Thursday ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
 2016             The truth will set you free 
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Featuring:
Winners or Whiners?
Thomas Sowell
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 Taxpayer Assistance for Deportees 
A U.S. government agency gives out $50,000 a year to Salvadorians who were deported back to their country so they can start businesses there. Can anyone say government waste? As Fox News' James Rosen reports, even the Small Business Administration doesn't provide that kind of assistance. SBA only provides loan guarantees for entrepreneurs looking to start small businesses — the things that grow our economy, maybe even provide some jobs. However, the Inter-American Foundation, an independent agency founded to hand out aid to countries below our southern borders, distributes taxpayer cash to Salvadorians who were caught breaking our immigration laws. The thinking is that the seed money will encourage Salvadorians to start their own businesses, become established in their home country and never make the trek back to the States. It's all well and good until the local cartel hits up those fledgling enterprises for protection money, or a deportee takes the cash and the business never materializes. This redistribution program was highlighted in Sen. Rand Paul's recent report on government waste.
          The news also comes just as IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the Senate his agency doesn't care if illegal aliens use borrowed or stolen Social Security numbers to pay taxes — as long as the tax revenue keeps flowing. The problem is that more tax revenue flows out than in because Democrats, Washington bureaucrats and all the other 'crats want to normalize illegal immigrants to make anything short of amnesty politically impossible.  -The Patriot Post
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 Nine Gitmo Prisoners Granted Refuge by Instigator 
 of 9/11   The prisoner population at Guantanamo Bay was shrunk for the umpteenth time this weekend after nine Yemeni nationalists were transferred to Saudi Arabia to begin life anew. USA Today says "it was the first time the royal kingdom agreed to take in non-citizens from Guantanamo." Just 80 detainees are all who now stand in the way of Barack nObama achieving his goal of shuttering the facility, and a quarter of them have arrangements to be transferred.
          nObama has a well-documented history of recklessly freeing Gitmo prisoners, but this one is especially difficult to swallow. "The timing of this latest release is curious considering the recent uproar over the so-called 'secret 9/11 papers' which ... implicate Saudi officials in the 9/11 terror attacks," notes Larry O'Connor.
          It's even more chilling when we digest it from a historical perspective. Here's Fox News analyst Ralph Peters writing in The New York Post:
          Firm figures are elusive, but estimates are that the Saudis fund up to 80% of American mosques, at least in part. And their goal is the same here as it is elsewhere in the world where Islam must compete with other religions: to prevent Muslims from integrating into the host society. ... Consider how idiotic we've been, allowing Saudis to fund hate mosques and madrassas, to provide Jew-baiting texts and to do their best to bully American Muslims into conformity with their misogynistic, 500-lashes worldview. ... Decades ago, the Saudi royal family realized it had a problem. Even its brutal practices weren't strict enough for its home-grown zealots. So the king and his thousands of princes gave the budding terrorists money — and aimed them outside the kingdom. Osama bin Laden was just one extremist of thousands. The 9/11 hijackers were overwhelmingly Saudi. The roots of the jihadi movements tearing apart the Middle East today all lie deep in Wahhabism.
          Some kind of "ally" we've got there. O'Connor adds, "The president's priorities are clear: Empty Gitmo at all costs, even if it means handing terrorists over to a government that may have been complicit in the most devastating terror attacks in American history." We've been duped — and not just by the Saudis. 
 -The Patriot Post
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 OPINION IN BRIEF 
Stephen Moore: "[L]eftists care more about the supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle class. The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed with these radicals, and now they — and all of us — are paying a heavy price. The latest evidence came last week when another coal giant in America, Peabody Energy Corp., filed for bankruptcy. This is the same fate suffered by Arch Coal Inc., Alpha Natural Resources Inc. and other coal producers that have filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors. This isn't a result of free-market creative destruction. This was a policy strategy by the White House and green groups. They wanted this to happen. ... America is the Saudi Arabia of coal; we have an estimated 500 years' supply. So for economic and ecological reasons, we should want American coal to dominate the world market. But the environmentalists' rallying cry is: 'Keep it in the ground.' Do liberals care that the demise of coal could lead to major disruptions in America's electric power supply? ... Perhaps the millennials will realize their mistake when they won't be able to power up their PlayStations, iPhones and laptops."  -The Patriot Post
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Hilly Clinton Is ‘Utterly Corrupt,’
‘Incompetent,’ ‘Soulless’
David Rutz
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{freebeacon.com} ~ Feminist Camille Paglia unloaded on Hilly Clinton during an interview with Spiked last week, calling her incompetent, corrupt and soulless... Asked by Ella Whelan if she had to choose between Clinton and Donald slump-Trump in a general election, Paglia quickly said she would simply not vote for either candidate, adding she would either write in Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) or the Green Party’s Jill Stein. The clip was flagged by The Federalist. “I feel Hilly Clinton is utterly corrupt,” she said. “Her current positions on the campaign trail have been just co-opted from what Bernie Sanders was saying, because her poll testing told her that that’s where the party was. I think she’s absolutely soulless. I think she’s incompetent.”...     http://freebeacon.com/politics/paglia-hillary-clinton-corrupt-incompetent-soulless/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=b3e952a4c7-WFB_Morning_Beacon_04_19_164_18_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-b3e952a4c7-45611665
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China Flight Tests New
Multiple-Warhead Missile
Bill Gertz
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{freebeacon.com} ~ China conducted another flight test of its newest and longest-range intercontinental ballistic missile last week amid growing tensions with the United States over the South China Sea... Pentagon officials told the Free Beacon the flight test of the new road-mobile DF-41 missile took place Tuesday with two multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, that were monitored in flight by U.S. military satellites and other regional sensors. Officials did not say where the test took place. Past DF-41 launches were carried out from the Wuzhai Missile and Space Test Center in central China. The latest flight test followed an earlier, rail-based canister ejection test of a DF-41 on Dec. 5...     http://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-flight-tests-multiple-warhead-missile/?utm_source=Freedom%20Mail&utm_campaign=b3e952a4c7-WFB_Morning_Beacon_04_19_164_18_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-b3e952a4c7-45611665
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An Emerging Defense Budget Deal?
Peter Huessy
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{aim.org} ~ Last October I wrote a budget essay for FSM about the broken budget process and what could be done to fix it. An update is necessary... The American public is understandably fed up and this is in large part due to Washington’s inability to pass fiscally responsible budgets. What does that mean? Simple. The administration and Congress almost always wait until the end of the year to agree to a budget. With a filibuster rule in the Senate, efforts to cut spending which 41 Senators vote to oppose will bring the government to a halt. This gives a big spending administration a lot of power...
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Something Else Clinton Is Hiding Is Enough
To Wipe Out Her Campaign
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Just what did Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs,
expect to get out of Hillary Clinton in return for the hundreds of
thousands his company paid her to speak?
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{investors.com} ~ Election ’16: Many voters know by now that Hilly Clinton made a speech to Goldman Sachs for which she was well paid. What they don’t know is the content of the speech... They should. It might change some votes... Clinton was paid $225,000 in 2013 to speak to Goldman Sachs executives and technology chiefs at an Arizona conference. All told, she made $675,000 for three Wall Street speeches. Politico has reported that at the Arizona speech, Clinton “spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis,” a posture that is expected of Democrats. Instead of railing against Goldman Sachs and Wall Street as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would if they had the chance, Clinton apparently heaped praise on the company. A person who was present at one of the speeches said her remarks were “pretty glowing about us.”...
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Conservative Groups Call on Mitch McCon-nell, Paul Ryan to Not Hold a Lame-Duck Session
Leah Jessen
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{dailysignal.com} ~ A group of 75 conservative leaders want Senate Majority Leader Mitch McCon-nell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul Ryano, R-Wis., to promise that Congress will not hold a lame-duck session after the November elections... “At a time when the American people’s trust in their government is near an all-time low, the Republican-led Congress should demonstrate exemplary behavior by completing its work before the November elections so that voters can judge all the legislators on the basis of the votes they have cast,” conservative leaders wrote Thursday in a letter to McCon-nell and Ryano. Sent from the Conservative Action Project, the letter includes signatures from CEOs affiliated with organizations representing economic, social, and national security elements of the conservative movement. The leaders were not speaking for their organizations...
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North Korean Missile Exploded, Damaged Launcher in Failed Test
Bill Gertz
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{freebeacon.com} ~ North Korea’s first attempt to test-launch a new intermediate-range missile last week failed after the Musudan blew up shortly after launch, causing a huge fireball that damaged the mobile launcher, according to American defense officials... “We’re still assessing the specifics of it but I can tell you that it was a fiery, catastrophic attempt at a launch,” Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters Friday. “It was not successful.” The test failure on Friday represents a setback for North Korea’s largely untested long-range nuclear missile forces that include launch pad-based Taepodong-2 missiles, and two road-mobile systems, the KN-08 and Musudan. The Pentagon last month also confirmed that a newer long-range mobile missile, the KN-14, was unveiled during a recent military parade. North Korea also is developing submarine-launched nuclear missiles...     http://freebeacon.com/national-security/north-korean-missile-exploded-failed/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=d0b9afe196-WFB_Morning_Beacon_04_20_164_19_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-d0b9afe196-45611665
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Stop Complaining About the Primary Process if You Haven’t Done Anything to Change It
Pamela Adams
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{constitution.com} ~ When Sen. Bernard Sanders won New Hampshire and Hilly Clinton walked away with the majority of delegates, people were shocked but made some very funny “spreading the wealth around” jokes... When Sen. Ted Cruz started winning delegates at conventions in Colorado and then Wyoming, the cries of fowl play and shouts of unfairness shook the rafters. People are beside themselves because they believe it is a rigged system. If it is, it’s nobody’s fault but our own. We have sat by, asleep, voting in the same state and federal congressmen for decades, without doing any homework on our own, because we recognize their names on the ballot. We complain about the system but what have we really done to stop it? We moan and whine about the establishment running everything but what have we really done to change it?...     http://constitution.com/delegate-counts-unfair-peoples-fault-ignoring-constitution/
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New directions in the Iranian and Hezbollah threat against Israel
Michael Rubin
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{aei.org} ~ Chairman Poe, Ranking Member Keating, Chairman Ros-Lehtinen, Ranking Member Deutch, and distinguished representatives, it is an honor to speak before you today about the growing threats Israel faces to its security... Israel and, for that matter, moderate Arab states across the Middle East face a growing threat from a resurgent Islamic Republic of Iran. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has been a game changer, but not necessarily in the way the nObama administration recognizes. To claim a decade-long deal to be a success is disingenuous simply because the JCPOA front-loaded tens of billions of dollars in unfrozen assets, sanctions relief, and new investment. On one hand, if Tehran walks away from its commitment, it will have pocketed more than 20 times the annual budget of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. On the other hand, if Iran fully complies with the JCPOA, it will be left in little more than a decade with an industrial-scale nuclear program greater than that which Pakistan possessed when it built itself a nuclear arsenal...    
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United Healthcare To Pull Out Of Most nObamacare Exchanges
Jeff Dunetz
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{lidblog.com} ~ The other shoe has dropped. Last November, United Healthcare  announcing they were considering exiting the nObamacare exchange marketplace because they lost almost a half a billion dollars selling nObamacare plans... Earlier this week it was announced that United Healthcare, the country’s largest insurer announced that they will pull out of Arkansas, Georgia and Michigan exchanges. Today United Healthcare announced the will indeed stop offering plans in most of the healthcare exchanges. But UnitedHealth Group hasn’t fared so well in the exchanges created in many states by the Affordable Care Act. In an earnings call with investors Tuesday, UnitedHealth Group’s CEO Stephen Hemsley said that the smaller market size, and the higher risks in the short term of those exchanges are limiting the company’s ability to continue providing services. While the company services 795,000 people through public marketplaces as of March, that number is expected to drop to 650,000 by December. “Next year we will remain in only a handful of states,” Hemsley said, adding that the company doesn’t plan to have financial exposure to any exchanges in 2017...
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Hilly's Undeniable Terror Ties
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{americanactionnews.com} ~ Right now the Saudi Arabian government is busy lobbying the United States to stop the declassification of 28 pages of the 9/11 report that may reveal that Saudi intelligence provided material support and direction to the men who carried out the terrorist attack... If those pages are declassified, it will reveal what many Americans already suspect: that Saudi Arabia is not our friend, but a dangerous enemy engaged in a covert holy war on the United States.  The Saudis obviously don't want this to happen, so they're lobbying the US government to prevent the release of this information. And when the Saudis lobby the US government, they turn to one company: The Podesta Group. Here's why that's so interesting: A major Hilly Clinton campaign funder is personally lobbying on behalf of an arm of the Saudi government, federal records show...     http://americanactionnews.com/articles/hillary-s-undeniable-terror-ties
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Winners or Whiners?
Thomas Sowell
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{freedomsback.com} ~ If there is one pattern that is emerging from this year’s political campaigns, it is that rhetoric beats reality — in both parties.

The biggest surprise among the Democrats is Bernie Sanders, and among the Republicans is Donald slump-Trump. Although they are each seeking to be put in charge of the nation’s government, does anyone know — or care — what their actual track record in government has been?

slump-Trump of course has no track record at all in government. If Sanders has anything to show for his many years in Congress, no one seems to know what it is. But both are great at rhetoric.

Hilly Clinton’s biggest selling point is that she has lots of “experience” in government, having been a Senator and a Secretary of State. But what she actually accomplished in those roles gets remarkably little attention.

The foreign policies under Secretary Clinton have led to one disaster after another, whether in the Middle East, in Ukraine, or in North Korea. Where are her successes?

The Republicans began this primary election campaign with a number of candidates who did have track records as governors that could have been examined, debated and critiqued. But Donald slump-Trump’s rhetoric and antics got the lion’s share of the attention. Governors Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal were gone before most people knew much of anything about their track records.

Partly this was due to the media’s obsession with Donald slump-Trump. But the public shares responsibility for the triumph of glitter over substance, because polls repeatedly showed that the public was far more attracted to the glitter.

The current angry outcries because there was no primary vote in Colorado to choose delegates, supposedly because “the system” was “rigged” against Donald slump-Trump, is only the latest sign of a widespread lack of interest in facts.

The Colorado rules were there before the time for delegates to be chosen. If Donald slump-Trump did not bother to learn those rules, or to hire people to keep on top of such things, that was his fault. But it is all too typical of slump-Trump to cover up his own lack of knowledge or understanding by making wild accusations against others and inciting the gullible.

The convention rules that require a candidate to get a majority of the delegates, in order to become the party’s nominee for President, are also nothing new. But, here again, slump-Trump and his followers are raising an outcry by saying that it would not be “fair” or “democratic” to “steal” the nomination from slump-Trump and give it to some other candidate.

First of all, it is not slump-Trump’s nomination until after he has earned it, under the rules that apply to all candidates. Nobody can “steal” what was not his in the first place.

The rules are the rules. As an old New York Yankees fan, I still have a painful memory of the 1960 World Series, where the Yankees scored 53 runs and the Pittsburgh Pirates scored 27. But the Pirates won the World Series, because the rules go by how many games were won, not how many runs were scored.

As for “undemocratic,” institutions do not exist to exalt some principle, but to carry out whatever the missions of those institutions are. In even the most democratic countries, undemocratic institutions abound.

Families are one of those institutions. In a family with 3 children and 2 adults, the children do not run the family. In a military unit, democratic decision-making on a battlefield can cost a lot more lives.

Political parties are private institutions. They exist to choose candidates they think can win elections. How they do it is their business. Nobody has a Constitutional “right” to vote to choose a party’s nominees.

A party may decide to have voters in the primaries elect delegates. But, if that method fails to turn up anyone capable of winning a majority of the delegates’ votes on the first ballot, the party can then turn to Plan B, as has happened before, long before Donald slump-Trump came along.

The time to change rules is before the game starts. If the current rules need changing, there will be four long years before the 2020 elections in which to try to create better rules. The 1960 Yankees never whined that the World Series had been “stolen” from them. They were adults who knew the rules in advance.

http://freedomsback.com/thomas-sowell/winners-or-whiners/

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