Obama Commutes Sentences of More Violent Criminals

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The fundamental transformation continues to roll on as scheduled. As always, Obama waited until late Friday afternoon, when reporters largely pack up for the weekend, to announce the commutation of sentences for 42 more drug traffickers in federal prison.

President Obama defended this move as a common sense gesture to low-level nonviolent drug offenders, but as we’ve explained over the past few years, most people in federal prison are anything but “nonviolent.” MRC has posted the names of 10 of the individuals who were convicted of firearms violations in addition to drug trafficking charges. This at a time when Obama wants to crack down on law-abiding gun owners and dealers.

In addition to this list of 10 violent drug dealers, let’s take a look at one of the other 32 names on the list of commutations from Friday:

Sherman Ray Meirovitz – Minneapolis, MN
Offense: Possession with intent to distribute cocaine; conspiracy to distribute and
possession with intent to distribute cocaine; District of Minnesota
Sentence: Life imprisonment (January 5, 1990)

On the surface this doesn’t appear to warrant a life sentence. After all, wasn’t Mr. Meirovitz just a “nonviolent” cocaine dealer? I took a look at his sentencing history from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and found the full story:

After a three-day jury trial, Meirovitz was convicted on both counts of conspiracy to distribute and possession with the intent to distribute. The United States Probation Officer calculated his offense level at thirty-eight and his criminal history category at VI due to his status of career offender. Therefore, Meirovitz’ appropriate sentencing range was thirty years to life. Judge Devitt sentenced Meirovitz to the maximum sentence because of his substantial criminal record which included a history of drug-dealing and the shooting death of his mother-in-law.

This is a microcosm of much of the federal prison population. Many of the individuals who are currently serving time for drug trafficking were either originally in prison for more serious charges, but released in the revolving door of already-lenient safety valves, or they were arrested for robbery and even murder but the charges were pleaded down, leaving only the conviction on drug charges in place.

In total, Obama has commuted 348 federal sentences, more than the past six presidents combined. He has essentially used the presidential power to pardon as a back-door jailbreak to categorically remake the criminal code. This comes at a time when, contrary to myths propagated by “public policy” NGOs, more criminals are being released early by “the system” than ever before. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 62.4% of all drug traffickers sentenced in FY15 received a sentence below that which is recommended in the sentencing guidelines. The average sentence was only five and a half years. Less than half of all drug traffickers were convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum and half of those were not even sentenced to the mandatory minimum because of the safety valve or substantial assistance.

This is under current practice, before passing the jailbreak bill pushed by the pseudo intellectuals in Washington. Taken in totality, Obama’s dismantling of the law and order regime of the past few decades will release thousands of violent criminals onto our streets. And they will be committing offenses over and beyond drug trafficking As victims’ rights activists Kimberly Corban wrote in her column for Conservative Review last week, “We live in a society that is so hell bent on redeeming those who are undeserving of second chances that we choose to overlook blatant red flags.”

It would be nice if we had an opposition party putting out the flames instead of fanning them and providing Obama with cover. (For more from the author of “Obama Commutes Sentences of More Violent Criminals” please click HERE)

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The GOP Plan to End Wall Street Bailouts

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House Republicans are priming the pump for the next president to overhaul much of the financial regulation enacted in the aftermath of the 2008 global market downturn. The GOP plan would repeal and replace most of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul with a more market-based regulatory scheme.

As part of the GOP’s “A Better Way Agenda,” House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, was scheduled to unveil details of the simpler, yet stricter, regulation Tuesday morning at the Economic Club of New York.

“In a phrase,” he said, summarizing the Republican plan in prepared remarks obtained by The Daily Signal, “we need economic growth for all and bank bailouts for none.”

Hensarling blames Washington, not Wall Street, for that downturn.

“It wasn’t deregulation that created the great financial crisis of 2008, it was mostly dumb regulation by the Washington elite,” Hensarling told The Daily Signal on Monday before the speech. “And there were none dumber than those compelling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to loan money to people for homes they couldn’t afford to keep.”

Originally proposed by President Barack Obama and heralded by proponents as the greatest expansion of government control of banking and financial markets since the Great Depression, the mammoth Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was supposed to prevent another fiscal crisis.

Named for its principal authors, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the law imposed more government regulation on nearly all aspects of the financial services industry. It passed along party lines: by a vote of 237-192 in the House and 60-39 in the Senate. Neither Dodd nor Frank remains in Congress.

Citing economist Friedrich Hayek’s book “Fatal Conceit,” Hensarling described the law’s 2,300 pages as an example of “Washington’s elite deciding they’re smarter and can somehow manage the economy better than the rest of us.”

Central to the Republican replacement for Dodd-Frank is a regulatory offramp. Under the Hensarling plan, banks that “hold high levels of capital and maintain a fortress balance sheet,” he said in his speech, can escape much of the Dodd-Frank regulation.

Though larger banks would have to raise more capital, Hensarling said, the requirement wouldn’t have much of an impact on the books of smaller, more local lending institutions. Either way, he argued, control remains with the bank.

Hensarling’s plan represents a test balloon, a dry run at achieving permanent reform should a Republican win the White House in November. The newly released plan is just one plank of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s promised “bold, pro-growth agenda.”

Ownership of risk is the biggest difference between the new GOP plan and the Dodd-Frank regulatory scheme, Hensarling told The Daily Signal.

The plan would encourage market discipline, what he described to The Daily Signal as “having your own money at risk as opposed to having a taxpayer backstop which provides privatization of profits and socialization of losses.”

Without government loan guarantees and under the new capital requirements, Hensarling told members of the Economic Club of New York they may see more failure for financial institutions once deemed too big to fail.

In an ironic twist, Hensarling told The Daily Signal, he believes the GOP plan will do away with bailouts—something the Dodd-Frank law purported but failed to do. Instead, the GOP plan creates new avenues for controlled bankruptcy.

Troubled megabanks with more than $50 billion worth of assets would qualify for an entirely new bankruptcy process, not multibillion dollar packages given to lending institutions such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley.

“Some large firms will likely become smaller because the credit they now obtain will be priced according to their inherent risk of failure without implicit government guarantees,” Hensarling said in his New York speech. “As a result, failure—when it does happen—will be more contained.”

The Hensarling plan takes steps to more aggressively enforce laws against fraud, self-dealing, and insider trading by instituting new penalties, like doubling and tripling fines in some cases.

It also would change the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a government agency created by the Dodd-Frank that Hensarling described in an advance copy of his speech as Orwellian.

“We know the best consumer protections are competitive, transparent, and innovative markets, vigorously policed for fraud,” Hensarling said. “So the penalties we have in our plan go way further than anything Dodd-Frank conceived of.”

In the current political climate, Hensarling’s plan is a political impossibility. Even if the proposal advanced out of Congress, it wouldn’t make it past the White House.

Last week in Elkhart, Indiana, Obama described any plan to do away with Dodd-Frank as “crazy.”

“I don’t care whether you are a Republican or Democrat or an independent, why would you do that?” Obama said. “Less oversight on Wall Street would only make another crisis more likely … How can you say you are for the middle class and then you want to tear down these rules?”

Hensarling responded by calling the president a “liberal ideologue” and accused him of trying “to turn America into a European social democracy.”

“The ultimate goal of the left is to turn our large, money-centered banks into the functional equivalent of utilities so that Washington can politically allocate credit,” Hensarling told The Daily Signal.

Increased regulation has hurt smaller banks in particular, he said, and the left is “very happy to let community-centered banks wither on the vine.” (For more from the author of “The GOP Plan to End Wall Street Bailouts” please click HERE)

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Conservative Senator Is Trying to Keep Women out of the Draft

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To Sen. Mike Lee, the battle over whether women should have to register for a draft that does not exist is more consequential than it sounds.

Though the U.S. has had an all-volunteer force since 1973, some Republicans are using this year’s defense policy bill to try to require women to sign up for the Selective Service System, compelling them to serve in the military if a draft were ever reinstated.

Supporters of the provision of the National Defense Authorization Act expanding Selective Service to women are doing so in the name of inclusivity, arguing that if women are able to serve in combat—which they can—they should naturally be eligible for the draft if it were brought back.

But as senators debate the annual defense policy bill this week, conservatives like Lee are fighting back, arguing that forcing women into the Selective Service would actually restrict their freedoms.

“It’s one thing for women who want to be in combat and have earned it to do that, but forcing women to fight is a totally different matter,” said Lee, R-Utah, in an interview with The Daily Signal.

Lee added:

This has nothing to do with opportunities for women in the military. This has to do with whether we should put women in a position where they are forced to register for the Selective Service, and when you are doing that, you are submitting them to a future draft. That’s a totally different question and that’s a question that has yet to be adequately studied or considered by Congress in a manner I think it deserves. My amendment preserves choices that women currently have—choices that would be taken away if the language in the base bill were to become law.

Lee wrote an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would remove the provision that requires women to register for the Selective Service. The amendment also forces the Pentagon to prepare a report for Congress by July 2017 about whether the Selective Service is even necessary and if registration should be required regardless of gender.

The amendment, one of nearly 400 proposed to the defense policy bill, is also sponsored by GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

Extending the Selective Service to women has powerful Republican backers, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

In addition, military leaders from the Army and Marine Corps testified before Congress in February voicing support for requiring women to register with the Selective Service.

The Selective Service System was created to ensure the military has enough manpower when it is short-handed in a time of war.

The Selective Service System currently requires registration of men ages 18-25 only. But when the Obama administration opened military combat roles to women in December 2015, supporters saw gender neutrality in draft eligibility as a logical next step.

“Because the Department of Defense has lifted the ban on women serving in ground combat units, the committee believes there is no further justification in limiting the duty to register under the Military Selective Service Act to men,” wrote the Senate Armed Services Committee, which drafted the National Defense Authorization Act, in its executive summary to the bill.

When the House passed its version of the National Defense Authorization last month, opponents of expanding the Selective Service to women were successful in stripping the provision from the bill.

Lee hopes for a similar result in the Senate, and not just because he disagrees with the underlying policy.

The Utah senator is also concerned with a separate provision of the National Defense Authorization Act that would create a “National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service” to review the future of the Selective Service System. The commission would also “consider methods to increase participation in military, national, and public service in order to address national security and other public service needs of the nation.”

While backers of that provision, including McCain and Graham, say the commission is meant to increase interest in the U.S.’ system of an all-volunteer military force, Lee alleges his colleagues are trying to “open the door” to mandatory service making a comeback.

“I think the current NDAA calling for a study on national service is laying the groundwork for a mandatory national service draft,” Lee said. “Based on my reading of the language of the base bill, I certainly think that is a risk. I have some concerns about that. Voluntary service is an indispensable part of what makes America exceptional and mandatory service would destroy all of that.”

An aide to a senator who supports the commission denied Lee’s accusation.

“That’s an absurd argument,” the aide said. “No one is suggesting that we bring back mandatory service except for Senator Lee. The provision that would create the commission was included to study if we even still need a draft due to the success of the all-volunteer force.”

No matter the intent of the commission, and the push to require women to join the Selective Service, Lee agrees the nature of how the U.S. assembles its military is due for fresh scrutiny.

“One of the things facilitated by my amendment is a conversation that if you aren’t ever going to have a draft, taking a look at the need — or lackthereof — of Selective Service in general,” Lee said. “If we aren’t going to have a draft at some point in the future, it would defy logic and reason to expand the Selective Service requirement.”

It’s still unclear when — or if — Lee’s amendment stopping the expansion of Selective Service to women will be voted on. McConnell has said he hopes to finish work on the National Defense Authorization Act this week. (For more from the author of “Conservative Senator Is Trying to Keep Women out of the Draft” please click HERE)

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The False Comparison of Trump to Hillary

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A lot of Republicans still upset over Donald Trump winning the nomination resort to a false equivalence between Trump and Clinton in order to justify sitting the election out or even voting for Hillary.

Take a recent example by the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. First he lists Hillary’s manifold sins that Trump is innocent of: lying to the parents of the Benghazi victims, promising to nominate hard-left jurists to the Supreme Court, and supporting Obamas’ high-tax economics and unconstitutional amnesty of illegal aliens.

Then Ponnuru offers a catalogue of Trump’s sins Hillary hasn’t committed: mocking a reporter’s disability, indulging a preposterous conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald, threatening a trade war with China, or threatening war crimes against the families of terrorists. Trump’s list presumably balances Hillary’s flaws, in order to make the point that both Trump and Hillary are equally distasteful, thus making the election a Hobson’s choice for principled conservatives.

But this comparison is false and misleading, for Trump and Clinton have had very different careers with different obligations and responsibilities.

Most obviously, Donald Trump is a private citizen who has never held public office. He is a businessman in a world where decorum and class often aren’t as important as sharp elbows and tough negotiating skills, where making a profit is more important than consistency or sparing people’s feelings. His goal is to make money, and his flamboyant life-style is our culture’s sign of his skills and success at doing so. Moreover, his flaws of personality and character, like his rude bluster and outrageous claims, are not, alas, that exceptional or different from those of millions of other private citizens, which may explain his populist appeal. And in his line of work, especially as a reality television star, such braggadocio and insensitivity may be assets. Intellectuals of more delicate sensibilities and refined manners may not like such déclassé qualities or grubby dealings, but most of them don’t live in a hard, risky world of tough negotiations and profit and loss.

Hillary Clinton is in a very different line of work from Trump’s. Her whole life has been spent as what we laughably call a public servant. In other words, she is supposed to be working not for profit or her own status and enrichment, but for the public weal. For progressives, that means striving for “social justice,” income equality, the abolition of prejudice and bigotry, the emancipation of women, the improvement of the middle class, and the salvation of the planet from the merchants of death by carbon. This is what she tells us over and over, and this is her case for why she should be president.

But while Trump’s character flaws have been assets in his profession, Hillary’s arrogant sense of entitlement, relentless money-grubbing, chronic mendacity, and obvious dislike of people other than her minions all undercut her claims to be a public servant, and help explain why she has serially failed at that role.

Of course, some presidents have shared the same flaws as Hillary, but they at least showed some restraint in exploiting their position for private gain, and at least could pretend to be a warm “people person,” as the ghastly phrase goes. Even Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh In. But Hillary has been inept at camouflaging her unseemly ambitions and even pretending to be a caring tribune of the people––in contrast, say, to Elizabeth Warren, who is just as much a hypocritical one-percenter as Hillary, but manages to come across as sincerely passionate. With Trump, however, you know exactly what you’re getting.

Finally, if a businessman like Trump fails, he reaps most of the damage. But if a “public servant” like Hillary fails, the security and interests of every single one of us are damaged, even as she advances her own political and fiscal interests as much as Trump does. Trump’s alleged shenanigans with Trump University are nothing compared to Hillary’s exploitation of her position as Secretary of State to steer money to her foundation, which is to say to herself, her husband, her daughter, her friends and political cronies, no matter the damage to America’s interests. Trump’s inconsistencies and alleged exaggerations about his net worth or charitable contributions are a dog-bites-man story compared to Hillary’s lies about Benghazi and her private email server. Nothing Trump has publicly said or done is as self-servingly despicable as Hillary’s implications that the grieving families of the four dead Americans in Benghazi are not telling the truth about her personal promise to them to “get” the obscure producer of the on-line video supposedly responsible for the attacks, when she knew that claim was untrue.

In short, Trump has been accountable to the bottom line. Hillary has been accountable to the people. Trump has succeeded in his job; Hillary has failed abysmally at hers. Making the two equally unpalatable to the principled voter is making a false equivalence between two different kinds of public life.

Perhaps Trump’s flaws would make him a bad president. But other presidents who had flaws equally distasteful––such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton––managed to do some good things as president regardless. With Trump there’s at least a chance he could turn out to be a better president than his bluster and insults suggest. Hillary, on the other hand, has a long public record of using her position for personal gain, and putting her ambition ahead of her responsibilities to the country she supposedly serves. Her role as First Lady was marked by bungling health care reform, indulging silly fantasies of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and allowing herself––an “I am woman hear me roar” feminist––to be publicly humiliated by her satyr husband while attacking his victims. Her tenure in the Senate lacked any substantive legislative achievements, and her stint as Secretary of State furthered Obama’s destruction of America’s global influence, power, and security from Syria to the South China Sea. It may be possible that she could experience a road-to-the-White House conversion and become a good president, but given everything we know from her 25 years of public “service,” the probability is close to zero.

With Trump, in contrast, we know that at least he won’t be as destructive to our political order as Obama has been. With Hillary the odds are much higher that she will continue Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of our country into an E.U.-like technocratic regime of smug elites whose aim is to erode individual freedom and compromise our country’s sovereignty. Worse yet, if she becomes president, she will most likely nominate two or three Supreme Court justices, creating a court that will gut the and First and Second Amendments and legitimize further the dismantling of the Constitution’s divided powers and limited executive. And don’t put your faith in the Republican Senate that confirmed Loretta Lynch to shoot down every one of Hillary’s picks, even if that means eight years of an eight-member court.

The November election is not a choice between two equally bad candidates. It’s the moment when we reject the candidate who we know, based on her long public record of corruption, lying, and grasping for power and wealth, will take us further down the road to political perdition. (For more from the author of “The False Comparison of Trump to Hillary” please click HERE)

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Joe Miller Blasts Senator Sullivan for Betrayal of Conservative Values

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Fairbanks, Alaska – The news of Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan’s endorsement of Lisa Murkowski’s re-election campaign versus former Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan was met with strong condemnation from 2014 rival Joe Miller on Tuesday evening.

“From supporting Planned Parenthood’s federally funded abortions, to continuing Barack Obama’s illegal amnesty and funding Obamacare, Lisa Murkowski’s loyalty lies with DC cronies and political insiders rather than the people of Alaska.

“Senator Dan Sullivan’s endorsement of Lisa Murkowski is a betrayal of everything Alaska conservatives hold dear,” continued Miller. “Dan told us he was a conservative. He told us he shared our Tea Party values. He told us he was a fighter who would confront the Obama administration. Now he has endorsed one of Barack Obama and Harry Reid’s chief enablers.

“I think I owe Alaskans an apology for taking Dan at his word and supporting him in the 2014 general election.”

Just last month Senator Sullivan endorsed Alaska nemesis and ANWR development opponent John McCain’s re-election bid against strong free-market conservative Kelli Ward.

Joe Miller concluded: “This is a sad day for Alaska. Dan Sullivan needs to be reminded that we have enough talkers in the Senate. All talk, no action won’t cut it. Talk is cheap. Sadly, it appears Dan has abandoned Alaska conservatives for the DC Cartel.”

Latest Primary Has Big Impact on Clinton Campaign

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Though the primary election did not play out as the coronation many pundits initially forecast, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has reportedly amassed the 2,383 delegates needed to become her party’s presumptive nominee. Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has proved a popular alternative among left-leaning voters, was not able to make up for the deficit he faced among Democrat-exclusive superdelegates.

Reports indicate the Puerto Rico primary, along with late support from uncommitted superdelegates, put Clinton over the threshold.

According to the Associated Press, 571 of the 714 Democratic superdelegates — a group made up of influential party leaders — supported Clinton, with less than 100 still uncommitted. These members of the Democratic Party’s elite have played a pivotal role in securing Clinton’s presumptive nomination.

One superdelegate, Alabama Democratic Party chairwoman Nancy Worley, pledged her vote to Clinton recently in an effort to wrap up the primary election and allow Clinton to focus on her race against presumptive general-election rival Donald Trump.

“We really need to bring a close to this primary process and get on to defeating Donald Trump,” she said.

Another superdelegate, Michael Brown of Washington, D.C., explained the reason for his late-in-the-game support for the former first lady.

“It’s time to stand behind our presumptive candidate,” he declared. “We shouldn’t be acting like we are undecided when the people of America have spoken.” (For more from the author of “Latest Primary Has Big Impact on Clinton Campaign” please click HERE)

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Here’s How Clinton Answered When Asked If the Right to Bear Arms Is a Constitutional Right

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Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton declined to say if she thinks the Second Amendment guarantees the constitutional right to bear arms during an interview Sunday with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Stephanopoulos asked Clinton, “Do you believe that an individual’s right to bear arms is a constitutional right, that it’s not linked to service in a militia?”

“I think that for most of our history, there was a nuanced reading of the Second Amendment until the decision by the late Justice Scalia, and there was no argument until then that localities and states and the federal government had a right, as we do with every amendment, to impose reasonable regulations,” she replied. “So I believe we can have common-sense gun safety measures consistent with the Second Amendment” . . .

“I said, do you believe that their conclusion that an individual’s right to bear arms is a constitutional right?” he pressed.

“If it is a constitutional right, then it, like every other constitutional right, is subject to reasonable regulations, and what people have done with that decision is to take it as far as they possibly can and reject what has been our history from the very beginning of the republic, where some of the earliest laws that were passed were about firearms,” Clinton said. (Read more from “Here’s How Clinton Answered When Asked If the Right to Bear Arms Is a Constitutional Right” HERE)

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8 Lessons We Can Learn From the Epic Economic Meltdown in Venezuela

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We are watching an entire nation collapse right in front of our eyes. As you read this article, there are severe shortages of just about anything you can imagine in Venezuela. That includes food, toilet paper, medicine, electricity and even Coca-Cola. All over the country, people are standing in extremely long lines for hours on end just hoping that they will be able to purchase some provisions for their hungry families. At times when there hasn’t been anything for the people that have waited in those long lines, full-blown riots have broken out. All of this is happening even though Venezuela has not been hit by a war, a major natural disaster, a terror attack, an EMP burst or any other type of significant “black swan” event. When debt spirals out of control, currency manipulation goes too far and government interference reaches ridiculous extremes, this is what can happen to an economy. The following are 8 lessons that we can learn from the epic economic meltdown in Venezuela…

#1 During an economic collapse, severe shortages of basic supplies can happen very rapidly…

“There’s a shortage of everything at some level,” says Ricardo Cusanno, vice president of Venezuela’s Chamber of Commerce. Cusanno says 85% of companies in Venezuela have halted production to some extent.

At this point, even Coca-Cola has shut down production due to a severe shortage of sugar.

#2 If you have not stored up food ahead of time, your diet could quickly become very simple during a major emergency. The Los Angeles Times recently covered the plight of a 42-year-old single mother in Venezuela named Maria Linares, and according to the story her family has not had any chicken to eat since last December…

In December, she was spending about half her salary on groceries. It now takes almost everything she earns to feed her two children, who subsist on manioc (also known as cassava or yuca), eggs and cornmeal patties called arepas, served with butter and plantains.
“The last time we had chicken was in December,” she said.

The best deals are generally at government-run stores, such as Mercal and Bicentenario, where the prices are regulated.

To shop there, however, Linares said, she has to line up overnight. Even then, she might come home empty-handed if everything sells out before she gets to the front of the line — or if she is robbed leaving the store.

#3 When people get hungry, they become very desperate. And very desperate people will eat just about anything.

In a recent article, I detailed the fact that some people down in Venezuela have already become so desperate that they are actually hunting dogs and cats for food.

Could you ever do that?

I couldn’t, but just like in Venezuela there are people in this nation that will eat anything that they can get their hands on when they are desperately hungry and their children are crying out for food.

#4 When an economy melts down, it isn’t just food that is in short supply. This week, there have been several mainstream news stories about the severe shortage of toiletries in Venezuela…

Toiletries are running in short supply across the country. Many Venezuelans say that people wait in lines for several hours to buy basic toiletries, only to sell them at much higher prices on the black market.

Bloomberg reported last year that Trinidad & Tobago had offered to exchange tissue paper for oil with Venezuela. It’s unclear if the deal ever came through.

Condoms and birth control are hard to find, Venezuelans say. You won’t have any more luck with toothpaste, soap, toilet paper or shampoo. And Maduro has asked women to stop using blow dryers.

What would your life be like if you had no toothpaste, soap, toilet paper or shampoo? If you do not want to do without those items in the future, you might want to start stocking up on them now.

#5 If you need medical care during a major economic meltdown, you might be out of luck. Just consider what sick Venezuelans are going through right at this moment…

The Luis Razetti Hospital in the portal city of Barcelona looks like a war zone.

Patients can be seen balancing themselves on half-broken beds with days-old blood on their bodies.

They’re the lucky ones; most are curled up on the floor, blood streaming, limbs blackening.

Children lie among dirty cardboard boxes in the hallways without food, water or medication.

Without electricity or functioning machines, medics have had to create their own solutions. Two men who had surgery on their legs have their limbs elevated by makeshift slings made out of water bottles.

#6 During a currency meltdown, owning precious metals such as gold and silver becomes much more important. This even applies to entire countries. So far during this crisis, Venezuela has had to ship 2.3 billion dollars worth of gold to Switzerland because the bankers won’t take their paper currency any longer…

Venezuela’s government has been running out of foreign reserves and literally shipping gold to help pay for its debt. Venezuela only has $12.1 billion in foreign reserves as of March, according to the most recent central bank figures.

That’s down by half from a year ago. In order to get cash loans to pay for its debt, Venezuela has shipped $2.3 billion of gold to Switzerland so far this year as collateral, according to Swiss government import data.

#7 When an economy crashes, crime goes through the roof. As I discussed the other day, there were 107 major episodes of looting or attempted looting in the first quarter of 2016 down in Venezuela, and things have gotten even worse over the past couple of months.

Meanwhile, crime continues to rise in major cities all over America too. According to Breitbart, 66 people were shot in the city of Chicago over the Memorial day weekend, and that was an all-time record. So far for the entire year, a grand total of more than 1,500 people have been shot in Chicago, and police are bracing for what promises to be a very chaotic summer.

#8 This may be the most controversial lesson in the list. Sometimes it takes a shaking to awaken a nation. Of course nobody really likes to go through a shaking, but in the end it can have some very positive results. Just look at what is happening in Caracas…

Churches in the capital Caracas recently organized a prayer walk. Thousands came to the main streets of the city crying out to God to ease their misery.

Under the slogan “I pray for my country,” dozens of Christians marched and prayed for unity of the church and for God to finally intervene to end their country’s plight.

Will a similar shaking be necessary to bring America to her knees?

What is it ultimately going to take to bring about a widespread awakening in this country?

If you follow my work closely, then you already know that I believe that a great shaking is coming to the United States. In the end, it will be far more serious than what Venezuela is going through right now, and it is going to shake this nation to the very core.

But a great shaking could turn out to be exactly what the United States needs, because without a great shaking I don’t believe that there would be a major awakening in America.

Or could it be possible that I am wrong about this? (For more from the author of “8 Lessons We Can Learn From the Epic Economic Meltdown in Venezuela” please click HERE)

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Trump Bashes His Own Campaign Staff on Call With Surrogates: ‘You Guys Are Sometimes Getting Stupid Information’

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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump bashed his own campaign staff during a call with supporters on Monday, telling his surrogates that his staff sometimes gives them “stupid information,” according to Bloomberg Politics.

During the call, Trump ordered his surrogates to defend his attacks regarding a federal judge’s Mexican heritage according to “two supporters who were on the call and requested anonymity to share their notes with Bloomberg Politics.”

Trump has directed a series of personal attacks towards the Hispanic judge hearing the Trump University lawsuit. Trump told The Wall Street Journal that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel has “an absolute conflict of interest” due to his heritage and Trump’s position that a wall should be built on the Mexican border.

According to Bloomberg Politics, during the call, former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer interjected to tell Trump that she received a memo from his staff telling her not to discuss the lawsuit.

“Take that order and throw it the hell out,” Trump said before demanding to know who sent the memo. (Read more from “Trump Bashes His Own Campaign Staff on Call With Surrogates: ‘You Guys Are Sometimes Getting Stupid Information'” HERE)

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Reality: Trump on Islam

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Former NSA head Michael Hayden recently joined a chorus of Trump’s critics blasting him for offending Muslims. “The jihadist narrative is that there is undying enmity between Islam and the modern world, so when Trump says they all hate us, he’s using their narrative,” he said.

That’s true. It’s also meaningless because in this case the narrative is reality.

Jihadists do hate us. Islam has viewed the rest of the world with undying enmity for over a thousand years. Some might quibble over whether a 7th century obsession really counts as “undying”, but it’s a whole lot older than Hayden, the United States of America, our entire language and much of our civilization.

Islam divides the world into the Dar Al-Islam and the Dar Al-Harb, the House of Islam and the House of War. This is not just the jihadist narrative, it is the Islamic narrative and we would be fools to ignore it.

The White House is extremely fond of narratives. The past month featured Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy guru, taking a victory lap for successfully pushing his “narrative” on the Iran deal. Rhodes takes pride in his narratives. His media allies love narratives. But none of the narratives change the fact that Iran is moving closer to getting a nuclear bomb. Narratives don’t change reality. They’re a delusion.

Narratives only work on the people you fool. They don’t remove the underlying danger. All they do is postpone the ultimate recognition of the problem with catastrophic results.

Islamic terrorism is a reality. Erase all the narratives and the fact of its existence remains.

Instead of fighting a war against the reality of Islamic terrorism, our leaders have chosen to fight a war against reality. They don’t have a plan for defeating Islamic terrorism, but for defeating reality.
So far they have fought reality to a draw. Ten thousand Americans are dead at the hands of Islamic terrorists and Muslim migration to America has doubled. Islamic terrorists are carving out their own countries and our leaders are focused on defeating their “narratives” on social media.

Hayden repeats the familiar nonsense that recognizing reality plays into the enemy narrative. And then the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism is by refusing to recognize its existence out of fear that we might play into its narrative. But Islamic terrorism doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

You don’t have to believe in a bomb or a bullet for it to kill you. A plane headed for your office building or a machete at your neck is not a narrative, it is reality. If we can’t tell the difference between reality and what we believe, then reality will kill us. And nothing we believe will change that.

We are not fighting a war of narratives with Islam. This is a war of bombs and bullets, planes crashing into buildings and blades digging into necks. And yet the men in charge of fighting this war remain obsessed with winning a battle of narratives inside the Muslim world. They have no plans for winning the war. Instead they are occupied with managing the intensity of the conflict, taking out the occasional terrorist leader, bombing only when a jihadist group like ISIS has become too powerful, while waiting for their moderate Muslim allies to win the war of narratives for them by discrediting the jihadists.

The narrative mistake is understandable. The left remains convinced that it can get its way through propaganda. Its record is certainly impressive. But it’s strictly a domestic record. Getting Americans to believe seven strictly irrational social justice things before breakfast is very different than convincing the members of a devout tribal society with a deep sense of history that they really don’t want to kill Americans. All that the narrative war accomplished was to show that the propagandists who convinced Americans to vote for their own exploitation have no idea how to even begin convincing Muslims to do anything. Think Again Turn Away was an embarrassment. Various outreach efforts failed miserably. American politicians devoutly apologize for any disrespect to Islam, but Muslims don’t care.

Hayden isn’t wrong that there is a narrative. But Nazism also had a narrative. Once the Nazis had power, they began acting on it and their narrative became a reality that had to be stopped by armed force. But at a deeper level he is wrong because he isn’t reciting the Islamic or even the jihadist narrative, but a deceptive narrative aimed at us in order to block recognition of the problem of Islamic terrorism.

The Islamic narrative isn’t just that we hate them. More importantly, it’s that they hate us. Muslim terrorists are not passively reacting to us. They carry a hatred that is far older than our country. That hatred is encoded in the holy books of Islam. But that hatred is only a means to an end.

Hatred is the means. Conquest is the end.

Assuming that Muslims are oppressed minorities is a profound intellectual error crippling our ability to defend ourselves. Islamic terrorism is not an anti-colonial movement, but a colonial one. ISIS and its Islamic ilk are not oppressed minorities, but oppressive majorities. Islamic terror does not react to us, as men like Hayden insist. Instead we react to Islam. And our obsession with playing into enemy narratives is a typically reactive response. Rising forces generate their own narratives. Politically defeated movements typically obsess about not making things worse by playing into the narratives that their enemies have spread about them. That is why Republicans panic over any accusation of racism. Or why the vanilla center of the pro-Israel movement winces every time Israel shoots a terrorist.

Western leaders claim to be fighting narratives, but they have no interest in actually challenging the Islamic narrative of superiority that is the root cause of this conflict. Instead they take great pains not to offend Muslims. This does not challenge the Islamic supremacist narrative, instead it affirms it.

Rather than challenging Islamic narratives, they are stuck in an Islamic narrative. They are trapped by the Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative of “Good Islamist” and “Bad Islamist” convinced that the only way to win is to appeal to the “Good Islamist” and team up with him to fight the “Bad Islamist”.

The “moderate” Muslim majority who are our only hope for stopping Islamic terrorism is an enemy narrative manufactured and distributed by an Islamic supremacist organization. When we repeat it, we distort our strategy and our thinking in ways that allow us to be manipulated and controlled.

It isn’t Trump who is playing into jihadist narratives, but Hayden and everyone who claims that recognizing Islamic terrorism plays into enemy narratives while failing to recognize that what they are saying is an enemy narrative.

The very notion that the good opinion of the enemy should constrain our military operations, our thinking and even our ability to recognize reality is an enemy narrative of unprecedented effect.

And this is the narrative that our leaders and the leaders of the world have knelt in submission to.

Narratives only have the power that we assign to them. No narrative is stronger than reality unless we believe in it. Not only have our leaders chosen to play into the enemy narrative, but they have accepted its premise as the only way to win. And so they are bound to lose until they break out of the narrative. (For more from the author of “Reality: Trump on Islam” please click HERE)

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