WOBIK Blog

Patrick J. Buchanan — Official Website, by Patrick J. Buchanan — 1/18/2019

Excerpt:

“Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.”

So said President Charles De Gaulle, who in 1966 ordered NATO to vacate its Paris headquarters and get out of France.

NATO this year celebrates a major birthday. The young girl of 1966 is no longer young. The alliance is 70 years old.

And under this aging NATO today, the U.S. is committed to treat an attack on any one of 28 nations from Estonia to Montenegro to Romania to Albania as an attack on the United States.

The time is ripe for a strategic review of these war guarantees to fight a nuclear-armed Russia in defense of countries across the length of Europe that few could find on a map.

Apparently, President Donald Trump, on trips to Europe, raised questions as to whether these war guarantees comport with vital U.S. interests and whether they could pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.

The shock of our establishment that Trump even raised this issue in front of Europeans suggests that the establishment, frozen in the realities of yesterday, ought to be made to justify these sweeping war guarantees.

Celebrated as “the most successful alliance in history,” NATO has had two histories. Some of us can yet recall its beginnings.

In 1948, Soviet troops, occupying eastern Germany all the way to the Elbe and surrounding Berlin, imposed a blockade on the city.

The regime in Prague was overthrown in a Communist coup. Foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell, or was thrown, from a third-story window to his death. In 1949, Stalin exploded an atomic bomb.

As the U.S. Army had gone home after V-E Day, the U.S. formed a new alliance to protect the crucial European powers — West Germany, France, Britain, Italy. Twelve nations agreed that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on them all.

Cross the Elbe and you are at war with us, including the U.S. with its nuclear arsenal, Stalin was, in effect, told. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops returned to Europe to send the message that America was serious.

Crucial to the alliance was the Yalta line dividing Europe agreed to by Stalin, FDR and Churchill at the 1945 Crimean summit on the Black Sea.

U.S. presidents, even when monstrous outrages were committed in Soviet-occupied Europe, did not cross this line into the Soviet sphere.

Truman did not send armored units up the highway to Berlin. He launched an airlift to break the Berlin blockade. Ike did not intervene to save the Hungarian rebels in 1956. JFK confined his rage at the building of the Berlin Wall to the rhetorical: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

LBJ did nothing to help the Czechs when, before the Democratic convention in 1968, Leonid Brezhnev sent Warsaw Pact tank armies to crush the Prague Spring.

When the Solidarity movement of Lech Walesa was crushed in Gdansk, Reagan sent copy and printing machines. At the Berlin Wall in 1988, he called on Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Reagan never threatened to tear it down himself.

But beginning in 1989, the Wall was torn down, Germany was united, the Red Army went home, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the USSR broke apart into 15 nations, and Leninism expired in its birthplace.

As the threat that had led to NATO disappeared, many argued that the alliance created to deal with that threat should be allowed to fade away, and a free and prosperous Europe should now provide for its own defense.

It was not to be. The architect of Cold War containment, Dr. George Kennan, warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics would prove a “fateful error.”

This, said Kennan, would “inflame the nationalistic and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion” and “restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations.” Kennan was proven right.

America is now burdened with the duty to defend Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic, even as we face a far greater threat in China, with an economy and population 10 times that of Russia.

And we must do this with a defense budget that is not half the share of the federal budget or the GDP that Eisenhower and Kennedy had.

Trump is president today because the American people concluded that our foreign policy elite, with their endless interventions where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, had bled and virtually bankrupted us, while kicking away all of the fruits of our Cold War victory.

Halfway into Trump’s term, the question is whether he is going to just talk about halting Cold War II with Russia, about demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, and about bringing the troops home — or whether he is going to act upon his convictions.

Our foreign policy establishment is determined to prevent Trump from carrying out his mandate. And if he means to carry out his agenda, he had best get on with it.

View the complete article including image and links at:

https://buchanan.org/blog/at-age-70-time-to-rethink-nato-135716#more-135716

RealClear Politics, by Susan Crabtree — 1-22-2019

Excerpt:

In the midst of the 2016 GOP primary season, few could have predicted that Sen. Marco Rubio would emerge nearly three years later as one of the strongest champions of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, as well as the president’s hard-ball government-shutdown tactics.

But there was the Florida senator on Twitter over the weekend, coming to the president’s defense and unabashedly backing his latest immigration compromise proposal. Rubio also joined Trump in characterizing Democrats as obstructionists who are refusing the deal simply because it would give the president a win.

“POTUS offers to support two bills sponsored by Dems in exchange for Border Security & the instant reaction from Dem leaders is No,” Rubio tweeted Saturday. “Because denying him a win on border matters more to them than paying fed workers or 3 yrs of certainty for TPS & DACA recipients.”

……………………………………………………….

View the complete article including image links and comments at:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/01/22/trumps_immigration_offer_solidifies_gop_behind_him_139243.html

Atlanta Business Chronicle, by Eric Mandel  – Digital Producer , Atlanta Business Chronicle — 1/17/2018

Excerpts:

…………………………………………………………….

The musical guests have been a major source of intrigue in this year’s event, primarily because of the reported difficulties in finding performers for the halftime show. Multiple singers and celebrities publicly stood in solidarity with ex-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who became a lightning rod of controversy over his decision in 2016 to kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality. He became a free agent in March of 2017 and hasn’t found a job in the NFL since.

…………………………………………………………

I am proud to use my voice to unite and represent our country in my hometown of Atlanta,” Knight said in a news release. …….

……………………………………………………….

Knight said it was “Midnight Train to Georgia,” released in 1973, that lifted her career to new heights. And that the Super Bowl performance is an extension of that.

“Here we are, we’re still here. And I’m in Georgia, singing the national anthem, at the Super Bowl,” she said. “I hope that this anthem will touch people in a different way. We’ve been singing it forever, but this time, I would hope that they would feel it so deeply that it wold lift them to a higher place. That’s what I feel when I sing this song.”

…………………………………………

View the complete article including video at:

https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2019/01/17/empress-of-soul-and-atlanta-native-gladys-knight.html

=============================

PELOSI ON TRUMP’S ADDRESS:

“The date of the State of the Union is not a special date. It’s not constitutionally required, it’s not the president’s birthday, it’s not anything”

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S REPLY LETTER TO HOUSE SPEAKER PELOSI:

“Due to the Shutdown, I am sorry to inform you that your trip to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan has been postponed”

Center for Immigration Studies files racketeering lawsuit against watchdog

The Washington Times, by Stephen Dinan — 1/16/2019

Excerpt:

One of the most prominent groups advocating for stricter immigration went to court Wednesday to demand a judge order the Southern Poverty Law Center to stop labeling it a “hate group,” accusing the self-described watchdog of running an illegal racket to silence political opponents.

The Center for Immigration Studies says the SPLC’s accusations that it is racist and anti-immigrant are wrong and have cost the nonprofit support and financial backing by scaring people away from doing business with the center.

The center brought its challenge to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by filing a civil complaint under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act against SPLC President Richard Cohen and Heidi Beirich, who runs the group’s Hatewatch blog.

Mark Krikorian, the Center for Immigration Studies executive director, says his organization doesn’t meet the SPLC’s definition of a hate group and the Alabama-based watchdog knows it but persists anyway — which he said was evidence of the racket.

………………………………..

View the complete article including image, links and comments at:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/16/immigration-group-files-rico-lawsuit-splc/

===========================

American Thinker, by Thomas Lifson — 1/17/2019

Excerpt:

The mobilization of law enforcement and intelligence assets by the Obama administration in 2016 to spy on the presidential campaign of rival party candidate Donald Trump is the biggest political scandal in our history.  The Mueller probe of Trump is a cover-up, as are leaks to friendly media by anonymous former officials.  Yet the pieces are falling into place to burn through the dust clouds and see the underlying crimes.

John Solomon of The Hill is one of our leading sources for the real story obscured by the guilty parties and their media allies.  Fully uncovering it will require prosecution of related crimes, and the testimony of cooperating witnesses in the interest of mitigating their legal consequences, up to and including prison time.

Testimony given by former FBI top lawyer Bruce Ohr that has been leaked to Solomon provides, in Solomon’s words:

… the most damning evidence to date that FBI and DOJ officials may have misled federal judges in October 2016 in their zeal to obtain the warrant targeting Trump adviser Carter Page just weeks before Election Day.

Misleading a federal judge is a big crime

……………………………………………….

View the complete article including links and comments at:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/leaked_bruce_ohr_testimony_may_be_the_key_to_unraveling_the_biggest_political_scandal_in_american_history.html

=================================

American Thinker, by Thomas Lifson — 1/15/2019

Excerpt:

Has President Trump suckered Democrats and the Deep State into a trap that will enable a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy?  In only five more days of the already “longest government shutdown in history” (25 days and counting, as of today), a heretofore obscure threshold will be reached, enabling permanent layoffs of bureaucrats furloughed 30 days or more.

Don’t believe me that federal bureaucrats can be laid off?  Well, in bureaucratese, a layoff is called a RIF – a Reduction in Force – and of course, it comes with a slew of civil service protections.  But, if the guidelines are followed, bureaucrats can be laid off – as in no more job.  It is all explained by Michael Roberts here (updated after the beginning of the partial shutdown):

A reduction in force is a thoughtful and systematic elimination of positions.  For all practical purposes, a government RIF is the same thing as a layoff. …

Organizations must stick to predetermined criteria when sorting out what happens to each employee.  They must communicate with employees how and why decisions are made. …

In deciding who stays and who goes, federal agencies must take four factors into account:

1.    Tenure
2.    Veteran status
3.    Total federal civilian and military service
4.    Performance
Agencies cannot use RIF procedures to fire bad employees. 

…………………………………………………

View the complete article including links an comments at:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/trumps_shutdown_trap.html