Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued the U.S. case with allies in the Middle East and beyond, asserting that Friday’s drone strike killing Gen. Qassem Soleimani was a necessary act of self defense. He asserted that Soleimani was plotting a series of attacks that endangered many American troops and officials across the Middle East.

The ramifications of Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani were still coming into focus Friday; they could include an end to the U.S. military partnership with Iraq in fighting the Islamic State extremist group. Some Iraqi politicians called the attack, which also killed an Iraqi general, a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and questioned whether U.S. forces should be expelled. The U.S. has about 5,200 troops in Iraq, mostly to train and advise Iraqi forces fighting IS.

In brief remarks to the nation, Trump said the Iranian general had been plotting “imminent and sinister” attacks. At the Pentagon, Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. had “compelling, clear, unambiguous intelligence” of Soleimani plotting violent acts.

“Oh, by the way, it might still happen,” Milley said, referring to the planned attacks.

Trump called Soleimani a ruthless figure who “made the death of innocent people his sick passion. ... We take comfort in knowing that his reign of terror is over.”

The president warned Iran against retaliating. He said the U.S. military has Iranian targets “fully identified” for counter-retaliation. The U.S. has a wide range of offensive and defensive forces in the Gulf area within range of Iran.

Asked about possible retaliation, Milley told reporters, “Is there risk? You’re damn right there’s risk.” He added, “There is a range of possible futures here, and the ball is in the Iranian court.”

As Iran warned of “harsh” reprisals, the U.S. Homeland Security Department watched for trouble brewing on the domestic front and reported “no specific, credible threats” in the first hours after the American attack in Baghdad, said the department’s acting secretary, Chad F. Wolf.

Senior State Department officials, in a briefing for reporters, said the drone strike near the Baghdad international airport was based on intelligence that suggested Soleimani was traveling in the area to put final touches on plans for attacks that would have hit U.S. diplomats, troops and American facilities in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the Mideast. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity under State Department ground rules, would not be more specific about the intelligence but said it clearly called for a decisive U.S. response.

Democrats in Congress questioned the administration’s approach, while making clear they don’t regret Soleimani’s demise. Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, noted that Pompeo said the administration wants to “de-escalate” tensions with Iran.

“I think the jury’s out on that,” Warner said. “I hope they’re successful on that. I think it could have brought in more congressional leaders and allies to help make that case ahead of time.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said he has not heard a satisfactory explanation for the timing of the U.S. attack.

“And the question is why the administration chose this moment, why this administration made the decision to remove him from the battlefield and other administrations, both parties, decided that would escalate the risks, not reduce them,” he said.

Fears about the repercussions of killing Soleimani persisted throughout the administrations of President George W. Bush, a Republican, and President Barack Obama, a Democrat, according to officials who served under both. Soleimani, they calculated, was just as dangerous dead and martyred as he was alive and plotting against Americans.

A decades-long U.S. nemesis, Iran holds a range of options for striking back, militarily or otherwise. Tens of thousands of American troops in the Persian Gulf area, including in Iraq and Qatar, are within easy range of Iranian missiles, and Iran has the capability to act more clandestinely with cyber attacks or military proxy strikes on U.S. targets abroad.

Last summer, following a string of intelligence indications that Iran was planning attacks on U.S. targets in the Gulf area, the Pentagon accelerated the deployment of an aircraft carrier to the region and deployed additional missile defenses. In all, about 14,000 additional U.S. troops were sent to the area over the summer and fall, but that did not deter Iran, which is feeling an extreme squeeze from U.S. sanctions that have all but shut off its oil exports.

The final sequence of actions leading to the killing of Soleimani began in October with rocket attacks in Iraq that Washington blamed on Iran-supported Shiite militias. A Dec. 27 rocket attack near Kirkuk killed an American contractor and wounded U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. The U.S. blamed an Iran-backed militia called Kataeb Hezbollah, or KH, and on Dec. 29 it bombed five KH-linked facilities. Two days later, KH militiamen and their supporters stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, an attack Trump cited as evidence that Soleimani deserved to be eliminated.

“The Iranian regime’s aggression in the region, including the use of proxy fighters to destabilize its neighbors, must end and it must end now,” Trump said.

Trump’s final pre-strike consultations were held behind the palm trees at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where the president has spent two weeks largely out of sight before his impeachment trial in the Senate. In the days before the attack, Trump huddled with aides, including Pompeo and his national security adviser, Robert O’Brien.

After the Soleimani killing, Pompeo announced that he was placing the Iran-backed Iraqi militia Asaib Ahl al-Haq on the State Department’s “foreign terrorist organization” blacklist, which blocks any assets the group may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bars Americans from providing it with material support.

The Pentagon was largely silent Friday on details of the drone strike and its aftermath. Officials announced the deployment of nearly 3,000 additional soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Kuwait as reinforcements. Separately, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, based in Italy, had been placed on alert for possible deployment of parts of the brigade to Lebanon to help defend the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

The additional troop deployments reflect concerns about potential Iranian retaliatory action. But they also run counter to Trump’s repeated push to extract the United States from Mideast conflicts. He has repeatedly called for withdrawing from Syria and Afghanistan, but over the past year he has greatly increased U.S. troop totals in the Middle East.

More broadly, some congressional Democrats and national security analysts questioned whether the Trump administration is prepared for Iranian retaliation and the prospect of political backlash in Iraq, where American troops are working with Iraqi forces in a sometimes tense partnership against the Islamic State extremist group. The Pentagon said it wants to sustain that work, but some Iraqi leaders said it might be time for U.S. troops to leave.

In Baghdad, Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi condemned the American drone strike, which also killed an Iraqi general who was deputy commander of the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Abdul-Mahdi called the killings an “aggression against Iraq.” An emergency session of parliament was called for Sunday, and the deputy speaker, Hassan al-Kaabi, said it would make “decisions that put an end to the U.S. presence in Iraq.”

Ordering out American forces would heavily damage Washington’s influence and make the U.S. troop presence in neighboring Syria more tenuous. But Iraq’s leadership is likely to be divided over such a step. President Barham Salih called for “the voice of reason and wisdom to dominate, keeping in mind Iraq’s greater interests.”

___

Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Jonathan Lemire and Matthew Lee contributed.

The dramatization of the downfall of the late former Fox News executive Roger Ailes is buoyed by terrific performances from Margot Robbie and John Lithgow. They overshadow a talented cast and share the film’s most visceral and disturbing moment. Nicole Kidman also stands out for her portrayal of former Fox host Gretchen Carlson.

However, these performances have not been enough to help “Bombshell” at the box office. It has recouped only $20 million of its $32 million production budget since premiering nationwide on Dec. 20. The reviews have not been stellar either. There are reasons for that.

Disappointingly, Charlize Theron’s turn as Megyn Kelly is more distracting than anything else. The actor gets the mannerisms correct, but her attempt to sound like Kelly is unintentionally comical. Kelly has a deep, baritone voice. Theron does not. In an effort to imitate the former prime-time host, Theron badly overshoots "husky" and lands somewhere between Elizabeth Holmes and the Cookie Monster. If you have ever wanted to hear an Academy Award-winning actor talk like the disgraced Theranos founder for two hours, “Bombshell” is the movie for you.

Although the script by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Charles Randolph has its bright spots, at times it seems bipolar.

The screenplay flips constantly from subtle and insightful to preachy and ham-handed. Characters are also written unevenly, including the fictitious one played by Robbie, who is presented first as a somewhat sheltered Christian millennial with a strong right-wing pedigree before the film lands her in bed with a lesbian co-worker (Kate McKinnon) immediately after their meeting. The paradox is that the movie actually tries to be fair and balanced. But like the network it covers, that effort is thwarted constantly by the ideological blinders of its creators.

The film’s use of character voice-overs is also hit-or-miss. In one great scene, for example, reporter Rudi Bakhtiar (Nazanin Boniadi) is propositioned by one of her Fox superiors. Bakhtiar’s panic in that scene is conveyed poignantly by her internal monologue. It is a solid narrative choice. Other scenes that use the voice-over device, however, including the film’s closing moments, come off as hokey and whimsical, almost as if we are watching an episode of “Sex and the City.”

I am also still trying to figure out the point of McKinnon’s character. Is she intended to be a composite of closeted liberal lesbians who work at Fox and live in constant fear of being discovered? Having been around the network for several years, including in 2016, when the story’s action takes place, I can assure you that there are openly gay people who work there – and that network employees are not expected to be hard-core right-wingers or even conservative. I am not sure what purpose McKinnon is supposed to serve other than being a lazy dig against a version of Fox that does not exist.

The film’s greatest failing is that it tells the wrong story. The chief focus of “Bombshell” is Megyn Kelly. It wants to tell the tale of her eventual decision to accuse Ailes of sexual misconduct. But the hero of the real-life story – and the woman with the most to say – is Gretchen Carlson. Yet Carlson plays only a supporting role in a narrative she orchestrated. It is true that her lawsuit against Ailes ended with a settlement and the signing of a non-disclosure agreement, but there is still plenty of publicly available material to make a movie about the woman most responsible for the disgraced media tycoon’s defeat.

“Bombshell” prefers to focus on Kelly’s 2016 battle with Donald Trump. “Bombshell” is obsessed with Kelly's thoughts, her feelings, her family, her desire to be taken seriously in a man's world, etc. “Bombshell” wants to paint Kelly as a heroic and selfless figure, which is why it makes no mention of the fact that she leveraged her public opposition to Trump and Ailes into a three-year $69 million contract with NBC. Details of Kelly’s move to broadcast network television after she came out on the right side of a story that was put into motion already by more daring players are omitted in favor of scenes of her thinking hard about what it means to stand in solidarity with other women. Or whatever.

There is an exciting and meaningful story behind Ailes' downfall. It is the one where Gretchen Carlson risks the late news executive’s legendarily vindictive wrath to build a David vs. Goliath lawsuit against him, including secretly recording their meetings. Instead, “Bombshell” is a movie about Megyn Kelly’s decision to follow Carlson’s lead. That should not have been main story material. It would have made a compelling footnote to a better movie.

T. Becket Adams is a senior commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.

Like you, I grew up in the rural South where you learn early that when people you love and care about go through something, you go through it too. It is a lesson you learn in triumph and tragedy, and you carry it with you always. 

When the world learned that you, Rep. John Lewis -- lion of the House of Representatives, hero of Selma, inspiration to two generations of African Americans -- had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the prayers and testimonials poured in. Almost all of them referenced your indomitable will. 

“If there’s one thing I love about John Lewis, it’s his incomparable will to fight. I know he’s got a lot more of that left in him. Praying for you, my friend,” said Barack Obama.   

“I am praying for him,” tweeted Bernice King, “and encouraged by the knowledge that he is a legendary fighter. Fight on, sir.” 

“Holding him in my heart as he battles cancer,” added Cory Booker. “Keep fighting, keep making good trouble.”

Your fight is now our fight, Congressman Lewis. And no fight is unwinnable, whether victory comes in this world or the next, as our faith teaches us. 

Twice in my life I’ve had to face cancer, not for myself but through someone I loved. Twice I have felt the heat of fear and desperation. Twice I have felt their pain and struggle in weakened hands. Twice I have turned my eyes to heaven in entreaty and supplication and twice felt the grace of God in remission. Twice I’ve faced cancer with someone I loved and twice we’ve won.  

But faith also teaches us, as Paul instructed Timothy, that our “supplications, prayers, intercessions and giving of thanks be made for all men.”  

When we pray, let us pray not just for ourselves and those we love, but for all mankind because we are all connected in what Bernice King’s father, Martin Luther King Jr., called an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” 

Of course, you knew this already, Congressman.  

That’s why you never hesitated even though you were arrested more than 40 times, beaten, and had your skull fractured. Though you faced constant threats and friends gave their lives, you never faltered. Because a prayer for one is a prayer for all. 

And because your fights have always been our own, we will face this fight with you. Your prayers are ours and, as you always stood for us, you do not stand alone now. We are with you. We will always be with you. Your trial is ours. Your fight is our fight and, together, we will give cancer a little good trouble of our own -- a little necessary trouble.  

We love you, John Lewis, and we have faith that you will come through this, perhaps not unbent, but unbroken. We will stand with you every step of the way. 

Antjuan Seawright is a Democratic strategist, founder/CEO of Blueprint Strategy, and a CBS News political contributor.

Two weeks ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got 13 federal district court nominations through the Senate, 11 of which were part of a deal to expedite appointments reached with Democrats on Dec. 18. Prior to the deal, McConnell had scheduled procedural votes roughly every two hours, reported CNN.  

Consequently, with 187 total judges confirmed Trump came close to confirming more judges in 2019 than in 2017 and 2018 combined. 

As of late November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit was the third circuit court to flip from a majority of Democrat appointees to a majority of Republican appointees under President Trump (not counting the many courts that had an even split that have also tipped Republican). In an interview with Hugh Hewitt on Dec. 18, McConnell said, “One of every four of the U.S. circuit judges in the country have been put on the bench in the last three years.”  

This is an astonishing figure when you consider the importance of the federal circuit court.'&#'.ord('â').';''&#'.ord('€').';''&#'.ord('¯').';' While the U.S. Supreme Court garners all the headlines, the overwhelming majority of federal court cases never make it there. Because the Supreme Court accepts around 1% of cases, the Court of Appeals — divided into 13 circuit courts — has the final say on matters of the law and Constitution.  

In three years, Trump has appointed 50 judges to the circuit courts. The numbers are impressive when compared to past presidents’ appointments at this time in their presidencies. Barack Obama made 24 appointments to the circuit courts, George W. Bush made 30, Clinton 27, George H.W. Bush 31, and Reagan 23.  

If conservatives of any stripe need a reason to see the silver lining of his presidency, this would be it.  

It matters for the conservative movement that Trump and McConnell — and judiciary Chairmen Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley — have prioritized judicial appointments. Trump, according to the White House, has focused on “appointing judges who set aside their personal views and political prejudices to do what the Constitution and the law demand,” a welcome change from activist judges who deviate from the text of the Constitution and law. But most of all, unlike elected positions such as the president or representatives in the legislature, judges hold lifetime appointments. This means that even when a Democrat becomes president, the judges that Trump has appointed will remain and will act as a constitutional check on the executive and the legislative branches until they die or step down. 

For this reason, the Trump administration has been strategic about the age of their judicial appointees, with the average age of Trump-appointed circuit judges under 50 years old (which is 10 years younger than the average age under Obama). According to the White House, judges appointed under Trump are expected to have 2,600 years of judicial service altogether.  

Now that’s a legacy.  

According to a Nov. 26 CNN poll, the impeachment hearings accomplished nothing in terms of changing the minds of Americans. In October, 50% of Americans overall were in favor of impeachment, while 43% were not. As of the week of Nov. 25, after the public impeachment hearings in the House, those polling numbers were exactly the same. While the notion of impeachment is fleeting, Trump’s presidency is also fleeting. His last year will be either 2020 or 2024.  

Judicial appointments, however, will remain for administrations to come. “But there's not much you can do about a young, strict constructionist who's committed for a lifetime to the quaint notion that maybe the job of a judge is to follow the law,” McConnell said at an October Federalist Society event in Kentucky. “My motto for the rest of the year is 'leave no vacancy behind.'”  

So what do they do for an encore? For starters, the liberal-leaning Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles all appeals for nine Western states, is on the verge of having a majority of Republican-appointed judges, depending on how many seats Trump has the opportunity to fill.'&#'.ord('â').';''&#'.ord('€').';''&#'.ord('¯').';' After Trump’s most recent appointment, according to Politico, “Democratic-appointed judges now hold a three-seat majority, compared with 11 at the start of Trump's presidency.”'&#'.ord('â').';''&#'.ord('€').';''&#'.ord('¯').';'  

It is no surprise that Trump wants to be known for appointing the most judges during his presidential career. "In terms of quality and quantity, we are going to be just about No. 1 by the time we finish,” he said in November. “No. 1 of any president, any administration.”  

If he gets a second term -- and McConnell still controls the Senate -- Trump might just get there.  

So no one can predict what 2020 holds. And yet businesses, nonprofit organizations and industry leaders still must plan for the future, using the best available information. Here are five trends that could shape the political landscape in 2020 – and help in the planning process.

Joe Biden’s 2020 Apology Tour

Every politician with a long career must confront the evolution of their political views, and Joe Biden is no different, especially since he’s been on the national stage longer than most. He's already apologized for a long-ago reference to a "partisan lynching," past collaboration with segregationist senators, and an angry confrontation with an 83-year-old Iowa farmer. Watch for the phrase "Biden apologizes" to explode in 2020.

On race, LGBT issues, women's rights and a host of other issues, the Joe Biden of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is out of step with today's Democratic Party, as are many  Democrats his age. But Biden’s bind is unique. His propensity for embarrassing gaffes, misstatements, and offensive comments makes him an opposition researcher's dream. Take his grilling of Zoe Baird, who was President Clinton’s nominee to serve as the first female attorney general of the United States. Back then, from his perch on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden demanded to know "how many hours she was away from her child: when she left at home in the morning and returned at night." At the time, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis openly questioned Biden's sexist double standard: "Would he have asked that of any male nominee, for any job?"

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has never been more sensitive to strict adherence to politically correct terminology. Every new Biden campaign announcement can be welcomed by a trigger warning from Joe's own unwoke phrasing. The good news for Biden? If he’s able to survive the primary season, none of this will hinder him too much in a general election matchup with President Trump.

Quality of life issues, especially homelessness, will rise to the forefront in 2020

Global stock markets added $17 trillion in value over the past year. But that doesn’t alter the fact that many Americans feel their quality of life slipping away. It explains why Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have gained such traction: Their campaigns are built around income inequality.

What progressives call the problem of income disparity, Americans in “fly-over” states consider more sweeping quality-of-life issues. The biggest such issue confronting many Americans is the rise of homelessness. In big cities, especially on the coasts, homelessness is inescapable. It’s going to become more widespread this year, thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision. In December, the nation’s highest court upheld a lower court ruling that established a constitutional right for the homeless to sleep on public property when denied access to shelters.

This means that local governments will be almost powerless to confront the problem. Americans already feeling a diminished quality of life will see the outward manifestation of their uneasiness every time they visit a public park or courthouse.  

San Francisco’s streets become Trump’s 2020 rallying cry

A master of rhetorical imagery, Trump connected with voters in 2016 by vividly describing policy problems and offering a clear visual of his solution. “Build the wall! Lock her up!” Simple slogans attached to a memorable image.

In tandem with the increased focus on homelessness, expect the president to shine the spotlight on San Francisco. The City by the Bay has become a haven for petty thieves, drug addicts, and the mentally ill, culminating in disturbing images of an American city once known around the world for its beauty earning a new reputation for streets with outdoor drug markets, discarded heroin needles, human waste on the sidewalk.

Trump beta-tested attacks on the liberal bastion in September, when he threatened to use the EPA to stop needles from flowing into the Pacific Ocean. That was before San Francisco voters elected a socialist as district attorney, who campaigned on a platform of ending prosecutions of gang enhancements and public urination. Every new "restorative justice" program launched in San Francisco is an opportunity for Trump to lampoon the left.

Democrats lose congressional seats, even in California

The media have focused on how their pro-impeachment votes will impact swing-state Democrats or freshman Democrats in districts Trump carried last November. That’s certainly a factor, but so is the basic issue of funding the party’s candidates.

Democrats regained the House in 2018 in no small measure because of the efforts of billionaires-turned-presidential-candidates Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. Steyer vowed to spend $120 million in support of Democratic candidates in the 2018 campaign. Not to be outdone, Bloomberg spent more than $112 million to aid swing Democratic campaigns, according to the New York Times.

To put those numbers in perspective, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $84 million during the 2018 cycle. Bloomberg and Steyer’s combined spending was nearly three times as much as the party’s official congressional operation.

Both Democratic super donors are now preoccupied with their own long-shot presidential campaigns. Without Steyer and Bloomberg underwriting their 2020 congressional campaigns, Democrats are likely to lose ground -- regardless of who is at the top of the ticket.

A serious third party candidate enters the presidential race

The dynamics of the 2020 presidential race will be too tempting for a serious independent contender to pass up. As Trump runs to the right and Democrats move further to the left, it creates the appearance of a centrist lane to the White House.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz briefly flirted with an independent campaign last year but was sidelined by a back injury. Billionaire Mark Cuban is another big-name billionaire with resources and ambitions for the presidency. Or, a former elected official, like former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, could see an opportunity to restart their political careers with a presidential bid.

A third party or independent candidacy could also emerge from the current Democratic field. Bloomberg, Andrew Yang, or Rep. Tulsi Gabbard could leave the party and perhaps even forge an unorthodox path toward the Oval Office.

Justin Wallin is CEO of J. Wallin Opinion Research, a national opinion research firm with business, political and government clients.

The president will host the kickoff meeting of “Evangelicals for Trump” just days after he was the subject a scathing editorial in the Christianity Today magazine that called for his removal from office. But Trump’s campaign believes that his record in office, including the installation of two Supreme Court justices, will cement the votes of religious conservatives this year.

“I think his record in the past three years is rock-solid in things that the faith community cares about him,” said Jentezen Franklin, a pastor to a megachurch in Georgia. “We used to see politicians once every four years but this one is totally different in constantly reaching out to the faith community and we even get a chance to tell him when we disagree.”

Campaign officials said the Miami event was in the works well before the Christianity Today op-ed which raised fresh questions about the durability of his support among the conservative evangelicals who have proven to be a critical component of his political base.

The magazine’s editorial, written by editor-in-chief Mark Galli, envisions a message to those evangelical Christians who have remained stalwart Trump backers “in spite of his blackened moral record.”

“Remember who you are and whom you serve,” Galli’s editorial states. “Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency.”

The piece, which comes in a magazine founded by the late Rev. Billy Graham, was denounced by Trump, who tweeted “No president has done more for the evangelical community.”

Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, a major Trump supporters, also criticized his father’s former magazine. But most political observers doubt it will cause many evangelicals to desert Trump, who received more than 80 percent of their vote in 2016.

Still, the campaign is taking few chances, citing the president’s support for Israel, installation of federal judges and prison reform as way to further jolt evangelical turnout that could help them secure wins in states like Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.

More than 5,000 people are expected to attend the event at the El Rey Jesús church. The kickoff of “Evangelicals for Trump,” which will be followed in the weeks ahead by the launches of “Catholics for Trump”” and “Jewish Voices for Trump,” also comes days after Trump and his wife went to an evangelical Christmas Eve service in West Palm Beach rather than the liberal Episcopalian church in which they were married and often attend holiday services.

Advisers believe that emphasizing religious issues may also provide inroads with Latino voters, who have largely steered clear of supporting the president. In particular, even a slight uptick with faith-focused Latinos could help Trump carry Florida and provide some needed breathing room in states like Texas.

“President Trump has appointed well over 180 solid, conservative federal judges, including two exemplary Supreme Court justices. He has defended religious freedoms and has stood as the most pro-life president we’ve ever had,” said campaign press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. “Evangelicals for Trump will engage the Christian community nationwide to overwhelming re-elect President Trump in 2020.”

)The event comes just day after a new poll revealed that white evangelical Protestants stand noticeably apart from other religious people on how the government should act on two of the most politically divisive issues at play in the 2020 presidential election.

Asked about significant restrictions on abortion -- making it illegal except in cases of rape, incest or to threats to a mother’s life -- 37% of all Americans responded in support, according to the poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Those abortion limits drew 39% support from white mainline Protestants, 33% support from nonwhite Protestants and 45% support from Catholics, but 67% support from white evangelical Protestants.

A similar divide emerged over whether the government should bar discrimination against people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in workplaces, housing or schools. About 6 in 10 Catholics, white mainline Protestants and nonwhite Protestants supported those protections, compared with about a third of white evangelical Protestants.

White evangelicals were also more likely than members of other faiths to say religion should have at least some influence on policy-making.

Rev. Franklin Graham pointed to Trump’s record on abortion as a key driver of the president’s support from his religious community.

“I don’t think evangelicals are united on every position the president takes or says, but they do recognize he is the most pro-life-friendly president in modern history,” Graham said in a recent interview. “He has appointed conservative judges that will affect my children and grandchildren’s lives, long after he’s gone.”

But Democrats have shown strong interest in connecting with voters of faith, even evangelicals whom Trump is often assumed to have locked down. And some religious leaders believe people of faith may be turned off by Trump’s personal conduct or record.

“Friday’s rally is Trump’s desperate response to the realization that he is losing his primary voting bloc — faith voters. He knows he needs every last vote if he wants a shot at re-election, as losing just 5% of the faith voters ends his chances,” Pastor Doug Pagitt, the executive director of Vote Common Good. “In addition, he is trying to use this part of his base to give cover for his broken promises and immoral policies.”

Schor reported from New York. AP Polling director Emily Swanson contributed from Washington.

(c) Associated Press

'&#'.ord('*').';'  '&#'.ord('*').';'  '&#'.ord('*').';'

Trump’s Iran Policy Game-Changer. Susan Crabtree assesses the president’s decision to order an airstrike that killed Iran’s most powerful general.

In New Crises, Our Enemies See How Vulnerable We Are. A.B. Stoddard writes that the airstrikes against Iranian-backed militias further rattle President Trump’s shaky standing in the world and at home.

After Soleimani: Confronting Iran’s Dangerous Regime. In RealClearWorld, Charles Lipson weighs in on the latest developments.

“Trump and His Generals.” In RealClearDefense, Neil Hassler has this Q&A with Peter Bergen about his new book, subtitled “The Cost of Chaos.”

When the 737-Max Returns to the Skies, It Will Fly Full. In RealClearMarkets, Arnold Barnett explains why the public’s hesitation will evaporate.

Five Facts: The USMCA Trade Deal. In RealClearPolicy, No Labels has this primer on the agreement.

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With each passing year, H.L. Mencken is increasingly remembered as a caricature. Cigar-smoking “curmudgeon,” he is invariably called. “Elitist” is another label, as is “snob.” A respected biographer described him as “heartless.” He was certainly a Germanophile, which was problematic politics before and during World War II, although no one at the time considered Mencken an anti-Semite, which became a prevailing depiction 30 years ago.

These descriptions and debates over his legacy obscure a simple historic fact, however: In the 1920s, Henry Louis Mencken was the most towering figure in American letters. It is also true that neither Mencken’s style nor his antipathy toward Big Government transitioned easily to the 1930s. Iconoclasm was no longer the currency during the Great Depression. The unwashed hoi polloi Mencken loved to ridicule valued government action over cynical social commentary. And even those who shared Mencken’s skepticism about the New Deal couldn’t fathom how he clung to his isolationist views after Pearl Harbor.

As Americans steeled themselves to fight a two-ocean war, Mencken maintained his rhetorical attacks on a president he despised, the popular Franklin Roosevelt. By the end of the 1940s, after both voices -- FDR’s and Mencken’s -- were stilled, the latter’s reputation was besieged by the academic types he was so fond of ridiculing. He was also undermined by a weapon he handed his critics posthumously: a lengthy private journal containing petty criticisms of his friends and ethnic insensitivities, including unflattering references to Jews.

In 1989, when a large portion of the diary was published by a Baltimore library (against Mencken’s explicit instructions), his enemies took their revenge. Even those who knew better didn’t show much restraint. Writing about “Mencken’s dark side,” The Washington Post not only called him mean-spirited, but “a paternalistic racist.”

The newspaper had only to read its own files to know better.

And if it seems uncharitable to let the words a lonely old widower wrote in his diary outweigh his lifelong advocacy on behalf of African Americans -- especially black writers -- well, it seems that way to me, too.

Perhaps out of guilt, the editor of those diaries, Charles A. Fecher, pointed out in the book’s introduction that Mencken last column was headlined “Equal Rights in Parks.” Appearing in the Baltimore Evening Sun on Nov. 9, 1948, two weeks before the stroke that would incapacitate him until his death seven years later, Mencken wrote with his familiar bluntness. “It is high time,” he wrote, “that all such relics of Ku Kluxry be wiped out in Maryland.”

It was a fitting end to his career: Mencken had come full circle.

The historical event that got me thinking about Mencken this week was the publication on this date in 1950 of “The God That Failed,” a powerful repudiation of the Soviet Union by six famous writers, all former members of the Communist Party. One of the two American essayists was Richard Wright, the foremost African American novelist of his generation. As he began a migration that would ultimately land him in France for the last 14 years of his life, Wright trekked from his native Mississippi to Memphis. From there, he went to Chicago, where he made his name and joined -- and quit -- the Communist Party, and then New York. It was while he was in Memphis, however, and only 19, that he encountered his first piece by H.L. Mencken.

Immediately galvanized, he persuaded a nonplused but willing white man to lend him a library card, and forged a note requesting the librarian allow this boy to “have some books by H.L. Mencken.”

To say that no white writer was approaching race relations -- often called the “Negro question” in the press -- the way Mencken was is to engage in bland understatement. “The white man,” Mencken wrote, “looks ridiculous even to me, a white man myself. To a Negro, he must be a hilarious spectacle, indeed. Why isn’t that spectacle better described? Let the Negro sculptors spit on their hands. What a chance!”

You can see how young minds like Richard Wright’s were inspired by such words. But the Sage of Baltimore did more than inspire black writers -- the “sculptors” in his metaphor. In his role as editor of the American Mercury, a literary magazine, Mencken personally encouraged them, edited them, and published them, a total of 54 articles by black writers, including W.E.B. Du Bois and future NAACP President Walter White, whom Mencken urged to write a novel.

Twenty-five years ago, Johns Hopkins University Press published a fine exploration of Mencken’s influence on the Harlem Renaissance. The book was written by University of Arizona professor Charles W. Scruggs. I highly recommend it.

Toward the end of his life, H. L. Mencken apparently came upon his own pre-written obituary in the files of the Baltimore Sun. To the relief of its author, Mencken deemed it sufficient before asking puckishly for one sentence to be added: “As he got older, he got worse.”

It’s a funny line, but on the issue of race, it really wasn’t true, irrespective of his churlish and decidedly less witty private journal. The real Mencken was captured in a pithy observation he made in middle age, one in which he adopted his familiar pose as a misanthrope:

Personally, I hate to have to think of any man as of a definite race, creed or color; so few men are really worth knowing that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.

And there’s your quote of the week.

Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau Chief
RealClearPolitics
Twitter: @CarlCannon 

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.

Trump also didn’t attack when it was clear Iran was responsible for explosions that disabled two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman last June, though he ratcheted up sanctions and cyberattacks and sent more troops to the region instead. He again didn’t go on the military offensive when a drone fleet that U.S. intelligence identified as Iranian proxies in Yemen launched a damaging assault on the Aramco oil facility in Saudi Arabia in mid-September.

Over the last two months, the Iranian regime became even more aggressive, attacking nearly a dozen times Iraqi air bases where U.S. military and civilian personnel were operating. When a U.S. contractor was killed days ago in one of those bombings, it crossed the line for Trump and he ordered airstrikes against the Iranian proxy militia responsible.

But few could have predicted the tumultuous events that followed and just how much the game was about to change for Trump and his Iran policy.

When members of that Iranian-controlled militia, Kataib Hezbollah, threatened another Benghazi-like attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad amid taunts from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, Trump responded Thursday night by ordering an airstrike near the Baghdad airport that killed Iran’s most powerful general, Qassam Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force.

Soleimani, the Pentagon said in statement, was “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” Thursday’s U.S. airstrike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an adviser to Soleimani and deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces.

The overnight attack stunned Americans and U.S. allies alike even as defense hawks and Trump’s allies praised the move as decisive and fitting because U.S. intelligence had determined  Soleimani approved the raid on the embassy and was planning more attacks on Americans.

Trump’s supporters highlighted Soleimani’s role in killing an estimated 600 Americans over the course of the Iraq War, labeling him a chief architect of Iran’s terrorist activity throughout the region.

James Carafano, a leading national security expert at the Heritage Foundation who also served as on Trump’s presidential transition team, called the airstrike that killed Soleimani and his cohorts a “bold and decisive military action made possible by excellent intelligence and the courage of America’s service members.”

“This strike against one of the world’s most odious terrorists is no different than the mission that took out Osama bin Laden – it is, in fact, even more justifiable since he was in a foreign country directing terrorist activities against Americans,” he said. “His death is a huge loss for Iran’s regime and its Iraqi proxies, and a major operational and psychological victory for the United States.”

But even Trump backers were warning of likely consequences as Khamenei and other Iranian officials vowed retaliation. Tucker Carlson, the host of Fox News’ top-rated show, said it appears that America is now “lumbering toward a new Middle East war, a war that many in Washington have wanted for decades.” Those advocates for war in Iran, he said, epitomized by former national security adviser John Bolton, are the same leading Washington national security experts who turn a blind eye toward the “invasion from the South” -- the threat of unchecked illegal immigrant entering the country from Central and South America.

“Pay no attention to that, these very same people tell us. The real threat is Iran. Well, they’re liars,” Carlson said. “They don’t care about you. They don’t care about your kids. They’re reckless and incompetent. And we should keep all of that in mind as war with Iran looms closer tonight.”

The killing of Iran’s top military leader also shifts Trump’s foreign policy agenda to the forefront in a presidential campaign where health care and impeachment were previously the main driving factors.

Democratic presidential candidates denounced the airstrike that killed Soleimani Thursday night, with Joe Biden deriding it as a “hugely escalatory move” in the region. Even though Biden said the leader of Iran’s elite Quds force deserved justice, he argued that “President Trump just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.”

“We could be on the brink of a major conflict across the Middle East,” he said in a statement.

Biden himself is highly vulnerable on the issue both for his vote in favor of the U.S. invasion of  Iraq and for leading the Obama administration’s efforts to withdraw all American troops there, a decision that left a security vacuum the Islamic State exploited.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was not in Congress during the run-up to the Iraq War, called the move a “reckless” escalation.

“Soleimani was a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans,” she said in a statement shared on Twitter. “But this reckless move escalates the situation with Iraq and increases the likelihood of more deaths and new Middle East conflict. Our priority must be to avoid another costly war.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a similar dire warning: “Trump’s dangerous escalation brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East that could cause countless lives and trillions more dollars.”

“Trump promised to end endless wars, but this action puts us on another path to one,” tweeted Sanders, who voted against the invasion of Iraq while serving in the House.

More centrist Democratic candidates were also highly critical, with Sen. Amy Klobuchar warning about “the timing, manner and potential consequences of the administration’s actions and concerns about an escalating conflict.”

“Our immediate focus needs to be on ensuring all necessary security measures are taken to protect U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in Iraq and throughout the region,” she said. “The administration needs to fully consult with Congress on its decision-making, response plans, and strategy for preventing a wider conflict.”

But the bold military action also received cautious praise from some unexpected GOP corners.

Sen. Mitt Romney, a frequent Trump critic on the right, tweeted that Soleimani “was a depraved terrorist who had the blood of hundreds of American servicemen and women on his hands, and who was doubtlessly planning operations to further harm our citizens and allies.”

The 2012 GOP presidential nominee also praised the “brave troops and intel officers who carried out this successful mission.”

“At this time of increased tension in the region, the U.S. must take necessary steps to protect our personnel there and beyond,” he continued, calling on the administration and U.S. allies to “articulate and pursue a coherent strategy for protecting our security interests in the region.”

In the hours after ordering the attack, Trump let Defense Secretary Mark Esper do the talking.

Appearing on NBC News, Esper condemned Iran’s malign behavior that he said “they’ve been spreading across the region from Africa all the way through the Middle East into Afghanistan now, for 40 years.”

In a broader statement on Twitter directed to “Iran & its proxy militias,” Esper said the U.S. “will not accept continued attacks to our personnel & forces in the region.”

“Attacks against us will be met w/responses in the time, manner, & place of our choosing. We urge the Iranian regime to end malign activities.”

Earlier in the day, Esper told reporters that the Pentagon was ready to take military action to pre-empt future attacks on Americans in Iraq.

“The game has changed and we’re prepared to do what’s necessary to defend our personnel and our interests and our partners in the region,” he said.

Unusually quiet on Twitter, Trump simply tweeted an image of the American flag minutes before the Pentagon publicly said it was responsible for Soleimani’s death.

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national political correspondent.

There are substantive questions about the efficacy of Trump’s three-year policy record toward North Korea and Iran and the two maximum pressure campaigns that have not brought the Iranians to the table, nor convinced Kim Jong Un to disarm his nuclear arsenal. He has answered Kim’s ominous hint of a long-range ballistic missile test by calling the murderous dictator “a man of his word.” But his shocking decision to order the latest airstrike, which the administration characterized as “defensive action” against the Iranians, is likely to, at best, demand more U.S. forces in the region just as Trump sought to draw them down while threatening the safety of American service men and women in the region. At worst, he has begun the very hot war he has opposed throughout his campaign and presidency.  

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted on Twitter that “it would be ironic and worse yet tragic as well as dangerous if an administration that wanted to reduce the US footprint in the Mideast has set in motion a dynamic that will draw us in much further at a time we face challenges from China and NK in Asia and Russia in Europe.”

President Trump stands at this brink having depleted the trust of allies around the world. Indeed the only alliances Trump seems to be strengthening are the ones between our adversaries. As he was carrying on about Hillary Clinton and “Crazy Nancy” last week, the Iranians participated in naval exercises with the Russians and the Chinese, an ominous signal to any national security expert not lost in a tweet storm. 

What’s more, those nations, and non-state actors, that seek to harm U.S. interests must be delighted by what they see in Washington, D.C. While the U.S Embassy was still under attack in Baghdad they saw our commander-in-chief tweeting about something someone on Fox News said about Peter Strzok. They have seen him demean as “human scum” patriotic Foreign Service officials who revealed his Ukrainian shakedown; retweeted an article outing the whistleblower; pardoned war criminals within the U.S. armed services; and then referred to the military leaders who opposed such a breach of the warrior code of conduct as “the deep state.” They have read the crazed six-page letter Trump sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the eve of the impeachment vote in the House, and they saw his wife’s face as he laced into Pelosi again on New Year’s Eve, a tuxedoed tailspin about how Pelosi should be ashamed of herself, and she’s so “overrated.”

They also know the Russian government, perhaps trolling us as President Vladimir Putin enjoys doing these days, informed us of his latest conversation with Trump before our government owned up to it. They know Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is managing fallout from the Ukraine scandal he’s complicit in along with both new security crises while he weighs a Senate bid. On Wednesday Pompeo canceled his second planned trip to Ukraine to visit with President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Trump tried to extort. In November it was impeachment that kept Pompeo away, and this time he remained in Washington because of the attacks in Iraq. In the intervening two months he has made time to meet with donors, travel to Kansas, and update his personal Twitter account as well as his old campaign website. 

Like Pompeo, many others who have served for nearly all of Trump’s tenure in office will soon be leaving as the end of a first term is a traditional time of attrition in every administration. Yet turnover in Trump’s administration has set a record. As he takes on two new international crises, this won’t get better -- stepping into consequential roles in a dysfunctional administration during a tumultuous election year isn’t high on the list of most credentialed experts best suited to fill the openings.  

Beneath the surface of Trump’s erratic and reactive leadership during three years free of international crises, he has also destabilized the infrastructure meant to bolster the defenses in place to manage them. A flurry of departures at the Pentagon, including some people who started their jobs last year, has worried national security officials concerned that the combination of vacancies and people serving in acting roles has undermined our capacity and damaged morale in ranks across the departments of state, homeland security and defense, where cohesive policy goals and a clear mission are necessary for effective outcomes.

Six of 21 deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy positions are either vacant or filled in an acting capacity. The recent firing of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, resulting from his disagreement over Trump’s controversial pardons, was followed by the exit of five additional top officials in December, including the head of personnel and readiness, a top Asia policy official, senior adviser for international cooperation, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Four of the announcements occurred in one week. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he expects more departures soon. 

While President Trump has said he enjoys the “flexibility” of having unconfirmed staff in “acting” roles, those officials traditionally don’t enjoy the authority, or often resources, to enact change, lead their teams and maintain morale.

According to the political appointments tracker compiled by the Partnership for Public Service, 136 key positions have no nominee, 83 are nominated but not confirmed, and 515 of 743 have been confirmed. At the State Department, that includes 26 positions with no permanent nominee -- among them the special envoy for North Korea human rights issues, an assistant secretary for south Asian affairs, ambassador to Japan, ambassador to Ukraine, undersecretary for arms control and international security affairs, and assistant secretary for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense. At the Department of Defense there are nine and at the Department of Homeland Security the five positions without permanent nominees including secretary, director of ICE, deputy secretary, and general counsel.

There are currently too many vacancies in critical positions, leaving the government unable to respond to challenges -- beyond the current crises -- that we cannot even yet anticipate, said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service. 

“Challenges to our government become more dangerous and complicated, not less, over time,” Stier said. “Having a robust and effective government is fundamental to our safety.”

While Stier said there is blame to go around for a system that is backlogged by far too many positions (1,200) requiring Senate confirmation, leaving so many open or staffed by those without adequate authority creates an unnecessary and potentially dangerous vulnerability.

“That’s not the way this government is supposed to work, that’s not the way the Constitution says it’s supposed to work,” he said. “This should be something that worries people.” 

Crises cannot be avoided. But reliable leadership, with every available resource behind it, is required. Trump meets his most critical test yet without it.

A.B. Stoddard is associate editor of RealClearPolitics and a columnist. 

Earlier in the year, to the dismay of the usual suspects, Texas governor Greg Abbott had signed a bill making it explicitly legal for Texans with concealed-carry licenses to bring their weapons into places of worship. These kinds of protections allowed Wilson to achieve something that no gun laws now being pursued nationally by Democrats has ever accomplished: He stopped a mass shooter. My guess is that Wilson, a former deputy sheriff, is the kind of guy who probably wouldn't have broken the law and carried a firearm into church had it been illegal to do so. The killer, on the other hand, I'm wholly certain, would have been undeterred by any laws.

Yet allowing people who pass ongoing criminal-background checks and take state-mandated training courses to bring their guns to a church or a school is a move that generates tremendous hostility among gun control advocates. We must "do something" about gun violence, but we've learned that, in the liberal vernacular, that's nothing more than a euphemism for "do something to inhibit law-abiding citizens from owning guns."

Even when Abbott signed the law that clarified the right of people to enter churches with concealed firearms unless otherwise prohibited, it was framed as something nefarious by the media. "Texas loosens firearm laws hours after the state's latest mass shooting left five dead," one CNN piece noted after the Walmart shooting in El Paso in September, as if clarifying the constitutional right to protect oneself from bigoted killers is somehow helping the bigoted killers.

Democratic Party front-runner Joe Biden called the Texas law "irrational." Now, if you don't believe that trained and licensed safety-conscious Americans should be allowed to protect themselves, their community and their family in a place of worship, then you're not a moderate, you just don't believe in the Second Amendment or the right to self-defense -- what John Adams, quoting Blackstone, referred to as "the primary canon in the law of nature."

There is, of course, no panacea for the problem of deranged people shooting up churches and schools. The argument, however, that guns rarely stop these events is highly misleading when one considers that most high-profile mass shootings happen in gun-free zones, and concealed carriers are some of the most law-abiding citizens in the country. It is also impossible to quantify how often the presence of good guys with guns dissuades murders. Shooters prefer soft targets.

We also know that while having a gun in the hands of a citizen may not stop most murderers, it can sometimes mitigate the damage they inflict. Two incidents come to mind: the shooting at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Spring, Texas, where Stephen Willeford grabbed his AR-15 and shot the mass killer before he could do more damage, and the case of Jeanne Assam, a congregant security volunteer at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, who, in 2007, dropped a murderer who had already killed four people in two churches.

While the chances of being caught up in a mass shooting, despite what you may have heard, is incredibly rare, there is virtually no downside in allowing congregations to govern their own security. No one is forcing a church to arm itself. The Mormon Church, for instance, has banned firearms from all its places of worship. Yet some states are compelling millions of Americans to sit there defenseless.

In New York, where Orthodox Jews have increasingly become the target of violence, there are no Assams or Willefords or Wilsons allowed. Draconian laws make it virtually impossible for normal people to practice their right to self-defense.

Using history as a precedent, Jews should find this kind of limitation especially offensive. One of the greatest triumphs of the state of Israel, and the chief reason so many anti-Semites detest it with such ferocity, is that Jews finally stopped asking for permission to exist and picked up guns to defend themselves. The United States is perhaps the only other place in the world where Jews are also blessed -- or should be -- with an inherent right to self-protection. It was the great Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky who implored his people to arm in the early 20th century. "Better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it," was one of his slogans. This notion was once widely embraced in the United States. Apparently, it still is in Texas.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.

I laugh and say, "It's because none of those things are true!" and then hit them with facts, not #FakeNews.

Let's start with the absurd allegation that President Donald Trump is anti-women. "If that were true," I ask, "why has he created millions of jobs for women?" Under the Trump administration, the unemployment rate for women is 3.5%, the lowest in 66 years. Hence the poverty rate for women has fallen to record lows. In September 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau reported, "While both the poverty rate and the number of people in poverty fell for many demographic groups between 2017 and 2018, a large proportion of the decline can be attributed to female-householder families with no spouse present."

Why is this so vitally important? It's because financial independence truly empowers and liberates women, giving them the freedom to chart their own course on their own terms, beholden to no one.

Isn't that the definition of feminism?

This means millions of women employed in the roaring Trump economy fueled by capitalist, free market principles aren't dependent on "the Man," aka the government, reliant on that next welfare check, nor are they dependent on a man in the traditional sense. One of the many benefits? Women in bad jobs or bad relationships have the power to change direction without the paralyzing fear or financial worry they won't be able to pay the rent or afford life's other necessities.

If you think this isn't a game changer, ask any woman who's ever been trapped in a dead-end job or an abusive relationship. She'll set you straight.

Last month, the president signed into law up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave for federal civilian employees, which will go into effect this year. Undoubtedly, this most benefits women, who disproportionally care for children. It's also a stepping stone toward the president's broader goal of implementing paid family leave for all Americans, which will benefit women across the nation by not penalizing them financially for caring for their families.

Since Trump took office, nearly 7 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps, which means millions of women have transitioned from poverty and government dependence to a career and self-reliance.

If that isn't female empowerment, what is?

My liberal friends will then pivot and say, "But Democratic lawmakers and cable news 'experts' say he's a racist!" To which I counter that thanks to the president's leadership with the economy, the black unemployment rate is also at a historic low. The president has delivered on criminal justice reform, giving thousands of those wrongfully incarcerated a second chance at life while also implementing a number of initiatives that support the nation's historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. In fact, just last month, the president signed legislation that will permanently provide $255 million annually to HBCUs and dozens of other institutions that predominantly serve minority students. He also signed an executive order in 2018 that established the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council to improve revitalization initiatives that target economically distressed areas including so-called opportunity zones.

Now, would a racist be uplifting minorities and empowering them with enhanced housing and education opportunities, block grants, access to small-business loans, jobs, higher wages and tax breaks while also rebuilding their communities?

No.

And when it comes to allegations of homophobia, the Trump administration last year launched a global crusade alongside LGBTQ groups and human rights organizations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. Leading the charge? Richard Grenell, the openly gay U.S. ambassador to Germany the president appointed.

When I hear, "Trump's a criminal," from some on the far left, I remind them that in America everyone is innocent until proven guilty by a jury of their peers. Since the president has occupied the Oval Office, he's been subjected to a daily deluge of investigations including a 22-month special counsel probe that found "insufficient evidence" of criminal mischief.

Undoubtedly, if any of these partisan investigations had found a scintilla of evidence of criminal wrongdoing, he would've been charged long ago.

Grasping for straws at this point, some of my Democratic friends will say, "OK, I guess you're right, but he's still a bully." To which I respond that if you were to have the entire Washington establishment against you and the #FakeNewsMedia accusing you of treason and other accusations that are heinous, false, defamatory -- and hurtful -- wouldn't you fight back, too?

That's usually where the debate swiftly ends and they change the subject.

Bottom line: Plain and simple facts, not blind hatred fed by #FakeNewsMedia, should be one's guiding light leading into the next election.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

Those predictions have partially come true. Barack Obama was elected and reelected president in 2008 and 2012, respectively, and Democrats won majorities in House contests in 2006, 2008 and 2018.

But those are slimmer pickings than were promised. And President Donald Trump's victories in 2016 have made a mockery of the predictions. He wasn't ascendant America's choice. Like (but no more so than) other Republicans, he ran way behind among nonwhites. From millennials and Generation Z he evokes the response, "OK, boomer." Feminists feel queasy at the mention of his name.

Demographics, it turns out, don't automatically turn into destiny. Ascendant groups' triumphalism can coalesce those with opposite values into unaccustomed unity and enthusiasm. Ascendant leaders, not cautioned by sympathetic media, can concoct extreme policies (Green New Deal, anyone?) unsellable to most voters.

And perhaps ascendant groups, with their low birth rates, may not become as ascendant as demographers expected.

That's a conclusion you might draw from the Census Bureau's state population estimates for midyear 2019, released just one day before the year-end deadline. They're the best leading indicator we've got for the 2020 census, whose results will reapportion the House of Representatives and the Electoral College.

Reapportionment, it appears, would work to the advantage of Trump: The 30 states he carried in 2016 seem likely to gain at least three congressional seats and electoral votes.

One reason is that California, for the first time since it was admitted to the Union in 1850, is gaining population at a rate below the national average and is likely to lose a House seat. The nation's most populated state seems stalled at just below 40 million people, with net domestic outflow of 912,000 over the decade, only barely outbalancing international immigration.

Texas, the second most populated state, is growing far more robustly, from 25 million in 2010 to almost 29 million last year. That's a bigger percentage gain over nine years than any other state except big-family-size Utah. Florida, which passed New York to become number three in 2013, gained 14%. A decade ago, it trailed New York by half a million. Now, with 21 million, it's 2 million ahead.

These changes favor Republicans. Some upscale Texans trended Democratic in 2018, and perhaps some incoming Californians might import the left-wing politics whose results spurred their migration, as in Colorado and Arizona. But Texas' middle-income Latinos and high-education whites remain much more Republican than their California counterparts.

Florida, though attracting more international immigrants than California and more domestic in-migrants than Texas, is nevertheless trending Republican. Domestic newcomers tend to be Trump-friendly: Catholics fleeing the high-tax Northeast and small-town Midwesterner retirees fleeing the cold. Incoming immigrants and Puerto Ricans seem amenable to Republican policies, and Hispanics and blacks join in, making Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' job approval over 60%.

With Texas projected by Polidata Inc. to gain 3 electoral votes, Florida projected to gain 2 and California projected to lose 1, together they should outvote California 72 to 54 electoral votes, compared with 67-55 this year.

Working for Democrats is the perceptible migration of blacks from ailing northern cities like Chicago to Southern boom metros like Atlanta. But fragmentary poll results suggest some blacks, especially young middle-class men, may be moving Trumpward, perhaps recoiling from policies that have produced high crime and stagnant economies in the cities they chose to leave.

In the early 2010s, there was notable population growth in the central cities that have become almost unanimously Democratic. But that trend has now been reversed; even New York City, after six years of Mayor Bill de Blasio, is losing people.

That leaves Democrats, however ascendant they may feel, with the psephological disadvantage of having their votes heavily concentrated in low-growth metro areas while opposition voters are more evenly spread out over the faster-growing remainder of the country.

A party in that situation has two choices. One is to change the rules, but amending the Constitution is hard, and finagling to undercut the Electoral College likely won't work.

The other choice is to extend your appeal beyond your 80%-plus strongholds in central cities, university towns and suburbs favored by Ivy League graduates. Democrats had some success doing this in 2018. But their presidential candidates, seeking Democratic primary votes, so far seem less interested.

Relying exclusively on "ascendant America" is not a sure-to-lose strategy. Hillary Clinton, despite her disdain for "deplorables," nearly won. But as Donald Trump shrewdly discerned (or stumbled into discovering), it's not a sure winner, either.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for  the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

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That applies to more than vision; we often take all sorts of things for granted. To be grateful, we must first understand and appreciate the gifts that we have -- even gifts that have been given to us by God.

We often view our personal historical experience and changes as events that happened to us, that shaped us in one way or another. These historical events have made us who we are today.

Despite the many events that have shaped each and every one of us, when looking into the future, we typically see little change ahead, according to researchers Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson. They concluded that people view "the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person that they will be for the rest of their lives."

The researchers called this belief "the end of history illusion." At the time they were questioned, study participants held the illusion that the changes they had witnessed were done; no more history was being made.

How do we know that we are often wrong in our predictions that the future will include no more additional changes? Just look at the last presidential election. If you look at the aggregate polling numbers for Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, Clinton appeared to be leading during most of the race.

On election night, many could not believe that Trump was winning. While we might look back now and say that Nov. 8, 2016, was an unusual time in politics -- and this cycle, we will be back to normal -- what we should be thinking is this: How could it get even weirder?

Welcome to 2020, a presidential election year once again. Additionally, all members of the House are up for election, as are a third of U.S. senators and 11 governors. North Carolina, New Hampshire and Montana are toss-ups; Democrats should win Vermont, Delaware and Washington; Republicans should win West Virginia, Utah, North Dakota, Missouri and Indiana. Many of the state legislators who are picked this cycle will have a say in how the new congressional and state districts are redrawn based on the 2020 census results.

While President Donald J. Trump is a lock for the Republican presidential nomination, the Democratic nominee is up for grabs. This year, the process starts late with the Iowa caucuses being held on Feb. 3. The New Hampshire primary follows on Feb. 11; the Nevada caucuses are on Feb. 22, South Carolina's on Feb, 29.

On March 3, Super Tuesday includes Alabama, American Samoa, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. A week later, Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio and Washington have their say in the process. The last primaries occur in June 2020.

While former Vice President Joe Biden has a lead among Democrats in national polls, the first few states will go to other contenders, and the shape of the race is still largely undefined. The Democratic convention will be held July 13-16 in Milwaukee. Imagine a scenario where there is no clear winner in the Democratic primary process; the convention becomes brokered; and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is brought in to unite the party and run against President Trump.

You say this is crazy and could never happen. But no one can predict the future with certainty.

The Republican convention will be held over a month later, from Aug. 24-27, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Just imagine the fun that President Trump will have if Clinton is the nominee. What we should expect is that 2020 will be even wilder than 2016 was -- and in ways that we might not even be able to anticipate.

So what should you do this political year? Don't pay attention to all of the personal attacks and reporting on the horse race (who is up in the polls by a percentage point or two). Instead, watch for the results of what the current administration accomplishes, and focus on the discussions of policies instead of personalities. Here's to a clear-eyed vision for 2020.

COPYRIGHT 2020 JACKIE CUSHMAN
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Irving was Irving Kristol, Bea's husband of 67 years. It was one of the great marriages of our time -- two towering intellects who were also devoted to one another and to their family and friends. Irving would not have been the giant he was without Bea, and vice versa. They were also completely down to Earth.

Born into an immigrant Jewish family in 1922, Bea attended Brooklyn College where she managed a triple major in history, economics and philosophy while simultaneously studying Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, more than an hour-long subway ride away. Like many young Jewish intellectuals of the day, she was briefly drawn to communism (in its Trotskyite variety). It was at a Trotskyite meeting that she met Irving, who had the good sense to propose marriage after just a few dates. I once asked her whether there was a Bohemian atmosphere among leftists at the time and she allowed that there might have been, but it skipped her.

It would, because one of Bea's insights was that the "bourgeois virtues," which very much included marriage, were key to human happiness. She brought this focus to her in-depth study of the Victorian thinkers.

When she began her scholarship, the Victorians were held in low esteem. The very notion of virtue as they perceived and attempted to practice it had been scorned and rejected, first by the Bloomsbury circle in the early 20th century and later by Marxists. As Himmelfarb put it in a 1988 essay for the Wilson Quarterly:

"'Respectable' -- there's another Victorian word that makes us uncomfortable, which we can scarcely utter without audible quotation marks. An influential school of historians now interprets the idea of respectability, and all the virtues connected with it, as instruments of 'social control,' -- the means by which the middle class, the ruling class, sought to dominate the working class: a subtle and covert way of conducting the class struggle."

Himmelfarb sought to banish those "audible quotation marks." She argued, in more than 12 books and a stream of articles published over many decades, that Victorian virtues were actually more democratic and more beneficial to the working classes than the condescension of the radicals. "One wonders," she wrote, "which is more condescending: to attribute to the Victorian working class a radically different set of values from those professed by the rest of society, or to assume that most workers essentially shared these so-called middle-class values, and that if they sometimes failed to abide by them it was because of the difficult circumstances of life or the natural weaknesses of the human condition." Besides, the workers had affirmed these values themselves. She cited the memoirs of the Chartists, who bolstered their claim to universal suffrage by seeking to be hard-working, frugal, clean and sober despite "all temptations to the contrary."

Himmelfarb defended middle-class Victorian moralists against the charge of hypocrisy. While acknowledging that human beings always fall short of their ideals, she noted that reformers declined to patronize the poor by applying standards to them that they would not apply to themselves. The virtues they preached were actually democratizing. "Hard work, sobriety, frugality, foresight -- these were modest, mundane virtues, even lowly ones. But they were virtues within the capacity of everyone; they did not assume any special breeding, or status, or talent, or valor, or grace -- or even money. They were common virtues within the reach of common people."

This is but a small taste of the lively, stimulating and tremendously erudite corpus Gertrude Himmelfarb leaves us. In person, and on the page, intelligence glinted from her like gleams off a diamond. But intelligence is common. Himmelfarb personified something much rarer -- wisdom. She could detect and dissect intellectual cant at 40 paces, yet she was scrupulously fair, balanced and good-hearted. She lived the virtues she taught, and died at 97 surrounded by her family. She was a paragon of intellectual accomplishment, personal grace and solid integrity. On a personal note, I report with a heavy heart that this is the first time in two decades that I will not be emailing her a copy of my column. She surprised me many years ago by asking that I do so, advising that she wouldn't always respond, but she would always read.

May her loved ones be comforted and may her memory be a blessing to the country she loved.

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Thus did Time magazine pass over every world leader to name a Swedish teenage climate activist, Greta Thunberg, its person of the year.

On New Year's Day, the headline over yet another story in The Washington Post admonished us anew: "A Lost Decade for Climate Action: We Can't Afford A Repeat, Scientists Warn."

"By the final year of the decade," said the Post, "the planet had surpassed its 2010 temperature record five times.

"Hurricanes devastated New Jersey and Puerto Rico, and floods damaged the Midwest and Bangladesh. Southern Africa was gripped by a deadly drought. Australia and the Amazon are ablaze."

On it went, echoing the endless reports on the perils of climate change to the planet we all inhabit.

Yet, from the inaction of the carbon-emitting countries like India, China, Russia and the USA, the gravity with which Western elites view the crisis is not shared by the peoples for whom they profess to speak.

For many First World countries, there are more compelling concerns. High among them is population decline, and, if birth rates do not rise, the near-extinction of many Western peoples by this century's end.

Consider. The number of births in Japan fell in 2019 to a level unseen since 1874, around 900,000. But there were 1.4 million deaths for a net loss of 512,000 Japanese. An even larger loss in Japan's population is expected this year.

Japan's population has been shrinking since 2007, when deaths first exceeded births by 18,000. And with 28% of its population over 65, and fewer births every passing year, Japan is aging, shrinking and dying -- with no respite in sight.

Across Japan, writes The New York Times: "Whole villages are vanishing as young people choose not to have children or move to urban areas ... The Government estimates that the population could shrink by about 16 million people -- or nearly 13 percent -- over the next 25 years."

South Korea has an even lower birth rate, and its population is expected to start diminishing this year.

But it is Eastern Europe where the population crisis is most advanced.

At the end of the Cold War, Bulgaria had 9 million people. By 2017, that had fallen to 7.1 million. In 2050, Bulgaria's population is estimated at 5.4 million -- a loss of 40% to death and migration since Bulgaria won its freedom from the Soviet Empire.

By 2050, Ukraine and Poland are each projected to lose another 6 million people, and Hungary will lose 1.5 million.

Lithuania and Latvia have seen serious population losses since the end of the Cold War and are in the front rank of European nations losing people at the fastest rate.

U.N. demographers project Russia's population may fall from 145 million today to 121 million by 2050. Such losses rival those that Russia suffered under Lenin, Stalin and World War II.

The Far East is home to some 6 million Russians who dwell on that vast tract that is so full of natural resources like timber, oil and gas.

"The population continues to decrease almost everywhere in the Far East," lamented President Vladimir Putin at an investment conference in Vladivostok: "The inflow is increasing, but it does not cover the number of people leaving the region."

In the Far East, Siberia and the Lake Baikal region, investors and workers from China are appearing in growing numbers.

The tribes of Europe, the peoples of almost every country of the Old Continent, are visibly aging, shrinking and dying. The population crisis of Europe is "existential," says Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic.

Since this writer published "The Death of the West," nothing has happened to alter my conclusion as to where the West was destined:

"The Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen. It is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying. They face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World. Western fertility rates have been falling for decades. Outside of Muslim Albania, no European nation is producing enough babies to replace its population. ... In a score of countries the old are already dying off faster than the young are being born. ... There is no sign of a turnaround. Now the absolute numbers of Europeans have begun to fall."

We are talking here about what historians, a century hence, will call the Lost Tribes of Europe. And if a people has ceased to replace itself, and the national family is dying out, it is difficult to generate alarm over the slow sinking of the Maldives into the sea, the melting of the polar ice caps, or the fact that Greenland is getting greener every year.

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The so-called “Phase One” agreement is smaller than the comprehensive deal Trump had hoped for and leaves many of the thorniest issues between the two countries for future talks. Few economists expect any resolution of “Phase Two” before the presidential election in 2020.

And the two sides have yet to release detailed documentation of the pact, making it difficult to evaluate.

Trump said high-level Chinese government officials will attend the signing on Jan. 15 of “our very large and comprehensive Phase One Trade Deal with China.”

“At a later date I will be going to Beijing where talks will begin on Phase Two!” Trump said in his tweet. He did not announce a date for the visit.

China has agreed to boost its U.S. goods imports by $200 billion over two years, the U.S. Trade Representative said Dec. 13 when the deal was announced. That includes increased purchases of soybeans and other farm goods that would reach $40 billion a year.

China has also agreed to stop forcing U.S. companies to hand over technology and trade secrets as a condition for gaining access to China’s vast market, demands that had frustrated many U.S. businesses.

In return, the Trump administration dropped plans to impose tariffs on $160 billion of Chinese goods, including many consumer items such as smartphones, toys and clothes. The U.S. also cut tariffs on another $112 billion of Chinese goods from 15% to 7.5%.

Many analysts argue that the results are fairly limited given the costs of the administration’s 17-month trade war against China. U.S. farm exports to China fell in 2018 to about one-third of the peak reached six years earlier, though they have since started to recover.

Import taxes remain on about half of what the U.S. buys from China, or about $250 billion of imports. Those tariffs have raised the cost of chemicals, electrical components and other inputs for U.S. companies. American firms have cut back on investment in machinery and other equipment, slowing the economy’s growth this year.

A study last week by economists at the Federal Reserve found that all of the Trump administration’s tariffs, including those on steel and aluminum as well as on Chinese imports, have cost manufacturers jobs and raised their costs. That’s mostly because of retaliatory tariffs imposed by China and other trading partners.

Many experts in both the U.S. and China are skeptical that U.S. farm exports can reach $40 billion. The most the U.S. has ever exported to China before has been $26 billion. China has not confirmed the $40 billion figure.

Still, the agreement has helped calm concerns in financial markets and among many U.S. businesses that the trade war with China would escalate and potentially lead to a recession. The approval by the Democratic-led House of the Trump administration’s revamp of the NAFTA agreement has also reduced uncertainty around global trade.

Since the U.S.-China pact was first announced in October, the stock market has risen steadily and is on track to finish the year with its biggest gain since 2013. Most analysts now forecast that the economy will grow at a steady if modest pace in 2020, extending the current record-long expansion.

The Phase 1 deal has left some major issues unresolved, notably complaints that Beijing unfairly subsidizes its own companies to give them a competitive advantage in world markets.

The Trump administration argues -- and independent analysts agree -- that China uses the subsidies in an effort to gain an advantage in cutting-edge fields such as driver-less cars, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Another sticking point in future talks will likely involve rules around data flows, with China looking to require more foreign companies to keep data they use in China as opposed to stored overseas.

“It’s a very toxic brew and I don’t know that we’re really going to see much progress on it,” said Mary Lovely, a trade economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

___

Rugaber reported from Washington.

Sanders’ campaign said Thursday that the haul came from more than 1.8 million donations, including from 40,000 new donors on the final day of the year alone. Sanders’ total exceeds the $24.7 million that Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, announced a day earlier that he’d raised during the fourth quarter of last year.

Strong totals from a nationally known candidate and one virtually unknown when he jumped into the race suggest that their party’s primary could feature a protracted fight among well-funded rivals. The lead-off Iowa caucuses are Feb. 3, and Sanders and Buttigieg are considered among the front-runners in a crowded and unsettled field, along with former Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Like Sanders, Warren has relied heavily on small donations coming primarily online. Her campaign raised $24.6 million in the third quarter but said in a recent fundraising email that it had collected around only $17 million with a few days to go — hoping to persuade supporters to open their wallets and improve the final totals.

Sanders’ 2020 bid has now raised more than $96 million built on 5 million-plus individual donations worth an average of about $18. Sanders’ campaign says that more than 99% of his donors have not reached federal donation limits, meaning they can contribute again. That total does not include $12.7 million Sanders transferred from other campaign accounts as part of his presidential run.

“Bernie Sanders is closing the year with the most donations of any candidate in history at this point in a presidential campaign,” his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, said in a statement.

Sanders’ polling and fundraising have remained strong since he suffered a heart attack while campaigning in Las Vegas on Oct. 1. The 78-year-old this week released three letters from doctors saying that he had suffered “modest heart muscle damage” but has since recovered well and is fit enough for the rigors of the presidential campaign and the White House should he win.

Sanders’ campaign said its best fundraising month came in December, when it took in more than $18 million from 900,000-plus donations. It said that the most common occupation listed by its donors was teacher and that the five most common employers were Amazon, Starbucks, Walmart, the U.S. Postal Service and Target.

In an email to supporters on Thursday, Sanders said there will be more where that came from.

“Against Trump, I believe we will have 50 million individual contributions, at least. And at $27 a piece, that would be more than $1 billion,” Sanders wrote. “It’s absolutely obscene and outrageous that an election would cost that much money, but our campaign has proven we will be able to raise more than enough money to win.”

(c) Associated Press

It was a generous thought, nonetheless, albeit one I don’t expect to hear from the current occupant of the Oval Office (or vice versa). Perhaps President Obama was feeling magnanimous because he’d spent Christmas in Hawaii, the place of his birth, and had reconnected with the “aloha” spirit. Awaiting him upon his return to our nation’s capital, however, was the annual end-of-the-year report from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, which detailed the detrimental effects of partisan budget gamesmanship on the federal judiciary.

This year, another momentous task almost certainly awaits the chief justice: presiding over a Senate impeachment trial.

On this date in 1801, a former chief justice told an outgoing president why he would not accept another appointment to head the high court. This refusal created a crisis for the Federalist Party, and for the nation, but John Adams rose to the occasion. His second choice as chief justice would go on to establish the concept and practice of an independent judiciary.

I’ll have more on John Jay and John Marshall in moment. First, I’d point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion pieces spanning the political spectrum. We also offer original material from our own reporters, columnists, and contributors, including the following:

'&#'.ord('*').';'  '&#'.ord('*').';'  '&#'.ord('*').';'

Worst Foreign Policy Disasters of the 2010s. Daniel DePetris’s list is in RealClearWorld.

New Year’s Resolutions for Concerned Catholics. George Weigel has these suggestions in RealClearReligion.

Books That Defined the Decade. RealClearBooks offers perspectives from The Guardian, Washington Examiner and elsewhere.

RealClearLife’s Best of … All Sorts of Things From 2019. InsideHook provides this wide-ranging assessment of the year we’ve left behind.

Big Beer Threatens Commodities Status Quo. In RealClearMarkets, Kevin Kearns reports on major breweries’ efforts to give the Commodities Futures Trading Commission power to set aluminum prices.

'&#'.ord('*').';'  '&#'.ord('*').';'  '&#'.ord('*').';'

John Marshall followed George Washington into battle, serving as an officer in the Revolutionary War, and then followed him into politics as well. Marshall heeded Washington’s call to run for Congress in 1799, winning that election, but was soon tapped by President Adams to be secretary of state.

In January 1801, with the Federalist era coming to an end, Adams tried to persuade famous patriot John Jay to accept another appointment as chief justice of the Supreme Court. But Adams’ entreaties failed.

Jay had been a delegate to both the first and second Continental Congress, an ambassador to Spain, and the new nation’s first secretary of foreign affairs (later changed to secretary of state). In 1789, President Washington nominated Jay as the first chief justice of the United States, a job Washington said, that “must be regarded as the keystone of our political fabric.”

Jay was confirmed unanimously in the Senate and served for six years before stepping down to become governor of New York. But when Adams offered Jay his old job back, he was rebuffed, and in a way that revealed the tenuousness of the new form of government still taking shape on these shores.

“I left the bench perfectly convinced that under a system so defective it would not obtain the energy, weight, and dignity which was essential…nor acquire the public confidence and respect, which, as the last resort of the justice of the nation, it should possess,” Jay wrote Adams on this date in 1801. “Hence, I am induced to doubt both the propriety and expediency of my returning to the bench under the present system.”

Jay’s central objection was that the Constitution didn’t exactly spell out the high court’s authority, nor specifically state whether Congress or the executive branch must consider its rulings to be binding. Jay wasn’t wrong, exactly, but he wasn’t the right man for the job -- not this time. That calling would fall to John Marshall, the Virginian who thought highly of George Washington, so highly that when Washington’s former vice president asked him to fill the vacancy as chief justice, he consented.

Adams’ “midnight appointments” to the judiciary were challenged by the incoming Jefferson administration. Notably, however, President Jefferson did not challenge the appointment of John Marshall. This would prove wise. Marshall’s impeccably reasoned Marbury v. Madison opinion established the concept of judicial review that Jay had found lacking.

John Marshall served 34 years as chief justice. If John Adams had done nothing else in his career -- and he did plenty -- he would have justified his place in history with the Marshall judicial appointment alone.

Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau Chief
RealClearPolitics
Twitter: @CarlCannon 

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.

Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable -- even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.

At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele's allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.

In 2018, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and the committee's then-ranking minority member, Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), each issued contrasting reports of the committee's investigation into allegations of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump's campaign team and the misbehavior of federal agencies.

Schiff's memo was widely praised by the media. Nunes' report was condemned as rank and partisan.

Many in the media went further. They contrasted Harvard Law graduate Schiff with rural central Californian Nunes to help explain why the clever Schiff got to the bottom of collusion and the "former dairy farmer" Nunes was "way over his head" and had "no idea what's going on."

Recently, the nonpartisan inspector general of the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, found widespread wrongdoing at the DOJ and FBI. He confirmed the key findings in the Nunes memo about the Steele dossier and its pernicious role in the FISA application seeking a warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

In contrast, much of what the once-praised Schiff had claimed to be true was proven wrong by Horowitz -- from Schiff's insistence that the FBI verified the Steele dossier to his assertion that the Department of Justice did not rely chiefly on the dossier for its warrant application.

When special counsel Robert Mueller formed an investigatory team, he stocked it with young, progressive Washington insiders, many with blue-chip degrees and resumes.

The media swooned. Washington journalists became giddy over the prospect of a "dream team" of such "all-stars" who would demolish the supposedly far less impressively credentialed Trump legal team.

We were assured by a snobbish Vox that "Special counsel Robert Mueller's legal team is full of pros. Trump's team makes typos."

Yet after 22 months and $32 million worth of investigation, Mueller's team found no Russian collusion and no evidence of actionable Trump obstruction during the investigation of that non-crime. All the constant media reports that "bombshell" Mueller team disclosures were imminent and that the "walls are closing in" on Trump proved false.

Mueller himself testified before Congress, only to appear befuddled and almost clueless at times about his own investigation. Many of his supposedly brightest all-stars, such as Lisa Page, Peter Strzok and Kevin Clinesmith, had to leave his dream team due to unethical behavior.

In contrast, Trump's widely derided chief lawyers -- 69-year-old Ty Cobb, 78-year-old John Dowd, and 63-year-old radio and TV host Jay Sekulow -- stayed out of the headlines. They advised Trump to cooperate with the Mueller team and systematically offered evidence and analyses to prove that Trump did not collude with the Russian to warp the 2016 election. In the end, Mueller's "hunter-killer team" was forced to agree.

When the supposed clueless Trump was elected, a number of elites pronounced his economic plans to be absurd. We were told that Trump was bound to destroy the U.S. economy.

Former Princeton professor and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman insisted that Trump would crash the stock market. He even suggested that stocks might never recover.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Trump would bring on a recession within a year and a half.

The former head of the National Economic Council, Steven Rattner, predicted a market crash of "historic proportions."

In contrast, many of Trump's economic advisers during his campaign and administration, including outsider Peter Navarro, pundit Steven Moore, former TV host Larry Kudlow and octogenarian Wilbur Ross, were caricatured.

Yet three years later, in terms of the stock market, unemployment, energy production and workers' wages, the economy has been doing superbly.

The point of these sharp contrasts is not that an Ivy League degree or a Washington reputation is of little value, or that prestigious prizes and honors account for nothing, or even that supposed experts are always unethical and silly.

Instead, one lesson is that conventional wisdom and groupthink tend to mislead, especially in the age of online echo chambers and often sheltered and blinkered elite lives.

We forget that knowledge can be found at all ages, and in all places. And ethics has nothing to do with degrees or pedigrees.

(C) 2020 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Savior Generals from BloomsburyBooks. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Europeans, in stark contrast, relish their free time. Workers in Denmark actually went on a general strike because they were entitled to only five weeks of vacation. They wanted six.

Many American workers get a lousy one or two weeks off, if that much. Yet 55 percent of Americans with paid vacation said they didn't even use all the time off, according to the U.S. Travel Association.

John de Graaf, who writes on free time and consumption, has a theory on why Americans don't pound the table for more paid vacation. "Until you actually get a block of time off," he said, "you don't really appreciate it."

He cites an interesting case in Amador County, California. After the 2007-09 financial crisis, California trimmed its contribution to every county by 10 percent. County officials in Amador decided that rather than lay off public workers, they would cut their working hours by 10 percent.

The Service Employees International Union cried foul. It preferred layoffs of low-seniority people over a shorter workweek for other public employees. The county stood firm but said that it would honor the union's preference in two years if money remained tight.

Two years later, the budget still needed cutting. The union leadership predictably chose layoffs and restoring the five-day week for the others. But the workers said, "Wait a minute." They weren't asked. The union put the matter before the rank and file, which voted 71 percent to 29 percent to stay on four days with less pay.

What happened? As de Graaf observed, "Workers were now saying things like, 'Now I go fishing on Fridays.'" (Only a few, mainly men, used the freed-up day to take on outside work.)

The female employees tended to like the four-day week more than the men, according to de Graaf. They would tell him, "Well, now what I do is the kids are in school on Fridays, so I do various chores on Friday, and then I have the whole weekend off."

Amador County workers enjoyed the added advantage of all having the same day off, so they had friends to go fishing with. That's the thinking in Europe, where nearly everyone gets vacation time during the same weeks of August. Europeans realized that people want time off when friends and family do.

During the Great Depression, a number of big American companies moved to 30-hour weeks. One of them, Kellogg's in Battle Creek, Michigan, adopted a kind of compromise. The workweek was reduced to 30 hours, but the company paid the employees for 35 hours. Interestingly, Kellogg's found that these workers had become more productive during the hours worked.

Those holding multiple jobs -- now about a quarter of U.S. workers -- are far rarer in Canada and France, according to Gallup. Why would that be?

Perhaps the stronger social safety nets in those countries make ordinary people feel more economically secure. Perhaps a consumer culture flashing luxury in our faces makes Americans see some expenditures not as extravagances but as basic necessities. Work is how they can afford them.

"Other things being equal," de Graaf adds, "when Americans are given the choice of time or money, most will choose the money."

But looking at the experience in Amador County, it's possible that we just don't understand the value of time off because we've had so little experience with it. If so, what a sad commentary on the American way of life.

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fharrop@gmail.com

No matter how the Senate proceeds with Trump's trial, Schiff should be held accountable for the devious means he used to drive impeachment.

The public also needs the truth about the so-called whistleblower. Real whistleblowers deserve to be treated like heroes. But the man identified as the whistleblower by Judicial Watch and many media accounts -- Eric Ciaramella -- is no hero.

To dignify Ciaramella with the term "whistleblower" misrepresents what he allegedly did. Let's say he filed what is technically called a whistleblower complaint. He had no firsthand knowledge of Trump's controversial July 25 phone call or motivations. Every allegation in the complaint begins with "I learned from multiple U.S. officials," or "multiple officials told me" or "officials with direct knowledge informed me." Just gossip. He never names any sources. Ciaramella acted as the anti-Trumpers' frontman. As for courage, there's not an ounce. He's cowering from public view.

Compare him to real whistleblowers. Kansas' top Transportation Safety Administration official, Jay Brainard, blew the whistle this month, warning the TSA is lowering metal detector sensitivity levels to shorten airport lines. He went on TV to warn against sacrificing safety for expedience.

Similarly, Boeing ex-employee Ed Pierson is blowing the whistle against the company for overworking assembly line employees, leading to production errors that could cause 737 Max planes to malfunction or crash.

Real whistleblowers speak from firsthand knowledge and don't hide their identities. They muster the courage to expose dangers or abuses that would otherwise go unreported. Movies are made about heroes like former cigarette company executive Jeffrey Wigand, who went on "60 Minutes" to expose the industry cover-up of addiction.

During hearings, Schiff cracked his gavel repeatedly to silence questions from Republicans about the whistleblower. Truth is, Schiff was protecting himself. Even now, if the whistleblower talks, details of Schiff's role in launching the complaint may come out.

What is already known is that on July 26, one day after Trump's call with the Ukrainian president, Schiff hired Sean Misko to join his staff. Shortly after that hire, Schiff's staff met with Ciaramella, who is a friend and co-worker of Misko's in the intelligence community. Schiff's staff gave Ciaramella "guidance" on how to make a complaint. A cozy arrangement. The emails will likely divulge more.

Schiff concealed these dealings until The New York Times caught him in the lie. Schiff also withheld documents about aiding the whistleblower to House investigators.

The whistleblower filed his complaint with the Inspector General Michael Atkinson on Aug. 12, also concealing that he had met with Schiff's staff. When the complaint became public in September, Schiff feigned surprise.

Even worse, Schiff obscured how the whistleblower complaint ever saw the light of day. The big question is why Atkinson deemed the complaint "credible" enough to be reported to Congress -- the trigger required for Schiff to launch an impeachment investigation.

The complaint contained nothing but "secondhand or unsubstantiated assertions," which regulations say are insufficient for a complaint to be acted on. Accounts of wrongdoing from co-workers don't qualify. Atkinson's Sept. 30 statement defending his decision to deem the complaint "credible" amounts to "I did it because I did it" double-talk. He never gives a reason.

Atkinson's Oct. 4 closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee undoubtedly offers answers, but Schiff refuses to let even House members see it. The transcripts of all 18 other witnesses have been released -- but not Atkinson's. It's a stunning omission.

By concealing that testimony, Schiff is propping up what Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel calls the whistleblower's "hearsay report" and keeping Schiff's own role in launching the complaint under wraps.

But the shameful truth about Schiff's hoax will likely be uncovered in the emails Judicial Watch is seeking. Sadly, it's too late to spare the nation from impeachment.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

Four people were murdered at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City by self-described Black Hebrew Israelites just weeks ago; five people were stabbed at a Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, New York; this week alone, New York police are investigating at least nine anti-Semitic attacks. The upsurge of violence against Jews in New York in particular has finally prompted commentary from Democratic politicians ranging from New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, who just weeks ago expressed shock at anti-Semitism reaching "the doorstep of New York City"; to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who expressed puzzlement at the attacks, noting broadly: "This is an intolerant time in our country. We see anger; we see hatred exploding."

This isn't new. Back in 2018, The New York Times admitted there was a massive spike in anti-Semitic attacks in the city -- and even acknowledged that the newspaper of record had failed to cover that surging anti-Semitism because "it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy." But that has always been true of anti-Semitism. It's possible, as The Times should recognize, to walk and chew gum at the same time in covering anti-Semitism.

But it's not mere lack of focus and time preventing the media from taking anti-Semitism in New York seriously. It's the identity of the attackers. Armin Rosen wrote for Tablet Magazine back in July 2019 about the Jew hatred in New York and correctly noted "that the victims are most often outwardly identifiable, i.e., religious rather than secularized Jews, and the perpetrators who have been recorded on CCTV cameras are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic." This throws the media -- and many left-leaning Jewish organizations -- into spasms of confusion, since it cuts directly against the supposed alliance of intersectionality so beloved by the political left. White supremacists attacking left-leaning Jews fits a desired narrative. Black teenagers beating up Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg doesn't.

And so the left ignores the wrong type of anti-Semitism.

The same media that will ask whether President Donald Trump's executive orders designed to protect Jews on campus are ackshually anti-Semitic will ignore the fact that former President Barack Obama sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years -- the same Jeremiah Wright who railed against Jews and Israel routinely during those years; who said Jews kept Obama from talking with him after the election; and who avers that "Jesus was a Palestinian." Democratic candidates who suggest that Trump has emboldened anti-Semites will make pilgrimage to Rev. Al Sharpton, who was instrumental in not one but two anti-Semitic riots. The same commentators who will police Republican references to George Soros for hints of anti-Semitism completely excuse open anti-Semitism when it comes from Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. It's deemed completely vital by our intelligentsia to survey white Americans for signs of white supremacy and, by extension, signs of anti-Semitism. Those same intelligentsia will patently ignore the fact that anti-Semitic attitudes among black Americans far outweigh similar attitudes among other racial groups, according to repeated polling by the Anti-Defamation League.

Anti-Semitism grows when the victims become secondary and the perpetrators become primary. If you're only concerned about anti-Semitism from white supremacists but utterly blithe about Jews being beaten in the streets of one of the nation's largest cities by suspects who clearly are not white supremacists, you're part of the problem. And that goes for those who govern New York, from De Blasio to Cuomo.

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It is just the latest in an ever-lengthening litany of putrid examples showing the terrible consequences of hating the "other" rather than loving in our hearts all of those created in God's image. The facts surrounding the murder of innocents just across the river from New York City illustrate how pervasive this problem is today.

The alleged perpetrators of this heinous crime, a man and a woman, were apparently both motivated by their deep hatred of Jews. Information continues to emerge that speaks to the motivation behind this callous crime, including that they were reportedly linked to a sect of Black Hebrews who hold anti-Semitic beliefs.

The violence itself was bad enough, and critics who seek to downplay the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism within our borders could easily write it off as an isolated anomaly. But it was the television footage shot at the scene of the crime in the immediate aftermath that sent shudders down my spine.

A succession of black neighbors railed against the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, who moved to Jersey City in recent years to escape soaring real estate prices in nearby Williamsburg. In a clear and shocking instance of blaming the victim, they said that things like this never happened until the Jews came to their city. "I blame the Jews," said one bystander, who said her children were stuck at school on security lockdown "because of Jew shenanigans."

It was not too long ago that the black and Jewish communities were connected through friendship and solidarity, owing much to their shared involvement in the civil rights movement. It seems quite prescient now that those very sentiments were the focus of an in-depth television segment that I produced months ago focusing upon the rise of anti-Semitism in America.

But as is often the case for closed-minded politicians looking to score cheap points, the shooting became the topic of misinformation and misplaced blame. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., erroneously tweeted that "white supremacy kills" before deleting the tweet, perhaps after realizing that the black people who pulled the trigger probably were not white supremacists.

Tlaib's decision to weigh in on this tragedy with controversial comments should come as little surprise, given that she attacked Republican congressmen who voted to condemn the racist Boycott Divestment and Sanction movement, singling out Israel as having "forgot what country they represent." This from an Israel-baiter who posed for photos with the leader of a pro-Palestinian group who has described the founding of Israel as a "crime" and equated Zionism with Nazism.

The Jews in Jersey City certainly live an insular life, focused with zealousness on living based upon strict Biblical tenets. Since arriving in their new neighborhood in search of more affordable housing, they have, out of desire and necessity, set up synagogues, their own religious schools and supermarkets to stock kosher food.

Were they perfect neighbors? Of course not, since no person is ever an ideal citizen 100% of the time, but that certainly owes much to the fact that their community keeps to itself, speaks its own language and eschews many of the aspects of modern-day life.

And yet there is nothing in the world that could ever justify shooting people to death. The supermarket slaughter showcases the worst of modern-day America. It illustrates that anti-Semitism and xenophobia are alive and well.

The problem is not the role of religious minorities in our town. Nor is it the racial makeup of the criminals who carry out such disgusting deeds. The source of the issue is the sickening hatred that resides within the hearts of far too many Americans.

Until we address this sad reality, confront it and make strides to correct it, we can expect to see more tragedies that cut short innocent lives and make this a more dangerous and divided society.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

The close of 2019 marks two full decades since I entered national newspaper syndication. You are reading the 1,571st column I've filed with Creators Syndicate. The years have flown and so have the words: More than one million of them carefully marshaled each week for the past 1,043 weeks to enlighten, entertain and enrage.

Thank you, Creators Syndicate founder Rick Newcombe, for your steadfast support and friendship.

Thank you to the hundreds of newspaper op-ed and website editors who publish my work.

Thank you to the thousands of readers over the past 20 years who've provided warm encouragement, sharp criticism, typo corrections, whistleblower tips, crochet patterns, favorite poems and prayers. I am especially heartened by positive feedback from high school students assigned by their English teachers to expose themselves to views different from their own.

Though the past few months have been filled with slanderous accusations that I am a purveyor of "hate," longtime readers of this column know that these weekly pieces are undergirded by love of language, love of family, love of freedom and love of country.

My columns have been filed from across the heartland and around the world, from our southern border to the Pacific Northwest, from Washington, D.C., to Iraq. I root for underdogs, watchdogs and sheepdogs. I oppose elites, control freaks, race hustlers, con artists, ingrates, liars, reality deniers, bullies and incompetents.

No topic is off-limits. I've shared dissenting views on the Japanese internment, rethought my former support for the death penalty and challenged the Big Pharma/Big Government orthodoxy on vaccines since 2004, when our family pediatrician kicked us out of her practice for requesting that a Hep B jab simply be delayed. While every major American media outlet cowered as Muslims worldwide rioted against free speech in 2006, my columns vigorously defending the Danish newspaper cartoonists who dared to draw Muhammad earned death threats, distributed denial of service attacks on my website and sharia warnings that continue to this day.

I've exposed the cronyism and corruption of the Bushes, McCains, Clintons, Obamas and Bidens. I've offended Muslims, Catholics, Lutherans and Jews with my opinions and reporting. I've been an equal-opportunity hate crime hoax debunker and crapweasel hunter.

Politics and policy have been a central focus, of course, but I've also shared the joys and pains of my personal life: the birth of my children, the still-unsolved disappearance of my cousin from the University of Washington campus in 2011, my late mother-in-law's experience with medical marijuana to relieve stage 4 melanoma-related pain in 2014, my daughter's struggles with chronic illness and pain in 2015, and my 25th wedding anniversary celebration last year.

So many of the stories of suffering, perseverance, patriotism, faith and sacrifice I've shared with you remain inscribed on the hard drive of my soul, including Guadalcanal war hero and U.S. Coast Guard Signalman Douglas A. Munro and his dedicated friend Mike Cooley; the children who died on 9/11; Rick Rescorla; Jahi McMath; Haleigh Poutre; Justina Pelletier and Marty and Dana Gottesfeld; Daniel Holtzclaw; Valentino Dixon; Jeff Deskovic; and Brian Franklin.

Along the way, I've enjoyed connecting with remarkable human beings of all backgrounds and political stripes. In 2002, I wrote a tribute column to my friend and veteran crime journalist Jack Olsen, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack. We had carried on phone and email conversations for years since my days as a columnist at the Seattle Times. I recounted him jokingly calling himself my "one lefty friend." We traded notes berating and cajoling each other.

"O for Chrisakes, Michelle, lighten up," Jack wrote in response to a column I did on touchy-feely conflict resolution seminars in the public schools.

"You are incorrigible," he ribbed when I told him that was my idea of lightening up.

From the very start of my journalism career, I've fought the scourge of identity politics and fetishizing of false "diversity." One of my very first syndicated columns in 1999 called out a "journalists of color" conference in Seattle for "treating minority journalists as trinkets to be tallied."

A "newsroom that looks like America is worthless if it doesn't reflect the diverse and discordant beliefs of its readers," I wrote at the time. "Journalism doesn't need more like-minded foot soldiers who march in political unity. It needs straight shooters who think fearlessly for themselves."

With free speech and free thought under intense fire from all quarters, those words mean more to me now than they did when I wrote them 20 years ago. My New Year's resolution is to forge ahead and put the roar in the "Roaring Twenties." There is so much truth yet to be exposed, so many more stories yet to tell, and miles to go before I sleep.

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1. Jobs – The stunning recent news on employment proves, more than any other metric, the efficacy of President Trump’s growth doctrine of economic nationalism and the diffusion of power. Defying globalist skeptics from Wall Street, academia, and the corporate media, payrolls surged in America in 2019. The most recent jobs report revealed a plethora of records and extended the wage-growth winning streak to 16 straight months above a 3% pace, a mark seen only three months total during the sluggish Obama years. In addition, the fastest wage gains now flow to those groups that formerly lagged badly in the slow-growth recovery following the Great Recession. For example, the lowest 10% of earners saw income grow at an astounding 7% rate over the last year. Similarly, those without a high school diploma welcomed 9% wage acceleration in 2019.
2. Broadening the Movement – 2019 represented a seminal breakout year for the America First movement as the Republican Party changes to a workers’ party. This new focus translates, already, into significant signs of ethnic, racial, and geographic diversity for the GOP. For example, a recent CNN poll in deeply blue California reported 32% minority support for Trump vs. current Democratic front-runner Joe Biden. Similarly, recent polls by The Hill and Emerson show Latino approval for the president at nearly 40%. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this kind of minority support, both for politics and, more importantly, for the overall cohesion of our society.
3. Confronting China – Though a near-term détente in trade tensions was reached, Trump proved to the world in 2019 that tariffs can be effectively deployed to force the Chinese Communist Party into a bargaining posture. The soaring economy in America demonstrated that tough trade policy can indeed coincide with growth.
4. Trade Deals With Allies – In contrast to the mostly contentious trade chess match with Beijing, Trump proved that America First hardly means America alone. The USMCA was finally ratified by the House of Representatives this year and points to a new era of prosperity with our neighbors as the global supply chain reorients from the Far East back to the Americas. Similarly, a breakthrough agreement was signed with Japan and the new U.S.-Korea trade pact took effect in early 2019.
5. Judges – While Nancy Pelosi dithers and corporate media obsess over the sham impeachment inquest, President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mitchell quietly pile up a historic pace of judicial confirmations. Trump in 2019 secured his 50^th federal appeals court judge in only three years, compared to just 55 for President Obama over eight years. Over the long term, remaking the federal judiciary into an originalist, constitutionalist branch of government may create Trump’s most enduring legacy.
6. Remain-in-Mexico Policy – Our country still needs to drastically reform its inane asylum laws and provide vastly more border wall funding, but nonetheless President Trump found a fair and effective near-term solution for border control by requiring asylum seekers to apply from Mexico rather than trespassing across our sovereign border. Not surprisingly, according to NPR, less than 1% of the economic migrants who apply actually qualify as refugees. Trump’s 2019 move, therefore, provides a deterrent and averted a full-scale crisis at our border.
7. Mueller Exoneration – Though admittedly not an active achievement, nevertheless the long-awaited Mueller report validated the president on two key topics. First, that no one in the 2016 Trump campaign actively cooperated with Russia or with any other foreign power. Secondly, Democratic Party chieftains such as Rep. Adam Schiff, along with a complicit media, repeatedly fed the public demonstrable lies for years about supposed “proof” of conspiracy.
8. Al-Baghdadi Killing – The October special forces raid that eliminated the terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proved that America can aggressively hunt down terrorists and dispense with enemies without nation-building and concomitant large-scale troop commitments. Some brave U.S. fighters, along with a terrific dog, highlighted that surgical strikes can protect our homeland without the massive outlays of blood and treasure employed by Trump’s predecessors.
9. Natural Gas Exports Soar – Early in the Trump presidency, America became a net natural gas exporter for the first time since the Eisenhower administration. In 2019, this trend expanded in earnest, with an astonishing 60% growth rate of liquefied natural gas exports for the year. Establishing America as an energy superpower drives domestic prosperity, particularly in heartland energy regions, and facilitates affordable energy to power the on-shoring manufacturing renaissance that has produced 500,000 new factory jobs under Trump. In addition, American energy dominance benefits the geopolitical security of the entire globe.
10. Space Force – Establishing the sixth military service branch in 2019 was pure Trump: imaginative, bold, forward-looking, and – predictably – roundly derided by establishment critics. In alignment with his outsider perspective, Trump correctly ascertains the potential of space as a warfighting domain, and that America must dominate there. As satellites increasingly guide the behaviors of our everyday lives, the U.S. Space Force will protect our security and economy far into the future, forming a lasting legacy for this most unorthodox president.

These 10 achievements build a foundation for our nation to flourish in the New Year. In addition, these accomplishments exhibit his leadership skills, in spite of a near-totally obstructionist House of Representatives and a consistently biased media establishment. Such accomplishments make the president the prohibitive favorite to win reelection over an unimpressive Democratic presidential stable of candidates. Looking bigger picture, the first three years of the Trump presidency have established the policy framework and upward momentum for a truly amazing decade ahead – the new Roaring Twenties.  

Steve Cortes is a contributor to RealClearPolitics and a CNN  political commentator. His Twitter handle is @CortesSteve.

For three years, President Trump managed to avoid getting stuck in this foreign policy tar pit, but critics say he did so only by ignoring Iran’s increasing control over northern Iraq and its influence over Baghdad’s top officials even as he relied on sanctions to curb Iranian behavior.

Now, just as his 2020 reelection campaign revs up, Iraq has again become a powder keg, sparking another fierce national debate about whether U.S. military intervention there makes America more secure or far less so by exacerbating regional tensions and turning the United States into a targeted common enemy.

Trump’s decision to launch military strikes against Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria over the weekend is receiving new scrutiny after Iraqi protesters broke into the Green Zone compound surrounding the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday, setting fires and shouting "Death to America!" They demanded that the U.S. withdraw its forces from Iraq.

The president assailed Iran for "orchestrating" the protests, and reports indicated that the same Iran-supported militias targeted in the airstrikes were behind the turmultuous scene outside the embassy.

The turmoil in Iraq is also creating trouble for Joe Biden as his Democratic opponents take aim at his Senate vote in favor of the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Trump administration officials over the last two days delivered conflicting messages about the significance of the airstrikes against Kataib Hezbollah, which two days earlier attacked an Iraqi military base near Kirkuk, killing a U.S. contractor and wounding U.S. and Iraqi troops.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday said the airstrikes were a “defensive action” designed to protect American forces and American citizens in Iraq, implying that it was an isolated step, not the beginning of more robust use of military force in the region. Yet, on a conference call with reporters Monday, two senior State Department officials muddied those waters.

When asked directly if this was a one-time strike or part of a more concerted U.S. military effort to counter Iran’s influence in Iraq and Syria, one official declined to “preview future military actions” but pointedly referred to the 14,000 U.S. troops sent to the region since May and strengthened U.S. “intelligence and reconnaissance assets” there.

“You’ve had 11 attacks against Iraqi bases that host coalition forces in just the last two months — it’s very important that we don’t tolerate that behavior because it invites further aggression,” the official said.

“We’re not returning to the front in the Middle East – we never left,” another remarked. 

Those statements undercut Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to pull the U.S. out of “forever wars” and are stoking new criticism from anti-interventionists on the right.

“Whenever I hear people talk about the U.S. having disengaged in the region, I have to laugh,” Christopher Preble, the Cato Institute’s vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, told RealClearPolitics. “There are at least 14,000 more troops in the Middle East than when Donald Trump took office.”

“This speaks to the much broader problem of the [Trump administration’s] maximum pressure campaign on Iran and the belief that pressure on the Iranians will result in them capitulating to Secretary Pompeo’s 12 demands,” he said. “The Iranians have a range of responses … and we have seen it play out very dramatically and tragically over the last year with a number of violent incidents that is not in keeping with the claim that the maximum pressure campaign is working.”

The airstrikes and potential escalation are placing the U.S. role in Iraq in the spotlight once again and making it more likely that foreign policy will play a greater role in the presidential contest than previously anticipated.

The military action exacerbated tensions between the U.S. and Iraqi officials, with Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi condemning the attack as an “unacceptable vicious assault” and predicting it will have “dangerous consequences.” 

Foreign policy hawks, meanwhile, are applauding Trump’s decision to launch the strikes, arguing that Iraqi government officials condemning the retaliatory action are bowing to Iranian pressure after allowing Iranian proxies to operate in the country unfettered.

“Finally, after multiple attacks on U.S. bases and allies, Trump approved a military response against Iranian-allied militias in Iraq and Syria,” tweeted Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank. “Trump has to be prepared to do more if the Iranians decide to escalate.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board on Sunday ran a piece headlined: “Trump Finally Fires Back at Iran.” The article argued that Iran’s proxies will keep attacking “if they sense weakness” – and have increased their assaults on Iraqi bases where U.S. forces operate after Trump called off a retaliatory strike at the last minute after Iran shot down a U.S. drone in June.

The WSJ predicted that any U.S. reluctance to respond to Iranian aggression only emboldens adversaries to test the president’s resolve, especially in an election year.

While Trump must grapple with GOP divisions over military interventions, Democrats are already beginning to dust off their Iraq War talking points. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan, on Sunday blasted Biden for his vote to approve the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“He supported the worst foreign policy decision by the United States in my lifetime,” Buttigieg told Iowa Public Television.

“This is an example of why years in Washington is not always the same thing as judgment,” he added.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, has repeatedly criticized Biden for his vote to authorize the war. Sanders, who was a House member at the time, voted against the invasion.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times last week, Sanders predicted that Trump will “eat Biden’s lunch” over his war vote.

While the Biden campaign has yet to respond to Buttigieg’s criticism or to comment publicly on the weekend airstrikes, the candidate pushed back at Sanders’ remarks last week.

“Tell him to come and I’ll give him dessert at the White House,” Biden told reporters on the campaign trail.

Biden, who served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time of the Iraq War vote, has tried to push back by arguing that he later opposed efforts to expand the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. While vice president, Biden reportedly urged President Obama’s national security team against increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan, and he led the administration’s effort to withdrawal all U.S. forces from Iraq, a decision that left a security vacuum, which the Islamic State exploited.

While Biden will undoubtedly feel the heat over his 2003 vote, his record during the Obama administration was strongly in favor of pulling troops out of the Middle East and South Asia, Preble argues.

“He was quite skeptical of expanding the mission in Afghanistan during President Obama’s first term and the use of force in Libya in Obama’s second term,” Preble said. “There’s more recent evidence that Vice President Biden has learned something in the process.”

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national political correspondent.

Often, the email responses I receive are simple messages of thanks. Today, I’m returning the favor, and expressing my gratitude to you, the readers, especially those who take time to send along an interesting observation or enlighten me to facts I did not know.

On Jan. 9, after I wrote about “The Last of the Mohicans” and James Fenimore Cooper’s “Hawkeye” character, a buddy from upstate New York named Andrew Tarr wrote to pass along an interesting historical footnote to the story. Like the famous author, Andy hails from Cooperstown, where the local high school mascot for many decades had been named the Redskins. Six years ago, a group of students petitioned the school board to change it. The teams are now called the Cooperstown Hawkeyes. “Still a great name!” Andy wrote. I agree.

I’ll have more from our 2019 readers in a moment. First, I’d point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion pieces spanning the political spectrum. We also offer original material from our own reporters, columnists, and contributors, including the following:

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Iraq Back in 2020 Spotlight After Trump Orders Airstrikes. Susan Crabtree explores the ramifications for the president -- and those who hope to take his place.

2019 Census Estimates Foreshadow House Seat Gains, Losses. Sean Trende analyzes the latest figures.

Trump’s Top 10 Achievements for 2019. Steve Cortes compiled this list.

A Sensible Plan to Reform U.S. Health Care. In RealClearPolicy, Fred Gluck targets “institutional bloat and other unproductive costs.”

Climate Change and the Fizz in Your Drink. Also in RCPolicy, Charles Hernick argues for greater emphasis on carbon capture and storage.

Even If the Fed Were to End, Little Would Change. RealClearMarkets editor John Tamny explains why the central bank’s role in shaping the economy is overstated.

Affluent Parents Are Giving Their Kids HGH. RealClearScience editor Ross Pomeroy spotlights a trend causing concern among pediatric endocrinologists and medical ethicists.

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On Jan. 15, 2019, a devoted reader (and former U.S. Marine) named Warren Miller called my essay on Martin Luther King “the finest piece of journalism I’ve ever read,” adding, “Nothing I’ve read can hold a torch to your eloquence and insights about our beloved country.”

Obviously, Warren was overgenerous, but such compliments do motivate me and my ace editor Tom Kavanagh to arise at 5 a.m. each weekday to produce these essays, so keep them coming.

My Jan. 21 note on Ronald Reagan’s frigid second-term inauguration generated a pithy response from political-consultant-turned-historical-author Craig Shirley: “I worked on the 1985 Inaugural in charge of the governors. Froze my ass off.”

Political author Tevi Troy replied to my piece on Feb. 6 about Babe Ruth’s birthday by emailing to say that he was such a huge fan of Babe that 16 years earlier he and his wife had named their daughter Ruth. “Our due date was Feb 6,” Tevi wrote, “but she was born a day early, and we still went with the name.”

The following morning, when I noted the birth of Laura Ingalls Wilder in 1867, a friend named Julie Rotherham wrote to thank me for reminding her about the joys (amid the constant chaos) of child-rearing. I’ll return to her in a moment.

During “March Madness,” a new letter writer named Jeff Kaplan surfaced, provoked by a dismissive reference I made to Ohio State’s basketball team. Jeff proved to be clever and good-humored, and he knows how to employ irony properly -- all traits in short supply these days. “I still think you distribute the best even-handed summaries around, and I love your historical openings,” he wrote, “but ATTACKING THE BUCKEYES?  What are you, a fascist commie Michigan fan?”

My April Fool’s Day spoof that began with Ruth Bader Ginsburg announcing her retirement and ended with Melania Trump running for president generated several responses, including a nice one from a reader named Jeremy Albers of Jacksonville, Fla. “Current events are ridiculous enough that these were eminently plausible,” he wrote. “You had me going all the way to the end. Well done.”

An April 24 piece on the Turks’ efforts to wipe out Armenians during the First World War brought a poignant missive from a woman named Renita Esayia. “Dear Mr. Cannon,” she wrote. “Thank you for your thoughtful piece on the Armenian Genocide. My grandparents were among the survivors.”

In August, political writer Salena Zito simply wrote in the subject line of her email: “I love this in my inbox every morning.” In September, a reader from Deerfield, Ill., named Kyle Stone wrote: “Please take pride in the joy you bring your readers each morning. Today’s note, like so many others, is simply wonderful. Thank you!”

My occasional pieces about baseball engendered warm responses. Columnist Quin Hillyer wrote on Sept. 26, “Great stuff on our mutual hero, Willie Mays!” Carole Arnold, a friend whom I’ve never met in person, responded to a World Series-themed essay this way: “You could look it up...seven days...seven games...just as God intended. Go Nats. (I’m always for the underdog.)”

Not all the emails were fawning, or even appreciative. One former editor of mine let me know that none of the links were visible in my June 4 note. A retired U.S. military man informed me that my June 10 piece floating the idea of giving Guantanamo back to Cuba was a fantasy. Several of you pointed out typos that appeared over the course of the year. A handful of readers, including Ben Bradlee Jr., a journalist who has been a friend for 40 years, expressed disappointment when I linked to a RealClearInvestigations piece identifying a man Republicans believe was the CIA whistleblower who launched the Ukraine investigation that led to President Trump’s impeachment.

When I defended the decision to Ben, he replied, “We’ll agree to disagree on that one.” Then he invited me to come see him in Boston. Wouldn’t it be nice if Democrats and Republicans could differ on an argument’s merits with the same equanimity? 

A July “quote of the week” -- a feature I produce each Friday -- jogged Mike McCurry’s memory. I had reprised a line from the Democrats’ 1988 Atlanta convention, which got Mike to recalling fiery Texas progressive Jim Hightower’s convention speech castigating moderates: “In the middle of the road, there are only yellow lines and dead armadillos.”

Mike was laughing at himself (and me) when invoking Hightower. Yet, many Americans do not consider moderation in the pursuit of civility a virtue any more, which was on the mind of Joel Garreau after reading my Sept. 11 Morning Note. An acclaimed author, former Washington Post reporter and editor, and current Arizona State professor, Garreau wondered if my “sensible thoughts” made me a target of verbal attacks.

I guess the answer is: not really. I suppose the bile-spewing crowd hangs out on Twitter. Judging by the responses I get each day, the members of our community -- the readers of this note -- are more accepting of their fellow human beings, and untroubled by the thought that people of good faith can hold divergent views. That’s an especially poignant idea on this day, when we look back on the year, and the people we’ve failed and the people we miss, and “raise a cup of kindness yet” in remembrance.

In August, while writing about the opioid epidemic wreaking such havoc in this country, I invoked my own nephew, who died of a heroin overdose in 2011. “Beautifully written, dad,” one of my daughters emailed me. “It's nice to think about Nathan. I have very specific memories of him talking about and playing with cars when he was little.”

Which brings me back to my friend Julie Rotherham. Responding to a vignette about the book “Little House on the Prairie,” she wrote of the travails of child-rearing on a day when her pre-teen kids were acting like, well, teenagers, the dog was misbehaving, the husband was working long hours, and the plumbing in their house wasn’t working. “But I know these days of having my kids at home are some of the best days of my life,” she wrote. “I know all those things will be forgotten and these are the days of Auld Lang Syne that I’ll sing about in the future. Thanks for the reminder.” 

Carl M. Cannon 
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com 

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.

American troops are still engaged in America’s longest war in Afghanistan. North Korea hasn’t given up its nuclear weapons. Add to that simmering tensions with Iran, fallout from Trump’s decision to pull troops from Syria, ongoing unease with Russia and Turkey, and erratic ties with European and other longtime Western allies.

Trump is not popular overseas, and being an impeached president who must simultaneously run for reelection could reduce the time, focus and political clout needed to resolve complex global issues like North Korea’s nuclear provocations. Some foreign powers could decide to just hold off on finalizing any deals until they know whether Trump will be reelected. Trump himself has acknowledged the challenge in his Dec. 26 tweet:

“Despite all of the great success that our Country has had over the last 3 years, it makes it much more difficult to deal with foreign leaders (and others) when I am having to constantly defend myself against the Do Nothing Democrats & their bogus Impeachment Scam. Bad for USA!”

At the same time, there is widespread expectation that Trump never will be convicted by the Republican-controlled Senate, so 2020 could well bring more of the same from the president on foreign policy, said Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy.

“America still has an awful lot of power,” said Neumann, a three-time ambassador and former deputy assistant secretary of state. “With a year to go, a president can still make a lot of waves, impeachment or not.”

For Trump, 2019 was a year of two steps forward, one step back — sometimes vice versa — on international challenges. Despite claiming that “I know deals, I think, better than anybody knows deals,″ he’s still trying to close a bunch.

Trump scored high marks for the U.S. military raid in Syria that killed the leader of the Islamic State, but U.S. military leaders worry about a resurgence. He is credited with coaxing NATO allies to commit to spend billions more on defense, but along the way has strained important relationships.

His agreement on a “Phase 1” trade deal with China has reduced tensions in their ongoing trade war. But the deal largely puts off for later complex issues surrounding U.S. assertions that China is cheating to gain supremacy on technology and China’s accusation that Washington is trying to restrain Beijing’s ascent as a world power.

A deeper look at the state of play on three top foreign policy challenges on Trump’s desk as 2020 begins:

US-NORTH KOREA NUCLEAR TALKS LOSE TRACTION

The U.S. is watching North Korea closely for signs of a possible missile launch or nuclear test.

Pyongyang had threatened to spring a “Christmas surprise” if the U.S. failed to meet Kim Jong Un’s year-end deadline for concessions to revive stalled nuclear talks. Trump speculated maybe he’d get a “beautiful vase” instead. Any test flight of an intercontinental ballistic missile or substantial nuclear test would further derail the diplomatic negotiations Trump opened with Kim in 2018.

Washington didn’t accept Kim’s end-of-year ultimatum, but Stephen Biegun, the top U.S. envoy to North Korea, said the window for talks with the U.S. remains open. “We are fully aware of the strong potential for North Korea to conduct a major provocation in the days ahead,” Biegun, the new deputy secretary of state, said recently. “To say the least, such an action will be most unhelpful in achieving lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula.”

In recent months, North Korea has conducted a slew of short-range missile launches and other weapons tests.

In 2017, Trump and Kim traded threats of destruction as North Korea carried out tests aimed at acquiring the ability to launch nuclear strikes on the U.S. mainland. Trump said he would rain “fire and fury” on North Korea and derided Kim as “little rocket man.” Kim questioned Trump’s sanity and said he would “tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire.”

Then the two made up and met three times — in Singapore in 2018, in Vietnam last February and again in June when Trump became the first U.S. president to set foot into North Korea at the Demilitarized Zone.

While the get-togethers have made for good photo-ops, they’ve been devoid of substantive progress in getting Kim to get rid of his nuclear weapons.

Trump has held out North Korea’s self-imposed moratorium on conducting nuclear tests and trials of long-range intercontinental missiles as a major foreign policy achievement. “Deal will happen!” he tweeted.

Trump’s former national security adviser doesn’t think so.

“The North Koreans are very happy to declare that they’re going to give up their nuclear weapons program, particularly when it’s in exchange for tangible economic benefits, but they never get around to doing it,” John Bolton told National Public Radio.

US-IRAN TENSION ESCALATING

Tensions with Iran have been rising ever since Trump last year withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 nuclear deal that Tehran had signed with the U.S. and five other nations. Trump said the deal was one-sided and gave Iran sanctions relief for rolling back, but not permanently dismantling, its nuclear program.

After pulling out of the deal, Trump began a “maximum pressure” campaign, reinstating sanctions and adding more that have crippled Iran’s economy. His aim is to force Iran to renegotiate a deal more favorable to the U.S. and other nations that are still in the agreement.

In response, Iran has continued its efforts to destabilize the region, attacking targets in Saudi Arabia, interrupting commercial shipping through the critical Strait of Hormuz, shooting down an unmanned U.S. aircraft and financing militant proxy groups. Since May, nearly 14,000 U.S. military personnel have deployed to the region to deter Iran.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said his country’s nuclear experts are testing a new type of advanced centrifuge. Iran recently started exceeding the stockpiles of uranium and heavy water allowed by the nuclear deal and is enriching uranium at a purity level beyond what is permitted. Tehran’s violations, which it says are reversible, are an attempt to get France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia — the other nations that signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — to offer new economic incentives to offset the American sanctions.

The White House says its pressure campaign is working. The Iranian economy is collapsing, inflation is high. And crushing U.S. sanctions blocking Iran from selling its crude oil abroad have helped fuel nationwide protests.

Earlier this month, there was a rare diplomatic breakthrough when a Chinese-American Princeton scholar, Xiyue Wang, who has held in Iran for three years, was freed in exchange for a detained Iranian scientist in the U.S.

Trump said the prisoner exchange could be a “precursor as to what can be done.”

Iran says other prisoner swaps can be arranged, but there will be no other negotiations between Tehran and the Trump administration.

AFGHANISTAN

It’s no secret that Trump wants U.S. engagement in Afghanistan to end, but critics have expressed concern about giving too many concessions to the Taliban or if they will honor any agreement that could end the fighting.

In what appeared to be a breakthrough Sunday, top Taliban leaders agreed to a temporary cease-fire nationwide, but didn’t say when it would start or how long it would last. A cease-fire, however, could provide an opening for a Taliban peace agreement with the United States that would let Trump bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan, where they have fought for more than 18 years.

The U.S. wants any deal to include a promise from the Taliban that Afghanistan would not be used as a base by terrorist groups. A key part of a pact would include the Taliban agreeing to participate in all-Afghan negotiations to decide what a post-war Afghanistan would look like.

Such negotiations are expected to be contentious and touch on the rights of women, free speech and changes to the Afghan constitution. They also would determine the fate of tens of thousands of Taliban fighters and heavily armed militias run by Afghan warlords who have amassed wealth and power since the Taliban was ousted from power after 9/11.

“We’ll see if they want to make a deal,” Trump told U.S. troops on Thanksgiving Day when he visited Afghanistan for the first time. “It’s got to be a real deal, but we’ll see. But they want to make a deal.”

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who resigned from the Trump administration over his opposition to the president’s decision to remove troops from Syria, said the Taliban have not proven trustworthy in the past so instead of “trust and verify,” the U.S. should “verify and then trust.”

But he added: “I think the president was right to start the negotiations with the Taliban and I think he was right to call it off when the bombings occurred.”′ Trump canceled the talks in September when violence didn’t abate during U.S. talks with the Taliban.

And even as the militants agreed to a cease-fire, an attack in northern Afghanistan killed at least 17 on Sunday and last week an American soldier was killed in a roadside bombing, also in the north.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who visited Kabul this month, said Trump might announce an American troop drawdown from Afghanistan before year’s end. Graham said that beginning next year, the president could reduce the 12,000 U.S. troops to 8,600, which he thinks is enough to make sure that Afghanistan doesn’t become a launching pad for another 9/11-style attack on the U.S. The Taliban have said any peace agreement must include getting all American troops out of the country, where more than 2,400 American service members have been killed.

Hunter Biden’s position on the board of the company Burisma has been a rallying point for Republicans as they try to defend President Donald Trump against impeachment charges over Trump asking Ukraine’s new president to investigate the former vice president and his son while also withholding crucial U.S. military aid.

Buttigieg, the childless mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said in an Associated Press interview Monday that his administration would “do everything we can to prevent even the appearance of a conflict. That’s very important because as we see it can create a lot of complications even when there is no wrongdoing.”

Still, he insisted that the issues raised about Hunter Biden and his father by Trump and his defenders are a diversionary tactic.

“So, I would not have wanted to see that happen,” Buttigieg said when asked how he would have handled a situation like Biden’s. “And at the same time, again, I think this is being used to divert attention from what’s really at stake in the impeachment process. There’s been no allegation, let alone finding of any kind of wrongdoing.”

Biden campaign aides reached on Monday declined to comment on Buttigieg’s remarks.

Buttigieg — well organized in Iowa and New Hampshire, drawing large crowds and leading in polls in both first-voting states — has started to aggressively highlight differences with Biden, even on issues of foreign policy that the former vice president considers his strength, as both men compete for the vital middle of the electorate.

With little more than a month before the first votes in the Democratic nominating fight are cast, candidates are drawing sharper contrasts with one another in field where there is no clear leader.

To be sure, Buttigieg has repeatedly stressed that Biden is not a target in the impeachment proceedings.

“I just think it’s the wrong conversation to be having right now, though, given the spectacular misconduct that we have already seen in facts that are not in dispute, where the only argument to be had is over whether it rises to the level of removal” of Trump from office, Buttigieg said.

Still, Buttigieg, facing criticism from rivals for his scant national and foreign policy experience, has been quick to renew his argument that experience and judgment are separate issues.

Asked Sunday about his familiarity with global affairs, Buttigieg called Biden’s vote as a Delaware senator for the 2002 resolution authorizing military force in Iraq part of “the worst foreign policy decision made by the United States in my lifetime.”

In the wide-ranging AP interview, Buttigieg addressed criticisms of his foreign policy experience given the global challenges that would await a new president.

He has recently stressed more directly his record as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan in 2014, pointedly noting the contrast with Trump’s lack of military service. Working to use his service record and local government background to his advantage, he argued that Washington experience on foreign affairs can be remote from the effects on the ground in communities.

“The experience of being on the ground versus experiencing these things through the perspective of official Washington or legislation on Capitol Hill is different,” he said. “And I’d say that on the ground perspective is especially relevant right now at a time when sometimes the political debate and the debate on TV gets more and more decoupled from that on the ground reality.”

Buttigieg, who is openly gay, is often asked by voters how he would handle being attacked as the Democratic nominee for his sexual identity, a question he typically dismisses by noting he has known bullies throughout his life.

And though he referred to Trump on Sunday at a rally in Fort Madison as a “bully who specializes in identifying your vulnerabilities,” Buttigieg, wrapping up a three-day trip through central and eastern Iowa, stopped short in the interview of suggesting he was expecting Trump to make his sexual identity an issue.

“I don’t possess enough imagination to speculate exactly what forms of creative meanness this president will develop toward me or any fellow Democrat,” he told the AP.

A more predictable attack is coming from within the Democratic presidential field, notably from Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar: the suggestion that the mayor of a city of 102,000 is ill-equipped for the divisive politics of a polarized Washington controlled in part by hard-liner Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Buttigieg notes that, as the mayor overseeing a workforce of 1,000 people and a budget of $360 million, he has executive experience many of his rivals lack.

But his competitors have suggested that is not sufficient to take on problems on a global scale and politics that are dramatically more complex and bitter. He said a Democratic president would have a mandate for measures to advance health care, curb climate change and enact gun restrictions.

President Barack Obama, who had served as a U.S. senator, soon found that the solid wall of Republican opposition, led by McConnell, made even modest change fundamentally difficult. Buttigieg said he is not daunted by Obama’s experience.

He promises to staff his White House with savvy legislative aides, but more broadly, he is calling for circumventing McConnell to build public pressure for the issues that enjoy broad bipartisan majorities, larger than 10 years ago, he said.

“It’s not that I don’t understand the ways of official Washington,” he said. “It’s that I don’t accept them.”

But if you ask a leftist what one or two books you should read to understand leftism, every leftist will give you a different answer -- or need some time to think it over. Few, if any, will suggest Marx's "Das Kapital" because almost no leftists have read it and because you will either not finish the book or reject it as incoherent.

So, then, how is one to understand what leftism stands for?

The truth is it is almost impossible. What leftist in history would have ever imagined that to be a leftist, one would have to believe that men give birth or men have periods, or that it is fair to women to have to compete in sports with biological males who identify as females?

There are two primary reasons it is so difficult, if not impossible, to define leftism. One is that it ultimately stands for chaos:

-- Open borders.

-- "Nonbinary" genders.

-- Nonsensical and scatological "art."

-- "Music" without tonality, melody or harmony.

-- Drag Queen Story Hour for 5-year-olds.

-- Rejection of the concept of better or worse civilizations.

-- Rejection of the concept of better or worse art.

-- Removal of Shakespeare's picture from a university English department because he was a white male.

-- The end of all use of fossil fuels -- even in transportation (as per the recent recommendation by the head of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization).

-- The dismantling of capitalism, the economic engine that has lifted billions of people out of abject poverty.

And much more.

The other major reason it is impossible to define leftism is that it is emotion-based. Leftism consists of causes that give those who otherwise lack meaning something to cling to for meaning.

Two things about Greta Thunberg, Time magazine's 2019 person of the year, embody these explanations.

With regard to chaos, here is what Greta Thunberg wrote at the beginning of the month: "The climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice and of political will. Colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fuelled it. We need to dismantle them all."

Greta Thunberg, like all leftists, seeks to dismantle just about everything. As former President Barack Obama said five days before the 2008 election, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

As regards emotion and meaning, the Guardian reports, this is what Thunberg's father just told the BBC: "Greta Thunberg's father has opened up about how activism helped his daughter out of depression ... how activism had changed the outlook of the teenager, who suffered from depression for 'three or four years' before she began her school strike protest outside the Swedish parliament. She was now 'very happy', he said ... 'She stopped talking ... she stopped going to school,' he said of her illness."

The post-Judeo-Christian world the left has created has left a vast number of the West's citizens, especially more and more young people, with no meaning. This Grand-Canyon-sized hole is filled by leftist causes.

The fact is life is better, safer and more affluent, and offers more opportunities for more people, than ever before in history. Just about all emotionally stable, mature people should be walking around the West almost delirious at their good fortune. Americans in particular should feel this way. But leftists (again, as opposed to many liberals) are not usually emotionally stable and are certainly not mature. That is why depression among young Americans (and perhaps Swedes) is at the highest levels ever recorded. So, like Greta, they look to left-wing causes to find meaning and emotional fulfillment. Until she embraced climate crisis activism -- a chance, as she sees it, to literally save the world -- Greta Thunberg was so depressed "she stopped talking." But thanks to climate activism and other left-wing activism, she is now "very happy" (an assessment I suspect many observers find hard to believe).

Feminism and "fighting patriarchy" (in an age when American women have more opportunities than ever before and more opportunities than women almost anywhere else in the world), fighting racism (in the least racist multiracial society in history), fighting white supremacy (which has almost disappeared from American life) and fighting on behalf of myriad other leftist causes -- in other words, fundamentally transforming society -- gives meaning to people with no meaning.

None of that is morally or rationally coherent. But it is very emotionally satisfying. Just ask Greta Thunberg's dad.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

The story of America's evolving political topography is one of tectonic plates that slowly grind against one another until a break notably alters the landscape with seismic consequences -- a sudden lurch long in development. The election of President Donald Trump cemented a realignment of the two political parties rooted in cultural and economic change years in the making. Although he has been the epicenter of all politics since his announcement of candidacy in 2015, Trump is the product of this realignment more than its cause, a fact that becomes clear as you travel the back roads to the places that made him the most unlikely president of our era.

Thirty-year-old dairy farmer Ben Klinkner doesn't consider himself a member of either political party. "I am a Christian conservative," he says matter-of-factly.

Sitting at conference table at the Westby Co-op Credit Union, the sixth-generation family farmer who has a master's degree in meat science explains that when he left to attend college at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and then at North Dakota State University in Fargo for his master's, he vowed he would never milk a cow again.

"And I've been doing just that every day for the past six years," he said.

On Trump, Klinkner is pragmatic. "I am very happy with his policies. I just wish he'd put that Twitter down," he said of the president's unorthodox style of communicating. This cuts against the national media's narrative that farmers will dump the president because of the trade uncertainty.

And, yes, Klinkner will vote for him again.

Trump's 2016 victory came in spite of his historically weak performance in the suburbs long dominated by Republicans. The key was that he more than overcame his suburban weakness with the mass conversion of blue-collar voters in ancestrally Democratic bastions of the Midwest, and he inspired irregular voters who mistrust both parties. For "The Great Revolt," we traveled to the counties in the Great Lakes states that Trump wrested away from Democratic heritage to find examples of the voter archetypes that define the Trump coalition.

Large strata of the population are now not just eager to vote in the next race for president but eager to vote against the party of their ancestry. This enthusiasm for new alliances is perhaps the greatest indicator of lasting realignment.

The election of Trump glued populism to conservatism, an ideology long leavened by anti-establishment rhetoric but rooted in the inertial acquiescence to the status quo that comes with laissez-faire policies. In Trump, Republicans have embraced, or have been forced to embrace, a more muscular and activist approach on issues ranging from trade policy to nonstop legal warfare with liberal state governments like California's. Gone is the consistency of federalism, replaced in conservatism's pantheon with the base-motivating potency of perpetual confrontation.

The emotional exertion of Trump's combative approach continues to provide Democrats with avenues of appeal to buttoned-up suburbanites who otherwise resist liberal policies. And it has forced populists on the left to copy Trump's antagonistic style, elevating Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the edgiest of the Democratic contenders for president, into front-runners.

Democratic populists seek to copy Trump's success but not to win back the same populist voters who flipped margins by 32 points from 2012 to 2016 in places like Ashtabula, Ohio, or 18 points in Erie, Pennsylvania, both of which we profiled in "The Great Revolt." Democrats such as Warren and Sanders have given up on winning those places -- and those Obama voters.

Instead, Sanders and Warren hope to emulate Trump's success with their party's version of the voters we called Perotistas, those whose participation in elections is irregular, even elliptical, and who pass into voting booths every decade or so like comets crashing into an otherwise orderly solar system, only to disappear just as abruptly.

For his part, the president has accepted his path, choosing not to broaden his appeal by tapering his temperament to one that might suit the two-income, two-degree Republican-leaning suburban families who split their tickets in 2016 and then chose Democratic congressmen in 2018. These voters crave predictability and civility at a gut level, two things in short supply in Trump's style, but they tell pollsters they are wary of the lurch toward socialism in today's Democratic Party. Thus far, their hearts have overpowered their heads in off-year elections in the Trump era, and Democrats are banking on the same result in 2020.

Whether or not the president ever turns his attention to winning over the voters who resist both socialism and his own style, other Republicans will be appealing to them. Suburban voters hold the keys to hotly contested 2020 Senate races in Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona and Colorado -- not to mention the entire slate of competitive House districts.

The suburbs may be where control of government will be decided, but the 2020 election will not be the end of the coalition Trump mobilized in 2016 or the resistance that formed in response. Why? Because the individualization of our cultural economy and the self-sorting of our communities will keep fueling distrust of establishment institutions and keep roiling our political and consumer behaviors. Establishment politicians, CEOs and journalists all ignore the dynamism of this great revolt at their own peril.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

They are important because the 2020 census will determine the next congressional reapportionment.  By looking at the estimates, we can get a sense of how things are likely to turn out the following year.

To estimate the actual census outcome, some back-of-the-envelope calculation is in order.  I took the (estimated) changes in population in every state from 2017 to 2018, and then again from 2018 to 2019.  I created a weighted average by counting the 2018-2019 changes twice and the 2017-2018 changes once.  I then assumed that this would be the amount by which state populations would grow (or shrink) come the official count in 2020.

Using the current apportionment formula (known as the Method of Equal Proportions), we can estimate the following changes:

• Texas should gain three seats
• Florida should gain two
• North Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, Montana and Oregon should gain one each
• Alabama, California, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Rhode Island should each lose a seat.

Of course, it is difficult to know exactly how this would play out in redistricting. Obviously, the West Virginia and Rhode Island seats would have to be taken out of the Republican and Democratic columns, respectively (barring a major surprise next year).  It is difficult to eliminate an additional Democratic seat from Ohio (though not impossible), while drawing an additional Democratic seat in Oregon is unlikely (though not impossible).

In the Electoral College, President Trump would gain electoral votes, but these changes would not take effect until the 2024 election (Trump could theoretically run if he loses in 2020).

These are, however, just estimates, and we have been surprised in the past.  The most vulnerable seats are (in increasing order of vulnerability): Illinois’ 17th District, Florida’s 29th, Texas’ 39th, Montana’s 2nd, and New York’s 26th.  The next seats subtracted, should the actual count for some of the previous seats fall short of estimates, are (in order): Alabama’s 7th, Minnesota’s 8th, Ohio’s 16th, California’s 53rd, and Rhode Island’s 2nd.

Sean Trende is senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics. He is a co-author of the 2014 Almanac of American Politics and author of The Lost Majority. He can be reached at strende@realclearpolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter @SeanTrende.

But on "The McLaughlin Group," the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s.

Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump's great domestic challenge would be to keep the economy firing on all cylinders. His great foreign policy challenge? Avoiding war.

When one looks at the numbers -- unemployment at or below 4% for two years, an expansion in its 11th year, the stock market regularly hitting all-time highs -- Trump enters his reelection year with a fistful of aces. One has to go back half a century to find numbers like these.

Moreover, the opposition shaping up to bring him down seems, to put it charitably, not up to the task.

Joe Biden, 77, with 45 years in electoral politics, has lost more than a step or two and his most memorable Senate vote was in support of George W. Bush's decision to take us to war in Iraq, the greatest blunder in U.S. diplomatic history.

Biden's challengers are a cantankerous 78-year-old democratic socialist who just had a heart attack and a 37-year-old mayor of a small town in Indiana who claims that his same-sex marriage is blessed by the Bible.

Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg are white male billionaires who are dumping scores of millions into TV ads to buy the nomination of a party that professes to stand on principle against white male privilege, wealth inequality and the noxious effects of big money in politics.

While Trump is facing an impeachment trial, an acquittal by a Mitch McConnell-run Republican Senate seems a pretty good bet.

And the coming report of U.S. Attorney John Durham into the origins of the Russiagate probe is expected to find political bias, if not conspiracy, at its root. Trump could emerge from the Mueller Report, Horowitz Report and Durham Report as what his allies claim him to be -- the victim of a "deep state" conspiracy to fix the election of 2016.

If there are IEDs on Trump's road to reelection, they may be found in the Middle and Near East, land of the forever wars, and North Korea.

Not infrequently, foreign policy has proven decisive in presidential years.

The Korean War contributed to Harry Truman's defeat in the New Hampshire primary and his 1952 decision not to run again. When General Eisenhower, architect of the Normandy invasion, declared, "I shall go to Korea," his rival Adlai Stevenson was toast.

Lyndon Johnson saw his party shattered and chances vanish with the Tet Offensive of 1968, Eugene McCarthy's moral victory in New Hampshire, and antiwar candidate Bobby Kennedy's entry into the race.

Jimmy Carter's feckless response to the seizure of U.S. hostages in Iran consumed the last year of his presidency and contributed to his rout by Ronald Reagan.

The critical foreign theaters where Trump could face problems with his presidential re-election include Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea.

As of Dec. 30, Kim Jong Un's "Christmas gift" to Trump had not been delivered. Yet it is unlikely Kim will let many weeks pass without making good on his warnings and threats. And though difficult to believe he would start a war, it is also difficult to see how he continues to tolerate sanctions for another year without upgrading and rattling his nuclear arsenal.

Trump is eager to make good on his promises and remove many of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan before Election Day. Yet such a move is not without risks. Given the strength of the Taliban, the casualties they are able to inflict, the inability of the Afghan army to hold territory, and the constant atrocities in the capital city of Kabul, a Saigon '75 end to the Afghan war is not outside the realm of the possible.

Nor is a shooting war with Iran that rivets the nation's attention.

Yesterday, U.S. F-15s, in five attacks, hit munitions depots and a command center of the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia in Syria and Iraq, a retaliatory raid for a rocket attack on a U.S. training camp that killed an American contractor and wounded four U.S. soldiers.

"For those who ask about the response," warns a Kataib Hezbollah spokesman, "it will be the size of our faith." One has to expect Iran and its militia in Iraq to respond in kind.

They have a track record. During 2019, with its economy choked by U.S. sanctions, Iran and its allies sabotaged oil tankers in the Gulf, shot down a $130 million U.S. Predator drone, and shut down with missiles and drones half of Saudi Arabia's oil production.

In former times, a confrontation or shooting war often benefitted the incumbent, as there was almost always a rallying to the flag. Those days are gone. This generation has had its fill of wars.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Thus, we had a headline in The New York Times reading, "Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat," and one in Politico that said, "Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win the Nomination." The polls, however, have barely budged.

In a humorous tweet saying, "ThE PriMaRy HaS BeEn A CrAzY UnPrEDiCtAbLe RoLLer CoAsTer RiDe," statistical analyst Nate Silver compared recent RealClearPolitics averages for Joe Biden and Sanders to those of a year ago. On Dec. 19, 2018, Biden was at 27.5 percent and Sanders at 19 percent. Exactly a year later, Biden was at 27.8 percent and Sanders at 19.3 percent.

The first poll after the December debate, Silver tweeted, showed "not a heck of a lot going on." Andrew Yang, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg each gained a point. Bernie and Michael Bloomberg lost one.

A FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll asked likely Democratic primary voters who won the face-off. Biden got the most votes. Sanders came in second.

Nevertheless, Politico quotes Faiz Shakir, Sanders' campaign manager, saying that political insiders and pundits are finding it harder and harder to ignore Bernie because "he's rising in every average you see." That would seem at odds with reality, but one must concede that 19.3 percent is better than 19.0 percent.

It's true that Sanders wasn't getting a lot of attention in recent months but for two plausible reasons. One is the rise of Elizabeth Warren. The other is his heart attack.

Warren's numbers slipped after other candidates went after her. Sanders, if anything, benefited from being left alone.

Sanders loyalists seem to be ignoring that their candidate suffered a heart attack only three months ago. That Bernie is back campaigning is a tribute to his resolve. And we're pleased to see letters from cardiologists reporting that he is recovering well. But it does not cancel out the seriousness of what happened.

About 1 in 5 people who suffer a heart attack are readmitted to a hospital for a second one within five years, according to the American Heart Association. And a heart attack elevates the risk of a stroke. Sanders is 78.

The Vermont senator's people insist that Biden's lead in the polls will narrow or vanish once backers of Warren come over to their man. It is not clear whether they would in large numbers.

Sanders, not unlike President Donald Trump, has a cultlike following, which means few leave him but also few join up. And while Sanders conceivably could take hard-left support from Warren, Biden could take moderates from Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Yang and Cory Booker.

Referring to Biden, Sanders recently told The Los Angeles Times that Trump will "eat his lunch." Biden retorted that he will invite Bernie for "dessert" at the White House. Biden does know how to return a punch.

I'd wager that the spate of Bernie-can-win analyses reflects some news sources' sensitivity to complaints that the "corporate media" is slighting Bernie. That and the need for a new political angle every week.

In a replay of 2016, Sanders and his surrogates are portraying the "Democratic establishment" as the great enemy. They need reminding that other Democrats have a right to an opinion. Also, not all Democrats love Bernie's bashing of the leadership or how he slips in and out of the party, reenlisting when an election approaches.

The latest Economist/YouGov poll, meanwhile, shows Biden ahead of Warren by 11 points and ahead of Sanders by 13. As they say, the more things change ...

fharrop@gmail.com

Former Vice President Joe Biden recently declared, "The middle class is getting crushed. And the working class has no way up."

Sen. Bernie Sanders stews that President Donald Trump's policies have brought "handouts for billionaires and hunger for the poor."

Mayor Pete Buttigieg claims that many working families are struggling so much financially they don't have enough income to be able to "afford a two-bedroom apartment."

The Washington Post says that Americans are awash in debt they can't repay.

Time out for a dose of reality. If things are so bad, how is it that a new poll from CNN -- hardly a network friendly to Trump -- finds 3 of 4 Americans rate the economy as pretty good or really good.

We have become so rich as a nation that even most poor families can buy dolls and baseball bats and $100 Nike basketball shoes for their kids, as well as cellphones that have more computing power than every computer used to put a man on the moon.

It is nonsense to say the poor and the middle class are worse off than they were 20 or 30 or 50 years ago.

Go to any neighborhood Walmart or Target, and you will see average and even low-income Americans -- blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, teenagers, mothers with three kids, and seniors -- filing out of the store with sometimes two or three shopping carts overflowing with toasters, winter coats, flowers, games, dog food, stuffed animals, potato chips, video games and every conceivable piece of merchandise -- all stuffed in the back of the minivan.

The rich are doing better for sure. Our wealth as a nation has now topped $100 trillion, and the rich have a big slice of that. But well over half of all Americans own stock through 401(k) plans and other retirement savings. When the Dow Jones rises by 10,000 points in three years, it isn't just Warren Buffett who feels the wealth effect.

This past year, median family income adjusted for inflation rose to $66,000 for the first time ever. Think about that. In 90% of the world, an income of $66,000 is rich, rich, rich. The average household income in China -- which is our major challenger for global supremacy -- is less than $15,000. That's less than one-fourth of the level in America. There is an old saying that is true now more than ever: If you have to be poor, America is a good place to be poor.

For all of the constant talk about stagnant wages for the middle class since the 1970s, the average middle-income household today has access to technology, entertainment, household appliances and health care that even rich people couldn't buy in the 1960s. The folks at The Heritage Foundation have found that even poor families today are more likely to have access to things like air conditioning, dishwashers, televisions and laptop computers than middle class families did 50 years ago. These are the dividends from our free market capitalist economy.

As our old friend Arthur Laffer wisely reminds us, people don't work to pay taxes. They work and earn income so they can buy things -- for themselves and for others. And we are doing just that. Barron's just reported another blockbuster Christmas shopping season. So much for all the gibberish a few months ago about a recession. We are all spending more -- because we have more.

Yes, of course, I know money can't buy love or happiness. But let's face it: More money is a lot better than too little. Prosperity is a wonderful thing.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Stephen Moore is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. 

As we head into the New Year, the unofficial leader of the Democratic Party is Nancy Pelosi. She’ll turn 80 in March, the same month that the Democratic nominee should emerge. Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking House Democrat, is already 80. James Clyburn, No. 3 in the House leadership, turns 80 a week after the party’s nominating convention in Milwaukee.

Maybe this helps explain why House Democrats didn’t want to wait a year for an election. And the combined ages of these seven men and women is obviously a factor in the unlikely emergence of the mayor of a small Indiana city on the national stage: Pete Buttigieg is less than half the age of these political elders -- at a time when the number of millennial generation voters is surpassing the tally of vaunted baby boomers.

This date in history reminds us of the power of the presidency. On Dec. 30, 1853, Franklin Pierce, saw the labors of his diplomacy bear fruit. On that day, Washington envoy James Gadsden and three Mexican diplomats representing President Antonio López de Santa Anna signed a treaty in Mexico City ceding 29,600 square miles of land in Arizona and New Mexico to the United States for $10 million.

President Trump wants to build a wall there now, but 166 years ago the sale of that vast frontier brought closure to the costly Mexican-American War. In Washington, the Gadsden Purchase, as it was known, signified something else as well: the machinations of government officials already anticipating civil war in the United States.

Gadsden’s selection as minister to Mexico was urged on Pierce by a friend from the president’s days in the Senate, Jefferson Davis. In the U.S. a consensus was developing for building a railroad that connected the East and West coasts. But like everything else in the 1850s, this dream became entangled with the great argument over slavery.

Jefferson Davis and nearly every politician south of the Mason-Dixon Line wanted the transcontinental railroad to run along a Southern route -- hence the push to gain title to the rest of the New Mexico and Arizona territories -- as a way of extending slavery westward. This scheme was destined to be circumvented, however, thanks in part to the work of a long-forgotten railroad engineer named Theodore Judah.

I’ll have more on this visionary in a moment. First, I’d point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion pieces spanning the political spectrum. We also offer original material from our own reporters, columnists, and contributors, including the following:

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Pelosi’s Impeachment Delay Can’t Go On Forever. Bill Scher writes that the speaker’s attempt to influence the Senate could backfire.

2019 Was the Year That Democrats Went Off the Rails. Frank Miele looks back in dismay.

America’s Proud Legacy of Liberty. Peter Berkowitz reviews Richard Brookhiser’s “Give Me Liberty: A History of America’s Exceptional Idea.”

Low-Income Families Shouldn't Help Fund EV Charging Stations. In RealClearEnergy, Brendan Flanagan argues that transitioning away from gas-powered vehicles shouldn’t be done on the backs of the poor.

Shale Companies’ Credit Struggles Point to a Toothless Fed. RealClearMarkets editor John Tamny chastises those who blame the central bank for high borrowing costs.

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Theodore D. Judah was born on March 4, 1826, in Bridgeport, Conn., one of three sons of an Episcopal clergyman who moved his family to Troy, N.Y., when Theodore was a baby. One of his brothers would become a brigadier general in the Union Army, the other a lawyer who went to California. Theodore’s obsession was railroads.

As a teenager he studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. By 18 he was working across the Northeast as a railroad surveyor. In Greenfield, Mass., he met and married a local girl named Anna Pierce. He was still in his mid-twenties when he attended a fateful meeting in New York where local men -- one of whom had been to California’s gold fields -- recruited him to come build railroads in the Sacramento Valley. That night he excitedly told his wife that this is what he’d been waiting for: a transcontinental railroad. “It will be built,” he told Anna, “and I am going to have something to do with it.”

So they sailed around the continent to San Francisco, where Judah began making history. Two impediments stood in his path. The first was money. Laying track across the expanse of this country was expensive. The second barrier was finding a passage through the Sierra Nevada.

In California, Judah addressed both problems with his customary zeal. He found several partners willing to build railroads in the Sacramento Valley. These men, none born to wealth, had made money in the Gold Rush and wanted to make more. Eventually, the group of investors was whittled to four -- the “Big Four” is how they would be remembered in history -- and their surnames mark the geographical and commercial landscape of California to this day: Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington, and Charles Crocker.

Judah’s backers wanted to know what route the engineer and railroad surveyor had in mind. Specifically, they wanted to know how he proposed negotiating the High Sierra. This problem was solved in July of 1860, when Judah accepted an invitation to lunch with Doc Strong, a storekeeper from the foothills town of Dutch Flat.

Strong invited him to climb Donner Pass with him. Perhaps because of the fate of the doomed wagon train that gave the pass its name, road builders had shied away from it. But in one afternoon, Judah could see that Doc Strong was right. The long, easy climb through the pass, alongside Donner Lake and then down the mountain following the stream bed of the Truckee River -- this route seemed perfect.

He would be proven right, and Amtrak’s California Zephyr makes the journey through that pass each day, as do thousands of motorists on Interstate 80. On July 1, 1862, after President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act approving construction, Judah telegraphed his partners, “We have drawn the elephant, now let us see if we can harness him up.”

But fissures were developing between the tough-minded Big Four and their equally stubborn engineer. In 1863, they bought out Judah against his will, leaving open the possibility that if he could raise enough money, he could buy them out. So, in October of 1863, Theodore and Anna Judah sailed back East again, this time on a fundraising trip. While in Panama, however, he contracted yellow fever. Judah did not recover. Upon docking in New York Harbor, he was carried from the ship to a nearby hotel. He died in his wife’s arms on Nov. 3, 1863.

His dream survived, however, and the transcontinental railroad was completed on May 10, 1869. In some ways, his fate foreshadowed by exactly a century that of John F. Kennedy, the man who willed his nation to the moon, but didn’t live to see it happen. But JFK was a president, not an engineer, and while Judah’s name gradually faded from memory, the Big Four became railroad kings who built grand hotels, founded universities, ran for public office, and had edifices and monuments named after them.

May 10, Anna Judah considered with some bitterness, was the anniversary of her marriage to Theodore. On that day, she later recalled, “it seemed as though the spirit of my brave husband descended upon me and together we were there unseen, unheard of by man.”

But some did remember. In February 1931, the American Society of Civil Engineers unveiled a monument in Sacramento to the vision of a man once derided as “Crazy Judah” for his obsession about conquering the mountains with his trains.

Carl M. Cannon 
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com 

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.

Days to Iowa caucuses: 35

Days to general election: 309

THE NARRATIVE

The ups, downs and swerves of 2019 yielded a stable top slate. Former Vice President Joe Biden leads most national polls of Democratic primary voters, with Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts within striking distance. Yet in the first caucus state of Iowa and the first primary state of New Hampshire, there’s a jumble of Biden, Sanders, Warren and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. At first glance, it’s a clean choice: Biden and Buttigieg hail from the center-left; Warren and Sanders come from the progressive left. Reality is more layered. All four have weaknesses within Democrats’ diverse electorate; each makes a different case for carrying the banner against President Donald Trump, who is now impeached but a near certainty to survive a Senate trial. If that’s not enough indecision, several wildcards — including two billionaires — still hope to scramble the contest.

THE BIG QUESTIONS

Money: Who can (sort of) compete with Michael Bloomberg’s wallet?

The fourth-quarter fundraising period ends Tuesday. Warren and Sanders set the early curve for grassroots donations, outpacing Buttigieg and Biden, who tap traditional deep-pocketed contributors in addition to online donors. Now those small-donor juggernauts must compete with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who’s used a share of his estimated $50 billion personal fortune to blanket television and digital advertising and build an expansive staff in Super Tuesday states. For his rivals, it’s not so much about keeping up; Bloomberg can easily outspend every other campaign, including that of fellow billionaire Tom Steyer. But there’s only so much television time for sale, and if Warren and Sanders want to plow big money into Super Tuesday, especially the expensive television markets of California, they’ll need as much cash as possible ahead of time. Biden, meanwhile, has already secured his best fundraising quarter (a relative comparison for a candidate who’s lagged other top-tier contenders). The question is whether Biden’s “best” mollifies establishment Democrats who waved red flags when he reported having less than $9 million on hand at September’s end.

Money, Part II: How long can Cory Booker keep going?

The year-end deadline is critical for New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker as he reaches for relevance. The last of two African American candidates (along with former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick), Booker made a do-or-die money appeal in September, and it worked. But it’ll take more than scraping by to fund the turnaround he envisions: a surprise finish in overwhelmingly white Iowa to kick-start a dramatic rise in more diverse primary states that follow (Barack Obama’s 2008 path). Campaigns that hit big fundraising numbers tend to leak that news before Federal Election Commission filings are due. Candidates with bad news tend to wait. So, it bears watching how Booker’s team plays it to start January.

Is Amy Klobuchar being overlooked in Iowa?

Those previously mentioned Iowa and New Hampshire jumbles omit Amy Klobuchar. But the Minnesota senator is plugging away in both states. She just hit her 99th Iowa county (that’s all of them), demonstrating her effort to use complex caucus rules that can reward candidates with a wide geographic footprint. Notably, Klobuchar’s strategy tracks Biden. Both aim for a more consistent appeal across 1,679 precincts than Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg muster on Feb. 3. The question becomes how many precincts give both Biden and Klobuchar the minimum 15% support required to count toward delegates. Anyone who doesn’t hit that viability mark drops from subsequent ballots, their backers going up for grabs. Biden’s Iowa hopes depend in part on picking up moderates on realignment votes (read: Klobuchar and Buttigieg supporters). If Klobuchar is as strong as she hopes to be, she could turn that strategy around on Biden, driving him below viability and attracting his supporters on later ballots. Biden returns to Iowa this week for another bus tour, though not as lengthy as his eight-day jaunt after Thanksgiving.

Is Sanders a true contender this time?

Sanders lost the 2016 nomination because of Hillary Clinton’s advantage among non-white Democrats. Since then, Sanders has deepened his ties among Latinos, African Americans and other non-whites. Warren and Buttigieg are still chasing that success. Sanders’ advisers believe the senator is well-positioned to challenge Biden among non-whites if he’s able to build early momentum in New Hampshire and Iowa, where Sanders will spend New Year’s Eve. If they’re right, that would open avenues to delegates Sanders didn’t get in 2016.

Is Trump’s position improving?

The president has never been popular judged in a vacuum. In 2016, he won GOP primaries with pluralities and lost the general election popular vote. As president, he’s never reached majority job approval in Gallup’s polling. But he’s still hovering in the 40s, not far from where his immediate predecessors were 11 months before winning second terms. Impeachment proceedings haven’t affected Trump’s standing. Meanwhile, the same Democratic-run House that impeached him approved his new North America trade pact. Top-line economic numbers shine, even if the on-ground reality is uneven. And Trump could be on the cusp of a peace deal in Afghanistan after the Taliban ruling council on Sunday agreed to a temporary cease-fire. As frenetic as Trump’s messaging is, he proved in 2016 that he relishes framing binary choices for voters, and he’s more than convinced he has a case in 2020.

THE FINAL THOUGHT

Most voters are just tuning into a presidential race that’s raged for a year. They’ll find a Democratic contest featuring stark options on policy and personality, but lacking an undisputed favorite. Candidates are navigating primary politics: dancing along the progressive-liberal-moderate spectrum and carefully choosing when to go after each other. At the same time, Trump dominates the 2020 narrative, a fact demonstrated most recently as Biden spent two days talking about whether he’d testify in a Senate trial on Trump’s removal from office. It’s untidy enough for Trump’s reelection campaign to boast confidence and some Democrats to fret openly. History suggests, however, that all observers should respect the volatility. Indeed, incumbent presidents are difficult to beat. (Eight out of the last 11 who sought reelection won). But when they do lose, it’s nearly always to a challenger who emerged from the opposition party’s messy, even chaotic primary. Democrats’ chaos is just getting warmed up.

(c) Associated Press

So far, the House speaker’s maneuver appears to be succeeding in this respect: Though senators have time to stew during negotiations over trial arrangements, Democrats have remained unified while cracks are beginning to surface among Republicans.

McConnell has reportedly convinced Trump to shelve his narcissistic and politically dubious desire for a lengthy trial with lots of witness testimony. But he couldn’t stop Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska from publicly complaining about the majority leader’s expressed plans of “total coordination” with the White House. “When I heard that I was disturbed,” Murkowski told Alaska’s KTUU.

Murkowski may be only one voice, but she is one of three Republican senators — along with Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah — who refused in October to co-sponsor a resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. It will take four GOP senators to join a unified Democratic bloc and forge a majority that can sideline McConnell’s plan and determine aspects of the trial, including the witness testimony of current and former White House officials whom Trump would rather remain silent, such as White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former National Security Adviser John Bolton.  (Red state Senate Democrats such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Doug Jones of Alabama have kept the door open to acquitting Trump, but have echoed Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in calling for key White House witnesses.)

“How we will deal with witnesses remains to be seen,” said Murkowski, implicitly raising the prospect of a renegade faction denying the majority leader, in his words, “ball control” during the trial. (As to who might be the fourth rogue Republican, keep an eye on Colorado’s Cory Gardner, who, like Collins, is running for reelection in a state Trump lost.)

Murkowski, in characteristically balanced and cryptic fashion, was also critical of Pelosi for withholding the articles. But Murkowski may not have spoken out if Pelosi hadn’t elevated the debate over witnesses with her delaying tactics.

However, the speaker’s slow-walk strategy is double-edged. She can’t secure a victory regarding how the trial proceeds, unless the trial proceeds. And while Trump may grouse if he doesn’t get a splashy acquittal vote, McConnell doesn’t seem to mind. He would rather his blue state Republican senators avoid taking any controversial impeachment-related votes. “I’m not sure what leverage there is from refraining from sending us something we do not want,” McConnell crowed upon hearing about Pelosi’s delay.

Pelosi has already had her 31 Democratic members who represent Trump-won districts take a politically risky impeachment vote, in which neither a “Yea” nor “Nay” vote could easily satisfy all elements of their support back home. (Still, nearly every Democrat voted to impeach.)  The only way to spread the political risk is for blue and purple state Senate Republicans to take tough impeachment votes as well. That doesn’t happen if Pelosi keeps the articles of impeachment in her pocket.

Furthermore, allowing the Senate to avoid a trial gives Trump and his allies the ability to accuse House Democrats of playing politics with their impeachment power, a charge that could sting in those red districts. If the stalemate goes on for too long, vulnerable House Democrats could publicly break with Pelosi and demand the articles be sent to the Senate, without any deal in hand for how the trial will be run.

For Pelosi’s delaying tactics to be ultimately fruitful, Democrats will need to win agreement on some of their demands — which include having the White House hand over internal documents as well as securing witness testimony from four current and former White House officials — without making significant concessions.

McConnell has signaled a bit of flexibility, telling Fox News last week, “We haven’t ruled out witnesses.” But he has also said, “If we go down the witness path, we're going to want the whistleblower. We're going to want Hunter Biden. You can see here that this is the kind of mutual assured destruction episode that will go on for a long time.”

That’s not a swap Democrats can accept. Forcing the whistleblower to testify could put that person’s life in danger. Dragging Hunter Biden to the Senate would fulfill the objective Trump had in reaching out to the Ukrainian president in the first place: spotlighting his baseless accusation that, while serving as vice president, Joe Biden sought to squelch a Ukrainian investigation into the gas company on whose board Hunter served.

The question remains as to whether the uncertainty created by Pelosi’s delay allows more independence to ferment among Senate Republicans, prompting McConnell to cut a deal or prompting a bipartisan coalition to sideline his plan. One should never underestimate the speaker’s abilities, though her capacity to influence the Senate is untested. And time is not on her side.

Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ,” and host of the podcast “New Books in Politics.” He can be reached at contact@liberaloasis.com or follow him on Twitter @BillScher.

Sometimes, it’s as clear as the pimple on a teenager’s nose. Other times it’s as obscure as the reason why anyone would invest their life savings in blockchain — whatever that is. Usually, it’s a mixed bag. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

For me, I’m going to remember 2019 as the Democrats’ last stand. The party of Thomas Jefferson was given the keys to the nation’s future and told, simply, don’t drive it off the road. Instead, the Democrats honored their Southern roots and decided to go mud bogging! Might have been fun if they had four-wheel drive, but they were stuck with the antique transmission of the Constitution. Voters were sure to notice when the yee-haw Democrats covered them with dirt, ground the gears to dust, and spun the engine into oblivion.

But just in case you’ve forgotten, here’s the roadmap of how we got here:

Jan. 3: Democrats took over the Animal House of Representatives and immediately pledged to take down President Trump in the mistaken belief that he is really Dean Vernon Wormer. Nancy Pelosi auditioned for the role of chapter president, but was told she was born to play the John Belushi part of “Bluto,” the pathological sergeant-at-arms. That big nasty gavel sure does make power go to one’s head — and you don’t have to be a good ol’ boy to understand that!

Jan. 15: An apparent messiah complex leads Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand to join dozens (hundreds?) of other Democrats offering themselves as the Chosen One to defeat DJT. Political spin doctors warn that the delusion could spread rapidly and, indeed, before the year is half over, it has infected Jay Inslee, Marianne Williamson, John Hickenlooper, Beto O’Rourke, Bill de Blasio, Julian Castro, Steve Bullock and other non-entities. It appears, however, that although non-politicians were for the most part immune, a related condition resulted in uncontrollable laughter whenever two or three people gathered to discuss the state of the Democratic primary.

Jan. 29: Democrats encountered a detour on their road to ruin when “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett claimed to be the victim of a hate crime on the streets of Chicago in the middle of the coldest night of the year. The noose still hanging around his neck when police came to his door later may have seemed like the perfect prop to TV star Smollett, but to everyone else it seemed like a giant neon light shouting, “Give me attention!” Did I say everyone? Oops. Not Democrats, who have mastered the marriage of victimhood and hagiography. To them, St. Jussie was the second coming of Tawana Brawley. Oh, wait. This is getting way too uncomfortable! It’s almost like Democrats specialize in phony attacks and disingenuous outrage. Hmmm. On Feb. 21, Smollett was arrested for filing a false police report, but thanks to a corrupt system in Chicago, he walked away without even a slap on the wrist for his staged hate crime. Did I mention Chicago?

March 22: I know Democrats thought that Robert Mueller was the Easter Bunny, but when he delivered his report on Trump and Russia, it turned out to be a big goose egg. Attorney General Bill Barr tried to warn the nation that there was “no there there,” but we didn’t know he was talking about the space between Mueller’s ears until July 24 when the special counsel testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Turned out that Mueller doesn’t even recognize the name of Fusion GPS, the company that hired Christopher Steele to write the dossier that was behind the entire phony Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy sham. Case closed. But the Democrat conspiracy elves cobbled together a new hoax that was ready to go 24 hours later — the Ukrainian extortion quid pro quo bribery scandal. This time, surely it would be the beginning of the end for that impostor president!

March 25: CNN’s preferred candidate for president, porn-star lawyer Michael Avenatti, is arrested for a real extortion scheme he allegedly plotted against Nike. Over the next month, Avenatti, the darling of the Never Trumpers, would be indicted and charged with north of 40 federal crimes. The presidency would have to wait for a better con man.

April 25: Enter Joe Biden. Ignoring former boss Barack Obama’s wise counsel that “You don’t have to do this, Joe,” Biden commits professional suicide by announcing his candidacy for president, thus ensuring he will leap from comfortable irrelevancy to irrelevant corrupt con-man politician who will eventually have to answer for his bragging about a quid pro quo in Ukraine. Talk about poetic justice!

May 3: Unemployment falls to 3.6% in the United States, the lowest in 49 years. By October, it is down to 3.5%, setting the 50-year record, and jobless numbers for blacks, Latinos and other minorities are at all-time lows. Nor surprisingly, the Democrats blame Trump for the horrible economy because — well — there was nothing else they could do.

June 27: Wait, there actually was something else the Democrats could do. All 10 Democrat candidates in the first presidential primary debate on NBC raised their hands when asked if they would guarantee health-care coverage for illegal aliens. Democrats swooned, but the rest of us just felt sick.

Aug. 24: At their summer convention in San Francisco, the Democrats voted against holding a climate-change presidential debate. Three days later, 16-year-old climate phenom Greta Thunberg arrived in New York City propelled only by her own hot air across the Atlantic from her native Sweden. Told she is too early to appear as a teenage blimp in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, she decides instead to testify at the U.N. on gaseous emissions, of which she has become an expert. Somehow she never gets around to telling the Democrats what she thinks about their decision to sidetrack the climate debate. How dare they!

Aug. 28: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand withdraws from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. LOL.

Sept. 3: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passes a resolution calling the National Rifle Association a “domestic terrorist organization.” In response, the NRA passes its own resolution calling the San Francisco Board of Supervisors “a lime Jell-O salad with marshmallows.” At least that’s what I think they did. Reporting on this is somewhat vague.

Sept. 8: Disgraced former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford announces his primary challenge to President Trump. As part of his doomed bid for attention, Sanford simultaneously announces he will be departing the race on Nov. 12, but because he is not wearing a noose around his neck, the media misses the story altogether.

Sept. 9: The inspector general of the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, draws the short straw and is forced to launch a third unsuccessful coup attempt against President Trump by the CIA involving the “urgent” and “credible” whistleblower complaint that turned out to be “irrelevant” and “partisan” a few days later when President Trump released the consensus transcript of his call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. When will they ever learn? Oh, well, after Trump is reelected, they will have four more years to get their impeachment-coup machine in working order. If at first you fail to smear, try, try again.

Sept. 20: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announces his withdrawal from the presidential race. New Yorkers tremble in fear at the prospect of his return to work.

Sept. 24: In a legacy-building move, Nancy Pelosi announces she will go after the Guinness Book of World Records title for shortest successful impeachment proceeding in history. In a surprise, she also added a last-minute bid to win the title for the impeachment with the least evidence, and Guinness decided to award her that one summarily. As one Guinness judge was overheard to remark about Trump’s call with President Zelensky, “That was a perfect call. How the hell does she impeach with that call? Damn, she’s good.”

Then, in a shocking turn of events, the entire fourth quarter of 2019 was canceled on account of impeachment. Speaker Pelosi, who had been holding the nation hostage since September, is expected to free the impeachment sometime early in 2020, but the nation itself will remain a prisoner throughout most of the year as Pelosi and her henchmen in the media continue to pretend that the other shoe is about to drop, leading to a bombshell revelation that this is the beginning of the end of President Trump, who will nonetheless breeze to reelection on his pledge to Keep America Great and to keep the socialist Democrats at bay.

I, for one, can’t wait for 2020, but it will be hard to top 2019 if you enjoy a good laugh at the expense of liberals.

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His books — including “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?” — are available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to read his daily commentary or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter @HeartlandDiary.

Laws that restricted the sale of cigarettes to those 18 or older didn't stop me. Because 18-year-olds can buy for younger teens, anti-tobacco advocates supported raising the legal age of purchase to 21 to make it harder for 16-year-olds to get their hands on tobacco and e-cigarettes.

That's what Congress and President Donald Trump did as the year ended. With little debate while the country was focused on impeachment, they raised the legal age to buy cigarettes and vaping products to 21 by tucking the provision into the $738 billion Defense Spending Act.

Was there robust debate over Washington treating adults who are old enough to vote and old enough to fight in the U.S. military as children who can't make adult decisions?

(Given support on both sides of the aisles for the federal drinking age of 21, along with the 21-year age for the ownership of firearms in some states, the horse is out of the barn.)

Was there any hesitation about Washington abrogating states' rights by imposing a 21-year-old smoking age preferred by 19 states, including California, on the majority of states that have passed no such laws?

Hardly. "Stakeholders," which included tobacco and vaping interests, supported the old-enough-to-vote-but-not-old-enough-to-smoke provision as a sop to stave off attempts to ban flavored vaping products and menthol cigarettes.

Clearly, industry leaders believe that getting rid of flavors would be worse for their business model than a 21-year-old rule for buyers.

Only cranks such as me, who believe in adult rights for adult voters, even think to protest.

Wisconsin radio talk-show host Vicki McKenna, 51, counts herself among those who have issues with two ages of adulthood -- 18 and 21 -- but, as one of the millions of former smokers who kicked the habit when she started vaping, she is willing to accept the higher smoking age as the lesser of two evils.

Her mother and grandmother died of lung cancer. After smoking a pack a day for 23 years, McKenna quit smoking 10 years ago after starting to vape flavored e-cigarettes. Banning e-cigarettes, or their flavors, she argues, would be hazardous to her health.

When she started using e-cigarettes, vaping was not a big political target. That changed, as McKenna sees it, in 2019 when an outbreak of lung disease put more than 2,400 vapers in hospitals, and horribly killed some 54.

The media took a closer look at the practice of manufacturers using flavors to entice kids to vape.

Later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that most patients with vaping-related lung damage had used products that contained THC, the ingredient that creates the high in marijuana. It became clear that the culprit in these premature deaths was not bubble-gum flavors marketed by big corporations but the black market.

But flavors were on the media's radar, and the nation's politicians felt they had to do something.

Flavored vape products may well have been banned; Trump was heading in that direction.

Then an October survey by McLaughlin Associates showed that vapers in battleground states ardently oppose "banning flavors in all nicotine vapor products" and 83% of them were likely to vote based solely on a candidate's stand on vaping products.

The poll also found that by a ratio of 3-to-1, battleground state vapers supported raising the vaping age to 21.

So Washington raised the national smoking and vaping age to 21, with the industry's blessing, to vapers' relief and few frowns from the opining class.

According to an August Gallup poll, even Americans in the 18-21 age group supported a 21-year-old smoking age by a 2-to-1 margin. They'd vote that they're too young to choose to smoke.

So it's popular. But is it right?

The message from Capitol Hill: 18-year-olds are old enough to choose their government and old enough to die for it, but they are not old enough to make adult decisions on smoking or drinking. There are two ages of adulthood, depending on the situation.

At the same time, many progressives are pushing to lower the voting age to 16, which would be five years sooner than these teens would be able to purchase a glass of wine legally.

Don't they realize where their argument is heading? The subliminal message is that voting is a no-brainer. And if being under 21 makes you too young to make personal decisions, maybe it's too young to vote.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

The China challenge is daunting. That's not because the world’s most populous country has taken its place among the great powers of the world, but rather owing to China’s peculiar conception of the world and its rightful place in global affairs. China seeks to revise the established international order — which favors sovereign nation-states committed to protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms — to suit the authoritarianism of its communist form of government and the expansionist and hegemonic aspirations of its interpretation of Chinese nationalism.

Meanwhile, the educational challenge at home is formidable. That’s not because K-12 teachers and college professors raise questions about America’s founding principles, but rather as a result of their determination to prohibit questions about their wholesale indictment of the United States for perpetrating myriad forms of oppression. Launched to great fanfare a few months ago in the New York Times Magazine, The 1619 Project is only the latest and most extravagant expression of this campaign. The project’s central allegation — contrary to the facts and the scholarship — is that slavery has been the essential feature of and remains hardwired in American politics. And its larger aim is to reorient the American school curriculum to focus on the pervasive and enduring racism that, it contends, was originally inscribed in the nation’s institutions and spirit at America’s true founding — in 1619, when slaves were first delivered to the English colonies.

This transformation of education into propaganda fosters contempt for the nation. Students raised on relentless exaggerations of the nation’s deviations from its professed ideals — while glossing over the ideals themselves and the many instances in which the United States, in honoring them, has provided a model to the world — will be less willing to embrace the demanding policies necessary to preserve an international order that fosters free and sovereign nations. Consequently, reform of the American educational system — so that it transmits, rather than suppresses, knowledge of the principles of freedom — is an essential feature of sound American foreign policy.

Reformers can draw inspiration from Richard Brookhiser’s “Give Me Liberty: A History of America’s Exceptional Idea.” A veteran senior editor at National Review and author of 13 previous books, Brookhiser concisely and compellingly relates the stories of “thirteen documents, from 1619 to 1987, that represent snapshots from the album of our long marriage to liberty.”

He rejects the view — once a staple of the left and recently embraced on the right — that classical liberalism, which holds that government’s purpose is to protect individual freedom, is inherently incompatible with nationalism, which champions government’s promotion of a particular people’s traditions and political aspirations. Certainly, national traditions can be chauvinistic and authoritarian, rooted in subjugation of the individual to the collective good, and bound up with conquest of other peoples. But the United States, notwithstanding the blemishes and flaws it shares with all countries, is different.

“The unique feature of America’s nationalism is its concern for liberty,” writes Brookhiser. “We have been securing it, defining it, recovering it, and fighting for it for four hundred years.  We have been doing it since we were a floundering settlement on a New World river, long before we were a country.  We do it now on podiums and battlefields beyond our borders.”

Even the year 1619 testifies to liberty’s deep roots in America. True, it was then that the first slaves arrived. But slavery was an Old World import. In the same year, the minutes of the Jamestown General Assembly marked an advance in self-government: The freemen of the British colony established in the New World the first legislature by electing representatives, each of whose votes was counted as equal.

Religious liberty and free speech gained strength in pre-revolutionary America. The 1657 Flushing Remonstrance rebuked Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of New Amsterdam (the Dutch colony headquartered on what would become Manhattan), for intolerance of Quakers. Signed by 26 town residents, none of whom were Quaker, the Remonstrance argued that religious freedom was a biblical imperative. In the 1735 trial of New York newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger for seditious libel, which resulted in a verdict of not guilty, defense lawyer Andrew Hamilton stirringly rejected the idea that speaking the truth about government, however critical, was punishable by law.

America’s founding documents, Brookhiser emphasizes, put freedom at the center. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that legitimate government is grounded in the consent of the governed and has as its proper purpose the protection of unalienable rights, which by definition inhere in all persons. In 1787, the drafters of the Constitution presented for ratification to the people of the 13 states a charter of government carefully crafted to secure those rights. And in 1863 at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln paid tribute to the fallen soldiers who fought to preserve a “nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” while summoning his fellow citizens to rededicate themselves to the equality in freedom in which the nation was born.

Two of the documents to which Brookhiser devotes chapters illustrate citizens’ role in extending freedom. The 1785 constitution of the New-York Manumission Society maintained that slavery had no place in a free society because God gave to all human beings an “equal right to life, liberty, and property.” The 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments rallied support for women’s equality by appealing to the unalienable rights that inspired the nation’s founding.

American views about immigration and the economy also reflect an enduring commitment to freedom. In “The New Colossus,” composed in 1883 and installed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903, Emma Lazarus connects freedom to refuge for the oppressed: “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/ Send them, the homeless, tempest-tost to me/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”  In his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech delivered in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, William Jennings Bryan presented equal treatment for workers as an imperative of freedom.

Freedom also directly informs American foreign policy. In his 1823 message to Congress, President James Monroe placed the Western Hemisphere off limits to further colonization by European monarchies. The Monroe Doctrine, Brookhiser argues, “made America, as far as we were able, the advocate of liberty in the world.” In a 1940 fireside chat, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced that the defense of American liberty required the United States to become “the great arsenal of democracy” in support of Britain against the Nazis. And in 1987, before the Brandenburg Gate and in the shadow of the Berlin Wall — the grim barrier built by the communist bloc to lock residents in and keep others out — President Ronald Reagan reaffirmed the American conviction that liberty is the right of all humanity: “Mr. Gorbachev,” he exhorted the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “tear down this wall.”

Americans are the inheritors of a proud legacy of liberty. To meet the challenges to freedom at home and abroad, we must make a priority of reclaiming that legacy.

Peter Berkowitz is director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and a member of the department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is on leave from the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where he is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow. 

Let's not let liberals rewrite history.

In the real world, Bill Clinton, with help from the entire Democratic Party, kept earnestly lying to anyone who would listen -- the media, the American people, a grand jury -- until physical evidence compelled him to admit what he had done. His subsequent "contrition," as impeachment picked up steam, was a matter of political survival. The notion that Trump engaged in "bribery" is debatable. The notion that Clinton perjured himself is not.

If it hadn't been for the Drudge Report bypassing the institutional media, in fact, Newsweek, still an influential magazine in 1998, would likely have sat on the Monica Lewinsky story until after the Clinton presidency had ended. This was probably the first time that online alternative media exposed corrupt coverage, and it certainly wasn't the last.

Then again, even after Drudge reported on Lewinsky's semen-stained blue dress, Clinton still lied about his affair to the country, famously saying, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." His wife, Hillary, who almost surely knew the truth, told Matt Lauer that a "vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president" was responsible for the charges. Sounds familiar.

If it hadn't been for Linda Tripp recording her calls, Lewinsky would doubtlessly have been smeared by the Clinton Janissaries like so many other women before her. These were the virtuous days before Donald Trump hit Washington, when the White House was running a "nuts or sluts" operation to protect the president, led by James Carville, who said that Clinton accuser Paula Jones was the kind of person you found "if you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park."

Talk about projection.

It wasn't until Tripp had handed Lewinsky's blue dress to investigator Ken Starr, who then concluded that the president had lied during sworn testimony, that Clinton finally admitted to the affair. And really, what else was Clinton going to do? Argue that it was acceptable to lie under oath and carry on sexual relationships with 23-year-old interns in the White House -- sometimes while your wife and daughter and world leaders mingled in the other rooms?

More significantly, what liberals ignore is that Clinton's Starr-induced penitence was largely beside the point. Clinton wasn't impeached for acting like a dog; he was impeached for perjuring himself and obstructing justice -- on 11 very specific criminal actions -- in a sexual harassment case.

And any perfunctory willingness by his allies to admit wrongdoing was quickly overwhelmed by a Democratic Party rallying around the notion that Clinton had actually been the victim of "Sexual McCarthyism," a vacuous term that would be repeated endlessly on television by his supporters. Alan Dershowitz, then a Clinton defender, wrote an entire book titled "Sexual McCarthyism."

Worse, the entire country was soon plunged into an insufferably stupid debate over whether being fellated by an intern in the Oval Office should even be considered a sexual encounter. John Conyers's testimony defending Clinton's perjury on these grounds on the House floor makes some of today's defenses of Trump sound like the Catiline Orations.

Then again, Democrats largely offered the same arguments then that the GOP does today. "The Republican right wing in this country doesn't like it when we say coup d'etat," said Representative Jose E. Serrano, D-N.Y. "So I'll make it easier for them. Golpe de estado. That's Spanish for overthrowing a government."

"Not all coups are accompanied by the sound of marching boots and rolling tanks," said Representative Nita M. Lowey, D-N.Y.

"I rise in strong opposition to this attempt at a bloodless coup d'etat, this attempt to overturn two national elections," explained Representative Eliot L. Engel, D-N.Y.

"This partisan coup d'etat will go down in infamy in the history of this nation," Representative Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said. And on and on it went in the House.

In the end, there would not be a single patriotic Democratic senator who was brave enough stand up for the American justice system, for women, or for decency. Every single one of them chose partisan interests over their country and the cult of Clinton over the Constitution. (That's how it's done, right?)

Now, just as it's debatable whether Trump's Ukrainian call rises to the level of an impeachable offense, it was debatable whether Clinton's actions warranted it (I tend to think not). There's no debate, however, that Clinton had an affair with a subordinate in the White House and then lied about that affair under oath. His partisan allies did whatever they needed to save him because the notion that rank partisanship was discovered in 2016 is nothing but revisionism.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.

So is lying really the reason the left despises Trump? Or could the problem be, as is so often the case, the exact opposite of what they claim? What drives them completely crazy are those moments when Trump dares to tell the truth. Think back over the last four years to when the CNN anchors have been angriest. Was it when Trump exaggerated his own accomplishments? No. They are used to that kind of lying from all politicians. What infuriates them is when Trump tells the truth. Truth is the real threat to their power.

There is an unspoken agreement among the people in charge of our country not to talk about what has happened to it. They are personally implicated in its decline. Often they are profiting from it. The last thing they want is a national conversation about what went wrong. So they maintain an increasingly strict policy of mandatory reality avoidance. Everything is fine, they shout. Voices rising in hysteria. Shut up or we will hurt you.

Trump won't shut up. That is his crime; that is why they hate him. It started with his very first speech as a presidential candidate: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. ... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Trump could have worded his statement more clearly, but he never claimed that everyone coming over the border is a criminal. But acknowledging that not every illegal immigrant improves America raises uncomfortable questions. If illegal immigration has a downside, then why has Washington allowed so much of it? If the people in charge actually cared, they would have tried harder to protect our borders. But Washington, for decades, has let millions of foreigners with no screening come across the border to use our services, often lower wages and in some cases, commit crimes. That is all true, which by definition made it unacceptable to say. The news anchors pretended that by saying it, Trump was somehow attacking defenseless Mexicans. Actually, he was attacking the gatekeepers in our national media. The people who should have been sounding the alarm about all of this, but instead made common cause with the ruling class they were supposed to be covering. Our system is rotten and corrupt, and the news media are a major reason for why that is. That is what Trump pointed out, and, not surprisingly, they despised him for doing it.

Lost in the haze of this was any meaningful discussion of those policies. A cynic might say that was by design, the whole point of the tantrum. It's certainly a theme in Washington. For example, after the killing of Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump said that while he disapproved of the murder, Saudi Arabia remained a U.S. ally. The president cited the $450 billion worth of Saudi investments in the United States as well as agreements to buy American military equipment. If we broke our alliance with them, he said, the U.S. economy would suffer and China and Russia would benefit instead. Now, whatever you think of the Saudis, what he said is true. This is the arrangement we have had with the Saudi kingdom for generations. Everyone in Washington knows that because a lot of them are on the Saudi payroll. Trump's crime was saying it out loud.

The same is true with his comments on Baltimore. Baltimore may be the most depressing big city on the eastern seaboard. Have you been there? Everyone in Washington has. If you want to take a train from Washington to New York, you have to pass through Baltimore. This summer, the president told the rest of the world what it's like. Baltimore, he said, is "rodent infested, not to mention a corrupt mess." Why is Baltimore so bad? How did it get so poor and hopeless? Part of the answer is 50 years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule. But saying that would be embarrassing to the Democratic Party, so the party's apologists don't want to have the conversation. Instead, they attacked the man who tried to start it.

Baltimore remained dangerous, the kind of place where a kid gets shot riding his bike. That is what life is like for the poor people stuck in Baltimore, a place where MSNBC contributors don't dare to tread. The people in charge want to make certain you never think or talk about Baltimore. They also don't want any debate about the war in Afghanistan, immigration or declining middle-class life expectancy. Thinking or talking about any of this might point out our leaders' egregious failures. Whatever we do, we can't bring that up because it is embarrassing. So instead, let's just agree that Trump is a racist liar and move on. My gosh, what a bad person he is. Unlike us.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Eighty-seven years ago today, a building opened in New York City that was so spectacular visitors could imagine what the United States might look like again after the Great Depression. Despite the stock market crash, John D. Rockefeller Jr. had gone ahead with his plans to open a new venue for art and entertainment in midtown Manhattan. The first finished project within the sprawling complex was Radio City Music Hall, a name that still reverberates around the world.

David Sarnoff, head of a fledgling broadcasting outfit called the National Broadcasting Co., had coined the catchy appellation “Radio City.”

The result was a premiere on this date in 1932 that, while it lost its owner money, stamped Rockefeller’s new building as the place to go in New York -- at prices most people could afford -- to forget the troubles of everyday life.

The following year, the Radio City Hall Music Christmas Spectacular began its long run. Prohibition had been repealed, so many customers were in higher spirits during the 1933 holiday season. Putting them in the Christmas frame of mind was an eight-and-a-half-minute animated Walt Disney-produced version of “The Night Before Christmas.”

The first-run movie shown that year was “Flying Down to Rio,” starring a new song-and-dance man named Fred Astaire, partnered for the first time in this musical with 22-year-old Ginger Rogers. I’ll have more on that pairing, and a couple of memorable lines about the duo, in a moment.

First, I’d point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion columns spanning the political spectrum. We also offer original material from our own reporters and contributors, including the following:

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Why a Contested Democratic Convention Is Possible. Ron Faucheux writes that new delegate allocation rules could lead to multiple ballots at the Milwaukee convention.

Don’t Expect Recession in 2020. James Broughel explains in RealClearPolicy.

Competition Defines Wireless, So Regulate Lightly. Randolph May makes his case in RealClearMarkets.

The Best Cars of 2019. In RealClearLife, Benjamin Hunting assesses the vehicles he road-tested.

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Fred Astaire had been underwhelming in his screen test: RKO’s David O. Selznick called it “wretched” while disparaging Astaire’s large ears -- even while acknowledging his “tremendous” charm. Later, this tale morphed into a Hollywood legend that the summary on Astaire’s screen test was “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.” This story seems apocryphal, but Astaire later said it was true, and that the exact language was: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Also dances.”

Astaire and Rogers weren’t the stars of “Flying Down to Rio,” but they stole the picture. Fifty-five years later, at the Democratic National Convention, future Texas Gov. Ann Richards would get a laugh by invoking the female half of that famous duo as a feminist icon. “If you give us a chance, we can perform,” Richards said. “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”

It was a good line, but real-life Ginger Rogers acquitted herself with distinction in the battle of the sexes -- and in other battles as well. A life-long Republican, she was raised by a mother who had her own career in newspapers and movies and who was one of the first women to join the United States Marine Corps. Her famous daughter was married five times (but never to Fred Astaire), fought hard for equitable pay in her movies, became wealthy through her own shrewd investments, had close women friends such as Bette Davis and Lucille Ball, and directed her first picture in her mid-70s.

As for Fred Astaire, he overcame those big ears and balding pate by dint of his uncommonly elegant dancing.  And while he and Rogers were never linked romantically, their on-screen chemistry was undeniable. It was based on shared talent and mutual self-confidence. “I loved Fred so, and I mean that in the nicest, warmest way: I had such affection for him artistically,” Rogers once said. “I think that experience with Fred was a divine blessing. It blessed me, I know, and I don’t think blessings are one-sided.”

And that’s your quote of the week.

Carl M. Cannon 
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.

The thought of such a convention races the hearts of political junkies everywhere. It conjures the image of power brokers deciding the fate of the nation in a smoke-filled room. In 1924, it took 103 ballots for Democrats to settle on dark horse John W. Davis.

While it is not likely the 2020 Democratic nomination will be brokered in a backroom – rule changes have made that more difficult – it is possible that the convention could be contested, which means it would require more than one ballot to select a nominee.

In years past, most delegates went to conventions unelected by voters and unpledged to candidates. This happens less frequently these days. “Favorite son” candidacies, once used to park delegates until deals were cut, are now extinct. The “unit rule,” which forced state delegations to vote unanimously for one candidate, is also gone. Democrats now require the nominee win only a majority of delegates, long ago discarding the old two-thirds requirement.

During the last seven decades, candidates from both parties have usually gathered enough momentum from primary victories to clinch the nomination before conventions began.

Party strategists instinctively fear prolonged intraparty battling and its effect on general election prospects. That’s why they push to unite around one candidate as fast as possible. Next year, there will be several opportunities for that to happen. The first comes in February when four states vote. If Joe Biden wins Iowa and New Hampshire and continues to top national polls, an effort could emerge to rally around the former vice president as the nominee. While it’s conceivable something like that could happen, it’s more likely party activists would oppose shutting down the competition so soon.

The next milestone is Super Tuesday, March 3. At that point, 40% of delegates will have been selected from 18 states. Unless it’s a tight two-way contest, there will be enormous pressure to stop the fight by the end of April when 88% of delegates from 40 states will have been elected.

Despite forces working against it, a contested convention with multiple ballots is possible. While such a thing hasn’t happened since 1952, unique circumstances surrounding this election have increased the odds. For starters, there is immense pressure on Democrats to find a candidate who can beat Donald Trump. If the most electable contender stumbles along the way, a contested convention may be needed to find a new one.

Second, proportional allocation of state delegates and the 15% support threshold to win delegates also make it tougher to assemble a majority.

Superdelegates, who automatically become delegates by virtue of their positions as elected officials, are another factor. The next Democratic convention will have 758 of them. To weaken their influence, a rule was recently passed to prohibit superdelegates from voting on the first ballot, but not on subsequent ballots. Ironically, if a second ballot is required, this could give the pros more influence than ever. It will take 1,919 delegate votes to win a first-ballot victory. When you add in superdelegates on a second ballot, the bar rises to 2,298.

Candidates unable to win on the first ballot may bow out and use their muscle to stop or promote others. If Michael Bloomberg cannot be king, for example, he may be kingmaker. He’s in a unique position, of course, since he could fund the entire general election out of petty cash.

Keep in mind that a second ballot won’t necessarily change who wins. A contested convention may only delay the inevitable.

The candidate who gains the most popular votes and delegates during the primaries – be it Biden or someone else – would still demand the nomination on the basis of fairness, even if he or she fell short of a delegate majority. It’s not certain superdelegates would challenge that conclusion for fear of alienating voters back home.

In any case, a contested convention would be fascinating, a relic of older days brought back to life in a new, media-saturated environment. While far from a certainty, it’s not impossible.

Political junkies, take heart, you may finally get your wish.

Ron Faucheux is a nonpartisan political analyst. He’s publisher of LunchtimePolitics.com, a daily newsletter on polls, and writes columns for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

As I get older, I love the Christmas season more and more. Easter comes as a weekend. Christmas comes as a month of Advent on the heels of Thanksgiving. It gives time for more reflection, often centered around some pretty deep theology in carols. The basic gist of the caroling is all the same. God became flesh and humbled himself by being born in a manger and giving up the trappings of royalty and then dying a criminal's death having committed no crime.

In the United States, whether we like to admit it or not, we are already deep into political campaign season. Impeachment season is upon us as well. Everything is now political. Just two weeks ago, the author J.K. Rowling walked into a firestorm for having the audacity to be pro-science. She declared sex is immutable. Men cannot become women, and vice versa. Though she endorsed this scientific fact, woke protestors decided to burn her books. Even opinion writers in The New York Times denounced her for expressing an opinion others in The New York Times have expressed in the past.

Everything has become political. Every political cause has taken on religious fervor. It can wear a person out. In wokeness, every principled position firmly held will eventually give way to something more extreme, radical and wholly disconnected from reason. Truthfully, though, none of it matters. Too many people have separated themselves from the eternal to focus on the here and now. They have decided to seek a future utopia of some kind, aware their mortal life is limited and unaware there is an eternity. Behaviors change when one recognizes eternity.

Too many partisans have forgotten eternity. On both sides of the political spectrum, people are looking for political saviors to save them from people on the other side of that spectrum. It is sad to see secular progressives running in hamster wheels of outrage, perpetually spun up about some perceived injustice. It is hilarious to see Christian evangelicals insistent on loyalty to a politician to save them from the other side. Apparently, having the God of the universe on their side is not enough.

Americans need a recalibration on priorities. So much of what we argue about does not really matter. No Republican was ever profoundly impacted by Barack Obama except, arguably, in the area of health care. No Democrat has ever been profoundly impacted by Donald Trump except, arguably, in their take-home pay. Both sides treat Washington as more important than it is.

What is actually important is this: You have a soul, you will live forever, and there is a God who wants a relationship with you. One day you will stand before him, and he will judge you. Everything else should flow from that. For those who do not believe, one day they will, and hopefully that belief will come on this side of the grave. For everyone else, behaving in politics as if eternity does not matter might ultimately suggest one is not as truly committed to the idea of eternity as one might claim.

Protestant Christians believe we are saved by faith alone, and good works derive from our faith. Regardless of how one sees salvation, I would suggest a lot of us could stand to dwell more on it than on Washington. We find our welfare in our local communities, not in far off cities that affect us far less than we claim. As we move beyond Christmas and into a new year, I would urge you (and me) to dwell less on the here and now and more on eternity.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Erick Erickson is editor of TheResurgent.com.

What is Kim's game? What does Kim want?

He cannot want war with the United States, as this could result in the annihilation of the Kim family dynasty that has ruled North Korea since World War II. Kim is all about self-preservation.

What he appears to want in his confrontation with Trump is a victory without war. In the near-term, Kim seeks three things: recognition of his regime as the legitimate government of North Korea and its acceptance in all the forums of the world, trade and an end to all U.S. and U.N. sanctions, and a nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter a U.S. attack, including missiles that can strike U.S. bases in South Korea, Japan, Guam, and the Western Pacific. And he seeks the capability to deliver a nuclear warhead on the U.S. mainland.

Nor is this last goal unreasonable from Kim's vantage point.

For he knows what became of the two other nations of George W. Bush's "axis of evil" that failed to develop nuclear weapons.

Saddam Hussein's Iraq was invaded, and he was hanged and his sons hunted down and killed.

The Ayatollah's Iran negotiated a 2015 nuclear deal with America and opened up its nuclear facilities to intrusive inspections to show that Tehran did not have a nuclear weapons program.

Trump came to power, trashed the deal, reimposed sanctions and is choking Iran to death.

Moammar Gadhafi surrendered his WMD in 2004 and opened up his production facilities. And in 2011, the U.S. attacked Libya and Gadhafi was lynched by a mob.

Contrast the fate of these regimes and rulers with the Kim family's success. His father, Kim Jong Il, tested nuclear weapons and missiles in defiance of U.S. warnings, and now the son is invited to summits with the U.S. president in Singapore and Hanoi.

If Kim did not have nuclear weapons, would American presidents be courting him? Would U.S. secretaries of state be visiting Pyongyang? If Kim did not have nuclear weapons who would pay the least attention to the Hermit Kingdom?

Undeniably, with his promised "Christmas gift," possibly a missile capable of hitting the U.S., Kim is pushing the envelope. He is taunting the Americans. We have told him what he must do. And he is telling us where we can go.

But by so doing, Kim has put the ball squarely in Trump's court.

The question Trump faces: Is he prepared to accept North Korea joining Russia and China as a third adversarial power with the ability to launch a nuclear strike on the continental United States?

And if U.S. sanctions are insufficient to force Kim to "denuclearize," as seems apparent, is Trump prepared to force him to do so? Is Trump prepared to use "fire and fury" to remove Kim's nukes?

With 28,500 U.S. troops and thousands of U.S. citizens in South Korea, many within artillery range of the DMZ, is Trump prepared to risk a clash that could ignite a second Korean War in the election year 2020?

Is the president prepared for whatever that might bring?

How does this confrontation play out?

A guess: The U.S. has lived with North Korea's nuclear weapons for a decade, and Trump is not going to risk a second Korean conflict with a military attack on Kim's nuclear and missile arsenals. Kim Jong Un and his father have created a new reality in Korea, and we are going to have to live with it.

Where does East Asia go from here?

South Korea has twice the population of the North and an economy 40 times as large. Japan has a population five times that of North Korea and an economy 100 times as large.

If the U.S. treaty guarantees, dating to the 1950s, to fight for these two nations come into question as a result of America's reluctance to face down Pyongyang more forcibly on its nuclear arsenal, these nations are almost certain to start considering all options for their future security.

Among these are building their own nuclear arsenals and closer ties to the one nation that has shown it can discipline North Korea -- China.

Much is on the line here.

Kim's challenge is ultimately about the credibility of the United States, which has treaty commitments and issued war guarantees to scores of nations in NATO Europe, the Mideast and East Asia, but whose people have zero interest in any new war, especially a second Korean War.

If the world sees that America is reluctant to face down, or fight a North Korea that is threatening us, will they retain the old confidence that the United States will risk war for them?

What Kim is undermining is not just U.S. security but U.S. credibility.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Temperamentally, in the United States -- or at least in that loud, if not large, part of it dominated by political tweets -- the overwhelming weight of opinion, crossing party lines that are unusually rigid in this period of American history, is that we live in the worst of times.

President Donald Trump, enjoying all-but-unanimous support from Republicans in polls, tells us that we are living on the brink of disaster, at risk of being sucked under the sludge by vicious creatures of the swamp.

Trump opponents including almost the whole of the Democratic Party and a tattered but still loudly chirping fragment of the Republican Party assure us that we are entering the dark night of Nazism, racism and violent suppression of all dissenting opinion.

To which I say: Nonsense.

As does, in more elegant terms, science writer and British House of Lords voting member Matt Ridley in the British Spectator. "We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history," he writes of the decade just ending.

Olden times -- multiepisode dramas of Edwardian noblemen or statistics showing a narrower pay gap between 1950s CEOs and assembly line workers -- may look better in warm memories. But cold hard statistics tell another story.

"Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world's population for the first time," Ridley writes. "It was 60 per cent when I was born," which was in 1958, a year that some of us can actually remember.

Of course, you may say economic progress made since China and India discovered the magic of free markets has helped people over there but that over here, in advanced countries, we're not growing, just gobbling up and wolfing down more of the world's limited resources.

Not so, replies Ridley. Consumers in advanced countries are actually consuming less stuff (biomass, metals, minerals or fossil fuels) per capita, even while getting more nutrition and production from it. Thank technological advances and, yes, in some cases, government regulations.

We're also experiencing, as a world and in advanced countries and domestically, less violence and more in the way of peace. That's the argument of Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker in his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature." Wars are infrequent and less deadly than in the past.

So is violent crime in the United States and other advanced nations. It used to be taken as given that disadvantaged young males, especially those minorities discriminated against, were hugely likely to commit violent crimes. Now, thanks to improved policing and changed attitudes, far fewer do so.

The natural tendency of most people is to ignore positive trends. They are neither the lead stories on your local newscast nor mentioned in shouting matches on cable news. People usually focus on complaints and grievances. And there are worrying negative countertrends, like the opioid abuse that has cut life expectancies down for some demographic groups.

And we tend to focus on negative trends, even after they've been reversed. Illegal border crossings peaked just before the 2007-08 financial crisis and are much fewer -- though not zero -- today. Low-skilled workers' wages for years rose little or not at all, as politicians of both parties complained. Since 2016, they've been rising faster than average, but only Trump's fans seem to have noticed; Democrats probably will if the trend continues when their party has the White House.

One can even make the case that where we lament sluggish economic growth -- Japan since 1990, continental Europe since 2001, the U.S. from 2007 up through 2017 -- judged in any historic perspective, living standards remain more than comfortable.

That's a reminder that the positive force of democratic politics tends to produce the negative force of cynical partisanship, visible today not just in Donald Trump's America but in most of Europe and much of Asia. But nationalistic politics has not undermined civil liberties, and the center-left's fumbling attempts to sell economic redistribution suggest that people are actually better off than their grumbles to pollsters suggest.

Of course bad things can happen in even the best of times, and a minor cloudburst can spoil a bright summer day. But at year's and decade's end, our grumbling society is closer to the best of times than to the worst of times.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for  the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

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You know the ones -- the liberal economists with overpriced Ivy League degrees who told us that if Donald Trump were to get elected president in 2016, the economy would crash.

Fast-forward to today: More than $17 trillion in value has been added to the global stock market in 2019, with the U.S. reaping the biggest gains, according to a recent analysis by Deutsche Bank. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000 have all seen massive growth in the Trump economy -- more than 20% this year -- with American tech companies leading the pack.

This is a sharp contrast to what a gamut of left-leaning "experts" predicted including The New York Times chief economist Paul Krugman, who told us after Trump won the 2016 election: "So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened."

Huh? Krugman ought to take a bite of this apple: One of the world's most valuable companies, Apple Inc., saw an 80% increase in its stock value in 2019. While Amazon announced a record holiday shopping season. Software giant Microsoft reaped a 55% increase this year, while Facebook soared 57% in value -- just to name a few U.S. companies whose employees and shareholders are enjoying a golden age of prosperity under the current administration.

Same goes for all Americans who are benefitting from historically low unemployment -- including minorities and women -- and the jobs bonanza, which is lifting millions out of poverty and revitalizing the American dream.

Under the current administration, we've seen a rate increase of 3.1% for wages year over year. Fox Business reported, "Average hourly earnings are $28.29 with a week of take-home pay averaging $973.18 compared to $943.59 in November 2018."

That means labor workers and the middle class are benefitting -- not just the 1% -- like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders falsely claim on the campaign trail.

We've also seen the creation of 500,000 manufacturing jobs, new and better trade deals on the horizon with China, and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the last of which is estimated to create 176,000 jobs and add $68.2 billion to the U.S. economy, according to a study by the U.S. International Trade Commission this year.

If that's not enough winning for you, also consider the relentless surge in consumer optimism. Bloomberg's Consumer Confidence Index reported an increase to 62.3% in the week ending Dec. 22, up from 61.1%. "Record stock prices, unemployment at a five-decade low and steady wage gains continue to lift spirits, putting the 2019 average sentiment level on track for the best since the 1999-2000 dot-com boom," reported Bloomberg the day after Christmas.

Translation: It's time to uncork the champagne and celebrate America's unrivaled prosperity.

Needless to say, it's a good thing that the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump in the last presidential cycle didn't listen to the "experts" -- or the bottomless pit of naysayers in the media -- whose predictions about the economy and other topics proved worthless.

After all, these are some of the same "experts" who told us Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election, Brexit wouldn't happen, and that Trump and his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia, a conspiracy theory that's since been debunked by multiple congressional and Department of Justice investigations including a 22-month special counsel probe that found no such evidence.

Bottom line: With the 2020 election approaching, the American people should continue to trust their own instincts, pay stubs and 401(k)s, rather than the "experts." That's a far more reliable barometer, wouldn't you say?

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Sanders' appeal, the experts explain, is founded on "authenticity." Is he humorless, repetitive, cloying and rigid? Sure. But these are signs that he really believes something! He's not a packaged, blow-dried (no argument there), insincere pol cooked up in a political laboratory. He's the real deal.

Let's concede that Sanders is sincere, and that he is, with some small hypocrisies -- did you know he was a millionaire? -- honest. But what people actually believe is kind of important, and Sanders professes and sells a series of prejudices that do him no credit.

Sanders claims to be a democratic socialist in the European mold, an admirer of Sweden and Denmark. Yet his career is pockmarked with praise for regimes considerably to the left of those Scandinavian models. He has praised Cuba for "making enormous progress in improving the lives of poor and working people." In his memoir, he bragged about attending a 1985 parade celebrating the Sandinistas' seizure of power six years before. "Believe it or not," he wrote, "I was the highest ranking American official there." At the time, the Sandinista regime had already allied with Cuba and begun a large military buildup, courtesy of the Soviet Union. The Sandinistas, Sanders had every reason to know, had censored independent news outlets, nationalized half of the nation's industry, forcibly displaced the Miskito Indians and formed "neighborhood watch" committees on the Cuban model. Sandinista forces, like those in East Germany and other communist countries, regularly opened fire on those attempting to flee the country. None of that appears to have dampened Sanders' enthusiasm. The then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont, gushed that under his leadership, "Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America."

Sanders was impatient with those who found fault with the Nicaraguan regime:

"Is [the Sandinistas'] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan's eyes and the eyes of corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests."

Sanders now calls for a revolution in this country, and we're all expected to nod knowingly. Of course, he means a peaceful, democratic revolution. It would be outrageous to suggest anything else. Well, it would not be possible for Sanders to usher in a revolution in the U.S., but his sympathy for the real thing is notable. As Michael Moynihan reported, in the case of the Sandinistas, he was willing to justify press censorship and even bread lines. The regime's crackdown on the largest independent newspaper, La Prensa, "makes sense to me" Sanders explained, because the country was besieged by counterrevolutionary forces funded by the United States. As for bread lines, which soon appeared in Nicaragua, as they would decades later in Venezuela, Sanders scoffed: "It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don't line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor starve to death."

Sanders' stopped learning about economics and politics about the age of 17. He still believes that corporate "greed" is responsible for human poverty, and that the world is a zero-sum pie. The more billionaires there are, the less there is for everyone else. "I don't think billionaires should exist," he told The New York Times. So in the Bernie ideal world, we non-billionaires would be deprived of Amazon, personal computers, smartphones, fracking (which reduces greenhouse gases), Uber, Walmart, "Star Wars" movies and very possibly our jobs. Millions of children would be deprived of school scholarships, while the arts, medical research and poverty programs would be that much poorer. Billionaires are not heroes, but by making them boogeymen, Sanders betrays his economic infantilism along with a large dose of demagoguery.

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