THE FOUNDATION
"[L]et principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate — look to his character." —Noah Webster, Letters to a Young Gentleman Commencing His Education, 1789TOP RIGHT HOOKS
Nobel Committee Had Second Thoughts on Obama Prize
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Federal Reserve Keeps Nation at Zero
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee decided not to raise interest rates, just like it has for the last nine years. The nation has had seven years of 0% interest, despite the fact that, in the words of the Fed, "economic activity is expanding at a moderate pace." The Obama administration keeps insisting the economy is doing swell. Yet the Federal Reserve just can't bring itself to agree and raise rates. Part of the reason, the Fed noted in its announcement, is that countries like China and Greece recently added volatility to the global market. But this is not just a short-term hesitation, as the Fed sees at least three more years of Obama-induced economic stagnation. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board wrote, "The Fed predicts a stronger economy and rising inflation next year, but somehow they never arrive. And sure enough, the Fed's governors and bank presidents on Thursday again downgraded their median economic projections for real GDP growth in 2016 (2.3%), 2017 (2.2%) and even 2018 (2%)." Furthermore, as Investor's Business Daily notes, the government has an interest in keeping rates low because of the national debt. Increase rates, and the amount of money it pays servicing the monster also grows. In the meantime, the Journal notes, the Fed's zero interest policies are hampering the ability of middle class Americans to save.Comment | Share
No National Stats on Illegal Immigration and Crime
This is what happens when the government has an interest in not studying a problem: We can't accurately measure the relationship between crime and illegal immigration because the federal government downplays the information. Statistics on illegal immigrant arrests exist at the state and county levels, but the federal government doesn't compile or track this. According to J. Christian Adams, a former attorney in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, some states do track the relationship between crime and illegal immigration, but they do it in secret because of the policies set by the Obama administration. (We should also note that the DOJ stopped releasing its data on interracial violent crime in 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected.) "There are a lot of reasons states don't make this information readily available and there is no clearinghouse of data at high levels," Adams said. "These numbers would expose how serious the problem is and make the government look bad." According to a Fox News estimate, illegal immigrants commit 13.6% of the crimes in the United States, a number disproportionately large to the size of the demographic. This can be seen at a local level. For example, since San Francisco instituted its "sanctuary city" policies, the rate of rapes and murder in the city has spiked. But like its approach to the Syrian Civil war, the Obama administration places ideology before objective observation.Comment | Share
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
The Incredible Shrinking Military
By Michael Swartz
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Noting “the most important obligation that the federal government has is to keep this nation safe,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio made it clear that our Armed Forces are overdue for investment. “We are eviscerating our military,” said Rubio. “We have a world that grows increasingly dangerous, and we are eviscerating our military spending and signing deals with Iran.”
His solution: “Rebuild our military so that we don't deploy people over and over again without the necessary equipment to keep them safe, to send a signal to the world that we're serious. If we're going to lead the world, then we need to have the strongest military possible.”
Carly Fiorina lent more specifics in her call for the “strongest military on the face of the planet.” She rattled off her wish list: “[W]e need about 50 Army brigades, we need about 36 Marine battalions, we need somewhere between 300 and 350 naval ships, [and] we need to upgrade every leg of the nuclear triad.” She added that a bolstered Sixth Fleet, along with "rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland," could do the talking to Vladimir Putin for her.
Naturally, there are doubting Thomases who think the idea of more naval ships is overblown. Yet the Navy's fleet size is at its smallest in a century, and the concern is that lengthy deployments and an aging fleet risk our longtime dominance of the seas as China and Russia build up their forces.
There's also the issue of trust, for which Rubio called out Barack Obama's foreign policy strategies. “The United States military was not built to conduct pinprick attacks," Rubio argued. "If the United States military is going to be engaged by a commander in chief, it should only be engaged in an endeavor to win. And we're not going to authorize use of force if you're not put in a position where they can win. And quite frankly, people don't trust this president as commander in chief because of that.”
While peace through superior firepower is the objective, the military shouldn't get a blank check. In the latest of an ongoing investigative series, Arizona Sen. John McCain made an example of the spendthrift Permanent Change of Station moving program, which pays for the relocation of military personnel and their families and costs taxpayers over $4 billion a year. Exact savings can't be determined, writes McCain, because the Pentagon “can't track basic cost data and reliably compare it across the services.”
McCain isn't the only Republican speaking out about reforming military spending. Reworking the procurement system is one key for Gov. Bobby Jindal, who advocates spending at least 4% of GDP on defense. Fellow hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham has called Obama's sequestration cuts “insane”. This is all a necessary part of the long-term debate.
As it stands, most Republicans favor rebuilding the military, but they may run into the same sort of ginned up sentiment that allowed Obama to cut and run from Iraq and Afghanistan while taking a victory lap for his "success." (How'd that work out again?) Hillary is surely hoping the electorate doesn't care what difference it makes.
One lesson we've learned in the last decade, however, is that there's no such thing as a “peace dividend.” It was more of a short-term loan, and now creditors around the world are demanding our payment. We can spend it on deterrence or we can spend it in blood and sacrifice. It's our choice in November 2016.
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MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE
- ANALYSIS: ObamaCare Was Repealed From the Debate
- Fiorina Connects Iran and Planned Parenthood
- Bush's Answer to Funding Planned Parenthood
- Trump Lied About Casino Lobbying
- Appeals Court Sides With Religious Liberty
- Democrats Explain the Iran Deal
BEST OF RIGHT OPINION
- Michael Barone: Europe's Humanitarianism Is, Sadly, Not Humanitarian
- Erick Erickson: The Long Debate
- David Harsanyi: 'IStandWithAhmed': Pretend Islamophobia
TOP HEADLINES
- Trump Declines to Refute Voter Who Declares Obama a Muslim
- With Gov't 'Shutdown' Looming, Obama Ramps Up Attacks on Congress
- China to Build High-Speed Rail From LA to Vegas
OPINION IN BRIEF
Michael Barone: "Most Ellis Island-era immigrants came from the multiethnic Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires, where they were second-class citizens ... in an age of surging nationalism. America’s tradition of civic equality beckoned. Here, they believed, they would be equals with everyone else. They came not to oppose American culture but to partake of it. ... American elites today are less certain of the worthiness of our national culture and have retarded assimilation of immigrants. European elites are worse, laden with guilt of past sins exaggerated (imperialism) and all too real (Nazism). ... The United States has fallen short ... with immigration laws that have favored low-skill immigrants rather than the high-skill people the nation always needs, and by incompetent enforcement of those laws. Europe has fallen farther short by encouraging, through 'multiculturalism,' separate enclaves controlled by Muslim and other immigrants who oppose national norms of tolerance and order. And both the U.S. and Europe have allowed uprisings and civil wars in Syria and Libya to go on, generating hundreds of thousands of refugees and opening the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean. America and Europe may be uninterested in foreign disorders, but foreign disorders are interested in us. ... It’s natural for civilized people to offer help when they see a drowned child wash up on a beach. But it’s not always wise to offer to let anyone in who shows up. Such offers risk incentivizing literally millions to break the law and to risk — and sometimes lose — their lives. That’s not humanitarian."Comment | Share
SHORT CUTS
Insight: "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." —Aristotle (384-322 BC)Observations: "If [Carly] Fiorina rises, so, too, will Marco Rubio. Fiorina might have won the debate, but Rubio won Bush donors over along with others. He showed himself again to be a fresh face with new ideas and also a storyteller. People should not underestimate storytelling. The governors on the stage talked about their records. They talked about 2.5 million this, 100,000 that, so much cut, and so much saved. Rubio talked about his immigrant grandfather fleeing the communist uprising in Cuba. His grandfather spoke no English, but told Rubio to commit to America. Instead of talking data on global warming, Rubio talked about the economic impact on the poor and middle class. On ISIS, he did not cite troop numbers, but talked about safe havens. Republicans often lament no storytellers in their ranks. Here is a storyteller who connects with people through those stories." —Erick Erickson
Braying Jenny: "The evil genius of [Carly] Fiorina ... is her uncanny ability to play the gender warrior within the GOP while promoting the party’s misogyny. ... [H]er feminism seems to begin and end with the fortunes of Fiorina herself, and seeing as she probably doesn’t rely on Planned Parenthood for her health care, she’s happy to deprive millions of women of that care by promoting outright lies about the organization, as in her false description of the video she referenced." —American Prospect columnist Adele M. Stan
Talk about sore losers: "[I]f presidential campaigns were decided by fact checkers, Al Gore would have won in a landslide." —Vox's Ezra Klein
Non Compos Mentis: "[Y]ou wanna know who really won that debate? Hillary Clinton. ... Clinton is putting forward policy after policy that address America’s great problems. These people are just making stuff up." —The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky
And last... "Hillary Clinton banked on the First Woman President effect from the start — an understandable gambit for someone with no substantive accomplishments and many flaws. Her sex may be the only thing she hasn’t lied about." —Mona Charen
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Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis!
Managing Editor Nate Jackson
Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm's way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.
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