual political approach: showering the firm with other people’s money. In exchange for at least $7 million in tax incentives, Carrier will . . . do almost everything it was planning to do anyway: It will close Indiana facilities, and it will move manufacturing and manufacturing jobs to Mexico. The fig leaf is 800 jobs that will be “saved” in Indiana, a figure that includes at least 300 positions that never were scheduled for offshoring to begin with. Carrier will be using those tax incentives to improve the automation in its U.S. facilities, i.e., to replace Indiana workers with robots instead of Mexicans. United Technologies, like General Electric and Lockheed Martin, is deeply enmeshed in government. It derives at least 25 percent of its revenue from government contracts, 10 percent of it from the Department of Defense alone. It is not a company that can afford to have an enemy in the White House or the Pentagon. Which is to say that Trump, who prides himself on his negotiating skills, entered the negotiation with a very strong hand. Spending a few million dollars a year on more expensive labor in Indiana is chump change compared with the $5.6 billion in aircraft engines and components United sold to the federal government last year. Set aside, for the moment, the fact that using those federal contracts as leverage is kinda sorta technically illegal. It is difficult to imagine that a mere matter of law would prevent Trump from playing that card, and knowledgeable players such as former Indiana lieutenant governor John Mutz, who sits on the board of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, are frank about the larger financial stakes for United, as indeed is the firm’s CEO, who told Jim Cramer that the possibility of losing its government contracts weighed on his decision to give Trump a win in Indiana, however symbolic. In fact, Mutz’s organization had put together a similar proposal and was rejected by the company. Trump’s deal was substantially the same, but it was coming from the president-elect. So, why didn’t Trump get more? The answer is probably straightforward: He didn’t need more. Trump began his public life as a creature of the tabloid press in New York and is now a creature of social media. He was an incompetent casino operator and hotelier, but he understands publicity and has a genuine gift for it — without that, he’d just be another Fifth Avenue doofus who inherited a $200 million real-estate portfolio from his dad. There will be a day or two of headlines with the words “Trump,” “deal,” “Indiana,” and “jobs,” and that suits Trump. The emptiness of the deal will be documented and lamented by the 0.4 percent of Americans who follow these things closely. The Carrier bailout is awful, of course. It is a case of two politicians’ using public funds to bribe a business into doing things that benefit them personally and politically while creating no real long-term economic value. Pence, who dropped his free-market principles like the world’s hottest potato once he got within sniffing distance of presidential power, can burnish his populist credentials at the taxpayers’ expense, and Trump can get ready to flit on to the next publicity stunt. This is not part of an economic-development agenda: It is theater. But the emerging “Superman” politics here are truly poisonous. One of the genre conventions of superhero stories is the compression of all the world’s drama into the immediate presence of the hero — only his actions and intentions are relevant. People may be dying all over the world, but Superman saves Lois Lane. (Comic-book movies have lately subverted that convention by focusing on the collateral damage done by superheroes to the cities in which they live.) What that means in the context of our contemporary presidential politics is that no one takes any note of the fact that Carrier is not the only HVAC company in the United States or the only industrial concern in Indiana. Carrier has competitors that employ Americans, pay taxes, and produce real economic value, and they have been put at a relative disadvantage by the political favoritism extended to Carrier. What about them? They’re not on the stage, so they do not matter. What is important to understand here is that this is not part of an economic-development agenda: It is theater. It is an adolescent fantasy of political power, and wherever Superman happens to land is where the action is. Nothing else is relevant. It does not matter that there is no broader logic at work: Small displays of efficacy can work to create an illusion of general efficacy. It is busyness as business. #related#This is, by his own account, Trump’s conception of the purpose of the presidency: to go from situation to situation and “make deals.” But a long-term economic program for the United States — one that accounts for, e.g., that big automation investment in Indiana and what it means for the future of the American work force — is not a deal to be made. Preventing a single symbolically important act of offshoring is a fundamentally different thing from understanding the underlying economic forces that make that offshoring attractive — as the Germans will tell you, it isn’t just about low wages — and governing in a way that puts those forces to work in Americans’ interests. Trump’s big idea so far is spending $7 million of other people’s money to delay an embarrassing headline. Some deal. Some deal-maker. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent. This article originally appeared in the December 31, 2016, issue of National Review. * National Review magazine content is typically available only to paid subscribers. Due to the immediacy of this article, it has been made available to you for free. To enjoy the full complement of exceptional National Review magazine content, sign up for a subscription today. A special discounted rate is available for you here.
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#333198
Washington, D.C. – House and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairmen Bob Goodlatte and Chuck Grassley today are calling on the Obama Administration to explain its management of the U visa program following significant findings of fraud and a new administrative policy that appears to violate the law. The U visa program was designed to allow foreign …
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#333199
The time to push back against the Left is now.
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#333200
The Palestinians and the Iranians are flush with victory, but crisis awaits them.
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