Sorry, But Our Fight Against Liberal Fascism Has Only Just Begun

Kurt Schlichter

I wish I could tell you that, having dodged the naggy bullet that was Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, we can now spend the next four years being left alone. But that’s not in the cards. Liberals won’t – because they can’t – pause to reflect on how they should stop being such insufferable jerks and live with us normals in peace and mutual respect. Instead, they are doubling down on their gambit for unrestrained power over every aspect of our lives, fueled by a hatred for Donald Trump that is, in reality, a hatred for us.

Remember, they really do hate us. Just ask them.
Just watch what they do. They will always side against us – even when a professional scammer stages a fake “hate crime” on an airplane. They will side with the hoaxer even though every single “Trump-inspired hate crime” – and almost all others – turns out to be a hoax. Every. Single. One.
When it comes down to it, they are more worried that some buffoon will sneer at a woman trapped in burka than that the psychotic creep who stuck in it will butcher a bunch of normal Americans while shouting “Allah akbar!” We have to say “No” – normal lives matter.
Understand that they will not stop. They will not change. We must therefore defeat them, because otherwise there will be no peace. As with so much in life, Dolph Lundgren shows us the way, though in this case liberals are less a macho, tough prizefighter named “Rocky” than a 23 year-old gender-fluid Oberlin grad named “Fussy” who lives in Brooklyn off of his/her/xes dad’s money while trying to be a non-rhyming poet.
We must keep fighting. We must never give an inch, never back down, never give up. We must respond to every attack upon us, large or small, with overwhelming firepower. But defense is not enough – we must go on offense, seize the initiative, and aggressively destroy anything that will aid liberals in their long-term goal of rendering us silenced and subservient.
The Democratic Party? Smash it.
The mainstream media? Crush it.
Academia? Nuke it ‘til it glows, preferably from orbit.
It’s the only way to be sure.
They babble on about not “normalizing” Trump’s election when their real goal is to delegitimize anyone exercising political power but themselves. This is not about Trump – this about us. Reluctant Rockettes? Radical LGBT jerks screaming at children on airplanes? And my personal favorite, the recent discovery by the very people who never saw a Soviet rear they didn’t hurry to kiss that the Russians aren’t our pals. This is how liberals intend to break our will to resist, with a never-ending series of petty controversies and provocations until, exhausted, we simply give up and surrender, exhausted, to their benign dictatorship.
Well, to quote their failed progressive goddess, we ain’t in no ways tired.
Fight. Every time, in every way.
Some jerk mouths off to you on Twitter? Smack ‘em back until they are a quivering mass of whiny liberal Jell-O.
Some company decides to take sides against us? Boycott their crappy products and let them know it. Hey Kellogg’s, hope your liberal constituency enjoys its diabetes. And support the companies that reject liberal scams – fly Delta!
Some mainstream media liar lies? Carpet bomb the comments and unsubscribe to his dying paper.
Oh, and some spazz starts shrieking at you and your kids? Use appropriate force within the bounds of the self-defense laws in your state, of course, to protect yourself and your family.
Remember: Liberals are fearful because they know the kind of oppression they absolutely intended to inflict upon us if they had won, and they worry that we will do to them what they wanted to do to us. Well, I say let’s make their fears come true by demolishing their cultural edifice of hate and tyranny. Let them rule over the smoldering ruins of their dreams of power.
Look, none of us want to spend our lives in permanent battle mode, but there’s no time out for the foreseeable future. We don’t have a choice. Our enemies – and understand that progressives are our enemies, not just opponents of good will who merely disagree with us – will not give up. They can’t give up, because they are so invested in liberal fascism and in controlling us that they have nothing else, leaving them no option but perpetual cultural and political war. We would rather life get back to normal, but there is no “normal,” not anymore.
You may not care about politics, but politics cares about you, and if we just give up and let these nanny state parasites go unchallenged we will eventually wake up in chains. Forcing our little girls to be surrounded by urinating men in dresses is not the endstate – it’s just the beginning of a never-ending series of cruel humiliations and calculated oppressions liberals will seek to inflict upon us. Their goal is not just to take power but to revel in the wicked delight of rubbing our faces in our powerlessness.
They hate us. Get that through your head, then act accordingly. And acting accordingly means fight back, hard and ruthlessly, every time they try to assert their tyrannical inclinations.
But mere defense is not enough, though it is essential that each and every slight, provocation and assault be met with overwhelming and merciless pushback. It means attacking and gutting the liberal power base by popping the institutional pustules where progressivism festers.
Trump and the GOP must ruthlessly slash the governmental funding mechanisms that force us to pay for our own oppressors. Defund Planned Parenthood, sure. But that’s just a start. NPR, PBS, and all the rest need to go too. Outlaw collusive federal government lawsuit “settlements” that force companies to fund leftist “non-profits.” Derail the liberal gravy train.
Wreak the Democrat Party. Ignore the liberal lie that minorities are too dumb to obtain ID – aggressively move to fix the election system to ensure liberals in big cities can no longer cheat. And yeah, they cheat. Enforce immigration laws and stop letting them import foreigners to outvote the Americans who reject Democrat nonsense. Support President Trump as he seeks the support of minority Americans – the Democrats rely on retaining minority support through lies and governmental dependence. Break that cycle, and it becomes a party of a few white wine-drinking toffs in high income zip codes and college towns.
Crush the college cartel. Slash their budgets. Attack the student loan scam that transfers money from naive young people to scheming academics who steal the futures of their grads in return for useless degrees in gender studies.
Punish the mainstream media by going around them. Don’t subscribe. Don’t watch. Support the Trump administration as it avoids the gatekeepers via alternative media and by communicating with us directly via Twitter. Support the alternative media yourself – if you are paying for the New York Times or watching NBC, you are collaborating with the enemy. And the same goes for the entertainment industry – refuse to watch or read leftist propaganda and support independent entertainment and books like, well, mine.
Here are your three choices. There are only three. Pick one.
1. Peaceful coexistence while leaving everyone alone and free
2. Conservatives in charge, protecting normal Americans’ freedom
3. Liberal in charge, persecuting normal Americans.
I would prefer Choice One, but liberals seem to have vetoed that. Fine. Then Choice Two it is – us in charge, because allowing these aspiring liberal fascists to rule us is no choice at all.

http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2016/12/26/sorry-but-our-fight-against-liberal-fascism-has-only-just-begun-n2263156

RUSSIAN HACKERY FOR HACKS [WITH COMMENT BY JOHN]

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, RUSSIA,VLADIMIR PUTIN

In case you missed it last Friday in the run-up to Christmas, Brian Kennedy of the American Strategy Group offered up an extremely lucid analysis of the complete absurdity of the thesis that Putin’s Russia hacked into our election process with the deliberate intent to help Donald Trump win. To be sure, Trump’s equivocal statements about Putin lend some superficial plausibility to this idea—if you’re six years old. Or a Democrat and a media hack.

Do read the whole thing, but here are two of the more persuasive paragraphs about the illogic of the Putin-Loves-Trump theme:

We are being asked now to believe that the Russians wished to influence a U.S. presidential election. This master stroke of statecraft by Putin was designed, however, to bring to power a man, Donald J. Trump, who has pledged to rebuild the United States militarily and economically. Trump has detailed his intent to build a national missile defense, modernize our strategic arsenal to match that of Russia and China, ensure our ability to dominate the high seas with an expanded and more technologically advanced navy, guarantee our ability to project power with an improved air force, and have an intelligence and cyber capability second to none. How any of this is in the Russian strategic interest is yet to be explained.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton, following the policies of Barack Obama, stated she would, by not building missile defenses—no small strategic matter—continue the policy of vulnerability to Russian, Chinese, and Iranian ballistic missiles; delay the upkeep and modernization of our nuclear weaponry; and, pursue a reduction of our conventional military forces. On traditional strategic grounds, it defies logic that Putin would have preferred Trump to Clinton.

JOHN adds: We noted here that the Russians enthusiastically hailed the election of Barack Obama. Why? Because he was a Democrat and an internationalist, while “[a]ll Republican presidents have always defended national interests….” Is there any reason to think the Russians have changed that view in the last eight years? No.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/12/russian-hackery-for-hacks.php

Proof that a new ice age has already started is stronger than ever, and we couldn’t be less prepared

Lawrence Solomon: Proof that a new ice age has already started is stronger than ever, and we couldn’t be less prepared

Lawrence Solomon

Nathan VanderKlippe /National Post, file

“The New Little Ice Age Has Started.” This is the unambiguous title of a new study from one of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions, the Russian Academy of Science’s Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg. “The average temperature around the globe will fall by about 1.5 C when we enter the deep cooling phase of the Little Ice Age, expected in the year 2060,” the study states. “The cooling phase will last for about 45-65 years, for four to six 11-year cycles of the Sun, after which on the Earth, at the beginning of the 22nd century, will begin the new, next quasi-bicentennial cycle of warming.”

Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at Pulkovo and the author of the study, has been predicting the arrival of another little ice age since 2003, based on his study of the behaviour of the Sun’s different cycles and the solar activity that then results. His model — informed by Earth’s 18 earlier little ice ages over the past 7,500 years, six of them in the last thousand years — led to his prediction more than a decade ago that the next little ice age would occur between 2012 and 2015. Unlike the global warming models of scientists, which were soon disproved by actual measurements, Abdussamatov’s models have been affirmed by actual events, including the rise of the oceans and the measurable irradiance sent earthward by the sun. This record of accuracy — which he has repeatedly demonstrated in studies between 2003 and now — leads him to now confidently state that in 2014–15, we began our entry into the 19^th Little Ice Age.

Abdussamatov was once a lonely voice in the view that Earth could be embarking on a prolonged cooling spell due to solar, not manmade, factors. No longer. Because sunspots are eerily disappearing from the face of our sun — just as they disappeared during the Little Ice Age in the late 1600s — speculation of another cooling period has been widespread by bodies such as the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation. Last year, a team of European researchers unveiled a scientific model at the National Astronomy Meeting in Wales predicting a “mini ice age” from 2030 to 2040 as a result of decreased solar activity.

For one thing, we can deep freeze dreams of economically exploiting the vast energy wealth of the Arctic Ocean, which geological surveys indicate is the richest in petroleum of all the oceans. The conventional belief that global warming would soon melt the Arctic, and make economic the large-scale infrastructure needed to operate in its inhospitable environment, had many in the oil industry — and in governments — gearing up to claim their share of this new frontier. Their dreams will now need to be set aside for the cold century ahead.

The “upcoming new Little Ice Age will have a very serious impact” on energy security, Abdussamatov explains, because “deep cooling in the new Little Ice Age in the middle of this century would make it almost impossible to exploit offshore fields and pump oil and gas tens to hundreds of kilometres from the coast at depths of hundreds of meters.” Freezing conditions will also curtail energy developments elsewhere over many decades, elevating the need for energy conservation in a much more heat-needy world.

But Earth’s new climate will affect much more than the energy sector. Abdussamatov leaves us with a dire warning.

“The world must start preparing for the new Little Ice Age right now. Politicians and business leaders must make full economic calculations of the impact of the new Little Ice Age on everything — industry, agriculture, living conditions, development. The most reasonable way to fight against the new Little Ice Age is a complex of special steps aimed at support of economic growth and energy-saving production to adapt mankind to the forthcoming period of deep cooling.”

An overheated planet has never been a threat, say climate skeptics, not today, not ever in human history. An underheated planet, in contrast, is a threat humans have repeatedly faced over the last millennium, and now we’re due again.

“The upcoming climate change will be the most important challenge and a priority issue for the world and define the main events in politics, the economy, and the most important areas of the whole of humanity in the coming decades,” Abdussamatov concludes. It’s time we took the threat of climate change — of the real climate change — seriously.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.

http://www.financialpost.com/m/wp/fp-comment/blog.html?b=business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/lawrence-solomon-proof-that-a-new-ice-age-has-already-started-is-stronger-than-ever-and-we-couldnt-be-less-prepared

Posted in: FP Comment Tags: Environmental Issues And Protection, Global Climate Change, Nature And The Environment

New president is set to unleash a wave of prosperity

 

Wayne Allyn Root

Wayne Allyn Root’s column runs Wednesdays and Sundays in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Follow him on Twitter: @WayneRoot

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By Wayne Allyn Root
Review-Journal

Can you feel the sea change? America is open for business again. What a difference President-elect Donald J. Trump has made — and he’s not even in the job yet. Amazing.

First there was the Ford announcement. Ford officials decided to keep their small truck manufacturing in the United States (instead of moving to Mexico).

Then there was Carrier Air Conditioner and its decision to keep its U.S. factory open (instead of moving to Mexico).

Then there was the announcement by the Japanese billionaire who owns SoftBank that he is now investing billions of dollars into the United States to create 50,000 jobs, in honor of his friend Donald Trump.

 

Even Apple recently announced it was exploring ways to move iPhone manufacturing to the United States.

Why is all this happening? Some liberals claim, “It’s no big deal.” Or, “It’s all a coincidence” or “won’t make a difference.”

Really? If it’s no big deal, if it’s so easy to accomplish, why didn’t Barack Obama do it? Why were so many companies moving away from the United States under Obama?

If something is “too little, too late” do Democrats respond by throwing up their hands, waving the white flag and crying, “Uncle.” Because I don’t. I never accept defeat. Most entrepreneurs think like me.

Thank goodness we just elected an entrepreneur to run the U.S. economy.

I’ve lived my life with the Donald Trump school of thought. Trump and I have the same philosophy: Never ever ever give up. Just keep focused on your goal, no matter how impossible it might seem, and keep fighting like a cornered wolverine. Refuse to accept defeat. Stay in motion and always move forward. As one of my greatest heroes, Winston Churchill, is often attributed with saying, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Trump is not even in the White House yet. But he’s busy turning around the U.S. economy, bringing back U.S. jobs, and sending strong messages to counties such as China, Japan, India, Mexico and Brazil that America is back and either you play fair or we will even the score.

This is how smart businessmen play the game and win the battle for middle-class jobs.

Trump is winning on two fronts. One line of attack is to motivate business owners and business builders to start or expand by dramatically lowering corporate taxes, individual taxes, cutting regulations that strangle business, killing Obamacare and reigning in the IRS. If those things all happen, we will create a “reverse inversion.” All the companies in the world will want to move to the United States, instead of American companies running for their lives to escape. All the world’s companies rushing to relocate to America — wouldn’t that be wonderful?

 

But Trump is fighting on a second front, too: the psychological one. People are more productive if they feel positive, if they feel loved and appreciated. Over the past eight years, Obama has made business owners feel lousy, miserable, intimidated, targeted, persecuted, greedy. He made us feel like “Public Enemy No. 1.”

Remember Obama saying, “You didn’t build this”? That kind of thinking set the tone for the past eight years of misery and malaise. That’s why GDP has been close to zero. That’s why more than 94 million Americans are not working. That’s why business creation is the lowest in history. That’s why — for the first time in history — more businesses close each day than open.

Think about your own personal life. Would you work for a boss who treated you poorly and made you feel miserable? Would you produce your best work and efforts in that kind of hostile environment?

You can feel the sea change coming under President Donald J. Trump. America is open for business again. It’s cool to be an entrepreneur again. It’s fun to go to work again. Creating jobs makes you a hero, not a villain. How wonderful. How refreshing.

What a difference Trump makes.

And he’s not even in the job yet.

Wayne Allyn Root (Wayne@ROOTforAmerica.com) is a best-selling author and host of “WAR Now: The Wayne Allyn Root Show” from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. daily at 790 Talk Now. His R-J columns run Thursday and Sunday.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/columns/wayne-allyn-root/new-president-set-unleash-wave-prosperity

OBAMA’S U.N. PERFIDY

Anne Bayefsky is a leading human rights advocate. She is Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, and President of Human Rights Voices.

Bayefsky has written this article for Fox News called “Diplomatic terrorism at the UN, courtesy President Obama.” I have taken the liberty of posting it below, with emphasis added by me to certain passages.

The vicious condemnation of Israel at the UN Security Council on December 23, 2016 is a watershed moment in U.S.-UN relations – albeit not as President Obama hoped. Following the vote of fourteen in favor and one American abstention, Palestinian representative Riyadh Mansour and American Ambassador Samantha Power exchanged a telling handshake. Evidently, President Obama believes that he has put one over on Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the incoming Trump administration. But here’s another possibility: treachery at the UN will not be cost free.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what has just happened. The Palestinians have completed the hijacking of every major UN institution. The 2016 General Assembly has adopted nineteen resolutions condemning Israel and nine critical of all other UN states combined. The 2016 Commission on the Status of Women adopted one resolution condemning Israel and zero on any other state. The 2016 UN Human Rights Council celebrated ten years of adopting more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than any other place on earth. And now – to the applause of the assembled – the Palestinians can add the UN Security Council to their list.

Resolution sponsors Malaysia and New Zealand explained UN-think to the Council this way: Israeli settlements are “the single biggest threat to peace” and the “primary threat to the viability of the two-state solution.” Not seven decades of unremitting Arab terror and violent rejection of Jewish self-determination in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

This is not just any lie. This is the big lie of modern antisemitism. This is the lie that drove a Palestinian teenager in June of this year to creep into the home of 13-year old Hallel Ariel and butcher her with a knife in the back as she slept in her bed.

The bed was located in the “settlement” of Kiryat Arba – on Arab-claimed territory whose ownership – by agreement – is subject to final status negotiations instead of back-stabbing UN resolutions. So to skip the UN-eze, today’s hate fest was diplomatic terrorism.

Obama’s failure to veto the resolution is at odds with long-standing American foreign policy that has insisted on peace through negotiations, and not UN-fiat, as the only way to ensure genuine and long-lasting recognition and cooperation. His excuse for throwing bipartisan wisdom overboard was delivered by Ambassador Power, in one of the most disingenuous statements in the history of American diplomacy.

Power began by likening Obama’s deed to Ronald Reagan’s treatment of Israel. She repeatedly claimed that the move was nothing new and “in line” with the past, though “historic” is how speaker-after-speaker and the President of the Council himself described it. She noted “Israel has been treated differently than other nations at the United Nations” and then doubled-down on more of the same. She complained that Council “members suddenly summon the will to act” when it comes to Israel, after the White House had actively pushed the frantic adoption of the resolution with less than 48 hours’ notice.

At its core, this UN move is a head-on assault on American democracy. President Obama knew full well he did not have Congressional support for the Iran deal, so he went straight to the Security Council first. Likewise, he knew that there would have been overwhelming Congressional opposition to this resolution, so he carefully planned his stealth attack.

He waited until Congress was not in session. Members of his administration made periodic suggestions that nothing had been decided. There were occasional head fakes that he was “leaning” against it. He produced smiling photo-ops from a Hawaiian golf course with no obvious major foreign policy moves minutes away. Holiday time-outs were in full-swing across the country. And then he pounced, giving Israel virtually no notice of his intent not to veto.

Profound betrayal of a true democratic friend of the United States is the only possible description.

Israel’s Ambassador Danny Danon held up a Bible in that sanctuary of idolatry and spoke of the holiday of Chanukah, about to commence this calendar year on Christmas Eve. He reminded his listeners that over two thousand years ago another King had banished the Jewish people from the Temple in Jerusalem, and tried to sever Jews from their religion and their heritage.

And he continued: “But we prevailed. The Jewish people fought back. We regained our independence and relit the Menorah candles…We overcame those decrees during the time of the Maccabees and we will overcome this evil decree today.”

The Security Council and President Obama leave a trail of devastation across the planet, with evil empowered and good forsaken. But their record does not have to be our future. Today’s vote reminds us of what it takes for evil to triumph.

Doing nothing is not an option for our new President and our incoming Congress. The time has come to undertake an urgent and full review of America’s relationship to the United Nations, and to suspend financial support until that review can identify how best to use American dollars in the interests of peace, security and human dignity. The perfidy of Barack Obama will not be the last word.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/12/obamas-u-n-perfidy.php

Trump Should Quickly Rescind Obama’s Drilling Ban

Trump Should Quickly Rescind Obama’s Drilling Ban

 

BY ANDREW C. MCCARTHY 

In his enviro-extremism, President Obama is attempting to tie President-elect Trump’s hands by blocking vast swaths of the Arctic Ocean and stretches of the Atlantic from oil and natural-gas drilling. The gambit, announced by the administration on Tuesday, is part of an eleventh-hour wave by which Obama is flooding the regulatory zone: Promulgating so many rules – of the unpopular, hard-left variety that Democrats dare not unveil before Election Days – that he hopes the Trump administration will find it too cumbersome to undo all of them.

The incoming president should not let his predecessor get away with it. Obama’s lawyers apparently believe they’ve found a loophole that could make the anti-drilling ban stick. President Trump, however, will have the power to rescind it, and should do so promptly.

Obama will set an all-time record for pages added to the Federal Register this year. Actually, make that another all-time record, since he will (yet again) be breaking records he has set, and broken, repeatedly over the last eight years. In fact, the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes that on a single day in mid-November, Obama added an unprecedented 572 pages to the Federal Register.

Concededly, counting pages can be an imprecise or even misleading measure of presidential law-making. The Federal Register includes reams of documents besides rules and regulations. Plus, even rules that had the effect of rolling back rules would thicken the rule book. But let’s face it, Washington is rarely in the business of reining in its intrusions. The last eight years have been all about extending them – to the Arctic Ocean and beyond.

Trump will find it easy to cancel rules imposed in the late stages of the incumbent administration. Any rules that have not yet gone into effect can simply be suspended. And rules that have just gone into effect may be undone under the 1996 Congressional Review Act. The CRA empowers Congress, within 60 session-days of a rule’s implementation, to enact a resolution disapproving it. Such a resolution is not subject to Senate filibuster (i.e., it can be passed by a simple majority because the usual requirement of 60 votes to end debate does not apply).

For the most part, the CRA has been an illusory check on executive agencies run wild. A disapproval resolution, like any other congressional act, does not become law unless the president signs it (or unless the president’s veto is overridden). Obviously, a president is not going to sign a resolution that cancels rules promulgated by his own administration in furtherance of his agenda.

Still, the CRA has been successfully invoked once, in 2001. That example mirrors our current transitional circumstances: It happened at the start of the new Bush (43) administration, when Congress voted to revoke a rule implemented toward the end of the Clinton administration.

With Republicans in control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House, it will be possible to enact resolutions of disapproval, as long as it is done quickly. While the GOP margin in the Senate is thin, Republicans have been united in opposition, at least rhetorically, to Obama’s despotic style of governance. Now that they can easily do something about it, expect them to pass, and Trump to sign, resolutions that rescind brand new Obama rules.

Obama knows this, of course. His rule-making now is symbolism, an effort to buck up his demoralized left-wing base and shape how he is remembered. That is not true, however, of the anti-drilling gambit. On that, the outgoing administration hopes it has the incoming one outmaneuvered.

See, the anti-drilling edict was not issued as a rule. Obama’s lawyers combed the statute books and found a stray sentence in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) (specifically, in section 1341(a) of Title 43, U.S. Code). It says: “The President of the United States may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the outer Continental Shelf.”

From this, Obama claims statutory authority to bar exploration and drilling from any part of the Continental Shelf within American jurisdiction, apparently …forever. He reasons that, because the OCSLA does not prescribe a procedure by which lands that have been withdrawn by a president may be put back in play, no future president has the power to undo what he has done.

Nice try.

Obviously, the OCSLA gives a president, largely through the Department of the Interior, very broad discretion to manage development and preservation of the Continental Shelf. The statute provides the president with flexibility to react to circumstances that could impact either the environment or energy supplies.

Thus, the administration misses the point by highlighting Congress’s omission of any procedure to reinstate leasing in lands a president has withdrawn from leasing. That omission is unremarkable since Congress also didn’t prescribe a procedure presidents must follow to withdraw the lands in the first place. The withdrawal is accomplished by the president’s simple say so. Consistent with the congressional purpose of providing flexibility, reinstatement would be accomplished the same way. There is nothing in the statute suggesting otherwise.

Obama cannot tie a subsequent president’s hands by withdrawing lands from drilling. He can’t even tie his own hands. If the president had an epiphany tomorrow – if he suddenly realized that the ability to extract energy is in the vital interests of the United States (and of the world, which derives great benefit from U.S. energy development) – he could reverse his anti-drilling decision by simply announcing he was doing so. Or he could just have the Interior Department begin issuing licenses.

This would be entirely consistent with the OCSLA’s capacious grant of authority to the Interior secretary (in section 1334) to administer “the leasing of the outer Continental Shelf,” and to “at any time prescribe and amend such rules and regulations” as the department may previously have prescribed. Congress stressed that this broad authority is granted “notwithstanding any other provisions” of the OCSLA. Thus, if President Trump decided to reverse Obama’s withdrawal of lands from drilling, the secretary could immediately begin administering the leasing of those lands.

Perhaps Obama hopes that his ban will hold because Trump may not see any urgency in undoing it. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Obama’s action carried only “symbolic significance.” The is no real impact because “no commercial drilling is currently taking place in U.S. federal waters of either the Atlantic off the East Coast or the Arctic north of Alaska.”

Symbolism has its place, though. Even if there is no current drilling, leasing rights could be valuable. President Trump ought to announce that he will not continue Obama’s ban and will entertain bids. If the green crowd challenges any new leases in court, Trump should instruct the Justice Department not to defend the Obama administration’s specious theory that Congress, in a single, fleeting sentence that does not mention permanent withdrawals of land, empowered presidents unilaterally to impose perpetual drilling bans.

There was a legal way for Obama to impose an enduring ban on drilling. For the first two years of his administration, Democrats had complete control of Congress. Obama could have proposed a law removing U.S. portions of the Continental Shelf from energy exploration. Obviously, he didn’t do so for the same reason that he waited until after the 2016 election to announce his drilling ban: It would have been deeply unpopular and Democrats would have paid the price at the ballot box.

Thankfully, the days when Obama could impose by edict what he could not get enacted by congressional legislation are coming to an end. His drilling ban will hold until January 20, 2017. After that, President Trump should waste no time rescinding it.

https://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2016/12/22/trump-should-quickly-rescind-obamas-drilling-ban//?singlepage=true

The New York Times’ Fictitious Image of Gun Carriers

The New York Times’ Fictitious Image of Gun Carriers

Liberals imagine that law-abiding citizens do not have any idea how to use a gun responsibly — and that criminals will start following rules.

By Thomas Sowell 

Sometimes someone inadvertently performs a public service by bringing an unbelievably stupid and dangerous idea to the surface, where it can be exposed for what it is.

The New York Times can be credited — if that is the word — with performing this public service in a recent editorial against proposals to allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed guns. They refer to what they call the National Rifle Association’s “fantasy that citizens can stand up to gunmen by shooting it out.”

Nobody has suggested any such thing. Data collected over many years — but almost never seeing the light of day in the New York Times or the rest of the mainstream media — show many thousands of examples of people defending themselves with a gun each year, without having to pull the trigger.

If someone comes at you with a knife and you pull out a gun, chances are they will stop. The only time I ever pointed a gun at a human being, it was when someone was sneaking up toward me from behind a shed in the middle of the night. I never fired a shot. I just pointed the gun at him and told him to stop. He stopped.

Actually having to shoot someone is the exception, not the rule. Yet the New York Times conjures up a vision of something like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Concealed guns protect not only those who carry them but also those who do not. If concealed guns become widespread, then a mugger or a carjacker has no way of knowing who has one and who does not. It makes being a mugger or a carjacker a less safe occupation. Gun-control laws are in effect occupational-safety laws — OSHA for burglars, muggers, carjackers, and others.

The fatal fallacy of gun-control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns. Criminals who disobey other laws are not likely to be stopped by gun-control laws. What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims.

Mass shootings are often used as examples of a need for gun control. But what puts a stop to mass shootings? Usually the arrival on the scene of somebody else with a gun.

Mass shooters are often portrayed as “irrational” people engaged in “senseless” acts. But mass shooters are usually rational enough to attack schools, churches, and other places where there is far less likelihood of someone being on the scene who is armed.

Seldom do we hear about these “irrational” shooters engaging in “senseless” attacks on meetings of the National Rifle Association or a local gun show or a National Guard armory.

The fallacy of believing that the way to reduce shootings is to disarm peaceful people extends from domestic gun-control laws to international disarmament agreements. If disarmament agreements reduced the dangers of war, there would never have been a World War II.

The decades leading up to that war were filled with international disarmament agreements. As with domestic gun-control laws, the agreements were followed by peaceful countries and ignored by belligerent countries that built up huge war machines, such as in Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

The net result was that the belligerent countries had every incentive to start wars, and that they inflicted devastating losses on the peaceful countries that had drastically curtailed their own military forces.

Eventually the Western democracies got their act together and turned things around, after they belatedly beefed up their military forces. But thousands of lives were lost needlessly before that happened. World War II was in its third year before Western forces won a single battle.

Undaunted by history, the same kind of thinking that had cheered international disarmament treaties in the 1920s and 1930s once again cheered Soviet–American disarmament agreements during the Cold War.

Conversely, there was hysteria when President Ronald Reagan began building up American military forces in the 1980s. Cries were heard that he was leading us toward nuclear war. In reality, he led us toward an end of the Cold War, without a shot being fired at the Soviet Union.

But who reads history these days, or checks facts before leading the charge to keep law-abiding people disarmed?

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His website is tsowell.com. © 2016 Creators Syndicate Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443189/gun-control-laws-conflict-data-about-gun-owners-crime