Monday PM ~ TheFrontPageCover

TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~  
Early Mistakes in the War on 
Terror Hurt America Today
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by Harold Hutchison  
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Get Ready: California-Style 
Elections Are Coming to Your State
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{pjmedia.com} ~ If you thought the 2018 elections in California were a mess, you were right. Dangerous new election laws and lax practices contributed to that mess... and now they want the rest of the nation to suffer the way Californians do. First, the mess. Election Integrity Project, California (EIPCa), a group of concerned citizens in California, has been documenting problems in the state’s election system for years. We have done the hard, messy work on the ground to catalog the problems. California election officials and legislators have turned our elections into a free-for-all, with few safeguards, all in the name of “voter access." Recent initiatives include “top two” primary elections, automatic voter registration, allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections, allowing mail ballots to arrive after Election Day, rejecting voter ID, removing restrictions on who can handle and return mail ballots aka ballot “harvesting”, same-day registration and voting, allowing voters to “cure” their mail ballot signature mismatches via the honor system and, in 2020, providing all registrants with mail ballots... We don't want it.
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Trump Could Have DOD Build Wall Without State 
of Emergency, Congressional Approval
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by Luke Rosiak   
{westernjournal.com} ~ The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service released a paper internally that suggests President Donald Trump may have the authority to use Department of Defense resources to build a border wall... without obtaining congressional approval or declaring a state of emergency. CRS, Congress’s in-house research arm, internally published a paper Jan. 10 titled “Can the Department of Defense Build the Border Wall?” The Daily Caller News Foundation has obtained a copy of the paper.The CRS document says: “Another statute that authorizes the Secretary of Defense to assist civilian law enforcement with counterdrug activities may provide some authority for the construction of barriers along the border. “10 U.S.C. § 284 (Section 284) provides that the Secretary of Defense ‘may provide support for the counterdrug activities or activities to counter transnational organized crime’ of any law enforcement agency, including through the ‘construction of roads and fences and installation of lighting to block drug smuggling corridors across international boundaries of the United States.’ … “Use of Section 284 would not require a declaration of a national emergency  under the NEA. “However, the DOD’s Section 284 authority to construct fences appears to extend only to ‘drug smuggling corridors,’ a condition that may limit where DOD could deploy fencing.”...
Trump administration weighs oil embargo 
on Venezuela to oust Maduro
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{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ The Trump administration, fed up with the authoritarian government in Venezuela, could soon play its last hand and block imports of the country’s oil... a move that would upset Gulf Coast refiners and pressure energy markets. “The likelihood of significant sanctions including an import ban is higher now than it ever has been during the Trump administration," George David Banks, President Trump's former international energy adviser, told the Washington Examiner. Banks said the Trump administration has long debated restricting oil from Venezuela, whose heavy crude is used in large amounts by refiners in Texas and Louisiana such as Citgo and Valero. The administration held off, however, realizing refiners built to process heavy oil — before the U.S. became a dominant producer of light sweet crude during the shale boom — would struggle to find replacement sources, even though they have tried. But the stakes changed after the Trump administration on Wednesday recognized the oil-rich country's opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s official head of state, in a swipe at leftist authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro, whose political oppression and economic policies have created food shortages and a public health crisis...  https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/trump-administration-weighs-oil-embargo-on-venezuela-to-oust-maduro?utm_source=WEX_News%20Brief_01/26/2019&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WEX_News%20Brief
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FBI director tells employees he's 'angry' over shutdown
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{thehill.com} ~ FBI Director Christopher Wray tore into what he called a “mind-boggling” and “short-sighted” government shutdown in a video message to employees on Thursday... telling them he is angrier than he has ever been. Wray released a video message nearly six minutes long in which he encouraged employees to not give up hope during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. “It takes a lot to get me angry, but I’m about as angry as I’ve been in a long, long time,” Wray said. The five-week-long shutdown has caused around 800,000 federal employees to miss two consecutive paychecks. “I know tons of you are feeling the anxiety and the emotional strain of this shutdown,” Wray said. “And 100 percent of you are feeling the financial strain.” The Department of Justice is one of several federal agencies impacted by the ongoing government shutdown, which entered its 35th day on Friday. FBI agents are deemed essential and are still working, but they are not being paid as a result of the lapse in appropriations...Theres no need to be angry anymore, Trump signed the bill to end the shutdown.
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The Constitutional Fiasco of a Wealth Tax
by MATTHEW J. FRANCK

{nationalreview.com} ~ Today the New York Times gave a large chunk of op-ed real estate (1,300 words) to Daniel Altman... 
a former Times editorial board member now teaching economics part-time at NYU.  Concerned about wealth inequality–which he regards as a much more serious problem than mere income inequality–Altman proposes that we enact a wealth tax. This would target not what people earn but what they own–the houses, the cars, the money in the bank, the privately owned businesses, the investment portfolios themselves rather than the interests and dividends therefrom, and so forth. Altman recognizes various practical difficulties with the implementation of such a tax, but he is convinced it would be a good alternative to our present income tax. He proposes wealth tax rates of “zero percent up to $500,000 in wealth, 1 percent for wealth between $500,000 and $1 million, and 2 percent for wealth above $1 million.”  He continues with this sketch: To see how the wealth tax would work, consider a family with $500,000 in wealth and $200,000 in annual income. Right now, they might pay $50,000 in federal income tax. With the wealth tax brackets described above, they would pay nothing. On the other hand, a family with $4 million in wealth and $200,000 in annual income would owe $65,000. Most families that depend on their wealth for their income would pay more, and most that depend on their earnings would pay less.  Even assuming, as I do not, that the inequality Altman describes is in itself an injustice, or the cause of injustices, he is overlooking one huge problem–actually a set of problems–for any such proposal.  It is contained in the Constitution, which says the following... Both Altman and dinky-Warren are both wrong on this 
inequality.
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Early Mistakes in the War on Terror Hurt America Today
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by Harold Hutchison:  President George W. Bush had an unenviable task in the wake of 9/11: addressing the growing threat of radical Islamic terrorism. In some areas of the Global War on Terror, he did very well. But not in all.

He rightly recognized that treating terrorism like a law-enforcement problem, as scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton did, was the wrong strategy. When it came time to making terrorists talk, Bush’s administration used enhanced interrogation to obtain life-saving information. And state sponsors of terrorism were put on notice that such a status would be hazardous to their regime’s existence.

That said, Bush also made some big mistakes. His failure to push back against the Left’s defamatory “Bush lied” narrative was costly, both in our strategic position and politically. By the time he did fight for the “surge” in Iraq, all he did was stabilize the country to the point that Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s premature pullout was a non-concern to most Americans. The resulting rise of ISIS and the atrocities that terrorist group inflicted on millions of innocents are only the most visible consequences of that calamitous withdrawal.

Bush made other mistakes, too. He should’ve turned counterterror statutes on the Gitmo Bar, which was making Hanoi Jane look like a piker. A photo shoot on an enemy anti-aircraft gun pales in comparison to the access to the American legal system that our nation’s avowed enemies received. His failure to shut this down immediately yielded drastic consequences.

One of those consequences was that the CIA operatives who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (let’s face it: a six-pack of Coors Light and a carton of smokes wasn’t going to cut it) were set upon by the ACLU. Leftists outraged over the alleged outing of CIA desk jockey Valerie Plame were conspicuously silent when these authentic operatives were outed to terrorists for the sake of smearing them as torturers. Another consequence is that our nation’s acceptable interrogation techniques are now public, available on Amazon. It’s kinda hard to beat someone who’s literally read your playbook.

The Bush administration’s biggest mistake, though, was failing to sufficiently build up our military to face a global war on terror in addition to its other tasks around the world. The ArmyNavyAir ForceMarine Corps, and Coast Guard all needed to be built up, especially after the short-sighted “peace dividend” of the 1990s.

Not only would this have boosted our Rust Belt economy by creating jobs and upgrading our manufacturing capability, but a larger military would also have been less stressed by its increased workload. And there would’ve been plenty of reserve capability when Obama slashed the force structure.

Sound like a waste of money? Well, think about how much we’ve spent fighting the War on Terror, and how much it’s costing us to play catch-up as Russia and China get more aggressive. We needed a military that could kill jihadists and break (or take) their stuff, deter Russian aggression against Eastern Europe, and deal with any Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea. We never quite got that.

Today, we face a tougher situation, as any new build-up will take time to bear fruit. In a very real sense, while we’re safer in some ways because of what George W. Bush did, we also have some hard choices because of what he didn’t do.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/60771?mailing_id=4035&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4035&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
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