• Who Is Our Ally—Putin or Erdogan? By Richard C. Young
• Ted Cruz Exposes Marco Rubio By Richard C. Young
• Power’s Out. Now What? By E.J. Smith
• Two Air Force Ones Fly to Paris for the Price of…? Holy Cow! By Debbie Young
• Get Your Drugs and Guns By Richard C. Young
• Carry a Weapon When You Leave Your House By Richard C. Young
• Get Out Your Guns By E.J. Smith
• (Some) Black Lives Matter By Debbie Young
• Donald Trump Mocks the Media By Richard C. Young

Pat Buchanan asks, ”But in this war against  “radical Islamic terrorism,” who is the real ally: Erdogan, who has been aiding and abetting Islamic jihadists in Syria, or Putin, who has been bombing them?”

Mr. Buchanan also wonders, “What do we do should Erdogan provoke a Russian attack on his aircraft, and then invoke Article V and call on all NATO nations to come to Turkey’s defense against Putin’s Russia in Assad’s Syria?”

Pat continues:

Is Turkish strongman President Recep Erdogan trying to draw the United States in on his side in the war in Syria, and into a confrontation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia?

A little history is in order. Not until 1952 did Turkey join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, all but two of whose original 12 members were on the Atlantic or North Sea.

Yet bringing in Turkey was a ten-strike, putting NATO on the Dardanelles and Bosporus and on the southern coast of the Black Sea, right up to the border of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

But the world that made Turkey such a strategic asset has vanished. Armenia and Georgia are no longer Soviet republics but free nations. The Soviet Empire, Warsaw Pact, and Soviet Union no longer exist, and Balkan nations as well as the Baltic States are members of the EU and NATO.

Turkey is no longer the secular nation-state of Kemal Ataturk, but increasingly hearkens to the Islamic Awakening. In Syria’s civil war, her behavior has not been what one might expect of an ally.

Here at Bloomberg.com, Ted Cruz correctly explains to readers:

Qaddafi was a bad man, he had a horrible human rights record. And yet…he had become a significant ally in fighting radical Islamic terrorism. … We have no dog in the fight of the Syrian civil war. … Rubio and Clinton are repeating the very same mistake they made in Libya. They’ve demonstrated they’ve learned nothing.

Bloomberg.com notes that while Rubio favors a democracy-spreading “Wilsonian” view of foreign policy, Cruz embodies a narrower “Jacksonian” view. In a recent article for The Atlantic , political science professor Peter Beinart explained the Jacksonian philosophy: “They don’t like spending money or sending troops abroad. They don’t see free trade, let alone mass immigration, as unambiguously good. They don’t believe that American security depends on democratizing far-off lands, something they suspect is impossible. And when there’s a crisis in some other part of the world, their first reaction is likely to be: Why can’t the countries over there handle it? A notable proponent of the Jacksonian outlook, Beinart noted, is Republican front-runner Donald Trump.”

Regarding Marco Rubio’s foreign policy views, Cruz told Bloomberg that he views Rubio’s stance as “military adventurism” that has benefited Islamic militant groups. Cruz even tied Rubio to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Ted Cruz’s decision-making test on military action would be about whether there’s a “real threat” to American security. On foreign policy, Cruz said he will employ a simple test: “How does it keep America safe?”

Do you know what? 75% of people do not know what to do when the power goes out. I read this statistic twice over Thanksgiving in New Hampshire: Once reading Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, and Surviving the Aftermath and again in a Concord Monitor article. It was this time last year that New Hampshire got hit with two-feet of snow cutting off electricity for three to four days in large swaths of the state.

Experts say the first thing you should do in a power outage is call the electric company. In the article Don Nourse, a manager for distributed systems operations for Eversource in New Hampshire says, “Probably only about 25 percent of affected customers (in an outage) actually call us. A lot of folks think that their neighbors called and that we know, but oftentimes we don’t know. We rely on them.”

An old fashioned phone call to the electric company may seem outdated to some, but that’s what the experts running the grid are saying you should do. I’ve already entered the numbers in my phone and have them written down on a business card. I recommend the same for you and your family.

For a look at how snow can turn the lights out, watch this report from WMUR in New Hampshire last year:

So 40,000 people—each one on the taxpayer dime—are meeting in Paris to (a) save the planet, and (b) to suppress any dissent to the orthodoxy of climate change. “And yet all of them somehow fly to Paris on planes burning massive amounts of fossil fuel, not noticing any contradiction between how they demand you live your life and how they live theirs,” writes Francis Menton in the Manhattan Contrarian.

Consider the case of our President.  He has called the so-called “climate crisis” “worse than the terrorist threat.”   He has also just flown to Paris in Air Force One, and presumably plans to fly back the same way.  An Air Force One 747 consumes 5 gallons of fuel per mile.  It’s 3855 air miles from Washington to Paris, 7710 round trip.  Did I mention that Air Force One is actually two planes?  They always keep a spare 747 within about a half-hour, just in case.  So make that 15,420 air miles at 5 gallons per mile.  A gallon translates to 21.1 pounds of CO2 emissions.  So our dear President is emitting some 1,625,000 pounds of CO2 just for his own flight over and back, more than 800 tons.  For comparison, the average American’s annual carbon emissions are about 20 tons — for everything you do for an entire year.  Just for the President, and just for this one flight over and back, he is emitting 40 years worth of your carbon consumption.  Add in the emissions of his massive entourage on this boondoggle, and it’s a multiple of what you will emit in your entire lifetime.  Wired here calculates the total emission of all the attendees in attending the conference at 300,000 tons of CO2 — several hundred times what you will emit in your entire life.  And these people purport to lecture you and restrict you by force on how much energy you can use?

So 40,000 government employees meet in Paris seeking, as Mr. Menton puts it, “to put over on the world’s people a spending/control program of multi-trillions of dollars, all based on so-called ‘facts’ that all are required to believe but are contradicted by the best available data.  Our primary media sources systematically suppress the data. “

Just maybe, as the WSJ’s Review & Outlook suggests, President Obama should spend more time on America’s economic climate. (The leading measure of U.S. manufacturing fell in November to its lowest level since the end of the recession, and CEOs of America’s biggest companies offered a downbeat view of business for the third straight quarter.)

To see the latest satellite temperature record from UAH (University Alabama in Huntsville), from the time they first put up the satellites in 1979 and going right up to yesterday, go here. As Mr. Menton asks, “What does it even mean to say that ‘the Earth is warming’ when the best data show that the warmest time was 18 years ago?  The trend since 1998 is down, not up. The trend since 1997 is completely flat.”

Every time there is an attention getting gun-related incident “gun controllers” like Hillary Clinton roll out the gun prohibition list wagon. Last time I checked I was on just such a list. I have been on before and no one would tell me why. But I was sent a detailed form that I could fill in and send off to the FBI in order to facilitate my removal from the “no buy” list. The first time I realized I was on the government list a few years ago, I did nothing and waited. Eventually my name was removed. I have not bothered to check recently to see if my name has been removed this second time. When I feel the need to add to our already loaded arsenal, I will give it a go. And yes, the government, as I have found out, is under no obligation to tell me a thing as to why I have been on the list.  Ok, so what?

As John R. Lott, Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, tells readers:

Putting people on a list and prohibiting them from legally purchasing guns doesn’t really stop them from getting weapons. The fact that people are prohibited from buying certain drugs doesn’t mean people can’t get them. It’s the same with guns. And, incidentally, drug gangs supply both illegal drugs and illegal guns. Indeed, since Clinton wants to make a comparison to last week’s Paris attacks, we should point out that France’s strict weapon bans didn’t stop the terrorists from getting the AK-47’s and explosive belts they used in the attacks.

Ulster County sheriff Paul Van Blarcum, as reported in the Poughkeepsie Journal:

In light of mass killings nationally and globally, Van Blarcum said licensed gun owners should take it upon themselves to “responsibly take advantage of your legal right to carry a firearm….“I also want to remind all Police/Peace Officers both active duty and retired to please carry a weapon whenever you leave your house.

The political elite jumped to conclusion calling the San Bernardino terrorists something other than what they were: Terrorists. It’s time we listen to the real people. Sheriff Paul Van Blarcum issued a recommendation to the people of Ulster County, NY. Carry your guns and defend yourself.

Sheriff Paul Van Blarcum’s post on the Ulster County Sheriff’s Department’s Facebook page received a heavy mix of support and criticism from gun owners and non-gun owners alike Thursday.

Van Blarcum’s post was in response to hundreds of shootings reported across the U.S. this year, including the most recent where 14 people were gunned down in San Bernardino, California, Wednesday when gunmen — a man and a woman — burst into a social services center and opened fire.

In light of mass killings nationally and globally, Van Blarcum said licensed gun owners should take it upon themselves to “responsibly take advantage of your legal right to carry a firearm.

“I also want to remind all Police/Peace Officers both active duty and retired to please carry a weapon whenever you leave your house,” Van Blarcum said via the Facebook post. “We are the thin blue line that is entrusted in keeping this country safe, and we must be prepared to act at any given moment.”

About four weeks ago, the Chicago Tribune reported that on 3 November gang members lured a nine-year-old boy from a Chicago park into an alley and shot him point blank as revenge on the boy’s father.

One of the three chatted up Tyshawn [Lee], walked with him to the alley and then shot him five times as Morgan and the third individual looked on from a black SUV, prosecutors charged. Police found Tyshawn’s beloved basketball near his body. Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the boy was targeted because of his father’s gang involvement.

“If anybody marched on the Magnificent Mile to protest yet another Chicago killing — this time the cold-blooded murder of nine-year-old Tyshawn — the media failed to notice,” writes Larry Elder in RealClear Politics, referring to the protesting over the killing over a year ago of Laquan McDonald.

When Ferguson’s Michael Brown and Baltimore’s Freddie Gray were killed by police, Department of Justice probes began within days. Chicago’s Laquan McDonald was killed in October 2014, but the DOJ probe didn’t start until April 2015. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, of course, is Obama’s ex-chief of staff.

Why does the revenge killing by gang members of a nine year old not provoke the same reaction by “activists” on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile as the shooting by a policeman of Laquan McDonald, who spent most of his 17 years as a ward of the state?

Read more here from Larry Elder who asks, “What about agitating against a welfare state that encourages women to marry the government — and men to abandon their financial and moral responsibilities?”

Pat Buchanan, as usual, hits the nail on the head. Pat tells readers that Trump’s “popularity is traceable to the fact that he rejects the moral authority of the media, breaks their commandments, and mocks their condemnations. His contempt for the norms of Political Correctness is daily on display.”

Mr. Buchanan explains that the media “have played right into Trump’s hand.” Pat writes that they constantly demand he apologize, then Trump doubles down.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Trump has locked into the firestorm of independent thought sweeping not only America, but also Europe and for that matter Russia. Here at home, strident, deeply rooted right wing organizations like League of the South are resonating with voters. The “League,” by example, extols an American foreign policy that favors neutrality and strictly limited migration, and opposes standing armies and any regulation whatsoever of firearms. The “League” is opposed to fiat currency, personal income taxation, central banking, property taxes and most state regulation of business. The “League” sees its culture as profoundly Christian and pro-life.

Americans are hearing this exact message loud and clear. And Donald Trump is tapping into that wellspring, slapping the face of the media and, along the way, the entrenched, globalization focused, political elite.