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Conrad Black:
“…Conditions in Germany are just as worrisome.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and her chief coalition partner, both leaders of shrinking parties, are now clinging like drowning people to each other but sinking together. The opposition is fragmented between the reasonable but limited pro-enterprise Free Democrats, the very eccentric and militant Greens (who have already pushed Merkel to roll back nuclear power and make Germany dependent on Russian natural gas), the Alternative party which is moving steadily farther right and may actually entertain some of the views falsely imputed to Donald Trump, and the Link—the shriveled and embittered detritus of the old East German Communists. No easily visible successor to Merkel in the grand coalition looks adequate to reverse trends and no combination of the opposition parties looks remotely capable of governing. An ungovernable Germany is a historic menace.
Germany and France have both shaken the world before. Britain and France have on occasion inspired it. All three could do either now. The United States has saved Europe before, too.
It would greatly improve the quality of political conversation in Washington, in this week when it says farewell to a man who was a pillar of service to the nation in war and peace, nearly 45 years from combat hero to commander-in-chief, to set aside Muelleresque intrigue and cable news inanities, and recognize the condition of our esteemed allies.
The G20 meetings over the weekend in Buenos Aires demonstrated what we already knew: Trump and Xi will work it out. Putin is a scoundrel and a gadfly, and there are strong regional players, especially Japan and India. But the stability of the world requires that Western Europe rediscover its talent for self-government, which it spent centuries trying to impart to others…”
https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/05/the-west-needs-to-rediscover-a-talent-for-self-government/
“…It wasn’t just a “Blue Wave” that swept over California on Nov. 6, according to former GOP state Assembly leader Kristin Olsen. She said it was more like a “Blue Tsunami.” Now, some California Republicans are afraid the only thing that can save their party is the extinction of the state GOP.
“The California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time,” Olsen wrote. “The Grand Old Party is dead.”
California Democrats, holding at least 60 out of 80 Assembly seats after the Nov. 6 election, will have a historic supermajority in 2019. Only eight of the 53 California U.S. House seats will be held by the GOP. In statewide races, no Republican got better than 40 percent of the November vote.
So, Democrats go into next year with the largest caucus since California’s legislature went full-time in 1966. “When the nation looks toward California, it will look like the sun is rising in the west. That’s our future, shining bright,” Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D) said in a statement.
But, the San Diego Tribune editorial board noted, “the bad news (for Republicans) doesn’t end there.”
“Republicans used to be able to count on anti-tax sentiment among state voters. But a measure to repeal gas tax hikes went down in flames this month,” the Tribuneeditorial board wrote. “Supporters can blame misleading ballot language if they want, but voters’ recent support of tax hikes is also telling.”
How could this be? Life in California is far from perfect. Californians are coping with a housing crisis. More than 130,000 California residents were homeless in September, according to the Sacramento Bee.
Californians also suffer under the yoke of the highest rate of poverty in the U.S. According to the California Poverty Measure, more than 19 percent of Californians, close to 7.4 million people, “lacked enough resources to meet basic needs in 2016.”
U.S. News & World Report in March ranked California’s quality of life as absolutely the worst in the U.S. The Best States ranking graded the 50 states on having a healthy environment and a sense of community.
But, paradoxically, San Diego Tribune editorialists said voters are not blaming the party in power, Democrats, for anything that’s gone wrong.
“Voters seem to endorse Democratic values so strongly that they don’t sweat the details about everyone’s lives improving,” the Tribune wrote…”
https://pjmedia.com/election/california-gop-is-it-too-late-to-save-this-elephant-from-extinction/
“…Goodlatte’s statement matches the June statement by Rep. Jim Jordan, who said: ‘If our leadership had put the same whip effort behind that immigration legislation, Chairman Goodlatte’s legislation, it would have passed.’ . . . Retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan made the decision to create the rival bill that blocked Goodlatte’s bill…”
“…The plan was straightforward: After years of being challenged by President Trump and others about a decades-old claim of Native American ancestry, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would take a DNA test to prove her stated family origins in the Cherokee and Delaware tribes. But nearly two months after Ms. Warren released the test results and drew hostile reactions from prominent tribal leaders, the lingering cloud over her likely presidential campaign has only darkened. Conservatives have continued to ridicule her. More worrisome to supporters of Ms. Warren’s presidential ambitions, she has yet to allay criticism from grass-roots progressive groups, liberal political operatives and other potential 2020 allies who complain that she put too much emphasis on the controversial field of racial science — and, in doing so, played into Mr. Trump’s hands…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-dna-test-2020.html
“…The latest Census Bureau data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that about 72 percent of households headed by noncitizens and immigrants use one or more forms of taxpayer-funded welfare programs in California — the number one immigrant-receiving state in the U.S.
Meanwhile, only about 35 percent of households headed by native-born Americans use welfare in California.
All four states with the largest foreign-born populations, including California, have extremely high use of welfare by immigrant households. In Texas, for example, nearly 70 percent of households headed by immigrants use taxpayer-funded welfare. Meanwhile, only about 35 percent of native-born households in Texas are on welfare.
In New York and Florida, a majority of households headed by immigrants and noncitizens are on welfare. Overall, about 63 percent of immigrant households use welfare while only 35 percent of native-born households use welfare…”
“…BRUSSELS—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the Trump administration’s voice to a gathering of European leaders, offering a stinging criticism of the European order’s capitulation to rogue nations such as Iran, China, and Russia.
Pompeo, addressing a gathering of NATO leaders on Tuesday, offered a sobering rebuke of the international treaty group, telling the crowd the Trump administration will not stand down in the face of rising threats from a host of rogue regimes.
Criticizing the rise of anti-Israel bias and complacency in the face of growing threats from countries such as Iran, Pompeo championed President Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision.
“This U.S. leadership allowed us to enjoy the greatest human flourishing in modern history. We won the Cold War. We won the peace. We reunited Germany,” Pompeo said. “This is the type of leadership that President Trump is boldly reasserting.”…”
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/u-s-asserts-authority-nato-stinging-criticism/
“…Amazon is getting ready for the new Democratic House — and building a wall of protection against any potential focus on its growth and influence.
In the last month the tech, commerce, and media giant has hired three key Democratic aides, who will help with legislation and diversity issues.
The trade outlet Legistorm reported the latest hire and blogged, “Amazon is continuing its hiring sweep of Congress, adding its third Democratic aide in a month.”
It reported the hiring of Tina Tower as a program manager for public policy. She was Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Ed Markey’s assistant to the chief of staff.
And Politico reported two other big hires, House chiefs of staff LaDavia Drane and Tony Clair to handle the company’s ties to the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.
The outlet said that Drane came from the office of New York Rep. Yvette Clarke and Clair from North Carolina Rep. G.K. Butterfield…”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/amazon-on-democrat-hiring-binge
“…The CHSRA has also wasted large sums of money through poor management. Tillier has detailed how the Authority plans to spend billions to outfit Bay Area stations with unnecessary tunnels and viaducts, rather than making elementary improvements to operations. A state audit has shown that the CHSRA knowingly incurred massive additional cost risks by starting construction prematurely; desperate to show progress and to meet a deadline for federal funds, the CHSRA began construction in the Central Valley without buying all the land it needed, or even completing negotiations with the freight railroads whose rights-of-way it planned to use. The state auditor also criticized the CHSRA for hiring expensive consultants, over the objections of its former CEO, to do routine budgeting work.
Some of the worst revelations in the state auditor’s report concern basic failures of contract management. The CHSRA paid contractors without inspecting their work, and contract managers’ review of the quality and cost of finished products was often so shoddy that the auditor could not even conclude whether the CHSRA’s spending was justified. In one especially egregious case, in 2017, the CHSRA hired an external consultant to check the work of Parsons Brinckerhoff (now WSP USA), which had been paid $666 million for engineering consulting. The external consultant found that the CHSRA had not received finished work for 145 of 184 tasks that Parsons Brinckerhoff had called “complete.”
It seems clear that the CHSRA is too incompetent to manage a project of California HSR’s complexity…”
https://www.city-journal.org/californias-high-speed-rail-project
Related:
Meanwhile, the state’s existing water and road infrastructure is a shambles, and Sacramento still has no plan for dealing with a trillion-dollar underfunded pension crisis.
Charles C. W. Cooke:
“…Irrespective of whether he was a great man or a poor one, George H. W. Bush was a public employee. He was not a king. He was not a pope. He did not found or save or design the republic. To shut down our civil society for a day in order to mark his peaceful passing is to invert the appropriate relationship between the citizen and the state, and to take yet another step toward the fetishization of an executive branch whose role is supposed to be more bureaucratic than spiritual, but that has come of late to resemble Caesar more than to resemble Coolidge…”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-over-honor-our-presidents
This is an outstanding article by Victor Davis Hanson on the Mueller Investigation and the malfeasance in government and media circles relating to the Trump Campaign and presidency. I urge you to click over and read it.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/mueller-probe-fisa-warrants-fbi-informants/
“…It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk…”
http://nymag.com/news/features/45938/index12.html#
Related:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/late-capitalism-prophecy-faith/
“…This year’s United Nations climate summit will have a carbon footprint equivalent to the yearly electricity usage of more than 8,200 American households, according to the international body’s own figures.
The U.N. estimates the summit, called COP24, will emit 55,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide—the very greenhouse gas U.N. officials are trying to keep from accumulating in the atmosphere…”
“…A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans, a Census Bureau finding that bolsters President Trump’s concern about immigrants costing the nation.
In a new analysis of the latest numbers, from 2014, 63 percent of non-citizens are using a welfare program, and it grows to 70 percent for those here 10 years or more, confirming another concern that once immigrants tap into welfare, they don’t get off it…”