Iran Reaches Verdict in Case Against Detained Navy Veteran

By ABC News. Iran’s judiciary has delivered a verdict against U.S. Navy veteran Michael White who was detained last July in Iran but there is no information as to what the ruling contained, a semi-official news agency reported Monday.

A prosecutor in the northeastern city of Mashdad, Gholamali Sadeghi, was quoted as saying by the Tasnim news agency that the “verdict has been issued” against White and that he faced unspecified security charges.

Sadeghi’s remarks counter a February statement by the Iranian foreign ministry, which said White faces no security or espionage charge. There was no immediate explanation on the discrepancies. . .

White, who has been held in Mashhad, is the first American known to be detained since Donald Trump became president. Trump has pursued a maximalist campaign against Tehran that includes America’s withdrawal of Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers. Iran has in the past detained Westerners and dual nationals to use them as leverage in negotiations.

White’s family says he traveled to Iran to visit his girlfriend — the two met online — and was arbitrarily detained. Joanne White, the detainee’s mother, said in January that he was undergoing cancer treatment and that she feared he would not survive prolonged detention. (Read more from “Iran Reaches Verdict in Case Against Detained Navy Veteran” HERE)

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Verdict Issued Against US Navy Veteran Held in Iran

By AP. Iran’s judiciary has delivered a verdict against U.S. Navy veteran Michael White who was detained last July in Iran but there is no information as to what the ruling contained, a semi-official news agency reported Monday.

A prosecutor in the northeastern city of Mashdad, Gholamali Sadeghi, was quoted as saying by the Tasnim news agency that the “verdict has been issued” against White and that he faced unspecified security charges.

Sadeghi’s remarks counter a February statement by the Iranian foreign ministry, which said White faces no security or espionage charge. There was no immediate explanation on the discrepancies. (Read more rom “Verdict Issued Against US Navy Veteran Held in Iran” HERE)

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Thousands In ICE Custody Are Being Quarantined – Here’s Why

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has had to place more than 2,000 detainees in quarantine after an outbreak of mumps and other diseases, CNN reported. This is the first outbreak of mumps in more than two years but the increase in illegal aliens in ICE custody has spiked.

“As of March 7, 2019, there was a total of 2,287 detainees cohorted for exposure to a detainee with a contagious condition,” ICE spokesperson Brendan Raedy said in a statement. “ICE takes very seriously the health, safety and welfare of those in our care. ICE is committed to ensuring the welfare of all those in the agency’s custody, including providing access to necessary and appropriate medical care.”

51 ICE detention facilities have been investigated for mumps, chickenpox and influenza over the past years. During that time period, 236 reported cases of mumps occurred. . .

“Migrants travel north from countries where poverty and disease are rampant, and their health can be aggravated by the physical toll of the journey. Many individuals we encounter may have never seen a doctor, received immunizations, or lived in sanitary conditions. Close quarters on trains and buses can hasten the spread of communicable diseases,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said during congressional testimony last week. (Read more from “Thousands in ICE Custody Are Being Quarantined” HERE)

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Rashida Tlaib Quietly Unfollowed a Grossly Anti-Semitic Instagram Page

With freshman congresswoman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) stealing all the anti-Semitic headlines, of late, fellow anti-Semite and fellow freshman congresswoman Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has managed to fly by relatively under the radar. This, notwithstanding that Tlaib has longstanding ties with Hezbollah activists, quite literally wipes Israel off her congressional office maps, and exuberantly associates with the self-hating “Jewish” group, IfNotNow. . .

Now, as Ashley Rae Goldenberg reports for Capital Research Center, Tlaib quietly and without official comment unfollowed a vehemently anti-Semitic Instagram page that she had been previously following. According to Goldenberg, the account, “free.palestine.1948,” frequently shares “blatantly anti-Semitic posts and 9/11 conspiracy theories,” including posts that “compar[e] Jews to vermin and Hitler…assert[] Jews wield an enormous amount of power, and…claim[] Israel ‘did’ 9/11 and supports ISIS.”

As Goldenberg reported on Friday, the “free.palestine.1948” Instagram page once shared a meme about the “Rothschild-Israel Occult Connection” that was borrowed from an anti-Semitic site whose site manager claims that he “wish[es] to warn how Jewry is destroying Christianity throughout the world.” Other posts have included overt blood libel references and horrific, vile falsehoods about Israeli Jews sucking the blood out of Palestinian-Arab children. . .

Over the weekend, following Goldenberg’s report, Tlaib quietly unfollowed the bigoted Instagram page. Goldenberg reports today:

On Friday, the Capital Research Center (CRC) exposed Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) who was following an inflammatory anti-Semitic Instagram account. After the original report, Tlaib quietly unfollowed the account and stealthily edited her Instagram bio to say she does not support “all” of the posts of the accounts she chooses to follow. Tlaib’s communications director told CRC the office has “no comment” on the matter.

(Read more from “Rashida Tlaib Quietly Unfollowed a Grossly Anti-Semitic Instagram Page” HERE)

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Trump’s $4.7 Trillion Budget Proposal: Why Should the Third Time Be the Charm?

Despite eye-popping debt on every page of Trump’s latest fiscal year (FY) 2020 budget proposal, some in the administration are pushing for a spending fight with Congress at least on one portion of the budget. Will they succeed this time? Only if conservatives get focused.

At the beginning of the Trump presidency in 2017, his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) immediately introduced a budget to cut spending for the remainder of FY 2017. Yet despite his party controlling both houses of Congress, the president signed a budget that spring ignoring every facet of his proposal.

Later that year, he introduced his budget proposal for FY 2018. The same thing happened. Then, the following year, the administration didn’t even pretend to cut spending and agreed with Congress to bust the budget caps by $300 billion, expanding the budget of almost every program and agency Trump promised to cut or eliminate.

Now, Trump has introduced his FY 2020 budget proposal with plans to make some modest cuts from the record high baseline of spending he and congressional Republicans have agreed to, even though Democrats now control the House. They blew through about seven budget deadlines plus a debt ceiling with control of both houses, when it would have been easier to leverage a veto threat to force McConnell to play hardball on filibusters against budgets. They failed to do so. This is just Charlie Brown with another football.

Even though the administration proposed even bigger spending cuts in past budgets, here we are today, 26 months into this administration and $2.1 trillion more added to the debt, and they are promising to cut some spending again. It could be the administration now feels that a more modest approach will somehow net better results in Congress. It is proposing a five percent across-the-board reduction in current non-defense discretionary spending levels for FY 2020 over the current year’s. That is roughly $54 billion from current high levels, although proposed disaster spending chews up about half of that savings.

Before exploring the opportunity for conservatives in the budget fight this year, it’s important to take stock of how far to the left we have all moved and how we have all become OK with it.

The proposal would spend an unconscionable $4.75 trillion next year. Remember, for all our talk about the terrible spending under Obama, his final budget request was $4.15 trillion. Despite a record $3.6 trillion in revenue, this budget would result in a trillion-dollar deficit. These numbers are actually low, because they assume nearly $4 trillion in spending cuts the president has, thus far, failed to fight for.

The budget blueprint would spend $56.3 trillion over the next 10 years. It would create $7.3 trillion in deficits. That is less than under the current baseline, but that is only because the OMB predicts three percent growth for the remainder of the decade. This is very unlikely, precisely because of all the debt we are amassing. The debt has prevented us from enjoying more than three percent growth even during the best job market. It also assumes $2.8 trillion in mandatory spending cuts, which everyone on all sides has demonstrated will never materialize.

This coming year alone will result in another $479 billion in interest payments on the debt. That is more than the entire federal share of Medicaid and the Obamacare subsidies.

In 10 years, interest on the debt will rise to $823 billion, a cost that even Medicare is not projected to reach for another five years. And this proposal assumes that the 10-year Treasury note will not rise above 3.8 percent, still well below historical averages and unlikely to occur given our projected desperation for debt servicing.

The budget creates a massive new market-distorting entitlement program for paid family leave. The White House blueprint assumes it to be essentially revenue-neutral because it would rely on individuals drawing funds from their Social Security benefits early on in life, and those funds would not be replaced. As I’ve explained before, it’s inconceivable that this program would not spiral out of control and cost a lot more.

It’s quite evident that fiscal conservatism has gone the way of, well, social conservatism and national security conservatism.

So, is there any glimmer of hope?

If the administration is actually willing to fight for the strategy put forth by acting OMB Director Russ Vought, then there are at least some discretionary spending cuts that could easily be salvaged. While most of what is driving the insane debt is entitlement spending, it’s important to remember that when we cut the discretionary spending, we are not only saving money but draining the Swamp and its policies.

The strategy to win the spending fight goes as follows: Unlike last year, the status quo in any budget stalemate at the beginning of FY 2020 in October should benefit fiscal conservatives. That is because under current law, the spending caps of the 2011 Budget Control Act automatically revert to previous levels. This means that defense and non-defense discretionary spending automatically drop $35 billion beginning in October. Then, on January 1, 2020, automatic sequestration kicks in and another $89 billion is cut. Thus, if we simply operate on a continuing resolution without anything extra tied in during the first few months of the fiscal year, it will result in $124 billion less in discretionary spending than the current year.

Until now, the administration has been too scared to play chicken with Democrats on sequestration because, in the coming year for example, it would slash $21 billion more from defense spending than non-defense spending. However, Russ Vought warned Congress last month that the administration would be willing to shoot the hostage of defense spending and allow the budget caps to relapse for everything, while seeking the extra military spending from what is known as “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) accounts, which are not subject to the spending caps.

While conservatives usually detest the use of this budget gimmick because it allows Congress to spend even more, he is suggesting we use it to assuage the fears of military spending hawks so it frees us up to fight to cut spending across the board without fear of collateral damage to the military.

This is a good strategy, but it will only work if the conservative movement gets focused in the next few months and actually holds the rest of the administration and GOP leaders in Congress to this strategy. Otherwise, it will just result in the same capitulation we saw in February 2018, when Trump agreed to bust the budget caps for two years, even with Republicans in control of the House. As we get closer to September, Democrats and the media will warn of “draconian” spending cuts and threaten a government shutdown. The majority of those in the “shallow state” of this administration will then oppose this strategy and signal capitulation. Then, unless conservative media figures change their attitude, they will obsequiously follow the administration’s cues, thinking they are standing with the president but in fact standing with the Swamp in this administration against the MAGA figures.

Consequently, the importance of today’s budget is not in any numbers or figures. Either way, we are swamped in debt and will continue to be until we fundamentally alter our approach to health care. But if conservatives want to secure a single victory on spending during this entire administration, the time to defend the president’s budget is not now, when it’s just a piece of paper, but headed into the fall, when it could become a reality — if we hold the line. (For more from the author of “Trump’s $4.7 Trillion Budget Proposal: Why Should the Third Time Be the Charm?” please click HERE)

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While Everyone Sleeps, the Courts Are Abolishing All Immigration Enforcement

Congress could never get away with creating constitutional rights for illegal aliens to remain here, yet a single lower court just did so on Thursday. And where Congress would face deep reprisal in the next election, faceless judges will never feel the heat.

Conservatives fear that extreme Democrats might actually abolish ICE and all immigration enforcement, but the lower courts are already systematically abolishing ICE’s authority, nullifying immigration enforcement statutes, violating separation of powers, and constantly increasing the wave of bogus asylum-seekers that they originally spawned with other radical rulings. The latest ruling from the Ninth Circuit demonstrates that unless Republicans and the president begin pushing back against these radical judges and delegitimizing their rulings, Democrats will get everything they want without ever facing electoral backlash or even the need to win elections.

It’s truly hard to overstate the outrageously harmful effects of Thursday’s Ninth Circuit ruling. For the first time in our history, the courts have fabricated a constitutional right for those denied asylum to appeal to federal courts for any reason.

Here’s the background.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants are flooding our border, claiming the formula of “credible fear” of persecution. They get to stay indefinitely while they ignore their court dates in immigration court. Because of an amalgamation of several prior activist court rulings, mainly by this very circuit, roughly 90 percent of credible fear claims are approved by asylum officers and the claimants shielded from deportation, even though asylum status is ultimately rejected almost every time by an immigration judge. Unfortunately, by that point it’s too late for the American people, who are stuck with the vast majority of these claimants remaining indefinitely in the country. Yet rather than ending this sham incentive, the Ninth Circuit drove a truck through immigration law by asserting that there is now a constitutional right for even the few who are denied initial credible fear status and are placed in deportation proceedings to appeal their denials, not just to an administrative immigration judge but to a federal Article III judge for any reason.

In past cases, the courts merely twisted statutes and contorted their plain meaning. In this case, for the first time ever and in direct contrast to a ruling by the Third Circuit in 2016, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the immigration statute that denies the federal courts jurisdiction to hear such appeals is unconstitutional under the constitutional requirement of habeas corpus, thereby giving 7.8 billion people in the world habeas corpus access to our courts. This will allow numerous illegal aliens, including the brand-new ones entering now, to stay indefinitely while they litigate themselves into status. The ACLU, which of course led this lawsuit on behalf of a Sri Lankan migrant denied asylum, wasn’t kidding when it proclaimed, “The historical and practical importance of this ruling cannot be overstated.”

This is one of many recent violations of sovereignty doctrine, known as “plenary power doctrine.” This long-standing principle in the courts is that while aliens have due process rights against criminal punishment, they have no rights to litigate against deportation, which is a mere extension of sovereignty, other than the process laid out by Congress. This principle “has become about as firmly embedded in the legislative and judicial tissues of our body politic as any aspect of our government,” not “merely” by “a page of history … but a whole volume” (Galvan v. Press). The concept is “inherent in sovereignty,” consistent with “ancient principles” of international law, and “to be exercised exclusively by the political branches of government.” (Kleindienst v. Mandel).

What is so outrageous about this case is that Congress explicitly stripped the courts of any jurisdiction to hear such claims. The reason why the district judge, who was an Obama appointee, refused to even hear this case is because 8 U.S.C. §1252(e)(2) prohibits the federal courts (not to be confused with DOJ administrative courts) from hearing habeas corpus claims against expedited removal of those denied their credible fear claims unless of course they have a claim that they are a citizen or a legal permanent resident. In this case, the three Clinton appointees of this Ninth Circuit panel, Wallace Tashima, Margaret McKeown, and Richard Paez, ruled for the first time that this provision is unconstitutional and that the district court must hear the case.

The court used the Boumediene v. Bush decision, which created a right to habeas corpus for enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay, as the basis for its decision. That decision in itself was an egregious warping of the Constitution, a decision that Scalia angrily predicted that “the Nation will live to regret.” However, the important distinction is that Boumediene was a case of indefinite detention, whereas this is a case where we are enforcing our sovereignty and getting rid of the person, who can live freely wherever he wants. Applying habeas corpus to deportation is bonkers even by the Boumediene standard.

Now that there is a circuit split on this revolutionary idea, court watchers on all sides predict the Supreme Court will take up the case. While conservatives are fairly confident that this will be added to the endless list of Ninth Circuit reversals by SCOTUS (although I have my concerns about Gorsuch in this case), conservatives need to realize the factors creating an emergency with sovereignty and the lower courts:

We’ve seen over and over again how lower courts create a legal, political, and policy momentum for creating new rights. If they are not nipped in the bud and delegitimized immediately, they wind up growing and eventually being codified, even if initially reversed by the Supreme Court. This has happened with almost every phantom right created by the courts and has already begun with immigration law. We are at the cusp of the courts doing with immigration what they did with abortion and gay marriage, even though it took years for the Left to win in those cases. All of the justices except for Clarence Thomas succumb to pressure to varying degrees and will eventually go along with much of the anti-sovereignty doctrine building in the lower courts.

Many conservatives are suggesting that we “fix” our immigration laws to stop the asylum fraud, among other problems at the border. What this case demonstrates is that courts are so radical they are not just twisting the wording of statutes, they are downright invalidating them by creating new constitutional rights to immigrate. They are even brazenly invalidating statutes that block the courts from hearing cases, as we saw with the TPS amnesty case. Keeping out and deporting aliens as well as defining court jurisdiction are two of the most unquestionable and categorical powers of Congress, and they are backed by case law dating back to our Founding. This is no longer about any one statute. There is no statute to fix. Remember, we already fixed our immigration laws in 1996. Many of the things we want to do, including kicking the courts out of these cases, were already done in 1996, including the statute at issue here. This law passed the Senate unanimously! Passing more laws while continuing to legitimize lower court supremacy won’t help. If we continue to agree that lower courts rule over immigration, no amount of congressional changes could help, because the courts will rule the changes unconstitutional. This is why it’s time to grab the bull by the horns and attack the notion of judicial jurisdiction over these issues to begin with. The Trump administration needs to begin pushing back against the courts.

There is something much bigger occurring here. Putting aside particular smaller areas of immigration law, the legal profession has now pulled the trigger on a long-standing goal of what they refer to as “applying constitutional norms” to foreign nationals, not just in terms of criminal proceedings, but in the context of immigration claims themselves.

Justice Robert Jackson, the great champion of due process and the dissenter in the Japanese internment case, described it this way: “Due process does not invest any alien with a right to enter the United States, nor confer on those admitted the right to remain against the national will.” Due process for aliens in the context of immigration decisions is whatever Congress says it is. As the court said in Lem Moon Sing v. United States, “The decisions of executive or administrative officers, acting within powers expressly conferred by Congress, are due process of law.” Liberals have been trying to attack this for decades and ensure that even the aliens we successfully deport expeditiously (increasingly a small number) can remain here indefinitely and tie up our courts with lawsuits. If we allow this game to continue, the flow at our border will make what Europe is dealing with look like child’s play.

Every week, we cede another piece of our sovereignty to unelected courts who are actually violating longstanding Supreme Court precedent. The conservative movement needs to push this administration to stand up and put the Supreme Court on notice to guard its own precedents and doctrines and that if it fails to rein in its own quite inferior courts, the administration will certainly not regard those decisions as superior to our own laws. Trump has no other choice. (For more from the author of “While Everyone Sleeps, the Courts Are Abolishing All Immigration Enforcement” please click HERE)

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AOC Says Capitalism Is an ‘Irredeemable’ System, but It Eradicates Global Poverty While Socialism Creates It

In an onstage interview at the South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., jumped back into the headlines by calling capitalism “irredeemable.”

“Capitalism is an ideology of capital – the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “So to me capitalism is irredeemable.”

The line pushes the 28-year-old self-described socialist’s message, of course; it’s the same gross mischaracterization of free markets that has been floating around since Karl Marx first decided to blame all of this fallen world’s problem on people with more money than him. (For a better understanding of how the profit motive guides human activity, read the landmark 1958 essay on trade and economics “I, Pencil.”)

But to describe free markets in moral terms, why don’t we just take a look at what they’ve done for the developing world and see how “irredeemable” things are?

According to numbers from the World Bank, between 1990 and 2010, despite the increased world population during the same period, the number of people living in extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than $1.90 per day, adjusted for inflation over time, worldwide was cut in half.

Even more remarkable, extreme poverty during the time period between 1970 and 2010 declined around 80 percent. During that time, the world certainly hasn’t grown more socialist by any measure. “It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship,” said former AEI president Arthur Brooks in 2012. “In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.”

Looking specifically to the African continent, 2017 analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute found that not only have market-empowering innovations been crucial to increases in overall GDP, but that more economic freedom would be key to continued growth.

Historically, by contrast, case studies show that Ocasio-Cortez’s economic system of choice has been far more successful at creating widespread poverty than eradicating it. The most prominent currently is the ongoing man-made disaster in Venezuela.

“Economic growth has not eliminated all poverty, and it will never solve all the problems of the human heart,” explained Cato Institute executive vice president David Boaz in 2016. “But understanding the enormous increase in world standards of living over the past three centuries and the past 25 years should be a starting point for any discussion of further progress.” (For more from the author of “AOC Says Capitalism Is an ‘Irredeemable’ System, but It Eradicates Global Poverty While Socialism Creates It” please click HERE)

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YIKES: Disturbing Proof of Voter Fraud Now Documented

By WND. The Heritage Foundation has released documentation revealing nearly 1,200 “proven” instances of voter fraud in just the last couple of years.

There were 1,019 criminal convictions that result, 48 civil penalties, 81 sent to diversion programs, and 14 judicial findings.

“This database is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list, but is intended to demonstrate the many ways fraud is committed,” the report advised. “Preventing, deterring, and prosecuting election fraud is essential to protecting the integrity of the process.” . . .

They include ballot-petition fraud, which involves forging the signatures of registered voters. Another is buying votes, simply paying voters to cast a ballot one particular way. A third is duplicate voting, where voters register in more than one jurisdiction.

Then there are false registrations, using a phony name or fake address, fraudulent use of absentee ballots, which involves getting someone else’s ballot and turning it in, and illegal “assistance” at the polls. That’s forcing or intimidating voters – particularly the elderly, disabled, illiterate, and those for whom English is a second language – “to vote for particular candidates.” (Read more from “Disturbing Proof of Voter Fraud Now Documented” HERE)

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House Dems overwhelmingly reject motion to condemn illegal alien voting

By Fox News. Nearly every House Democrat on Friday opposed a measure condemning voting in U.S. elections by illegal immigrants, as part of a sweeping election reform bill.

The GOP-backed measure would have added language to the “H.R. 1” election proposal stating that “allowing illegal immigrants the right to vote devalues the franchise and diminishes the voting power of United States citizens.”

Federal law already prohibits non-citizens from voting in elections for federal office. But the GOP motion referenced how San Francisco is allowing non-citizens, including illegal immigrants, to register to vote in school board elections.

The motion was voted down 228-197. All but six Democrats in the House voted against it. Just one Republican opposed it.

Lauren Fine, a spokeswoman for House GOP Whip Steve Scalise, pointed out that an identical resolution was adopted by the House last September. But on Friday, 41 Democrats flipped to oppose the latest measure. (Read more from “House Dems overwhelmingly reject motion to condemn illegal alien voting” HERE)

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Alaska’s Budget Crisis: We Can’t Just Kick the Can Down the Road

The last letter to the editor I wrote was on the general principle of the Governor coming forth with the budget that he had promised the people of Alaska. In this article I want to make some specific talking points on the budget itself. This of course is knowing that smart legislators will make some deals with the Governor and conservative colleagues to payout more money working with him to get the main pieces of legislation passed that are important to Alaskans and a sustainable future. The Governor has line-item veto authority, so the intended balance of our representative system will be in full force.

Let’s start with the University, which has proposed cuts of around 17% of its current budget. There have been third-party reports that have shown in the past that the University of Alaska system has much more middle and upper management than similar universities around the country. I went to the University for thirty years, some full-time, most part-time to acquire my degrees. Every year I was there the bureaucracy increased and there was always more paperwork and unnecessary process that had to be dealt with. It’s an interesting question as to whether creating more bureaucracy requires more rules and process to justify the jobs, or whether unnecessary rules and processes force the institution to hire more people to enforce them; either way it’s a vicious circle that never stops unless there is some economic pressure brought to bear.

I’ve learned over the years through my involvement and observation of government entities that they never get lean and efficient with budget pressures, they always spend what they are given, creating the structure to spend the money. Keep that in mind with ALL of the budget issues, that years of overspending has created inefficient entities that until now had no reason to restrain themselves. One practical example of what the university could do is to combine all the campuses into one. Not physically of course, but management-wise. Currently they duplicate a lot of management running each campus as an independent entity. This would be a great first step to becoming a more efficient university and would result in the end in better education as resources would be more focused on educating instead of managing. Another easy to implement step is to move some of the satellite campuses back to the community college model.

The K-12 system is another great example of inefficiency. Currently Prince of Wales Island has four school districts that encompass it. In Fairbanks, the place I have the numbers for, the school district over the last 28 years has decreased in student count, the number of teachers has stayed pretty flat, but staff has more than doubled, and administration has gone up over 40%. So it would be nice if they didn’t use teachers as weapons to try and get more money from the State. Please remember that large pot of money that the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District has squirreled away, which came because we taxed more for them than they needed. They’re actually ashamed enough of their budgeting that they stopped the Fingertip Facts publication a few years ago that showed the public where the money came from and went in a nice simple layout. Last year they started giving the School Board an incomplete budget document, so that they don’t even have all the information they need.

There are many right now in the public sector hammering on the legislature to take most or all of Alaskan’s PFDs. Something you should know about is the presentation that economist Ed King gave to House Finance last week. He said if we didn’t cut spending and just used the POMV (Percent of Market Value) method and only paid dividends under $500, after two years the entire POMV will be entirely used by the increase that naturally occurs in the budget due to wage and other cost increases. The prior governor had attempted an income tax and found that at best it would bring in about $350 million, about a fifth of the deficit. The lesson to be learned here is that you can’t run away from the problem by taxing the PFD or any other tax, if you don’t decrease the budget you will never be sustainable. The last administration ignored that reality, and now the situation is a little more advanced. Wherever the legislature ends this year on the budget, they have to keep moving it downwards so we can one day have a sustainable budget.

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You’re welcome to use the byline: Lance Roberts is an engineer, born and raised in Fairbanks. He is a former member of the FNSB Assembly.

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New Global Warming Report Reveals Truth About Polar Bears

“Numbers are so high that Inuit leaders have been pleading with the Canadian government for more polar bear population control as violent attacks against native populations have dramatically risen in recent years,” pointed out Marc Morano at the Climate Depot website, which presents evidence countering the claim that mankind is causing catastrophic global warming. . .

But the report by zoologist Susan Crockford, writing for the non-partisan Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank, found that the bears are thriving.

Her study noted the finding “contradicts claims by environmentalists and some scientists that falls in sea ice would wipe out bear populations.” . . .

“Yet polar bear specialists are saying these bears are causing problems because they don’t have enough sea ice to feed properly,” she wrote. “The facts on the ground make their claims look silly, including the abundance of fat bears. Residents are pushing their government for a management policy that makes protection of human life the priority.”

The London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation describes itself as being “open-minded on the contested science of global warming” while remaining “deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated.” (Read more from “New Global Warming Report Reveals Truth About Polar Bears” HERE)

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WATCH: Ocasio-Cortez Slams Americans, Calls Them Garbage

By The Blaze. Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that “where we are” as Americans amounts to “garbage” during an appearance at the South By Southwest Conference & Festivals (SXSW). . .

“What’s really hard for people to sometimes see is that we are on this path of a slow erosion, and a slow slow slow just like — move away from what we’ve always been,” Ocasio-Cortez began by explaining how she feels that America has moved away from what it should be. “You won’t even realize that you’ve drifted a hundred miles.”

She then appeared to suggest that her Democratic Socialist policies represent core American values, arguing that we had just strayed so far from them that we couldn’t recognize them anymore. “So when someone’s talking about ‘our core,’ they’re like, ‘oh, this is radical,’ but it isn’t radical. This is what we’ve always been,” she said.

“I think all of these things sound radical compared to where we are,” she concluded, “but where we are is not a good thing. And this idea of like, ten percent better than garbage, it shouldn’t be what we settle for.” (Read more from “Ocasio-Cortez Slams Americans, Calls Them Garbage” HERE)

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Ocasio-Cortez: In U.S., ‘If You Don’t Have a Job, You Are Left to Die’

By The Daily Caller. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Saturday that in the United States, “if you don’t have a job, you are left to die.”

Ocasio-Cortez, who made the remark at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, added that “we should not be haunted by” the possibility of automated workers replacing jobs, according to The Verge.

“We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem,” added the congressman, whose Green New Deal proposal includes a federal jobs guarantee. (Read more from “Ocasio-Cortez: In U.S., ‘If You Don’t Have a Job, You Are Left to Die'” HERE)

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