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One day, President Donald Trump is at a prayer meeting talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger being lousy on TV, and on another, he is naming the brilliant Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his national security advisor. I will hereby be an unsolicited national hope advisor. Do the second kind of thing much more and wholly eradicate the first kind of thing, Mr. President, and save us from a grave public enemy.

That would be the kind of socialistically inspired future represented by Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. She wanted more freebies but less freedom, more spending, more regulations, a marketplace coerced into failures, identity-group divisiveness, contemptuous elitist supremacy and judicial power usurping democracy along with constitutionalism.

President Barack Obama was also a champ at all of this, and while the public mostly liked him, many did not like what was doing. Thus, after his eight years in office, Democrats had lost a net of 62 seats in the House, nine seats in the Senate, 12 governorships, more than 900 state legislature seats and the presidency, according to a Fox News report. Republicans took charge, and there is now an extraordinary opportunity to reverse a big-government trend threatening to encapsulate us for eons.

The thing is, we may be cheated out of that chance if Trump does not give up on his stupidities and instead provides his enemies the wherewithal to stymie the best in him and turn the country back over to their contrary dreams. If he loves America, therefore, he should please, please quit obnoxious tweeting for starters. It is absurd and makes him look like a misbehaving child with a misused toy.

Then he should quit holding zany press conferences in which he overstates everything, insults everyone and further institutes enmity. He should in fact avoid adlibbing as much as possible. He is a non-linear, now-you-see-it, now-you-dont speaker who treats us to unconnected, unexplained phrases that can mean just about anything and are advantageously interpreted by critics as saying he favors hell over heaven.

Still more advice. He should quit substituting glances at a TV set for actual study. He should quit having reckless phone calls with heads of state. He should quit putting together policy plots with minimal trustworthy advice. He should quit the small-mindedness that puts claims of crowd size above real issues.

Yes, it is absolutely the case that his critics are often far worse than he is. Sen. Elizabeth Warren? Sen. Chuck Schumer? There is nothing polite to say. The reputable press is not so reputable when its commentators, for instance, issue baseless growls about anti-Semitism.

It is also despicable that protestors carry signs referring to Trump as anti-gay when there is absolutely nothing to back them up. It is simple-minded and worse for anyone to insist Trumps criticism of someone who is black is ipso facto racism, and yet we have seen it. In terms of evidence at this point, the Russian collusion theory is right up there with the birther theory. Vandalizing college students should be required to clean up after themselves before packing their bags and going home, and the leakers in the intelligence community should be worried about criminal prosecution.

There is lots of good in Trump, as seen in his executive orders on pipelines and absolutely smothering regulations, his choice for the Supreme Court, most of his Cabinet picks and, as mentioned earlier, his choice of McMaster as a top advisor.

He may very well do something about a crime rise the left uncaringly dismisses as nothing much. Watch for an improved world order. Some of his tax ideas are excellent, if not the one on imports, and we should replace Obamacare with something better, although prudence is needed. The wonders already happening in the economy are signs of how he actually could do splendid things.

But if Trump does not cut out the bad, there are those waiting in the bushes with a ruinous future in mind.

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Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at [emailprotected]. Column courtesy of the Associated Press.

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How Trump could lead us to socialism yet - Xenia Gazette

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Take the socialist economic model. The USSR forced it on the millions living under communist thralldom and confined them to endless poverty.

Stupid Western academics made their pilgrimages and came back brimming with praise having seen only a few cotton-wrapped showcases of the workers paradise.

Eventually, after 70 years and unimaginable sacrifices, it all went very predictably bankrupt under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Since their liberation all the satellites have turned to capitalism and prospered.

If Scotland is ever to prosper again it will have to reject socialist economics

Frederick Forsyth

After the end of the British Empire most of the newly independent states chose the fashionable socialist economic model and slithered into bankruptcy with the best of intentions.

Remember the saints Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania? To rounds of applause from Britains academia they led their countries from prosperity to poverty.

Only Singapore, guided by Lee Kuan Yew, went for capitalism and became the richest per capita country in Asia.

Of course academics can always pursue will o the wisp theories. They never do anything practical and never have to bear the consequences of failure.

Our universities are still rife with hard-Left academics preaching poppycock to gullible students. In Africa Zimbabwe, once Rhodesia, was on independence the food bowl of the continent.

Then in 1980 came Mugabe. Today it is bankrupt and hungry, its currency worth no more than toilet paper. In South America Venezuela with its massive oil reserves was the richest country on that continent.

Then came Hugo Chavez, lauded and worshipped by idiots such as Jeremy Corbyn. Now dead he is succeeded by Nicols Maduro. Venezuela is destitute.

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Her people starve, desperate to cross the border each day to Colombia to buy basic foods. Ah, you may say, but that is all far away and nothing to do with us. Not quite.

So obsessed are people by the SNPs lust for an independent Scotland that it is overlooked that the Scottish National Party under Nicola Sturgeon is a hard-Left party and is destroying Scotlands economy.

Scotland exports to England double her exports to the rest of the world combined, never mind the EU. And it is English subsidies to Scotland that keep her from going into receivership.

Recent analysis by economist David Owen revealed that public contentment can only be maintained by Edinburghs lavish expenditure, which since the crash of oil prices the Scottish government cannot afford.

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In 2015-16 state expenditure in Scotland was 12,800 per person as against 11,500 for the UK as a whole.

The trouble is, Scotlands small and shrinking tax base cannot pay for this so the Sassenachs have to step in. Outside the UK but still inside the EU (a miracle that Berlin would immediately reject) Scotland would simply be a North Sea Greece, in permanent need of bailouts.

Which is why Germany would reply: In your dreams. If Scotland is ever to prosper again it will have to reject socialist economics and revert to policies to boost growth.

But so far SNP supporters are content to live off Sassenach largesse and just keep complaining and voting for the SNP, which dominates the landscape. But when we get Brexit sorted it may be wakey-wakey time.

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The favourite torture and execution method of those monsters who control Islamic State seems to be decapitation. Now it appears that IS is being treated to a touch of its own medicine.

Commander after commander is being systematically erased, so fast they cannot be replaced. The instruments of this justice are our weaponised drones, acting on electronically garnered information. Nemesis is now digitised but no less fearsome for that.

The covert truth is that we are listening to every word they say, reading every syllable they write and watching every move they make. Six years ago, when drones were remote and obscure, largely confined to Predators hunting Taliban in Afghanistan with their Hellfire and Brimstone missiles, I was intrigued enough to research the new technology and write a book about them.

I called it The Kill List after discovering there really is such a list of kill-on-sight targets in Washington. Since then these unpiloted death machines have revolutionised warfare. Included in warfare one must include espionage.

The days of the shifty figure scurrying down a faraway alley to meet another shifty figure and collect a package to bring back to the West are gone. Digitisation means that a million documents can be concealed in a memory stick no bigger than a forefinger and brought out in a crevice you do not want mentioned over breakfast.

It need not even leave enemy territory: it can be beamed upwards to the waiting drone. Constant interception and observation mean that the terrorist commander can be found bowling across the desert in his Toyota and vaporised with a missile. But the threat is far from over.

As land ownership becomes impossible for the terror groups they are already converting to assassin gangs and singleton killers who come out of nowhere, uncaring whether they live or die. Most dangerous are those who have never been heard of or suspected, such as the lorry-borne killer in Nice last July who can mow down scores of pedestrians with a truck.

Stanley Baldwin once said: The bomber will always get through. He meant something with wings and engines. The phrase is still true but the bomber now has two legs. That is why we need our counterintelligence teams more than we have ever done and why the whingeing civil-righters are doing us no favours.

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So Parliament has passed the last hurdle to endorsing the white elephant HS2 railway project from London to Birmingham (first stage). It is so far costed at 55.7billion, a figure which no one really believes. With rolling stock and the usual time-and-cost overruns which dog every public project nowadays, it is more likely to come out at 80billion.

No one remotely associated with it will be in office when it runs the first service north and many wont even be alive so they dont care anyway. The oddities surrounding the HS2 continue but with an added new one.

When it was first proposed the onus was all on its speed which would cut hours off the rail time between the capital and the Midlands and finally the North. This has now been admitted to be more like 20 minutes from London to Birmingham city centre. But now no one is mentioning speed.

It is all about capacity. A sure-fire warning about a white elephant is when it starts for one much-trumpeted purpose but then is explained as needed for a completely different one.

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It becomes more and more puzzling that Theresa May will not call a snap election. The polls show she would have a mandate of her own a 100-seat majority in the Commons and a five-year term.

If a my-way Brexit negotiation were included in the manifesto it would be unchallengeable and her diehard enemies would probably be swept by the voters into oblivion. As Franklin Roosevelt observed: we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

The trouble with our establishment is that it is riddled with fear. (She could also add Lords reform into the mix to widespread public acclamation!)

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Scots must REJECT socialism to prosper! SNP is destroying economy, rages FREDERICK FORSYTH - Express.co.uk

courtesy Chris Wang

As the election results rolled in, David Duhalde watched on his computer as Americas youth rushed into the arms of socialism.

You could literally track the states Trump was winning by our online sign-ups, said Duhalde, deputy director of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Its a whole timeline of people saying, Oh no, its all over; Im gonna join DSA.

Founded in 1982, DSA is a national organization that promotes democratic socialism, which Duhalde defines as democracy that extends beyond the polls into workplaces and homes. In practical terms, the group lives on the left edge of the Democratic Party, promoting single-payer health care, strong labor unions and rights for oppressed groups.

Duhalde said the organization now has 17,000 dues-paying members, up from 6,500 in May 2016 and 14,000 on Inauguration Day. The explosive growth shows no signs of abating, he added. The national website lists 105 chapters in 36 states, including 10 in Texas.

DSA campaigned hard for Bernie Sanders during the battle for the Democratic nomination. While some far-left organizations rejected the Bern, claiming the candidate was not a true socialist, DSA embraced Sanders as essentially one of their own. That put the group in a position to reap the harvest of politicized young people no longer afraid of the s-word.

Bernie helped to inoculate against the perception that socialism is un-American or foreign, said Jim Tourtelott, a retired lawyer and founding member of the Austin DSA chapter. Now after the election, people want more than to just say, Fuck Trump; they want a full critique of how we got here.

Since the election, four new chapters have cropped up in Texas, including groups in San Antonio and the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The 3-year-old Austin group is by far the largest, with around 500 members.

On a warm February evening, about half that number packed into Scholz Garten, a dimly lit beer garden near the University of Texas campus that has been a progressive watering hole for decades. Many sat on the ground or stood along the fence as waiters squeezed through the overwhelmingly young crowd with trays of burgers and beers.

Were moving away from being a group of older, white men, said Chau Ngo, co-chair of the Austin DSA. Were seeing a lot of women, and our queer coalition is exploding. Its still mostly white, but were seeing more members of color.

The meeting was a bit disjointed, perhaps because the groups growth is outpacing its organizational structure. The crowd heard from a series of speakers on topics ranging from independent voters to stresses on Austins water supply. They also heard from subcommittees, including the queer coalition.

Nikki Reese, the coalitions 31-year-old co-chair, told the Observer she ran away from her Dallas-area home at 16 when her parents rejected her sexuality a common story for LGBT youth. She joined DSA right after the election.

This is what were all doing to keep breathing, Reese said, gesturing toward the crowd. This is the start of our revolution; people are waking up more and more as Trump does these awful things. Seeing this crowd, I feel more hope now than ever in my adult life.

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Red Dawn: Socialist Group Sees Explosive Growth Ignited by Sanders, Trump - The Texas Observer

As things are going right now, it looks like sincere conservatives who accepted the lesser-of-evils excuse to vote for Donald Trump will soon be choking down its consequences when it comes to policy. President Trump is praising the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, offered by the GOPs House Leadership. But a slew of conservative groups has let out a howl of dismay, including cries of betrayal. They are demanding that Obamas socialist government takeover of the health system be peremptorily dismissed to be followed by legislation that promotes a health system based on free-enterprise principles.

What they demand is exactly what will benefit the nation. But their cries of betrayal are patently unfair. Throughout his presidential campaign, it was clear that Donald Trump never abandoned his commitment to socialist goals and principles for health care in the United States. He insisted on universal coverage, subsidized as needed by federal government largesse. He told conservatives they would just have to get used to it. Now he is working comfortably with the GOPs elitist faction leadership (whom he pretended so heartily to despise) to produce a result consistent with those promises. Trumpcare will have a lot in common with Obamacare, especially in its embrace of the socialist premise that shifts responsibility for universal health care to the national government.

I am tempted to say that Mr. Trump is reverting to type. But in this case that wouldnt be true. President Trump isnt reverting to socialism, because candidate Trump never professed to support anything else. Well soon see whether he reverts to his erstwhile identity as a socialist Democrat, with self-serving exceptions, in areas where he did make promises that plainly reject Obamas lifelong identity as an anti-American socialist ideologue. But Obamacare was never one of them. When Trump said repeal and replace Obamacare, it was clearly a matter of making socialism work, not discarding its goals or government concentric methods.

This contrasts with what would be the goal of a truly conservative administration to make free enterprise the norm, based on individual initiative; informed individual choice; and individual, family and corporate responsibility for doing right, as God gives us to see what is right. As with other matters that are inherently of consequence to our common good, governments role would be to facilitate and encourage such free enterprise; while good political leaders seek to assure respect for God-endowed right making it their aim to bring together a sufficient majority of the people to safeguard it. One thing is clear, however: Using government coercion to enforced uniformity, as socialism envisages, is utterly unacceptable.

Just as the government plays has a limited role in assuring that, as singular and corporate individuals, we can trust each other to have the training and information we need to act responsibly in the conduct of our vehicles on our roads, so it has a role in assuring our confidence and mutual trust when it comes to maintaining our bodily health. Our national security and material well-being self-evidently depend on it. But the health of our body politic requires that health care be focused on the initiative of individuals and the free associations they form voluntarily, not on coercively enforced government control. As a free people, the health of our body politic declines as the sphere of liberty is constricted. (Liberty being the free choice to do what accords with our obligation to respect what is essentially right for our humanity.)

In light of this understanding of the right role of government, socialism has to be rejected in principle. Neither Donald Trump nor the GOPs presently prevailing congressional leadership have any intention of doing so. They never did. This is why Mr. Trump and other elitist faction GOP leaders have long professed to admire socialist health-care schemes in Canada and Great Britain. Like the Canadian political parties, the leaders of both the Democrat and Republican parties are committed to a socialist path.

The Reagan era represented a tentative hiatus in this bipartisan abandonment of American principles. But the whole point of Donald Trumps bid for leadership in the GOP was to cast aside the last semblance of that truly conservative understanding, fulfilling the elitist medias headlines at the outset of the Obama era, proclaiming that We are all socialists now.

Socialism is utterly inconsistent with the founding premises of our identity as a free people (i.e., a people whose character and institutions permit their self-government). That identity is predicated on our common embrace of responsibility for preserving the integrity of human nature. It does not consist in some purely self-centered, routinely nationalistic obsession with our own material power and ambition. So, the triumph of socialism requires that we leave our identity behind. Donald Trumps boisterous assertion of nationalism, narrowly conceived, is meant to distract from this dereliction.

Americas understanding of human right is rooted in the obligation to respect and preserve human nature. This understanding ought to be a key influence on our deliberations about the proper approach to health care. All human beings have a common interest in what preserves and enhances human bodily health. Almost since the birth of medicine as a systematic discipline, the key premise of the medical profession has been to respect and serve that common good. To serve this good, in preference to any and all selfish individual aims, was the main profession of faithfulness undertaken by medical professionals.

This may seem directly in conflict with the understanding of free enterprise that see the individual selfishness, stylized as the profit motive, as the motivating rubric of economic choice. But not once we remember that the real root of economics is the household the family concentric association of individuals raised up in light of the mutual and voluntary commitment of parents to care for their children; and of all family members to care for one another.

On account of this commitment, profit is not defined in terms of radically selfish individualism. The rubric of each family members identity involves their participation and inclusion in the familys life. It involves their responsibility to and for others in their community. True free-enterprise approaches take account of this responsibility. They may use government as an instrument to assure that it is taken seriously, but they do not substitute the coercive power of government for choices informed by the decent character of the people, and their natural and voluntary associations. Are there still true conservatives in the GOP willing to battle for this responsible, free-enterprise approach? Is there any chance that President Trump will abandon his evident commitment to making socialism work in order, instead, to work with them?

Media wishing to interview Alan Keyes, please contact media@wnd.com.

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Why making socialism 'work' is utterly unacceptable - WND.com - WND.com

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By Brian Nichols

March 9th marks the official start to the NFL Free Agency period. For those of you unaware as to what free agency is, here is a basic summary:

-NFL teams have the choice to either a) let their currently players with expiring contracts test the open market as a free agent, thus allowing them to sign with any team or b) players are cut by their respective teams based on their age, injury history, off-the-field issues, inflated contract salaries, etc and then are allowed to test the open market as a free agent (again, free to sign with any team).

While this is an extremely basic introduction to NFL Free Agency, it is useful background for those of you reading this article with no prior football background.

While teams were preparing for this years free agent market, I began to think about the realities of the NFL marketplace, where players and draft picks are being bought, sold, and traded and how the NFL, with its self imposed salary cap for each team, proves that socialism doesnt work.

For some background, it is important to note that each team is granted a league-determined salary cap. This salary cap is a dollar amount imposed by the league each year that restricts teams from spending boatloads of cash for players. The idea of the salary cap was to create a more fair system in which all teams were placed on a level playing field in terms of how much money they can spend on players. While teams like the Dallas Cowboys have billions of dollars at their disposal, smaller-market teams like the Cleveland Browns have no such resources. This years salary cap per team is a whopping $167 million per club. This means that each club has up to $167 million in funds that they can allocate to player salaries.

To put this in perspective, lets consider a hypothetical football team: The Libertarian Ninjas. The Ninjas, like all 32 other NFL teams, will be allowed to spend up to $167 million in player salaries this year. They can determine how it is they want to spend that $167 million, but they cannot spend more than that fixed amount of salary. Some teams are able to finagle their salaries to fall well below the league imposed cap, while still signing some good players (while other teams not so much).

This background into free agency and the salary cap bring me to my main point: The NFL is proving, without a doubt, that their socialized salary cap does not work.

Take for instance, the typical NFL quarterback. Quarterbacks are arguably the most important players on any team. Teams that have good quarterbacks to what they can to keep them, while teams without good quarterbacks search tirelessly to find one.

The average salary for a quarterback in the NFL ranges between $15-$20 million per year, but this number is, without a doubt, smaller than it should be.

Consider the following: Yes, NFL quarterbacks are statistically the highest paid players on their respective teams. But are they getting a true market value for their services?

The answer is both yes and no, and heres why.

Yes, while the quarterback market is dictated based upon the value of a good quarterback, the scarcity of good quarterbacks, and the value teams place in good quarterbacks, their actual market value is substantially deflated thanks to the NFLs salary cap. With only $167 million allocated for each team to spend on player salaries, teams must be weary in terms of how they allocate those funds. So while a quarterback position might be receiving one of the highest average salaries in the NFL, it is only relative to the salary cap that has been imposed by the league.

To better contrast this, consider if there was no NFL salary cap-

Currently, Andrew Luck of the Indianapolis Colts is the highest paid quarterback (based on his average annual salary) at $24.6 million per year. That means at his current annual salary, Luck takes up 15% of the Colts salary cap space. To put this in perspective, Luck is valued at the price of 2 Richard Shermans (Cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks, whose annual salary comes in around $14 million).

Now, for you football fans out there, I ask you this: Would you rather have 1 Andrew Luck, or 2 Richard Shermans? Yes, Sherman is a great player, but if you were able to have a strong quarterback like Luck on your roster versus 2 strong corners, wouldnt you want the quarterback? And if so, how much would you be willing to pay for him?

One could argue that in a world without the NFL salary cap, great players such as Luck or any other stellar quarterback, would make tens of millions of dollars more than they currently are now, as teams would be willing to pay as much for their services.

See, even though the NFL imposed the NFL salary cap with the goal of implementing fairness in the league, they ended up hurting their own employees: the players.

Instead of players being justly compensated for their skills, teams are forced to pay lesser salaries relative to the salary cap. Instead of an amazing quarterback like Tom Brady making $50 million per year (as many could argue he deserves), the NFL salary cap keeps his annual salary around $20.5 million.

This also doesnt take into consideration the fact that the NFL, which wouldnt exist without its players, is projected to bring in $13 billion in revenue next year.

If anything, the NFL has shown that despite their claims to be promoting fairness, they are in fact promoting unfairness, especially when it comes to their players.

capitalismcapitalism v socialismeconomicsmarket valueNational Football LeagueNFLSocialism

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NFL Free Agency: How the NFL Salary Cap Proves that Socialism Doesn't Work - The Libertarian Republic