A New Course Must Be Set And Soon!

Philadelphia Vs. Cleveland: Divided We Stand

7/28/2016 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com

Wednesday was the best night of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Joe Biden, Tim Kaine and Barack Obama testified to her greatness and goodness and readiness to be president. And all saw in the Republican Convention in Cleveland a festival of darkness and dystopia.

Nor is this unusual. For, as the saying goes, the ins "point with pride," while the outs "view with alarm."

Yet the clash of visions between Cleveland and Philadelphia is stark. We appear to be two separate and hostile peoples, living apart in two separate Americas.

Obama's America is a country of all races, creeds, colors, lifestyles, a kumbayah country to be made more wonderful still when Clinton takes the helm.

The message from Cleveland: Cry the beloved country. America has lost her way. She is in peril. A new captain is needed. A new course must be set if America is to find her way home again.

Which portrayal is the more true? Which vision of America do her people believe corresponds more closely to the reality of their daily lives?

Do Americans share Philadelphia's belief in Clinton's greatness and in the magisterial achievements of the Obama presidency?

Let us see. Fifty-six percent of Americans believe Clinton should have been indicted; 67 percent believe she is neither trustworthy nor honest. And 75 percent of Americans think that, under Obama, the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

After Cleveland, Trump took a 62-23 lead among white high school graduates, those who constitute a disproportionate share of our cops, firemen, soldiers and Marines -- and those interred in Arlington National Cemetery.

Given that the media are mostly "progressives," why do Americans who rely on that media hold so negative an opinion of Clinton, and reject the direction in which Obama is taking their country? Does the reality they perceive help to explain it?

Consider. Obama did inherit a disastrous economy and growth has been at or near 2 percent a year since then. But this is not the growth we knew in the Reagan era. And what, other than the trade policies we pursued, explains the deindustrialization of America, the loss of manufacturing plants and jobs, and China's shouldering us aside to become the world's No. 1 industrial power.

What produced Detroit and Baltimore and all those dead and dying towns in the Rust Belt?

Even Hillary Clinton, who has called TPP the "gold standard," now rejects her husband's NAFTA. Is this not an admission that the elites got it wrong for a quarter century?

Obama in Philadelphia celebrated our diversity. Yet, we have seen Old Glory burned and Mexican flags flaunted this year. We have seen Black Lives Matter chant, "What do we want? Dead cops!" -- then watched black racists deliver dead cops in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Is Ferguson America's future?

From the podium in Philadelphia, we hear the word "love." But in interviews, Democratic activists invoke terms of hate, such as racist, fascist, homophobe, misogynist and sexist to describe the Cleveland Republicans.

Would the party of Philadelphia accept a President Trump?

Would the party of Cleveland accept President Clinton?

Hard to believe. Divided we stand. So, where do we go?

Given the distance between the two halves of America, given the contempt in which each seems to hold the other, we can probably drop from the Pledge of Allegiance the word "indivisible," right after the Philadelphia Democrats succeed in cutting out the words, "under God."

We are told our allies are nervous. They should be. Even FDR could not lead a divided nation into war. When America divided over Vietnam, Richard Nixon had to lead us out. Our division led to America's first defeat.

In the absence of a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack that brings us together in patriotic rage, Americans are not going to salute the next commander in chief, and then go fight Russia in the eastern Baltic or China over some reefs or rocks in the South China Sea.

Even when we were more united during the Cold War, Ike and LBJ never considered using force to roll back Soviet invasions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Our strongest ally in the Arab world, Egypt, and our NATO ally in the region, Turkey, are both descending into dictatorship. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen are bleeding profusely in sectarian and civil wars, breaking apart along tribal and religious lines.

Could a President Trump, or Clinton, rally us to stand together and send another Army of Desert Storm over there? Not likely.

Barack Obama believes the more diverse a country we become -- religiously, racially, ethnically, culturally, linguistically -- the greater, better and stronger a nation we become. And with his immigration policies, he has put us, perhaps irretrievably, on that road.

Yet, outside that Wells Fargo Center, where such sentiments seem to enrapture Democratic delegates, Europe, Africa, the Mideast and South Asia are all being pulled apart, right along those same fault lines. And measured by the rhetoric of Philadelphia and Cleveland, so are we.

Border + Language = Culture = Nation, a Simple Fact

Put the Wall in the Platform

6/7/2016 - Phyllis Schlafly Townhall.com

The promise to build a wall along America's southern border with Mexico has carried Donald Trump to his remarkable victory in the Republican primaries for president. Now it's time to put that promise into the official Republican Party Platform.

Many would be surprised to learn that a border security fence or wall was not already in the Republican platform. After all, President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, which Congress passed in 2006 with the support of many Democrats, including then-Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In the 10 years since Bush signed that law in a staged photo-op, the government has actually built only 36 miles of secure double fencing instead of the 700 miles authorized by that bipartisan, high-profile law. As a result, our southern border is penetrated daily by wave after wave of drug smuggling, human trafficking, people with incurable or infectious diseases such as the Zika virus, and even Muslims and Chinese people who somehow made their way to Mexico.

Business lobbyists and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who hold too much influence in the Republican Party, oppose a wall because it would interfere with their continued exploitation of cheap foreign labor at the expense of American workers. In addition to tolerating the flow of illegal labor, the Chamber wants to expand every category of visas for foreign workers, both skilled and unskilled.

According to Politico, Republican power brokers have convened "as many as 10 closed-door huddles with business lobbyists to discuss the party's platform." Attendees were warned not to discuss details with the press, but you can bet that building a wall was not on their agenda.

The big-business lobbyists also expressed alarm at Trump's promise to "discourage companies from moving jobs outside the United States." One participant said his colleagues are "pretty much aghast" at Trump's proposals to protect Americans against rampant cheating by our so-called "trading partners."

House Speaker Paul Ryan, meanwhile, has been developing his own agenda for Republicans in an effort to compete with Trump's. Under the slogan "A Better Way," Ryan's proposals include old chestnuts like cutting taxes, entitlements and regulations, but nothing about limiting immigration or the hemorrhage of jobs to foreign countries.

The Ryan agenda is basically the same as what Jeb Bush and 15 other failed presidential candidates campaigned on, but those ideas obviously didn't sell to the Republican electorate. The voters have spoken, and the future of the Republican Party starts with a wall along our southern border.

Even some members of the Republican National Committee are resisting the wall as a political statement that belongs in the party platform. One RNC member called the wall "a symbolic thing" rather than "a physical thing," while another member said the border wall is not to be taken "literally" because "it is a metaphor."

The two RNC members are right that the border wall would be a powerful symbol, but only if and when it is actually built. Once completed, the wall on our southern border would stand as a "metaphor" for the fact that coming to America requires the invitation and permission of the American citizens who are already here.

The 2012 platform has many good provisions, including opposition to "any form of amnesty" and support for states using their authority to enforce federal immigration laws. But building a wall is now the foundation of Republican immigration policy -- and yes, Mexico will pay for the wall.

Yet the Chamber of Commerce calls it a "myth" that "building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and deporting all undocumented immigrants from the United States, would enhance national security." The Chamber's analysis asserts that a border security wall would cost between $15 and $25 billion to build, and not even $1 billion to maintain, but those are small sums compared to the real costs of illegal immigration.

The federal, state, and local costs of criminal justice to process and incarcerate criminal aliens is at least $15 billion a year, not to mention the harm caused by those crimes, such as horrific crashes that have occurred when smugglers drive the wrong way on freeways at night with their headlights turned off. Even deportation is not as expensive as opponents of border security pretend.

A wall along the border would reduce illegal immigration and cause real wages to increase for average American workers for the first time in more than a decade. That may not be something the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants for big business, but it's something that would attract American workers to vote Republican.

Freedom is Under Siege in America

These Are the Times

7/10/2016 - Paul Jacob Townhall.com

. . . that try men’s souls. In Common Sense, his hit pamphlet of 1776, Tom Paine lamented that “Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe.”

Appealing to Americans, he urged us to “receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

Today . . . well, our country might be mistaken for an asylum. Just not the type envisioned by Citizen Tom Paine.

Freedom is now under siege right here in America.

Even before police added two more black men, one in Minnesota and one in Louisiana, to the horribly long list of black men and women (and white and Asian and Latino, too) killed by police in needless, stupid confrontations, and prior to the cold-bolded, premeditated murders of five policemen in downtown Dallas for the offense of being officers of the law and white, most Americans realized we were badly off track.

Respect for the law has been decimated, in part because too many police officers have abused their power and violated the law under color of law. And, moreover, because they’ve gotten away with it. Bad people will always do bad things, but when they get away with it, the bad gets worse.

And can crowd out the good.

Mostly, however, police have been put in untenable situations by politicians. Everywhere, the War on Drugs has led to over-policing, expecting the agents of government to control what far too high a percentage of the people seem intent on putting into their own bodies.

In inner city communities, and on the highways, the War on Drugs has become a war on black people. Mandatory minimum sentences have destroyed families and devastated neighborhoods over non-violent drug use.

Skeptical? Black drug use is comparable to white use, but black arrest and incarceration rates are far higher. It may be flat-out racism, but I suspect it mostly has socio-economic roots: it’s far easier to arrest and prosecute poorer people (who can’t lawyer up and effectively fight back) in our legal system. Yes, a higher percentage of black folks are poor.

There is a consensus in the country, across left and right, for criminal justice reform. Yet, politicians are offering mostly Band-Aids.

The Obama administration has highlighted the campaign to “Ban the Box” — the place on employment applications asking whether one has ever been convicted of a crime. Obama has already so ordered for those applying for federal jobs. Many are calling for reducing the number of folks incarcerated, one of the few categories where the U.S. leads the entire world.

But something is amiss. If these felons are dangerous, violent people, should we be opening the jail doors simply because there are so many of them? Or, is the problem actually that our laws are sweeping up far too many non-violent people? If that’s the case, as in the War on Drugs, the answer is not just to find ways to release those who never should have been incarcerated in the first place, but — get this — to STOP incarcerating them.

Maybe the country is simply too divided to solve the problems we face. But on criminal justice reform, America isn’t divided much at all.

There is a clear public consensus for requiring on-duty police to wear lapel cameras, for example. In addition to providing important evidence, lapel cameras have been shown to inspire better behavior from both cops and citizens.

Americans also overwhelmingly support ending civil asset forfeiture, a ridiculous and obviously unjust process whereby police and federal agencies simply seize assets or cash from “suspected” criminals and then keep the stuff even when the suspect is never charged with a crime, much less convicted of one. The once-upon-a-time suspect must then sue and prove his or her innocence to regain his or her property.

It’s not hard to understand that this has led to richer police departments and federal agencies and a lot of innocent citizens being ripped-off.

And to a sensible, reasonable, 20/20 vision diminishment of respect for the rule of law.

Yet, with all Mr. Obama’s executive orders, he hasn’t bothered to end this blatant destruction of the basic principle of innocent until proven guilty. He could constitutionally stop the federal government from engaging in stealing people’s stuff with a stroke of his pen.

Why doesn’t he? Is he unwilling to give up the revenue stream?

In the shadow of the disturbing violence of recent days, many will take sides between police and protesters, ignoring justice in favor of identity politics. That only embraces our dysfunctional politics and increases our inability to find peace.

Better to embrace justice where we can still find it.

There are many possible reforms. But they are unlikely to be enacted unless citizens work together to make change. Leaving it to interest groups and politicians will only give us more of the same. Or worse.

Patriotism Has Given Way to Team Sport

A Serious Nation No Longer

By Erick Erickson  |  July 9, 2016 Theresurgent.com

We are 240 years removed from the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It has become abstract to us. Its ideals are abstract. The causes over which our Revolution was fought seem far removed from our everyday lives.

For perspective, we are as close to World War II now as the World War II generation was to the Civil War, and the generation that fought the Civil War was as close to the Revolutionary War as we are to World War II. We have grandfathers who stormed Normandy. The men who stormed Normandy had grandfathers who endured the pains of the Civil War. The men of the Civil War had grandfathers whose first memories were of the birth of this nation. The Founders of our nation were as close in their lives to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as we are now to the early days of Germany’s re-emergence as a global threat.

Just as the struggle in World War II is real to us because we are so close in time to it, the struggle of the Glorious Revolution was not abstract to our Founders, who believed themselves heirs to it and the English Bill of Rights. Their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had fought for the rights of Englishmen and had been given rights such as a right to keep and bear arms and have trials by jury and have no soldier quartered in their homes. The reason we have our Bill of Rights is because the American revolutionaries were fighting for what they thought was their Bill of Rights. When it became clear that the king and Parliament had no intention of giving them those rights, they declared themselves free and independent.

Along the way they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, to an idea that is America. We are not a nation because of long held geographic proximity to each other and the evolution of a common tongue. Nor are we a nation because we had one strong man declared king to unite us. We are Americans, all of us, by choice. Perhaps it is not our choice, but the choice of our ancestors who chose to throw off their historic and binding ties to a former nation in order to begin again anew within the great experiment of the American experience.

Fast forward 240 years.

The Democrats would hand us over to a woman who, while in office, mishandled classified information and lied about it publicly. The Republicans would hand us over to a man who has swindled old people and single mothers out of money, rigged a system to ensure he got rich while others lost their shirts in bankruptcy, bragged about his affairs, and dog-whistled to racists and white supremacists.

No one in either party is willing to stand up and lead. Our leaders are children. None are willing to declare this madness on the part of both parties and demand a change.

Both parties have allegiances now to themselves and not to country. No right thinking person can look at Hillary Clinton and think her handling of classified information and lies about it to the public qualifies her for the office of the president of the United States. No right thinking person can look at Donald Trump and think this is a man we should put in the White House.

But patriotism has given way to team sport. Both parties declare others patriots by supporting their party, not their country. The Founders would be horrified and we should all be ashamed.

Wake Up America - This is Them Laughing at Us

Reboot America: Step Back From The Brink Before It’s Too Late

7/11/2016 - Kurt Schlichter Townhall.com

Welcome to 1968 2.0, the new and improved chaos, featuring a cutting edge assault on our foundational principles by an idiot elite that thinks it can gut the rule of law without consequence. Time to reboot, to wipe the hard drive and reload the factory software coded two-plus centuries ago by those dead white male geniuses.

Except I don’t think this country’s elite has the character, nor understands our constitutional technology enough, to do it. I think it fails to appreciate what is going on outside its cloisters, among those weird, patriotic, religious, and – significantly – armed people living in uncool places between the coasts. I think it believes this anger is a passing fad, that it can bluff and bully its way through it the way it did to previous challenges to its rule.

Obama and the progressive elite were not satisfied merely with exonerating the clearly guilty Hillary Clinton of charges that would have sent any mere mortal to the slammer. They had to shove it in our faces. The AG met with Bill Clinton. Then the FBI director laid out a devastating case, followed by an “and…nope.” Then President Faily McWorsethancarter swept her away in Air Force One – at our expense – to campaign with her and even placed her at a podium with the presidential seal while the liberal media thrilled and quivered. This is beyond mere corruption. This is them gloating over what they see as their unassailable power. This is them laughing at us.

Then Obama made yet another speech telling us how cops are racist. Understand that his attacks on cops are an attack on all of us normal Americans. Like soldiers, the police come from the ranks of us normal Americans, not the elite. And just as with soldiers, we normals revere cops as symbolic of the best of how we see ourselves – loyal, brave, patriotic protectors of order and decency. Obama – the guy who immediately assumed a Cambridge cop acted “stupidly” – as well as Hillary Clinton and the liberal elite, attacked cops as racist and evil as surrogates for attacking us as racist and evil.

And then yet another racial malcontent went on a shooting spree. The Los Angeles cop killer, the Virginia TV reporter, and now this creep in Dallas, all full of racist hate, and not one damn word about it from the elite. The motive hurt the narrative; they wanted to talk about cops oppressing people, so the elite simply lied by its silence about the Dallas killer’s expressly racist motive. And their media love-slaves obliged; when it became clear that this clown who couldn’t make E4 after six years was essentially just a Black Lives Matter supporter in a hurry, the story faded away.

But the lies did not fade away. Obama came out, feigned ignorance about motive (“We many never know what motivated the guy who expressly said that he was motivated by a desire to murder white cops.”), and blamed us yet again – this time for our stubborn refusal to disarm ourselves to please people who hate us and who refuse to acknowledge what drives those who say outright that they intend to murder us.

Did Obama try unity? Of course not – he divided Americans into the good ones who agree with him and us bad ones who refuse to kneel and bow. Leftists don’t want unity and they don’t want peace. Community organizers succeed when they divide; they need discord and hate to survive. Understand that all this discord and hate is not a bug. To them, it is a feature.

And this strategy is really, really dumb. It’s dumb because this country is not one big Chicago. It’s not one discrete, dysfunctional tumor surrounded by healthy tissue. The progressives can afford to play their games in the Chicagos and Austins and Berkeleys because outside the city limits there are normals of every race, color, and creed whose work feeds and powers and defends the elite’s urban petri dishes of blue model failure. They can live out their lefty fantasies because we normals subsidize them through our normalcy, like parents from Orange County paying tuition at Oberlin so their blonde daughter can learn how there’s no such thing as gender while she majors in Anti-Colonialist Pottery.

But what happens when they try to do that to the whole country? This time, the normals can’t just move away. Instead of driving them out, now the elite has to suppress normal Americans in place. They don’t realize that they are putting our backs against the wall.

And you have to wonder – have the elites considered their endgame? Because they may have learned the wrong lesson when they drove all the normals out of the Chicagos and Austins and Berkeleys. They may actually believe that normal Americans can just be bullied and badgered into submission. This is a very, very, very dangerous notion.

Have you elitists ever met normal Americans? Try this little experiment. Jump in your Prius and drive to, say, Oklahoma. Go ahead, Google it – I’ll wait. Then find a bar and go in after work. Look for a guy at a table in boots and jeans and a work shirt enjoying a Coors or some other non-craft, non-pumpkin-infused beer. Then tell him this:

“Hey stupid, you’re dumb because your parents couldn’t send you to college. You’re also dumb for believing in Jesus. You’re a sucker and a baby killer for joining the Army and fighting in Iraq. Plus, you have privilege because your great-great-great-great grandfather came from Glasgow. So I’m going to tell you what to do from now on. I’m your boss and moral superior. You’re going to let any dude dressed like a woman into the bathroom with your daughter. You’re going to turn in your global warming-causing pick-up truck. You’re going to be out of your job when we finish off the oil industry. You’re going to give up your guns. And I don’t care what you say about any of it. You don’t matter. You don’t get a say. Also, you’re racist.”

See how that works out, but check your dental coverage first. Now, think about how that strategy is going to work out in our country as a whole.

What’s the endgame here, liberals? Do you see over half the country just . . . giving up? Surrendering? Throwing in the towel once you have sufficiently nagged and insulted them? Or do you see them getting mad? Your media lackeys keep attributing phenomena like Trump and even Sanders to “anger.” Well, yeah. Right now, they are expressing that anger through legitimate means, at the ballot box. But what happens when you decide you’re going to step outside the law once again to ensure that their lawful expression of that anger is silenced?

Do you expect that normals will just shrug and submit? What if they don’t? How many of the 60,000-70,000 guns Americans buy every single day do you elites purchase?

What’s the endgame? What happens when – and the day will come – the normals say “No?” Does the elite try force? There’s no doubt it would if it could, but in the end, it needs to ask itself another question: Exactly who is willing to fight and die for their liberal Utopia? The elitists themselves? Their snowflakey kids Kaden and Ashleigh? Do they think they can pay enough people to suit up and go make people conform? How much money will you need to pay somebody to risk his skin to go down to Texas and try to take those Lone Star knuckle-draggers’ guns?

Oh, this is crazy talk! Hey, another right winger threatening rebellion! You know, the elite’s tactics of attacking strawmen and deliberately lying about political opponents pioneered by Obama and the Jon Stewart clones makes reasoned discussion almost impossible, and the malicious dishonesty underlying these ploys only ratchets up the anger. Eliminate the legitimate modes of opposition and you’ll leave only illegitimate modes of opposition.

I am not advocating the consequences that I see coming from the elite’s actions; to say so is a lie, though I suspect that will not stop them from lying about this column in the comments and elsewhere. I am only predicting the likely consequences of the elite’s unwise and malicious campaign against those it hates and seeks to rule.

But here is another way. Step back from the brink and reboot. Stop the corruption. Embrace the rule of law. Listen to those you have ignored. Hear what they say. Drop the divisive initiatives designed to humiliate and bring normals to heel – the gun grabs, the bathroom edicts, the Christian cake baker pogroms.

But if you can’t do that, if you can’t give up the money and the power, if the joy of inflicting petty oppressions and humiliations upon the people you look down on is just too satisfying to pass up, then ask yourself: What is your endgame?

Golden State is Severely Tarnished

Will California Ever Thrive Again?

7/7/2016 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

There was more of the same old, same old California news recently. Some 62 percent of state roads have been rated poor or mediocre. There were more predictions of huge cost overruns and yearly losses on high-speed rail -- before the first mile of track has been laid. One-third of Bay Area residents were polled as hoping to leave the area soon.

Such pessimism is daily fare, and for good reason.

The basket of California state taxes -- sales, income and gasoline -- rates among the highest in the U.S. Yet California roads and K-12 education rank near the bottom.

After years of drought, California has not built a single new reservoir. Instead, scarce fresh aqueduct water is still being diverted to sea. Thousands of rural central California homes, in Dust Bowl fashion, have been abandoned due to a sinking aquifer and dry wells.

One in three American welfare recipients resides in California. Almost a quarter of the state population lives below or near the poverty line. Yet the state's gas and electricity prices are among the nation's highest.

One in four state residents was not born in the U.S. Current state-funded pension programs are not sustainable.

California depends on a tiny elite class for about half of its income tax revenue. Yet many of these wealthy taxpayers are fleeing the 40-million-person state, angry over paying 12 percent of their income for lousy public services.

Public health costs have soared as one-third of California residents admitted to state hospitals for any causes suffer from diabetes, a sometimes-lethal disease often predicated on poor diet, lack of exercise and excessive weight.

Nearly half of all traffic accidents in the Los Angeles area are classified as hit-and-run collisions.

Grass-roots voter pushbacks are seen as pointless. Progressive state and federal courts have overturned a multitude of reform measures of the last 20 years that had passed with ample majorities

In impoverished central California towns such as Mendota, where thousands of acres were idled due to water cutoffs, once-busy farmworkers live in shacks. But even in opulent San Francisco, the sidewalks full of homeless people do not look much different.

What caused the California paradise to squander its rich natural inheritance?

Excessive state regulations and expanding government, massive illegal immigration from impoverished nations, and the rise of unimaginable wealth in the tech industry and coastal retirement communities created two antithetical Californias.

One is an elite, out-of-touch caste along the fashionable Pacific Ocean corridor that runs the state and has the money to escape the real-life consequences of its own unworkable agendas.

The other is a huge underclass in central, rural and foothill California that cannot flee to the coast and suffers the bulk of the fallout from Byzantine state regulations, poor schools and the failure to assimilate recent immigrants from some of the poorest areas in the world.

The result is Connecticut and Alabama combined in one state. A house in Menlo Park may sell for more than $1,000 a square foot. In Madera three hours away, the cost is about one-tenth of that.

In response, state government practices escapism, haggling over transgendered restroom issues and the aquatic environment of a 3-inch baitfish rather than dealing with a sinking state.

What could save California?

Blue-ribbon committees for years have offered bipartisan plans to simplify and reduce the state tax code, prune burdensome regulations, reform schools, encourage assimilation and unity of culture, and offer incentives to build reasonably priced housing.

Instead, hypocrisy abounds in the two Californias.

If Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg wants to continue lecturing Californians about their xenophobia, he at least should stop turning his estates into sanctuaries with walls and security patrols. And if faculty economists at the University of California at Berkeley keep hectoring the state about fixing income inequality, they might first acknowledge that the state pays them more than $300,000 per year -- putting them among the top 2 percent of the university's salaried employees.

Immigrants to a diverse state where there is no ethnic majority should welcome assimilation into a culture and a political matrix that is usually the direct opposite of what they fled from.

More unity and integration would help. So why not encourage liberal Google to move some of its operations inland to needy Fresno, or lobby the wealthy Silicon Valley to encourage affordable housing in the near-wide-open spaces along the nearby I-280 corridor north to San Francisco?

Finally, state bureaucrats should remember that even cool Californians cannot drink Facebook, eat Google, drive on Oracle or live in Apple. The distant people who make and grow things still matter.

Elites need to go back and restudy the state's can-do confidence of the 1950s and 1960s to rediscover good state government -- at least if everyday Californians are ever again to have affordable gas, electricity and homes, safe roads and competitive schools.

Will The American People Wake Up In Time?

No, Hillary, It Is Not Time to Move On

7/1/2016 - David Limbaugh Townhall.com

Am I fantasizing even to hope that Hillary Clinton will finally be held accountable for her lies and corruption -- to say nothing of her actions in her role as bimbo-slayer for her libidinous husband?

Perhaps so, but to borrow an underused cliche, hope springs eternal.

Hillary has operated above the law for so many years that her disinclination toward humility has ripened into unbounded hubris, which was particularly on display in her comments about the recently released House Select Committee on Benghazi report on the tragedy in Libya.

Clinton said the committee found nothing new and it is time to move on. Among her many liberal apologists, the panelists on "The View" united in outrage over the Republicans spending $7 million and "finding nothing new" against Clinton.

Joy Behar, after proclaiming that The New York Times "is the paper of record in this country, no matter what they tell you," indignantly noted that the cover of that paper reported, "Benghazi Panel Finds No Misdeeds by Clinton." She said, "So, I mean, that should be the last word."

Oh? To quote The Church Lady, "Isn't that special?"

I remember this painful song and dance well from the 1990s. Each time the Clintons were rightly accused of wrongdoing, they denied and attacked and slandered their accusers and then delayed long enough to claim that enough time had passed that we should just move on. For those who care anything about the rule of law, it was a frustrating period.

Over the years, the unglamorous power couple has become even more deceitful, brazen and defiant. Everyone, including Democrats, knows how corrupt the Clintons are, but they just continue to transgress with impunity. Hillary even had a phony smile on her face when she lied that the committee had found no misconduct on her part and demanded that it move on.

Let me just share a few highlights from the report that shed light on the Obama administration's and Clinton's overt malfeasance during the Benghazi attacks and in covering up their sins. Forgive me for going directly to the report rather than to The New York Times for my information to demonstrate that Rep. Mike Pompeo is correct that the administration, including Clinton, put politics "ahead of the lives of Americans, and while the administration had made excuses and blamed the challenges posed by time and distance, the truth is that they did not try."

--Though the administration was aware at the time of the terrorist attacks, no military assets were deployed to Benghazi when the last two Americans were killed, almost eight hours after the attacks began. Members of a fleet anti-terrorism security team sat idly on a plane in Rota, Spain, for three hours during this ordeal, changing in and out of their uniforms four times.

--When Ambassador Christopher Stevens was missing, the White House convened a two-hour meeting and agreed on 10 action items, five of which focused on a YouTube video that the administration, with malice aforethought, intentionally used as a scapegoat to cover the abject failure of its policies. In fact, the State Department had access to eyewitness accounts to the attacks in real time, and there were no discussions about any video. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security's command center was in direct contact with its agents on the ground in Benghazi and sent out many updates, including a "Terrorism Event Notification." Diplomatic Security well knew that it was terrorism and that there was no mention of the video from the agents on the ground.

--President Obama skipped his intelligence briefing the day after the attacks.

--Also, the morning after the attacks, the National Security Council's spokeswoman emailed some two dozen people from the White House, Department of Defense, State Department and intelligence community directing that they all refer to the released statements of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton "to ensure" they were "all in sync on messaging for the rest of the day."

--Minutes before Obama's Rose Garden speech on the attacks, Clinton aide Jake Sullivan emailed deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and others and informed them: "There was not really much violence in Egypt. And we are not saying that the violence in Libya erupted over inflammatory videos."

--Surely knowing it was untrue, Rhodes and Obama adviser David Plouffe prepped then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to say on her five Sunday talk show appearances that the attacks had spontaneously occurred and then evolved as a result, in part, of this anti-Islam YouTube video.

--After Rice's command performance, Sullivan reassured Clinton that Rice had made clear the "view that this started spontaneously and then evolved." From Clinton's retrieved emails, we know that she knew otherwise.

--The State Department was in shock and disbelief over Rice's statements. One officer said, "I think Rice was off the reservation on this one." Another said, "Off the reservation on five networks!" Yet another said, "(White House) very worried about the politics. This was all their doing."

--A headline on the CIA's intelligence assessment two days after the attacks stated, "Extremists Capitalized on Benghazi Protests," but the text said it was Cairo, not Benghazi. This obviously deliberate deception helped the administration falsely message the attacks.

It is indisputable that the administration, including Obama and Clinton, knew, at the very time these events were unfolding, that this was terrorism and concocted -- and then disseminated -- the outrageous lie that the attacks were spontaneous and based on a video. Members of the administration coordinated a scheme to deceive the American people and implemented it. Their motives were to cover up their gross negligence in failing to protect American lives and to preserve their bogus narrative that the administration had adequately contained the terrorist threat -- in view of the upcoming election. Adding insult to injury, they lied to the parents of the men who died in the attacks.

So no, Mrs. Clinton, it is not time to move on from your callous and cavalier behavior. It is time you were indicted for your email felonies, and it is time for all Americans to understand just how abominable your actions were on Benghazi and to vote against you in November.