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 As President Obama prepares to pass his executive order pen onto the Democrats presumptive candidate, Americans should understand that Hillary Clinton most likely would
outdo Mr. Obama in ruling by executive fiat and using federal bureaucracies to impose her agenda. If elected, Hillary Clinton would “fill the federal bureaucracies with people eager and willing to impose rules on the American people that would never fly in Congress,” writes Bill McGurn in the WSJ.
The result is the effective transfer of power from the American people acting through their elected representatives to the American people being told what to do—and threatened with crushing fines if they do not—by federal bureaucracies that use the vague congressional language in everything from Dodd-Frank to the Affordable Care Act to impose their own interpretations. Even worse, under the
Supreme Court’s 1984 Chevron decision, the courts are basically told they must defer.
At a moment when the media is thick with characterizations of Donald Trump as the new Hitler, America might do well to devote some attention to the soft despotism of the woman who promises to further embolden this unelected, unaccountable and out-of-control fourth branch of government.
Read more from William McGurn here.
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 Last December a cyber attack crippled Ukraine’s power grid. Engineers were able to manually restart power, workers still have to control the system manually. In many U.S. power systems, no manual overrides exist. A similar attack on the grid could leave
America out of power much longer. WIRED’s Kim Zetter reports:
Regardless, the successful assault holds many lessons for power generation plants and distribution centers here in the US, experts say; the control systems in Ukraine were surprisingly more secure than some in the US, since they were well-segmented from the control center business networks with robust firewalls. But in the end they still weren’t secure enough—workers logging remotely into the
SCADA network, the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition network that controlled the grid, weren’t required to use two-factor authentication, which allowed the attackers to hijack their credentials and gain crucial access to systems that controlled the breakers.
The power wasn’t out long in Ukraine: just one to six hours for all the areas hit. But more than two months after the attack, the control centers are still not fully operational, according to a recent US report. Ukrainian and US computer security experts involved in the investigation say the attackers overwrote firmware on
critical devices at 16 of the substations, leaving them unresponsive to any remote commands from operators. The power is on, but workers still have to control the breakers manually.
That’s actually a better outcome than what might occur in the US, experts say, since many power grid control systems here don’t have manual backup functionality, which means that if attackers were to sabotage automated systems here, it could be much harder for workers to restore power.
More on the threat from Ted Koppel here:
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 Harry Enten, writing at FiveThirtyEight.com gives readers the math.
My own delegate estimate has Trump falling short of the 1,237 delegates he needs because he has done poorly in the west so far, and many of those states haven’t voted yet. It’s also possible that Kasich plays better than we might think among moderate voters in the remaining states to vote in New England and Mid-Atlantic.
Moreover, there are plenty of signs that Trump would have lost a majority of states that voted on Tuesday had Rubio not been in the race. I’m talking about Missouri and North Carolina, where Ted Cruz beat Trump in a
one-on-one race in the exit polls. Trump may be rising, though he is still not getting close to a majority of the vote in most states. If the anti-Trump voters can find a better way to coordinate behind one candidate, they probably can beat Trump in a lot of upcoming contests.
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 Pat Buchanan tells readers, “Turnout in the GOP primaries has been running at levels
unseen in American history.”
A Trump campaign across the industrial Midwest, Pennsylvania and New Jersey featuring attacks on Hillary Clinton’s support for NAFTA, the WTO, MFN for China — and her backing of amnesty and citizenship for illegal immigrants, and for the Iraq and Libyan debacles — is a winning hand.
Lately, 116 architects and subcontractors of the Bush I and II foreign policy took their own version of the Oxford Oath. They will not vote for, nor serve in a Trump administration.
Talking heads are bobbing up on cable TV to declare that if Trump is nominee, they will not vote for him and may vote for Clinton.
This is not unwelcome news. Let them go.
Their departure testifies that Trump is offering something new and different from the foreign policy failures this crowd did so much to produce.
The worst mistake Trump could make would be to tailor his winning positions on trade, immigration and intervention — to court such losers.
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 Do you own a firearm? If not, for the safety of you and your family you should consider buying one now. President Obama has nominated the radical, anti-gun judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court seat vacated by the passing
of long-time second amendment supporter Justice Antonin Scalia. If Garland reaches the high court, he’ll tip the balance of justices to a majority against the individual right to bear arms.
The NRA released a statement skewering Garland over his record:
Obama has already nominated two Supreme Court justices who oppose the right to own firearms and there is absolutely no reason to think he has changed his approach this time. In fact, a basic analysis of Merrick Garland’s judicial record shows that he does not respect our fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. Therefore, the National Rifle Association, on behalf of our
five million members and tens of millions of supporters across the country, strongly opposes the nomination of Merrick Garland for the U.S. Supreme Court.
For firearms owners, the most vital decision to come from the Supreme Court in decades has been in the case of D.C. vs. Heller. Garland would be a threat to that decision, and to the second amendment rights of Americans. The National Review’s Carrie Severino writes:
But Garland has a long record, and, among other things, it leads to the conclusion that he would vote to reverse one of Justice Scalia’s most important opinions, D.C. vs. Heller, which affirmed that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to keep and bear arms.
Back in 2007, Judge Garland voted to undo a D.C. Circuit court decision striking down one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. The liberal District of Columbia government had passed a ban on individual handgun possession, which even prohibited guns kept in one’s own house for self-defense. A three-judge panel struck down the ban, but Judge Garland wanted to reconsider that ruling.
He voted with Judge David Tatel, one of the most liberal judges on that court. As Dave Kopel observed at the time, the “[t]he Tatel and Garland votes were no surprise, since they had earlier signaled their strong hostility to gun owner rights” in a previous case. Had Garland and Tatel won that vote, there’s a good chance that the Supreme Court wouldn’t have had a chance to protect the individual right to bear arms for several more years.
Given a Garland appointment to the high court, you can expect the anti-gun movement to go into overdrive, attempting to push lawsuits around the country designed to reach the Supreme Court, where Garland and the other anti-gun justices and tear down Americans’ rights.
You should get your gun today, and just as importantly you should get trained. I have often written about my experiences at the excellent Sig Sauer Academy (here, here and here for instance). Find such a reputable training facility near you, and learn to operate your firearm safely and effectively. Don’t wait, because if Garland and Obama get their way, you may miss your chance.
See more about Sig Sauer Academy here:
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  Shane Ellison, M.S. is an award-winning pharmaceutical
chemist and a former medicinal chemist for one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.
Shane is the author of the 2009 published Over-The-Counter Natural Cures. It is through Shane’s pace-setting Natural Cures reference guide that I was introduced to ThePeoplesChemist.com.
Today I rely on three of the all-natural compounds from The Peoples Chemist.
- Cardio FX: Validated by the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine, Cardio FX utilizes a compound formula of all natural ingredients to control blood pressure, reduce blood clots, and strengthen the heart.
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- Daily Dose: The most beneficial, naturally occurring nutrients required for energy, vitality, immunity and longevity.
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A Republican president with sound foreign policy instincts (stay with me here) would be crippled by the people staffing his administration. Since a president cannot serve as his own cabinet secretaries, or staff his own agencies at the deputy level, he would have to hire Republican foreign policy hands to do these jobs. Given the uniformly hawkish bent of the GOP foreign policy establishment and the
disproportionate influence of neoconservatives among them, they would hobble if not destroy the strategy of such a president. “Personnel are policy,” as the old saying goes.
At the risk of revealing how daunting the project would be, then, it is worth considering how to make the Republican foreign policy establishment better.
During a meeting I attended at Harvard several years ago, the attending group of restraint-minded international relations scholars and one major philanthropist was asked what they would do with $10 or $20 million. A range of answers surfaced. My own was “start raising money.” This elicited an eye roll and a probing question from the philanthropist, but I stand by my answer. In the war of ideas at present, restraint is hopelessly outgunned.
It might be easiest to break down the problem functionally. The relevant instruments would be think tanks, publications, journalists, pressure groups, and donors, in no particular order. This week, we’ll look at think tanks. In subsequent weeks, we’ll examine publications, journalists, pressure groups, and donors.
It is too much to ask for a quick turnaround when it comes to right-of-center think tanks on foreign policy. The combination of ideological blowback, having one’s mortgage paid by those
with interest in sustaining the status quo, and simple inertia make that unlikely.
What one might hope is that the John Hulsman saga is never again a live possibility. In 2006, the Heritage Foundation scholar was allegedly sacked for being too critical of Bush the Younger and the Iraq War, and made to sign a nondisclosure agreement to prevent him from discussing the terms of his dismissal. The man said to be responsible for firing Hulsman was Kim Holmes, who, whatever his ideological
disposition, showed himself to be a far lesser scholar than Hulsman after the latter’s departure.
The best that can be hoped for when it comes to the think tanks is that the middle-of-the-road, more partisan institutes like Heritage do not return to their Bush-Cheney worst. AEI, the Hudson Institute, and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies are duty-bound and money-motivated to stay neoconservative. A non-neoconservative AEI is unthinkable. What is thinkable is that a place like Heritage would make a big, showy hire not of a noninterventionist, but a Republican realist.
Someone a lot like John Hulsman, actually. It would serve as a sort of bat-signal to any disgruntled Hill staffers or others with interest in rekindling conservative realism.
When I worked at the Cato Institute, I believed every argument I made (and probably still do). But at least when it came to foreign policy, it was necessary to keep in mind the size of the ask. In terms of change from existing policy, what we were asking for was revolutionary: many fewer wars, many fewer allies, gutting the defense budget, mostly leaving the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia. In a Weberian sense, our job was to represent the extreme fringe of opinion. If successful, we
broadened the spectrum of allowable debate–in the process, pulling the center progressively in our direction.
What would be ideal is perestroika among right-of-center foreign policy think tanks, in which they hired more realists (not to say noninterventionists, necessarily), and engaged publicly with groups like Cato, inviting their scholars to debates and taking up their arguments. Without a massive influx of money, however, this is unlikely to happen.
FLASHBACK Video: John Hulsman on Prudence and Foreign Policy
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Pat Buchanan writes that neocon cheerleader and editor of the interventionist bible, the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, has “circulated a memo detailing how to rob Trump of the nomination if he finishes first in states, votes, and delegates.”
Mr. Buchanan, however, reminds readers:
The American people want their borders secured, the invasion stopped, the manufacturing plants brought back and an end to the conscription of our best and bravest to fight wars dreamed up in the tax-exempt think tanks of neoconservatives.
Trump is winning because he speaks for the people. Look at those crowds.
Apparently, William Kristol circulated a memo detailing how to rob Trump of the nomination, even if he finishes first in states, votes and delegates.
Should Trump win on the first ballot, Kristol’s fallback position is to create a third party and recruit a conservative to run as its nominee.
Purpose: Have this rump party siphon off enough conservative votes to sink Trump and give the presidency to Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose policies are more congenial to the neocons and Kristol’s Weekly Standard.
Among the candidates Kristol is reportedly proposing are ex-Governor Rick Perry of Texas and former Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, both respected conservatives.
Kristol contends a third-party conservative candidate can win.
He can’t be serious. It is absurd to think Gov. Perry, whose poll numbers were so low that he dropped out of the race last September without winning a single primary, caucus, or even a delegate, could capture the White House on a third-party ticket.
Also read:
How Bill Kristol Purged the Arabists by Pat Buchanan – May 2012
GOP Will Take Off the Gloves if Ron Paul Wins Iowa – December 2011
More of Pat on the GOP, and Bill Kristol:
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According to Amnesty International, political detentions in Cuba are at the highest level in “many years” and “Cuban human rights activists are at increased risk of detention or harassment from the authorities.” In December 2015, reported The Guardian, Obama declared that he would only visit Cuba if the government made progress on civil liberties. “If we’re
going backwards, then there’s not much reason for me to be here. I am not interested in just validating the status quo,” said Mr. Obama. But since President Obama’s new policy of engagement with the Castro regime was announced, repression in Cuba has increased dramatically, writes Mark A. Thiessen in The
Washington Post .
Despite this increased political repression — and despite his own promise not to “validate” this repression by visiting while it persists — the president (Obama) is in Havana anyway.
Dissident Cuban journalist and winner of the European Union’s 2010 Sakharov Prize for human rights Dr. Guillermo Fariñas warns, “We live in daily fear that we will be killed by the fascist government. And now, the U.S. – our ally – turns its back on us and prefers to sit with our killers.” Dr. Fariñas has conducted 23 hunger strikes to protest various elements
of the Cuban regime.
Mr. Thiessan adds that Cuba, along with North Korea, “is the most repressive totalitarian regime left on the face of the earth. Obama’s visit is a betrayal of the dissidents on the island who are risking their lives for democracy and human rights.”
On the other hand, Juan Carlos Hidalago, a policy analyst on Latin America at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, notes that U.S. policy toward Cuba has been a blatant failure and utterly counterproductive. By isolating the island, the Castro regime has been able to portray itself as a victim of U.S.
aggression.
But we should not kid ourselves about an imminent change of the nature of the Castro regime. … President Obama has said that his trip’s main objective will be to “improve the lives of the Cuban people.” If so, he should follow the steps of Jimmy Carter when he visited the island in 2002: the former president met with dissidents and was allowed to address the nation uncensored in
a speech on national TV where he called for democratic elections, respect for human rights and greater civil liberties.
If Obama fails to get similar concessions, his trip will only boost the standing of the Castro regime. It will be all about cementing his legacy and not about trying to improve the lives of ordinary Cubans.
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