Saturday PM ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover

~ Featuring ~
Does Steve Bannon Have Something to Offer?
by Peggy Noonan
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 Top Headlines 
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Study: Trump has eliminated $86B in regulations. (The Hill)
 
Trump demands border wall funds as part of spending bill. (The Washington Times)
 
Deported Dreamer lawyers vague on details. (Washington Examiner)
 
ISIS-claimed attack in Paris mars final days of campaigning ahead of Sunday's election. (CNS News)
 
CIA, FBI launch manhunt for leaker who gave top-secret documents to WikiLeaks. (CBS News)
 
While Bill O'Reilly was crashing and burning, the stock of O'Reilly Automotive was soaring. (Washington Examiner)
 
Nobody works in one in five U.S. families. (The Washington Free Beacon)
 
EPA begins Trump's process of cutting down size of government workforce. (Washington Examiner)
 
The insane punishment a school gave a teen over a water gun. (The Daily Signal)
 
Berkeley reverses decision to cancel speech by conservative pundit Ann Coulter. (The Washington Post)
 
Policy: Ignorance of U.S. tax policy fuels leftward sentiments. (The Daily Signal)
 
Policy: Earth Day and the divestment campaign against humanity. (American Enterprise Institute~The Patriot Post
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liar-nObama’s Rules of Engagement
Killed 17 Navy Seals
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{ipatriot.com} ~ The catastrophe at the compound in Benghazi, Libya has been well documented – books, movies, etc. Needless to say, there aren’t too many Americans who aren’t familiar with attack that killed four Americans, and the subsequent cover-up... To this day, no one has been held to account. Not liar-nObama, liar-Hillary, Susan Rice, etc. Yet recently we were reminded of another entirely preventable event which took the lives of 38 fighters, 30 of which were American and 17 were U.S. Navy SEALs. The 17 included one officer and 9 senior enlisted – 7 Chiefs, 1 Senior and 1 Master Chief Petty Officer. Trust me when I say these gentlemen have been missed – not only to their loved ones, but operationally as well. Sara Carter at Circa.com recounts the attack on Extortion 17, the August, 2011 downing of a Chinook helicopter gunship, and the greatest single day loss of Special Operations lives in American history. Mark Levin also highlighted this on his radio show the other evening...  http://ipatriot.com/eye-witness-2011-afghan-massacre-killed-17-navy-seals-obamas-rules-engaged-killed-american-heroes/
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liar-nObama entangled in brand-new
'political espionage' scandal
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by Bob Unruh
{wnd.com} ~ While the claims of collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia seem to have dropped abruptly off the media radar, there is a new report of collaboration between a U.S. political campaign and foreign powers... But the campaign was that of liar-Hillary Clinton, and the chief architect was Barack liar-nObama’s CIA director, John Brennan, the report says. “One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election – liar-Hillary’s,” writes George Neumayr in the American Spectator. “Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under liar-Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy,” Newmayr wrote...  http://www.wnd.com/2017/04/obama-entangled-in-brand-new-political-espionage-scandal/
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NYPD Boss Alberto Randazzo Jailed For
28 Years In Elite Pedophile Ring Sting
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by MIchael DePinto
{freedomoutpost.com} ~ The federal investigation into the elite pedophile ring is moving full steam ahead and heavy hitters have been employed to lead prosecutions... Randazzo was caught in February 2013, when a witness found disturbing text messages on Randazzo’s phone and uncovered emails from women sending Randazzo pictures of them molesting their children.  When the witness confronted him, Randazzo admitted his sexual interest in mothers having sex with their children. At sentencing the government presented evidence that at least five women complied with Randazzo’s solicitations and sexually abused children in order to satisfy his sexual desires...
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Afghan official: Gunmen attacked
army base, 100 casualties
{foxnews.com} ~ An Afghan official says more than 100 army personnel have been killed or wounded after gunmen wearing army uniforms stormed a military compound in Balkh province... Daulat Waziri, spokesman for the Afghanistan Ministry of Defense, said Saturday that the attack a day earlier on a compound of the 209th Corps of the Afghan National Army killed or wounded dozens of soldiers and other personnel. He says there were 10 attackers. Two carried out suicide attacks and eight other attackers were killed in the battle, Waziri said...  http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/04/22/afghan-official-gunmen-attacked-army-base-100-casualties.html
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Left, Dems Attacking Free Speech
Is Only The Beginning
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by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Judge Jeanine Pirro offers her insights into the latest hand-wringing by the left over an illegal who was deported... First they view a clip of DHS Secretary Kelly defending the actions of his Customs and Border Protection agents in the case, which has now gone into the realm of the ridiculous in the nature of the claims made by the Mexican who is now where he belongs, in his country. Kelly says, “You would expect someone that was here under the DACA rules to be extra-specially cautious in terms of getting crosswise with our laws. He didn’t, so he’s gone.” Judge Jeanine explains that DACA is not an absolute protection, that if you violate those rules, you can be deported.” It’s kind of like the deal for violating the immigration laws, that have been nullified. Geraldo apparently was advocating for another chance – a DACA – as in what a nation of saps we’ve become. As a DACA illegal who is still breaking our laws, he should have kept more up to date with the policies of the CBP. They no longer do catch and release, they do catch and process for deportation, as Judge Jeanine points out. He’s clearly lying...  http://rickwells.us/judge-jeanine-left-dems-attacking-free-speech-is-only-the-beginning/
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Does Steve Bannon Have Something to Offer?
by Peggy Noonan
 
{peggynoonan.com} ~ My late friend Bill Safire, the tough and joyous New York Times columnist, once gave me good advice. I was not then a newspaper columnist, but he’d apparently decided I would be. This is what he said: Never join a pile-on, always hit ’em when they’re up. Don’t criticize the person who’s already being attacked. What’s the fun in that, where’s the valor? Hit them when they’re flying high and it takes some guts.

So, in the matter of Steve Bannon:

I think we can agree he brings a certain amount of disorder. They say he’s rough and tough, and there’s no reason to doubt it. They say he leaks like a sieve and disparages his rivals, and this can be assumed to be correct: They all do that in this White House. He is accused of saying incendiary things and that is true. A week into the administration he told Michael Grynbaum of the Times the media should “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.” “I love a gunfight,” he reportedly said in the middle of his latest difficulties. When he tried to muscle members of the Freedom Caucus to vote for the liar-nObamaCare replacement bill, a congressman blandly replied, “You know, the last time someone ordered me to do something I was 18 years old, and it was my daddy, and I didn’t listen to him, either.” When I said a while back that some of the president’s aides are outlandish, and confuse strength with aggression, he was in mind.

But there’s something low, unseemly and ugly in the efforts to take him out so publicly and humiliatingly, to turn him into a human oil spot on the tarmac—this not only from his putative colleagues but now even the president. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Mr. Trump purred to the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin.

So let’s take a look at something impressive Mr. Bannon has done. I’ve been meaning to write of it for a while. In 2014 he did a live Skype interview for a conference on poverty at the Vatican. BuzzFeed ran it during the campaign under the headline “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World.”

It shows an interesting mind at work.

The West is currently facing a “crisis of capitalism,” he said. The world was able to recover after the world wars in part thanks to “an enlightened form of capitalism” that generated “tremendous wealth” broadly distributed among all classes. This capitalism was shaped by “the underlying spiritual and moral foundations . . . of Judeo-Christian belief.” Successful capitalists were often either “active participants in the Jewish faith” or “active participants in the Christian faith.” They operated on a kind of moral patrimony, part tradition, part religious teaching. But now the West has become more secular. Capitalism as a result has grown “unmoored” and is going “partly off track.”

He speaks of two “disturbing” strands. “One is state-sponsored capitalism,” as in China and Russia. We also, to a degree, see it in America. This is “a brutal form of capitalism” in which wealth and value are distributed to “a very small subset of people.” It is connected to crony capitalism. He criticizes the Republican Party as “really a collection of crony capitalists that feel they have a different set of rules of how they’re going to comport themselves.”

The other disturbing strand is “libertarian capitalism,” which “really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost.” He saw this strand up close when he was on Wall Street, at Goldman Sachs . There he saw “the securitization of everything” and an attitude in which “people are looked at as commodities.”


Capitalists, he said, now must ask: “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us . . . to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?”

With both these strands, he says, the middle class loses ground. This has contributed to the “global revolt” of populism and nationalism. That revolt was fueled, too, by the financial crisis of 2008. None of those responsible on Wall Street were called to account: “No bonuses and none of their equity was taken.” The taxes of the middle class were used to bail them out.

There’s more in the conversation, which lasted 50 minutes and included the problem of racist and anti-Semitic overtones in populist movements. But it’s a thoughtful, serious talk, and its themes would reverberate in the 2016 election.

You can see Mr. Bannon’s basic or developing political and economic philosophy as half-baked, fully baked, or likely to explode in the oven. And it is fair to note his views haven’t seemed to gel or produce very much in the first dozen weeks of the Trump era.

But what Mr. Bannon offered in the interview was a point of view that was publicly declared and could be debated.

What will take its place if he leaves the White House or recedes as a figure? What worldview will prevail, to the extent Mr. Trump does worldviews? Policy changes accompanying Mr. Bannon’s diminishment this week included the president’s speaking approvingly of the Export-Import Bank and NATO, declaring that China isn’t a currency manipulator after all, suggesting the dollar may be too strong, and hitting Syria and Afghanistan.

None of that sounds like Candidate Trump.

It is possible what we are seeing is simply the rise of a more moderate or conciliatory or establishment Trump White House. But it also looks like the rise of the Wall Street Mr. Bannon painted as tending to see people as commodities. Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, is said to be Mr. Bannon’s most effective internal foe. He is the new rising figure. There are many Wall Street folk—some from Messrs. Bannon and Cohn’s old stomping ground, Goldman Sachs—in influential administration posts. They don’t come across as the kind of people who exhaust themselves pondering the meaning of the historical moment or tracing societal stresses and potential responses.

Will all these changes, in policy and perhaps personnel, hurt Mr. Trump? Probably a little. But nothing dramatic right now, because his supporters knew they were making an unusual choice in making him president, and they will give him time.

But if the Trump White House is itself changing dramatically, we’ll look back on this week as the moment the change became apparent.

I end with Safire, who’s been gone eight years. I still miss him, and I thought of him this week when I received good news. He’d received the same news 39 years before. I think he’d be happy, clap me on the back, call me kid. And I’m telling you the first chance he got to take a deserved shot, he’d take it. And if instead I’d endured some personal or professional loss, he’d be first one on the phone.

He had style. Style is good.

Beautiful Easter and Passover to my readers, who wrote in this week and reminded me how beautiful they are. I know that’s corny, but sometimes life is corny.

http://www.peggynoonan.com/does-steve-bannon-have-something-to-offer/

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