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 Justice Scalia, it is said, lamented the absence of a “genuine Westerner” on the Supreme Court, writes Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. In nominating Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, Trump is filling the void Antonin Scalia was referring to.
Gorsuch is best known for his opinions supporting religious liberty and pushing back on the administrative state. These will be a focus of his confirmation hearings.
He’s an elegant writer, one with a penchant for clear yet memorable turns of phrase, like Scalia. “There’s an elephant in the room with us today,” he wrote in reference to the excessive deference judges pay to executive agencies. “Maybe the time has come to face the behemoth.”
Ilya notes, President Trump’s list of potential court nominees is notable for its “geographic breadth and professional depth. Yet even on that star-studded list, Gorsuch was a superstar.”
Ilya Shapiro discusses Trump’s SCOTUS pick in Neil Gorsuch on FBN’s Countdown to the Closing Bell with Liz Claman
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 Don’t be caught unprepared in the cold or snow. Here are a few basic recommendations from AccuWeather you should keep in mind during the winter months.
At Home or Work:
1. Working flashlight 2. A charged cell phone 3. Battery powered radio or television 4. Extra food, water and medicine 5. First Aid Supplies 6. Heating fuel (or turn up the heat prior to the storm if your house uses electrical heat) 7. Emergency heating source 8. Fire extinguishers 9. Carbon monoxide and smoke detectors
On a Farm:
1. Move all animals to an enclosed shelter 2. Bring extra feed to nearby feeding areas 3. Have an extra water supply easily available
In a Vehicle:
1. Full or near full gas tank 2. Let a friend or relative know your predicted arrival time 3. A charged cell phone 4. Extra food and water 5. Extra gasoline for emergency fuel
At Home or in a Building:
1. Stay inside 2. Close off unneeded rooms to save heat 3. Stuff towels or rags in cracks underneath doors to conserve heat 4. Cover the windows at night 5. Eat and drink to prevent dehydration 6. Wear layers of loose-fitting, light-weight and warm clothing
If Caught Outside:
1. Find a dry shelter immediately 2. Cover all exposed body parts
If Caught Outdoors Without Shelter:
1. Prepare a lean-to, wind break, or snow-cave for protection against the wind 2. Build a fire for heat and attention purposes 3. Place rocks around the fire to absorb and reflect the heat 4. Do not eat snow straight off the ground, melt it first.
If Stranded in a Vehicle:
1. Stay inside your vehicle 2. Run the motor for ten minutes each hour 3. Crack the windows to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning 4. Make sure the exhaust pipe is not blocked 5. Tie a colored cloth to your antenna or door 6. Raise the hood after the snow stops falling 7. Exercise to keep warm and keep your blood flowing.
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 Early front-runner in the race for President of France, Francois Fillon, has been hit by a scandal involving using government funds to employ his wife and children as “parliamentary aides.” The problem is that no one remembers them doing any work for Fillon’s office. No-show jobs paid with French taxpayer money is not great optics for a politician campaigning on budget cuts and free market reforms.
Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute eviscerates Fillon’s excuse that because taxes are so high, his wife didn’t really make that much money as she had to pay back so much to the government.
Here’s a story that reveals why France is in trouble. The Wall Street Journal reports that a French presidential candidate is arguing people shouldn’t get upset that he used taxpayer money to give his wife a no-show job because a big chunk of the money then went back to the government because of punitive taxes.
François Fillon…apologiz[ed] to the country for having employed his wife and children as parliamentary aides while rejecting accusations the jobs were phony. …Mr. Fillon characterized it as unfair for media reports to state his wife received nearly a million euros over a 15-year period, saying after taxes her monthly average income came to only €3,677 ($3,964). …The privileges traditionally available to France’s ruling class were exposed with rare candor.
So I guess Fillon wants people to think it’s okay to divert funds to family members if they “only” pocket about $48,000 per year after paying taxes.
This is disgusting. At least Fillon should have wasted taxpayer money more elegantly, like France’s current president, who doesn’t have much hair but still gave his stylist big bucks.
What makes Fillon’s story especially amusing is that he is the candidate trying to appeal to French voters who want to reduce the role of the state.
Fillon has maintained his innocence and vows to fight on, portraying the investigation as FT reports “as a Socialist conspiracy.”
In a communications offensive, Mr Fillon’s staff printed and distributed more than 3m leaflets over the weekend, entitled “Stop the Manhunt” and depicting the affair as a Socialist conspiracy.
An Ifop survey released on Sunday showed 68 per cent believing that Mr Fillon should drop his presidential bid. Less than one in four believed he was “honest”, from half of them in a previous poll in November shortly after he easily won the centre-right nomination.
But support from core Republican sympathisers has remained strong, with two-thirds wanting Mr Fillon to stay on.
Read more here.
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Robert W. Merry shines a laser on the most important point of the immigration debate, what kind of country do Americans want to have?
Behind the sturm und drang that greeted President Trump’s recent executive action on refugees lies the broader issue of U.S. immigration policies over the past half-century. And behind those immigration policies lies a profound question facing Americans: what kind of country do they want their country to be?
For most of our history, we have been largely a country of Europeans, a country of the West, with Western sensibilities and a shared devotion to the Western heritage. Now we are in the process of becoming something else—a mixed country without a coherent, guiding heritage of any civilization and certainly not of the West.
This is largely the result both of the numbers of immigrants coming into the country (both legal and illegal) and of the place of origin of most of those immigrants. In 1960, 84 percent of U.S. immigrants came from Europe and Canada; now that number is just 14 percent.
This is a profound national alteration, and what’s remarkable about it is how little debate, or even discussion, has attended it until recently. The American left and most of the country’s elites considered it a natural and beneficial development, a testament to the value of diversity and a shared aversion to discriminatory practice or even discriminatory thinking.
Then came Donald Trump, whose crude pronouncements on immigration heralded that this was one politician who wasn’t going to be silenced or intimidated on the issue.
Read more here.
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 Critical to our country’s national security is the need for reform within Islam, writes Andrew C. McCarthy in NRO.
First, reform is essential because the broader Islamic religion includes a significant subset of Muslims who adhere to an anti-American totalitarian political ideology that demands implementation of sharia — Islamic law. This ideology and the repressive legal code on which it rests are not religion. We are not talking about the undeniably theological tenets of Islam (e.g., the oneness of Allah, the acceptance of Mohammed as the final prophet, and the Koran as Allah’s revelation). We are talking about a framework for the political organization of the state, and about the implementation of a legal corpus that is blatantly discriminatory, hostile to liberty, and — in its prescriptions of crime and punishment — cruel.
Islam must reform so that this totalitarian political ideology, sharia supremacism (or, if you prefer, “radical Islam”), is expressly severable from Islam’s truly religious tenets. To fashion an immigration policy that serves our vital national-security interests without violating our commitment to religious liberty, we must be able to exclude sharia supremacists while admitting Muslims who reject sharia supremacism and would be loyal to the Constitution.
Second, sharia supremacists are acting on a “voluntary apartheid” strategy of gradual conquest. You needn’t take my word for it. Influential sharia supremacists encourage Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa to integrate into Western societies without assimilating Western culture. The renowned Muslim Brotherhood jurist Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who vows that “Islam will conquer Europe, conquer America,” urges Muslim migrants to demand the right to live in accordance with sharia. Turkey’s sharia-supremacist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, admonishes that pressuring Muslims to assimilate is “a crime against humanity.” The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of 57 Muslim governments that purports to speak as a quasi-caliphate, promulgated its “Declaration of Human Rights in Islam” in 1990 — precisely because what the United Nations in 1948 presumptuously called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is neither “universal” nor suitable to a sharia culture.
It is the reform Muslims who tell us that Islam can separate sharia from spiritual life and that pro-Western Muslims do exactly that. It is the sharia supremacists who are outraged by the very suggestion that reform is possible, let alone necessary. If we continue taking our cues from the latter, it means that their noxious political ideology is part and parcel of Islam, and therefore that screening to keep that ideology out of our country is a violation of First Amendment religious liberty.
Read more from Andrew McCarthy here.
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Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has developed a Golden Rule for starving the government beast. His common sense, easily remembered Golden Rule for government fiscal policy is, “The private sector should grow faster than the government.” Simple right? Yet for some reason this isn’t the normal operating procedure for most governments in the world today. Dan wrote recently about a handy table he created listing nations that increased nominal spending by less than 2% per year, and the fantastic response of those governments’ budget deficits as a result. Now he is adding a new country to the table, the U.K. Dan writes:
From the start of last decade up through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, government spending in the United Kingdom grew by 7.1 percent annually, far faster than the growth of the economy’s productive sector. As a result, an ever-greater share of the private economy was being diverted to politicians and bureaucrats.
Beginning with the 2010-2011 fiscal year, however, officials started complying with my Golden Rule and outlays since then have grown by an average of 1.6 percent per year.
And as you can see from this chart prepared by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this modest level of fiscal restraint has paid big dividends. The burden of government spending has significantly declined, falling from 45 percent of national income to 40 percent of national income.
Read more here.
Dan Mitchell Advocating Market Stimulus rather than Government Stimulus
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 Received this from a friend. A new tactic by pro-Second Amendment legislators in Oklahoma is to ban public monies from being used to fund anti-gun lobbying efforts.
Clever way to do away with anti gun laws.
Tomorrow, February 14, the Oklahoma Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider Senate Bill 275. Sponsored by state Senator Nathan Dahm, SB 275 would prohibit the use of public tax monies for the funding of lobbying efforts for gun control legislation.
Read more here from the NRA.
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 National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has resigned from the Trump administration after details were uncovered proving he lied to Vice President Pence about his discussions with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Flynn has a history of hawkish stances toward Iran, and was a proponent of the miserably failed counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. His obsession with Iran was frightening given his previous inability to succeed. Realism and reform, as well as restraint, are needed in America’s military. Hopefully President Trump will replace Flynn with someone more in line with the 9th and 17th National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft (check out Bartholomew Sparrow’s book,
The Strategist on Scowcroft to the right).
At The American Conservative, Daniel Larison highlights one possible downside of Flynn’s resignation. That is, Trump could install someone even worse as the next National Security Advisor. Given that America only narrowly avoided having Elliot Abrams working in the State Department as Rex Tillerson’s right hand, this is not a remote possibility.
Flynn’s departure is very good news for the country, and it could be good for the Trump administration if he is replaced by someone less fanatical and much more competent. It was obvious for a long time that Flynn’s worldview was warped and a terrible influence on the president, and he never seemed ready for the position he was given. The dysfunction of Trump’s National Security Council may not have been entirely his fault, but it was his responsibility and he was clearly not getting the job done.
His early resignation marks the quickest exit of a top presidential adviser that I am aware of, and very few will be sorry to see him go. The danger is that Trump will choose someone else just as unprepared or possibly even less qualified to do the job, but the exit of one of the most hard-line Iran hawks from the administration is practically the only good thing that has happened related to foreign policy since Trump was sworn in. The Trump administration continues to have many top officials that share Flynn’s Iran obsession, but perhaps with his exit that obsession will grow a little bit weaker.
Read more from Larison here.
Kellyanne Conway talks timing of Flynn resignation
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