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  David Lebovitz—chef, baker, cookbook author, and ex-pat living in Paris (read his
The Sweet Life in Paris) says that traditional recipes for duck confit can involve dozens of steps to prepare. Duck confit is the ancient way of preserving meat in an airtight grease pack. Before the days of refrigeration, this method was a lifesaver. Confit did not have to be chilled to stay fresh because harmful bacteria cannot thrive in dense fat.
But following a traditional recipe for confit de canard can be daunting—dozens of time-consuming steps. In David’s latest cookbook, My Paris Kitchen, he hacks back the recipe to five easy-to-follow steps.
The trick to this ridiculously easy technique is to use a dish that will hold the duck thighs snugly pressed together, which allows them to “confit” as they bake. If you only have a larger dish, increase the recipe and cook extra duck legs.
Another important step is to allow time before cooking for the seasoned legs to chill in the refrigerator overnight.
A bonus in the kitchen is the leftover duck fat. Use it to sauté onions, oven bake potatoes, fry eggs, or even to pop popcorn. You can also strain the fat and freeze it, or put it in little jars to give as gifts. David’s recipe is my go-to recipe for confit de canard. I buy excellent duck legs through D’Artagnan, a gourmet food company that bills itself as the “Vanguard of the farm-to-table movement for more than 30 years.”
Read more from NPR on David’s recipe for Counterfeit Duck Confit here.
Bon appétit.
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 Writing at nationalinterest.org, Daniel R. DePetris asks “What about the prospect for a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities?” How would Iran respond?
However Iran chooses to respond to an Israeli attack on its nuclear program, Khamenei will instruct the IRGC-QF to do its work as discreetly as possible. Any overt missile attack on an American ally in the Arab world let alone a conventional missile attack on Israel- would prompt the U.S. armed forces to scramble the fighter jets and deploy the aircraft carriers. This is not something Iran wants and a full U.S. military operation is certainly not something that they can afford to confront.
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With Hillary Clinton’s announcement of her plan to nearly double the capital gains rate for investments held less than six years, Stephen Moore writes that it shows a deep and disturbing ignorance of the effects of the capital gains tax and its impact on growth.
As Mr. Moore points out, Hillary’s plan to raise the capital gains rate will not raise any money. Instead it will hurt small businesses, workers, and American competitiveness. Read Moore here.
The late, great Jack Kemp, an architect of the Reagan tax cuts, used to say “without capital, capitalism is just another ism.” Capital is the plant, the machinery, the computers, and trucks that businesses invest in to become productive and efficient providers of goods and services.
So it’s strange that last week Hillary Rodham Clinton declared war on capital with her plan to nearly double the capital gains rate for investments held less than six years.
The capital gains tax rate fell to 15 percent in the George W. Bush years, was raised 23.8 percent under President Obama, and Mrs. Clinton would jack up the rate to as high as 42 percent — with the rate falling the longer the asset is held.
“This is the worst economic idea of I’ve heard in years,” marvels Larry Kudlow of CNBC. “It’s a wrecking ball to the economy.” Mrs. Clinton’s plan reveals such a deep an disturbing ignorance of the effects of the capital gains tax and its impact on growth that it’s time to bust some of the key myths about ow this tax affects the economy:
1. The tax on capital gains income is much lower than the tax on wages and salaries of the working class.
Mrs. Clinton says she would merely tax income from capital at the same rate as middle class Americans have taken from their paychecks. She would tax capital gains as ordinary income for those who make over about $450,000 a year. But this would make taxes on capital income punitive and here’s why. First, most capital gains come from the sale of financial assets like stock. But publicly held companies have to pay corporate income tax at a rate of 35 percent. Capital gains is a second tax on that income when the stock is sold. So the actual tax rate on capital gains income is closer to 40-50 percent and Mrs. Clinton would raise that to 60 percent.
Second, capital gains is a tax on the increase of the valuation of a stock, but is not adjusted for inflation. So when inflation is high, the capital “gain” can be mostly due to inflation. In other words the gain can be illusory and the tax rate can even rise above 100 percent.
Finally, although we require investors to pay tax on all of their capital gains, they only get to deduct a small share of their losses. So this skews the tax code against risk taking.
2. Raising the capital gains tax will raise billions of dollars for the government.
The Hillary plan is almost all pain with no gain. It’s highly unlikely the tax hike will raise any money for the Treasury and if history is a guide it will lose revenue. After the capital gains tax hike in 1986 from 20 percent to 28 percent, capital gains revenues actually fell from $44 billion a year to $27 billion a year by 1991. After Bill Clinton cut the capital gains tax down to 20% again, capital gains revenues surged from $54 billion in 1996 to $99 billion in 1999. Lower rates, more revenues.
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One takeaway from my recent visit with my friends at White Mountain Firearms in North Conway, New Hampshire is that guns and ammo aren’t getting any cheaper. My favored Sig Sauer 226 MK 25 chambered in 9mm is about 25 percent more expensive than it was five years ago. But I’ve invested a lot of time and energy becoming proficient in this particular model, so I purchased another. And I view my recent purchase as a collector, because it adds value to my situation. Often times the best investments are made when making a profit is the last thing on your in mind.
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  In his lead article for The National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn writes about a Richard Rovere article in the America
Scholar on the establishment. “The Establishment, as I see it, is not at any level a membership organization, and in the lower reaches it is not organized at all. In the upper reaches, some divisions have achieved a high degree of organization and centralization and, consequently, of exclusiveness and power. The directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, make up a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that seeks to control our destiny as a nation.”
Heilbrunn tells readers that the Vietnam War discredited the establishment. And he writes that establishment foreign policy studies that depict leading foreign-policy figures from the Cold War, some of whose surviving members (most notably George F. Kennan, who died at the age of 101 in 2005), warned against both NATO expansion and the Iraq War.
Writing about former U. S. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, Heilbrunn tells readers that Scowcroft “played a central role in promoting an internationalist foreign policy grounded in realist precepts. He stands for the antithesis of a crusading doctrine that goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The bluster and braggadocio that characterize many of his detractors are alien to Scowcroft. So as a welter of Republican candidates prepare to seek their party’s nomination for the presidency, they would do well to contemplate his legacy.”
Regarding Saddam Hussein, Scowcroft wrote in a WSJ article (Don’t Attack Saddam) that toppling Saddam would “swell the ranks of the terrorists” and might “destabilize Arab regimes in the region.” “Scowcroft had it right,” concludes Mr. Heilbrunn.
Jacob Heilbrunn wraps up with a rembrance of a dinner party attended by both Brent Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice. Rice commented regarding Iraq, “No one told me Iraq would be so difficult.” “Yes they did,” Scowcroft replied, “but you weren’t listening.”
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Wired’s Andy Greenberg shows how easy it is to make a ghost gun:
THIS IS MY ghost gun. To quote the rifleman’s creed, there are many like it, but this one is mine. It’s called a “ghost gun”—a term popularized by gun control advocates but increasingly adopted by gun lovers too—because it’s an untraceable semiautomatic rifle with no serial number, existing beyond law enforcement’s knowledge and control. And if I feel a strangely personal connection to this lethal, libertarian weapon, it’s because I made it myself, in a back room of WIRED’s downtown San Francisco office on a cloudy afternoon.
I did this mostly alone. I have virtually no technical understanding of firearms and a Cro-Magnon man’s mastery of power tools. Still, I made a fully metal, functional, and accurate AR-15. To be specific, I made the rifle’s lower receiver; that’s the body of the gun, the only part that US law defines and regulates as a “firearm.” All I needed for my entirely legal DIY gunsmithing project was about six hours, a 12-year-old’s understanding of computer software, an $80 chunk of aluminum, and a nearly featureless black 1-cubic-foot desktop milling machine called the Ghost Gunner.
The Ghost Gunner is a $1,500 computer-numerical-controlled (CNC) mill sold by Defense Distributed, the gun access advocacy group that gained notoriety in 2012 and 2013 when it began creating 3-D-printed gun parts and the Liberator, the world’s first fully 3-D-printed pistol. While the political controversy surrounding the notion of a lethal plastic weapon that anyone can download and print haswaxed and waned, Defense Distributed’s DIY gun-making has advanced from plastic to metal. Like other CNC mills, the Ghost Gunner uses a digital file to carve objects out of aluminum. With the first shipments of this sold-out machine starting this spring, the group intends to make it vastly easier for normal people to fabricate gun parts out of a material that’s practically as strong as the stuff used in industrially manufactured weapons.
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 What perspective do Donald Trump and Bono share? They both believe, according to Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell, that “your income belongs in your pocket, not in the grasping hands of politicians.”
Dr. Mitchell explains, “As an economist, I don’t want tax increases because the economy will be hurt and workers will suffer … what upsets me at a visceral level is the notion of sending more money to DC when there’s so much waste, fraud, and abuse.”
See Dan here in New Hampshire explaining spending restraint.
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 Writing in the July/August issue of The American Conservative, William S. Lind, director of the American Conservative Center for Public Action, tells readers it is the F-35 airplane: “Procuring the F-35 will cost nearly $400 billion and require annual funding of an average $12.4 billion a year through 2038.”
[W]e are buying F-35s before we know whether they will work. Almost half of developmental testing remains to be done, and operational testing—determining if the plane works in combat, not just technically—has barely begun.
Republicans in Congress continually call for reducing the federal deficit. Sloughing off this albatross would save a neat trillion. At the very least, congressional budget hawks should demand a fly-off, where the F-35 would have to prove it is a better fighter than our existing F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s. Will they? No.
My view is that the U.S. should not have gotten into the Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan (post bin Laden’s getaway), Iraq (second initiative) or Libyan adventures. So where would the supposed advanced technical advantages of the fighter, critics refer to as “Porky Pig” and claim “maneuvers like a brick,” be cost effective if even useful?
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 Not surprising, on the three major issues I would have liked answers to, none were forthcoming.
Here is how I saw the debate:
(1) Trump—As advertised, off the rails, but will have some appeal. Hard to think he helped himself.
(2) Bush—A real yawner. No way he helped himself.
(3) Walker—How did he even make the top ten? Walker hurt himself.
(4) Carson—Politics is new to Ben. May have dropped out of the top ten.
(5) Huckabee—Hard to think he plays beyond his Christian base.
(6) Cruz—Did himself no harm, but never got into “Cruz Mode.”
(7) Rubio—The clear winner. Sharp and on message.
(8) Paul—My favorite on the issues, but he has hurt himself in the foreign policy arena and did not help himself last night. Disappointing.
(9) Christie—Can swing for the fences and is going to be a factor. Did himself some good last night.
(10) Kasich—I have not been a Kasich fan on the issues, but I want to like John. He helped himself last night and will stay in the top ten, probably to include Fiorina.
Who drops out of the top ten? Ben Carson is probably the odd man out, which will be sad. Carson’s story is admirable.
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