The New Know-Nothings

The gullible young radicals covering the White House, and how they got that way

Benjamin Weingarten

There’s an underappreciated side to the now-infamous New York Times Magazine story about Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. As shallow and self-important as Rhodes comes across in the article, he clearly knows his audience. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes said. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” Rhodes, like much of the media he spins, is a well-educated member of the upper middle class. He is a product of the same progressive cultural and ideological milieu, and he thus has keen instincts for what he can get away with—and no shame about revealing it.
Rhodes has good reason for such confidence. Surveying America’s elite liberal arts institutions, with a focus on Oberlin College, The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller illustrates just how unhinged most institutions of higher education have become. Schools like Oberlin have for decades rejected the tenets on which they were founded—namely, that exposing young minds to the Western canon would teach them to think critically and yield productive, well-rounded members of society. Instead, Oberlin and many other once-prestigious schools have become cauldrons of radical leftism. Heller describes students who simply refuse to talk with classmates of other races; scholarship students who view the same college that provides them with free world-class educational opportunities as a “tool of capitalist oppression”; and students who feel they are being oppressed because their classwork distracts them from social activism.  
Heller’s account confirms what critics of campus environments have been chronicling for years: that “trigger” warnings must be slapped even on the greatest books to protect students from ideas that might upset them, and that “identity” is treated as a kind of knowledge in itself—classic literature, not so much. Students at many of today’s leading institutions no longer study the classics. What do dead white males know about microaggression or cultural appropriation, anyway? At Stanford University, students recently voted down an initiative to institute a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement for undergraduates. Today’s academy replaces the knowledge and wisdom gleaned from Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus with political correctness, multiculturalism, and infantilization—to devastating effect.
Supposedly liberal and tolerant campuses create “safe spaces” limited to certain identity groups and those of a certain ideological inclination. In reality, safe spaces are safe only from the diversity their inhabitants claim to cherish. Activist students decry institutions based in “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” as one group of aggrieved black students at Oberlin described it. One can’t escape the impression that liberal arts schools are more focused on coddling the next generation of community-organizing social-justice warriors than on educating them.
The end product is a cultural and political elite made up of entitled leftists ill-equipped to deal with the realities of a competitive world. As Ronald Reagan would say, the problem with America’s elites is that they know so much that isn’t so. They see things as they wish them to be rather than as they actually are. They can be easily manipulated because they’ve never examined their own assumptions. And this makes them ripe for the plucking by Ben Rhodes and his ilk.
The progressive academy impairs the minds of America’s elite, leaving them lacking in both knowledge and judgment. This miseducation permeates the culture, which feeds back into our political system in a vicious cycle. Conservatives thus face a deep challenge. Our ideas are losing, and increasingly are not even being considered. We need our own long march through the institutions. Without one, we will continue to lose the country. For ideas truly do have consequences far beyond any one election cycle.
Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) has written for The Federalist, PJ Media, and Conservative Review. He is founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media LLC, a media consulting and publication advisory firm. You can find his work at benweingarten.com.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/new-know-nothings-14585.html

Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Radical Islam

Americans have been arguing about Islam since 9/11. It was perhaps inevitable that our presidential candidates would bicker about it eventually.

President Barack Obama is a little more stubborn about it. He even insists that ISIS, or ISIL as he and other government officials call it, “is not Islamic” at all.It finally happened last week when Donald Trump slammed Hillary Clinton for refusing to say the words “radical Islamism.” Clinton responded by saying the words “radical Islamism.”

Of course ISIS is Islamic. The first letter in ISIS stands for “Islamic.”

Every literate person who knows what letters and words mean must at the absolute minimum recognize that ISIS claims to be Islamic. It sure as hell isn’t Christian, nor is it Jewish. It is not Buddhist, Hindu or Zoroastrian. No human being on this planet thinks ISIS is atheist.

Obama comes off like he’s living in an airy fairy fantasy land. “Unless,” Trump said last week, “you're willing to discuss and talk about the real nature of the problem and the name of the problem radical Islamic terrorism, you're never going to solve the problem.”

“What exactly would using this label accomplish?” Obama angrily said in response. “Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away…Not once has an advisor of mine said, man, if we use that phrase, we’re going to turn this whole thing around. If someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists who we’ve taken off the battlefield.”

Of course Obama knows who we’re fighting and why. He’s been bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq for more than a year now. He’s been doing it half-assedly, sure, but he’s not bombing the Middle East’s Christians, Jews, Druze, Yezidis or Alawites.

And he’s quite right that we aren’t losing because he doesn’t use the phrase “radical Islam.” He could change his mind and use the phrase every day for the rest of his term and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference on the battlefield.

What he’s doing here is picking up where former President George W. Bush left off when he repeatedly called Islam “a religion of peace.”

Trump says this is political correctness and that it’s killing us, but this is something else. It’s diplomatic correctness.

“There are good reasons why Obama—and President George W. Bush before him—did not describe jihadists in explicitly Islamic terms,” Eli Lake writes in Bloomberg. “It was not because they are cowed by political correctness. Rather it was because the wider war on radical Islamic terrorism requires the tacit and at times active support of many radical Muslims.”

Lake’s case in point is the Anbar Awakening during General David Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, when every tribal leader in the western Anbar Province aligned themselves with American soldiers and Marines against Al Qaeda.

“These sheiks were pious Muslims,” Lake writes. “Many believed that apostates should be punished by the state and that fathers had an obligation to arrange marriages for their daughters.”

He’s right. I spent more time than was good for my health in the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. These places are painfully, even brutally, backward. Not every Muslim who lives there is a fanatic, but virtually none can be described as liberal or cosmopolitan with a straight face.

Then there is Saudi Arabia. The United States has had a transactional alliance with the House of Saud since the 1930s. The Saudis provide the world with oil in exchange for American security. Since then, Washington and Riyadh have drawn closer together for other reasons. We share many of the same geopolitical interests, especially when it comes to Iran.

The Saudis are kinda sorta allies, yet they preside over and promote the most puritanical sect of Sunni Islam in the world—that of the Wahhabis, founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18^th century. The Saudis spend enormous amounts of money spreading this noxious and dangerous brand of Islam all over the world. It’s a serious problem, and it’s long past time for the United States to demand they halt it or else, but the Saudis are nevertheless helpful in other ways and have been for almost a hundred years. 

So yes, we have fanatical as well as moderate and liberal Muslim allies, and Obama, like Bush before him, is reluctant to alienate them. American presidents have to weigh the diplomatic consequences of their words. Journalists, intellectuals, activists and historians don’t.

The downside is that people don’t like or trust leaders who appear disconnected from reality. And Obama is far more worried about this than he needs to be. All he needs to do is be honest and reasonable. He just needs to make it clear, as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did when he was bombing the Taliban in Afghanistan, that “the war against terrorism is not a war against a religion.”

Middle Easterners are among the least “politically correct” people in the entire world. The very idea of Western-style “political correctness” in the Middle East is absurd. They are far less “sensitive,” in the progressive sense of that word, than virtually anyone in the United States. And they know damn well that ISIS is Islamic. We’re not earning any points with our allies in the Muslim world by denying this, nor would we alienate any of them by acknowledging it.

The United States government surely would alienate our friends and allies over there if we had a bombastic bigoted blowhard in the White House, but calling the Islamic State “Islamic” isn’t even in the same time zone as bigoted or bombastic.

Whatever Obama and Trump say, the rest of us need to get something straight. At one end of the American spectrum is the notion that Islam is a religion of peace while the other end insists that it’s a religion of war and jihad. They’re both right, and they’re both wrong. Islam is not a single monolithic thing any more than Christianity is.

Former Muslim and Somalia-native Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains this better than almost anyone in her latest book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, which I reviewed last year forCommentary.

She divides Muslims into three groups, ignoring the theological and cultural distinctions between Sunnis and Shias and smaller sects like Wahhabis and Sufis. She also sets aside national differences between countries like Kosovo and Azerbaijan, where almost everybody is secular, and ultraconservative realms like Saudi Arabia where almost nobody is.

First there are those she calls Mecca Muslims, traditional and largely peaceful people inspired by Mohammad’s benign example during the religion’s early years when he lived in Mecca and politely invited others to follow him. The majority of the world’s Muslims fall into this camp.

Then there are the Medina Muslims, the often violent minority that follows Mohammad’s example when he lived in Medina and assaulted those who refused to convert. Medina Muslims include the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS, and the ayatollahs in Iran.

Both types of people are authentic Muslims. Both can cite the Koran to back up their beliefs and behavior. Both can say they’re following Mohammad’s example. 

Hirsi Ali’s third group are the dissidents like herself. Some are ex-Muslims while others are reformers—including imams and respected scholars—who are doing everything they can to modernize the religion and discredit the Medina Muslims.

Insisting that the Medina Muslims aren’t Muslims is as pointless as it is wrong. It may be defensible as a diplomatic fiction, but it’s also unnecessary. The dissidents and the reformers know damn well who and what they’re up against. They wouldn’t need to reform the religion if it did not need reforming. They also know perfectly well that the Islamic State is Islamic. These people are our best friends in the Islamic world, and they won’t be the least bit offended if Obama or anyone else calls a radical Islamic terrorist a radical Islamic terrorist. 

The Saudis wouldn’t sever the alliance either if the White House calls a spade a spade. They need us more than we need them, after all. People like the sheikhs of Iraq’s Anbar Province wouldn’t refuse to work with an American president for using phrases like “radical Islam” either as long as the White House made it clear we’re not at war with an entire religion.  

Obama is far more worried about this than he needs to be, and Trump isn’t worried enough. A commander-in-chief who bares his teeth at 1.2 billion Muslims in the world would be a catastrophe for a reason that ought to be obvious: winning wars against radical Muslims without enlisting the help of friendly moderate Muslims is impossible.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/barack-obama-donald-trump-and-radical-islam

Clinton Foundation scandals will be good fodder for Trump

Here is a pocket guide to where Trump might attack.

By Nick Gass

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/trump-clinton-foundation-scandals-attacks-224178#ixzz4CMX566Ql 

As Donald Trump gears up for his all-out war on Hillary and Bill Clinton, the presumptive Republican nominee on Wednesday is planning to draw ammunition from the controversies that have dogged the family, and particularly its Clinton Foundation, for years.

"I will be making a big speech tomorrow to discuss the failed policies and bad judgment of Crooked Hillary Clinton," Trump tweeted Tuesday, teasing out an address scheduled for Trump SoHo in New York, a day after Clinton laced into his economic and business acumen.

Trump initially planned to deliver a speech, originally scheduled for June 13 in New Hampshire, "discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons." But after the Orlando attack, Trump instead refocused that address on national security.

Now, he'll be back on the attack — helped by four decades' worth of statements, association, innuendo and scandal. And the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which has been embroiled in political controversy from its inception in 1997, is going to be at the top of Trump's target list.

Before Clinton even formally announced her campaign last spring, conservative author Peter Schweizer was writing Clinton Cash, digging into the foundation's financial dealings and connections. Less than a month into her run, questions resurfaced about a series of issues related to the foundation, from troublesome tax returns to myriad donations from countries with less than stellar human rights records. And while the media frenzy has subsided somewhat in 2016, Trump's early line of attack suggests that as organization Bill Clinton describes as one that has "done a lot of good things" is about to be dragged back into a turbulent political season.

In a sneak preview of the coming battle royale, Trump declared that "Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund," during a speech June 7 at his Westchester County golf club. On Tuesday, Trump's rapid-response effort kicked into high gear, firing off multiple tweets, posts and emails seeking to undercut Clinton's argument that he would be disastrous for the economy while promoting his own policies. And he accused the former first couple of "laundering" money and making "hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favors, selling government contracts."

There's sure to be more. Here is a pocket guide to where Trump might attack:

Tuesday's warning

As Clinton finished up her speech laying into Trump's economic policies, the Republican's burgeoning rapid-response unit sent forth an avalanche of emails, tweets and social media posts critiquing both the candidate and former president for a series of misdeeds, ranging from instances of alleged personal impropriety to broad responsibility for the state of the American economy.

In the first of nine emails sent out directly before, during and minutes after the former secretary of state spoke to supporters in Columbus, Ohio, Trump's campaign pointed out that Mark Zandi, an economist who Clinton pointed out in her address advised McCain, had donated to the Democratic candidate and had his policies praised by the current administration.

Another email sought to link Tuesday's news that Boeing had reached an agreement with Iran's largest airline as a consequence of the Iranian nuclear deal, stating, "Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, would not have been allowed to enter into these negotiations with Boeing without Clinton’s disastrous Iran Nuclear Deal."

Trump's campaign later attacked Clinton's "lack of poise under pressure" in response to her argument that he lacks the proper temperament to be president, referring to a forthcoming book by a former Secret Service agent who wrote that what he "saw in the 1990s sickened me."

A later email alleged that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton "laundered money" to her husband through organization Laureate Education while he was still an honorary chairman for the educational for-profit organization.

The White House ethics agreement

Foundation officials disclosed in February 2015 that one donation made during Clinton’s time at Foggy Bottom violated the ethics agreement the foundation had signed with the Obama administration.

The agreement was reached in 2008, before Clinton was nominated as secretary of state, as the incoming White House expressed concern about countries using the foundation to leverage political favor from the State Department. The memo did not ban donations from foreign countries with a stake in U.S. interests, with one exception. The agreement blocked donations to the Clinton Global Initiative, which hosts the fancy annual Clinton Foundation event starring the former president and other world leaders.

In the one instance acknowledged as a violation more than a year ago, foundation officials said they should have submitted a $500,000 donation in 2010 from the Algerian government for its Haiti earthquake relief fund to the State Department for approval.

“This donation was disclosed publicly on the Clinton Foundation website, however, the State Department should have also been formally informed. This was a one-time, specific donation to help Haiti and Algeria had not donated to the Clinton Foundation before and has not since,” a spokesman told POLITICO at the time.

Should Hillary Clinton be elected president, "[t]here'll clearly be some changes in what the Clinton Foundation does and how we do it, and we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it," Bill Clinton told Bloomberg TV on June 14, echoing what the campaign has said.

The donations that ‘slipped through the cracks’

The day after Trump promised to unleash on the foundation, Clinton and her surrogates began a two-day media blitz. During the first day of that press tour, they answered multiple questions about disclosure surrounding their donors, remarking that the organization went above and beyond requirements in an effort to be transparent.

"We had absolutely overwhelming disclosure,” she told CNN's Anderson Cooper. “Were there, you know, one or two instances that slipped through the cracks? Yes. But was the overwhelming amount of anything that anybody gave the foundation disclosed? Absolutely.”

The time a donor got on a sensitive intelligence board

Rajiv K. Fernando, a Democratic donor and Chicago securities trader who contributed to the Clinton Foundation, was placed on the International Security Advisory Board in 2011 despite lacking the qualifications of his colleagues. “We had no idea who he was,” one board member said, according to a June 10 ABC News report. ABC's report detailed emails its journalists obtained from Citizens United through the Freedom of Information Act.

“The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to ‘protect the name’ of the Secretary, ‘stall’ the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later,” ABC reported.

The emails provided to ABC, according to the report, showed a State Department official unable to immediately answer why Fernando was on the panel.

Emails released by the State Department as part of the court-ordered schedule do not explicitly show Clinton being involved in Fernando’s placement. In one email from 2010 provided to ABC with the subject line “ISAB,” shorthand for the organization, chief of staff Cheryl Mills wrote, “The secretary had two other names she wanted looked at.”

(For the scandals below, go to link: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/trump-clinton-foundation-scandals-attacks-224178

The case of the errant tax returns

The speaking fees, part I

The speaking fees, part II

The Russian uranium deal

The UBS deal

The foreign donations

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/trump-clinton-foundation-scandals-attacks-224178#ixzz4CMTWCLKh 
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Don's Tuesday Column

            THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/28/2016

                  Independence or endless rapacity

As the seminal event in America’s history approaches, our Day of Independence, thoughts gravitate to conditions and declarations associated therewith. Consider how clearly our Founders, and the Framers of that document, could see the historical significance of their governing revolution. They needed to take the full measure of the capabilities, qualities and spirit of the people of the colonies to whom would fall the responsibilities of self-government.

As Benjamin Franklin later admonished someone asking what they had produced (the Constitution), Americans would have the blessing of “a Republic, if you can keep it.” Never in recorded history had self-governance been tried on such a scale. Attempts to depart the rule of kings and potentates had often devolved into chaos, factional violence and the return of either military rule or the reestablishment of a sovereign line of succession.

In writings from those revolutionary patriots, fighting for independent self-rule of free citizens, it is clear that the grand opportunity they sought to seize would all be put at risk if an imperfect system of governance emerged. Similarly, if the people, charged with self-governing through their chosen representatives, reverted to habits and patterns of narrow-mindedness and short-term advantage—the American experiment could fail. Is this today’s America?

Inspiration came from a British supporter of our independence and opponent of the French revolution, Edmund Burke, “the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party…widely regarded as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism.”(Wikipedia)

Read carefully his thoughts on what is required for sustaining “civil liberty” by and among the citizens: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites—in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity (Webster’s: greedy, voracious)—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.

“Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” (From Edmund Burke’s “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly” May 1791)

Wikipedia: “Burke’s religious thought was grounded in the belief that religion is the foundation of civil society. He sharply criticized deism and atheism, and emphasized Christianity as a vehicle of social progress…(and) the preservation of citizens’ constitutional liberties…beneficial not only to the believer’s soul, but also to political arrangements.”

So, let’s see why it is that “The Declaration should still wake the powerful up at night” (Glenn Reynolds, USA Today, July 5, 2015). “More than complaints about a king, the Declaration of Independence was a justification for rebellion that applies today….It did more than that [separate us from Great Britain]. It also spelled out a theory of governance that represented a tremendous departure from pretty much all of human history up to that date.”

While divine-right political practices still exist here and there, it is suggested, not required, that the sovereign treat the subjects decently. “But the Declaration takes a different approach. It says that rights come from God, not from the king, and that they are ‘unalienable’—that is, incapable of being sold (alienated), surrendered or given away.

Moreover, government exists to protect rights, in the declaration’s explanation, “and when the government fails to live up to its duties, and the people no longer consent to it, it becomes illegitimate and subject to replacement by something the people like better.

“Does our government now have, as its principal function, the protection of people’s rights? Or is it more of a giant wealth-transfer machine, benefiting the connected at the expense of the outsiders? And, most important, does our government enjoy the consent of the governed? According to a 2014 Rasmussen poll, only 21 percent think so.

“So is a new American Revolution in order? As our Founding Fathers knew, revolutions are chancy things and often make things worse. And as the declaration itself notes, ‘All experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.’

“Even so, it might be a good thing for our ruling class to spend a little time pondering the Declaration of Independence, and its principles. There is more to government than graft. May they recognize that in time.”

I see the “rapacity” of, not a literal king/queen, but certainly the well-connected supporters and hangers-on to government largess, the subsidized crony capitalist infrastructure, and entire classes of citizens (even non-citizens). Their net “taking” from government, in the form of “benefits,” far exceeds what they pay in the sum of all applicable taxes.

We’ve seen nearly endless special grants, loans and subsidies for deep-pocketed, lobbyist-employing corporations. We’ve seen protests and demonstrations, peaceful or otherwise, express intimidation toward legislatures, demanding funds for such masses. Is there any doubt such demands will usually prevail over the reluctance by the minority of producing citizens to “contribute” ever-greater levels of taxation?

The “takers” and the “givers” can’t forever be reconciled; force, political or otherwise, will be needed to settle it.

Obamanomics: R.I.P.

By Stephen Moore

Well, it turns out Annie had it wrong. The sun won’t come out tomorrow.

That was basically the message from Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen last week when she acknowledged the economy is doing more poorly (again) than previously hoped. The Fed admitted that sluggish growth that caps out at 2 percent is with us for as far as the eye can see, or at least through the next two years. Is this a declaration of the last rites for Obamanomics? It should be. Throw it in the dustbin of history alongside all the other failed liberal economic experiments.

The previously bullish Fed finally and openly acknowledged that sluggish growth is the long term new normal for America. Secular stagnation is here to stay. The growth rate has limped out of the 2008-09 recession at a 2 percent pace now for seven years. The Joint Economic Committee of Congress tells us a normal recovery gives us about 3.5 percent growth and the Reagan and JFK booms were closer to 4 percent. So the GDP today thanks to President Obama is about $2 to $3 trillion smaller than it should be. This is roughly the equivalent of losing the entire annual output of every business and worker in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana combined.

Instead of speeding up to recover all this lost ground, we’re decelerating. Growth was 1.4 percent in the 4th quarter of 2015. It was 0.8 percent in the first quarter of this year. The Fed now has downgraded growth now to less than 2 percent for the rest of 2016 — down from an original forecast of 2.4 percent. Ms. Yellen now is telling us that the chances of an interest rate hike this year before the election are close to zero. That certainly worked out well for Hillary who needs a growing economy to have any chance of winning in November.

No one is more surprised by this turn of events than Mr. Obama himself. The Obama economists have consistently overestimated growth for seven years now to the tune of $2 trillion accumulated lost growth (see figure.) Alas, they were drinking their own Kool-Aid.

Article Continues Below

Democrats Stage House Sit-In For Gun Vote

RollCall

All of this comes atop the lousy jobs report, the finding that 95 million Americans over the age of 16 aren’t working, and that still 40 million are on food stamps. The business sector is in especially worrisome shape with industrial production down 1.4 percent over the past year, investment slumping, and corporate profits flat lined.

The lesson of the Fed under Ben Bernanke and now Yellen is that easy money is no economic solution to this decade-long malaise. As economist Larry Kudlow puts it: “The Fed can print money, but it can’t create jobs.” Our central problem now is not with our monetary policies. It is severe regulatory and tax drag.

When I recently attended a meeting of the Trump Leadership Council in New York with dozens of industry leaders and CEOs, I was surprised to hear story after story of these major employers of how Washington regulations and mandates are suffocating their businesses. Their message to Donald Trump: “Please get government off of our back.”

All of this brings me to the Republicans. Why are they stone silent on the economy and jobs, and why are they beating up Mr. Trump rather than Hillary and Mr. Obama for their economic malpractice. Every poll over the last three years finds the economy and jobs are by far the biggest voter concern. In 2007 and 2008 when the role of the parties were reversed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a blizzard of legislation to the desk of George W. Bush which he either had to veto or put his tail through his legs and sign into law.

Where is the Republican tax cut? Where is the Republican regulatory freeze? Where is the Republican bill suspending the 50-worker rule under Obamacare or the 30-hour-a-week regulation that has forced millions of Americans into part-time jobs. Why haven’t they suspended the Clean Power Plant rules by the EPA that are putting coal miners out of work? House Speaker Paul Ryan has some wonderful policy ideas he is rolling out, but rather than talking about them, how about passing them?

Hillary’s growth agenda is to give America more of the same. Congressional Republicans seem to have no economic agenda at all — just white papers of what they will do in the future. But to quote George Allen, “The future is now.” Congressional Republicans like to blame Mr. Trump for their precarious political predicament and lousy poll numbers. Maybe they should look in the mirror.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/06/22/obamanomics_rip_130966.html