• Hillary Clinton: Islam Is Not Our Adversary By Richard C. Young
• Rubio’s Direct Collision Course with Russia By Richard C. Young
• Destroy ISIS Essential Facilities By Richard C. Young
• Goodbye Connecticut By E.J. Smith
• RIP Richard Russell By Richard C. Young
• ObamaCare’s House of Cards By Debbie Young
• Islamorada Sunset By Debbie Young
• Massachusetts AG to Keep Lights Out? By E.J. Smith
• Europe “Facing Its Destiny” By Richard C. Young

Here at realclearpolitics.com, Clinton is quoted, “Let’s be clear, though, Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison warns, “Rubio is going beyond his earlier reckless support for a “no-fly zone” and promising that he will risk triggering war with a major nuclear-armed power by seeking to topple its client while its forces are still in Syria.”

That isn’t the worst part of his plan. Now that Russia is committed to propping up the Syrian government, seeking to defeat Assad puts the U.S. on a direct collision course with Russia and could very easily lead to a clash between our forces and theirs. Even if U.S. forces don’t intend to, they could end up killing Russians on the ground, and that risks a shooting war with one of the most powerful states in the world. Rubio is going beyond his earlier reckless support for a “no-fly zone” and promising that he will risk triggering war with a major, nuclear-armed power by seeking to topple its client while its forces are still in Syria.

The idea that the U.S. should do “whatever it takes” suggests that there is no cost too high to achieve the stated goal of defeating ISIS, but that isn’t true. Furthermore, saying that he will do “whatever it takes” to win implies that he thinks that any tactic is permissible, and it traps him into persisting in the conflict no matter how much it costs. Based on the reckless, aggressive plan he has laid out, it could cost the U.S. a great deal. Even if the policy made sense, the attitude behind it is reckless maximalism, but as we can see the policy is also quite mad.

Former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer’s doable, unilateral, and non-time consuming plan to extract the United States from the Muslim world.

Dr. Scheuer concludes that if successful, his advised unilateral U.S. campaign would allow “the United States to bid farewell to the Middle East—leaving it to whoever is stupid enough to want to be involved.”

If the United States and the West really do not want to do the smartest thing and encourage a Sunni-Shia sectarian war, then it has the near-term option of destroying all those facilities in Syria and Iraq that are essential to the Islamic State’s effort to build a state or, in their words, rebuild the Caliphate.

Currently, IS is in possession of:

–Highways and bridges
–Portions of a railway system
–Fleets of tanker trucks, construction vehicles and machinery, and farming equipment
–Cell phone tower networks and overhead power lines
–Improved waterways and irrigation canals/systems
–Potable water and urban sanitation systems
–Hydroelectric dams and reservoirs
–Airfields
–Grain silos
–Mills for processing wheat and other grains
–Facilities for mining minerals
–Oil fields, wells, and refineries
–Gas fields, wells, and distribution systems
–Pipelines for fuel, gas, and water
–Factories, government buildings, warehouses, and military bases
–Farmland that is growing crops
–Hospitals
–Universities
–Police stations, military barracks, office buildings, and hotels that are used to store arms and house fighters

Each of these things, needless to say, is part of the IS military effort. They are even more important, however, to its effort to build a state, fund an economy, attract foreign volunteers, and feed, employ, and care for a population. They all are also wonderfully visible, cannot be readily moved or hidden, and are just the kind of targets that Western air forces can annihilate in an air campaign of relatively short duration. For the first time since 1996, the Islamists have acquired a large and valuable set of physical assets that they cannot afford to lose, and they are assets that are perfectly suited to the West’s conventional military forces and so will give Western militaries a respite from the folly of trying to defeat IS by killing their fighters one or two at a time.

Destroy the items listed above and you send IS back to being just very good Islamist insurgents; still dangerous, but no longer advancing the reconstruction of the Caliphate.* Moreover, the loss of these productive assets via air attacks, and the high numbers of civilians that surely will die therein, will create an unhappy and restive population prone to rebellion in the regions IS controls.

Over the weekend a client emailed me an article about Connecticut’s Borgeson Universal Co. It produces steering components and has operated in Torrington, Connecticut since 1914. It is leaving Connecticut for South Carolina because business is no longer doable or wanted in Connecticut. Here is the article:

With the Litchfield hills and Connecticut in our rear-view mirror as we move our 101-year-old manufacturing company to South Carolina, we are nostalgic, excited, and disappointed.

We love Torrington and Connecticut but not all the things the General Assembly and the governor have done to induce us to leave family and friends behind. After more than a century of manufacturing in Connecticut, we are not looking for handouts.

We have paid our fair share, but enough is enough.

Connecticut’s high cost of doing business and its anti-employer attitude have finally driven us out. We are not moving for any government incentives.

Consider these facts:

• We sold our 50,000-square-foot building for enough money to buy a 100,000-square-foot building — and still had enough money left to pay for the transport of 100 trailer loads of machinery and equipment to our new site.
• The property taxes on our big new facility in South Carolina are much less than those on our smaller former building in Connecticut.
• Our utility costs in South Carolina, especially for electricity, will be about a third of what we paid here, though our space will more than double.
• We are taking a third of our employees with us and paying them the same wages. With South Carolina’s lower cost of living, it is as if they are getting a big raise. And we pay our new employees in South Carolina competitive local wages.

These savings could no longer be ignored.

At the same time, the constant hostility of the General Assembly, the governor, and state agencies, particularly the state Labor Department, settled the matter against staying in Connecticut.

Year after year employers like us have to fight off efforts to:

— Expand state requirements for paid sick leave.

— Increase the highest minimum wage in the nation to $15 per hour and more.

— Require paid family and medical leave.

— Impose unworkable restrictions on workforce scheduling.

— Restrict our ability to talk to our employees about union organizing efforts.

— And, of course, make us pay for every new “investment” policymakers think is a good idea.

We have always believed that to attract the best employees, we need to be among the best employers. We have never paid minimum wage and we have always offered our employees excellent benefits, including health insurance plans, paid vacation time, disability insurance, a 401(k) plan with employer matching contributions, profit sharing, and other time off based on individual needs.

Some people in authority in Connecticut refuse to understand that a mandated $15 minimum wage would mean that companies like ours would have to raise pay across the board. It would mean that rather than investing in our company and being able to create more jobs, we would have to raise pay for all employees, including those who are already being paid a good wage. These cost increases would cause us to raise the price of our product and become less competitive with companies outside Connecticut.

To make it worse, staying in Connecticut would require us to speculate on how much more our taxes and costs will go up as state government fails to pass a balanced budget.

Under the current administration state government has imposed nearly $4 billion in tax increases and still runs a deficit.

We can’t afford to wait for the governor and the legislature to see they have a spending problem and to address it. We can’t wait for state government to make any more “investments” by giving our money to a few favored companies.

Perhaps the final straw for us was our mind-boggling treatment by the Labor Department, which actually awarded unemployment compensation to an employee who was fired for threatening a supervisor with physical harm.

No one is surprised that the only state agency we heard from when the word got out that we were thinking of leaving was the Labor Department, which insisted that we allow it into our company to conduct a seminar for our employees to tell them how to get all the benefits they were entitled to.

So, farewell to home, family, and friends. We have been forced to move to a place where we are welcomed and wanted.

Regrettably, it is no longer Connecticut.

Alan and Gerald Zordan own Borgeson Universal Co. in Torrington, which produces steering components and has operated in Torrington since 1914.

The publisher of Dow Theory Letters has passed away at the age of 91. Richard Russell worked right to the bitter end. Even in his final days, realizing that he was at the end of the line, Russell continued to offer great wisdom in his writing. I was a subscriber to Russell, virtually from his start in the late 1950s. Richard was put on the map with a great series of essays on Dow Theory in Barron’s.

In the early 1960s as a student at Babson College, I studied Dow Theory religiously. Over the decades, no one did a better job of bringing the tenets of Dow Theory to the individual investor than did Richard Russell. His newsletters were always cram packed with eclectic insights that often ran far afield from investing. Only Harry D. Schultz (HSL) was in the same league as Russell for turning out wide-ranging investment letters of amazing interest and prescience. I looked eagerly forward to each new letter from Russell. His passing leaves an irreparable hole in the genre of investment newsletters.

“We can’t sustain these losses. … We can’t subsidize a market that doesn’t appear at this point to be sustaining itself,” UnitedHealth Group Chief Executive Stephen J. Hemsley reportedly told the WSJ.

According to Rick Manning in The Hill:

It has long been rumored that health insurance providers were teetering on financial disaster due to the combination of fewer enrollees than planned, increased coverage requirements and profit restrictions imposed under the law. UnitedHealthcare’s admission during a briefing with stock analysts that continuing to operate under the strictures of the ACA doesn’t make financial sense is the equivalent of driving a dozen nails into the coffin of much-hated law.

But wait, there’s more. That ol’ promise that healthcare costs would go down by $2,500 for an average family took another hit of reality as a Wall Street Journal analysis of 2016 rates showed that premiums for individual health plans are going up, with double-digit increases more typical than not.

Besides skyrocketing healthcare costs, less healthcare service available, anticipated health insurance company abandonment of the system, patients being thrown off coverage and losing their doctors, and the failure of the co-op system, ObamaCare is doing just fine. It is the politicians who still support it who will be on life support come November 2016, when panic over the system intensifies.

Read more from Mr. Manning here.

Happy Thanksgiving from Dick and Debbie

Gratitude Keeps Your Heart Healthy

Taking the time to focus on what you are grateful for is not only good for your soul, but it is also good for your heart. New research suggests that gratitude helps the heart because it reduces stress, a huge factor in heart disease. Read more here from NPR on why the more grateful people were the healthier they were.

A study by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (Dem) concludes the state doesn’t need a new natural gas pipeline to keep the lights on, reports the Boston Herald:

Healey is advocating the “de-industrialization of Massachusetts,” said David Tuerck, executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute.

“She wants to exacerbate the existing problem where electric rates are higher than any other state already,” said Tuerck. “She must be caught up in the climate change madness — climate change has become a kind of religion and she is caught up in it.”

Healey’s study, conducted by the Analysis Group Inc., found that spending more on energy efficiency would ensure the electric grid’s reliability while saving ratepayers about $150 million a year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions — while building a pipeline would save closer to $60 million a year without any climate change benefits.

“This study demonstrates that we do not need increased gas capacity to meet electric reliability needs,” Healey said in a statement, “and that electric ratepayers shouldn’t foot the bill for additional pipelines.”

But the Baker administration has revised rules to allow electric companies to invest in natural gas pipelines and the governor has repeatedly backed expanding access to natural gas — as well as hydropower and solar energy — to cut electricity costs.

Healey filed the study with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in its review of Kinder Morgan’s plans to build a gas pipeline across parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Kinder Morgan called the study “flawed,” saying in a statement, “Its recommendations will do nothing to lower unnecessarily high electricity costs for ratepayers or provide long-term solutions to the region’s chronic energy problems and environmental challenges.”

 

France’s hardline PM Manuel Valls is supervising a nationwide crackdown featuring emergency measures that allow police to act without fear of judicial oversight. So far a countrywide sweep has produced over 1,000 searches and the seizure of over 200 weapons. It is “tough- talking” PM Valls and not President Francois Hollande who is orchestrating the French security response. The state of emergency will last at least three months. The Guardian reports here.