Radio America Online News Bureau

Archives for March 2018

‘The Mask Is Coming Off’ in Gun Control Push

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After years of gun control advocates insisting they didn’t want to take away anyone’s guns, the March for Our Lives and a string of opinion columns headlined by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens are making it clear that the movement is aimed at repealing the second amendment, and the head of one leading gun rights group welcomes the honesty.

“Obviously the mask is coming off.  There is a radical agenda that we are fighting against.  The anti-gun left wants to confiscate guns from law abiding Americans, but they’re not going to succeed,” said Gun Owners of America Executive Director Erich Pratt.

None of this comes as a surprise to Pratt.  He says opponents of the second amendment have been wanting this for a long time, even pointing to a ’60 Minutes’ interview with Sen. Dianne Feinstein from decades ago.

“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America turn them all in, I would have done it,” Pratt recounted Feinstein as saying.

He notes Gov. Andrew Cuomo openly talked about gun confiscation in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary massacre.

Pratt went to the March For Our Lives on March 24.  He says the overarching goal of the protesters was clear.

“It was all about, ‘Yes, we want to ban guns,’ or if they wanted to give us the privilege of keeping our guns, they would want to have the government go door-to-door and put trackers on the guns.  This is the type of thing we’re actually seeing in the movement,”said Pratt.

In his op-ed for the New York Times, Stevens asserted that the second amendment does not grant the right to keep and bear arms unless it is in the context of a militia.  Pratt begs to differ.

“That view lost at the Supreme Court,” he said, referring to a 2008 decision that affirmed an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.  The decision was 5-4.  Stevens wrote the dissent.

In addition to vigorously disagreeing with the effort to repeal the second amendment, Pratt says the logic of the protesters makes no sense.

“It’s almost like they don’t see the contradiction.  They want to take away our guns so therefore they want the Trump administration to have all the guns?  Wait, I thought they feared the Trump administration.  It simply doesn’t make sense,” said Pratt.

Stevens also claims a rich legal history of the courts severely restricting gun rights and he quotes former Chief Justice Warren Burger as saying the National Rifle Association committed “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime,” by claiming the right to keep and bear arms could not be tampered with.

While Pratt admits the courts did clamp down on gun rights over the years, the second amendment was vital in the wake of the Civil War and during the tensions of the civil rights movement.

He says one of the purposes of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment was to make it possible for blacks in the South to be able to purchase weapons when southern states refused to allow it.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, when police in the South were looking the other way while the KKK targeted black neighborhoods, black citizens restored order by patrolling their neighborhoods with guns.

“This idea that we can now trust the government, that we only needed (the amendment) in the 1700’s or 1800’s but we don’t need it today, that’s just simply crazy,” said Pratt.

Pratt does not believe the second amendment is going anywhere anytime soon, given 70 percent support for the right to keep and bear arms and the major difficulty of amending the Constitution.  He says the greater threat is the step by step erosion of gun rights that gun control proponents keep pushing.

For gun rights to survive long term, Pratt says parents need to educate their kids before the world gets to them.

“Use your sphere of influence.  If you’re a parent, I would ask you this.  Are you training your kids in your values and beliefs.  Sadly, too often the kids from conservative households have been lost to the current culture,” said Pratt.

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Booming Economy, Intolerant Left’s Purity Test, Disney Princesses & Abortion

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David French of National Review and David French of National Review welcome more good economic news, including weekly jobless claims at the lowest level since January 1973 and the highest consumer sentiment in 14 years.  David fights back against the intolerant liberal mob that wants former National Review columnist Kevin Williamson ousted from his new position at The Atlantic in the latest example of demands for ideological purity in journalism on the left.  And they fume at a Planned Parenthood chapter in Pennsylvania for not only tweeting that Disney needs princesses that have had abortions, are undocumented, are union members or transgender, but they unload at the radical social justice warriors who insist pushing an extreme agenda in the face of small children.

NOTE: There will be no Three Martini Lunch on Friday, March 30, in observance of Good Friday.  Jim and Greg will be back on Monday, April 2.  Happy Easter!

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Uproar over Census Citizenship Question

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Democrats in multiple states are planning to sue the Trump administration to stop the 2020 U.S. census from asking whether people living in the U.S. are citizens, a move that may find initial success in the courts but may also be based on false assumptions.

The citizenship question appeared on every census form from 1820 through 1950.  From 1960 through 2000, it appeared on the long form sent to about one-sixth of U.S. residences.  2010 is the only census in the past 200 years not to include the question to anyone.

Nonetheless, left-leaning states like California and New York are headed to court to prevent the question from appearing on the census.

“Having an accurate Census count should be of the utmost importance for every Californian,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “The Census numbers provide the backbone for planning how our communities can grow and thrive in the coming decade. California simply has too much to lose for us to allow the Trump administration to botch this important decennial obligation.”

“This move directly targets states like New York that have large, thriving immigrant populations — threatening billions of dollars in federal funding for New York as well as fair representation in Congress and the electoral college,” said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

The concern from Becerra, Schneiderman and others is that people living in the U.S. who are either not citizens or not in the country legally will be far more reluctant to fill out the census, thus skewing the data received and depriving certain states the congressional representation they ought to have and the government spending it needs.

And while the U.S. census is under the control of the executive branch through the Commerce Department, don’t be surprised if the courts back the challengers.

“We’ll get a court to enjoin this.  There’s no question.  The reason for that is that if the Trump administration were to say the sky is blue, you could find a federal court at this point to enjoin that and say it’s not correct,” said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“There’s just so many judges out there who have a deep suspicion of every motive and every action of the administration, that’s they’ll find a reason,” said Camarota, who says the likely verdict of the Supreme Court on this is less clear.

But while plenty of attention has been paid to the blowback from Democrats, why is the Commerce Department adding this question back into the census?

“It came at the request of the Justice Department, which said that we’d really like to have this question because it would be helpful in enforcing voting rights law,” said Camarota.

At issue is greater scrutiny of racial and ethnic gerrymandering and whether the drawing of legislative districts is putting certain people under a greater burden to get to the polls.

“You’re allowed to gerrymander for political reasons but you’re not allowed to explicitly try to dilute political power among different racial minorities.  Or another example is the placement of a polling place.  You can have a situation where minorities are all in one part of the area but the polling place is very far away and very inconvenient,” said Camarota.

“The same kind of thing could apply to naturalized citizens.  Does the placement of polling places or does the gerrymandering tend to dilute or make difficult the voting of naturalized citizens.  That’s why you would ask the question they’re planning on asking,” added Camarota.

While the reaction to the citizenship question is falling largely along party lines, Camarota says on the surface it is reasonable to wonder it will lead to fewer responses and less accurate data..

“The question is does the benefit you get by asking this question offset the risk that you might reduce the quality of Census Bureau data,” said Camarota.  “I think it’s not an unreasonable concern.  I think it’s an open question.”

That being said, Camarota says the best evidence suggests there probably would not be much of a drop off, if any, if the question is added to the census based on what we see with other surveys.

“Every year we do what’s called the American Community Survey.  It shoots for about one and a half to two percent of the population and they ask all these detailed questions, several related to citizenship.  The second survey we have is the Current Population Survey.  It’s done every month.  It’s where we get the unemployment numbers.  It has also been asking about citizenship for many years now,” said Camarota.

He says Trump’s campaign and presidency seem to have little or no impact on the response rate.

“The argument is that there’s a kind of Trump effect, that in the new context of increased immigration enforcement, now we’re really going to see people respond (at different rates).  You don’t really see it.

“With the American Community Survey, Trump ran for office and won office in 2016, but the share of people who refused to take the survey didn’t change between ’15 and ’16, which is what you’d expect if people were reluctant to answer these questions,” said Camarota.

He says the rate of response is trending down but that development began long before Trump’s political rise.  In addition, the same pattern can be seen on the monthly surveys.

“You’d think they’d be really reluctant to answer the question and you can do an analysis to see if in fact people are not answering that question, leaving it blank or what have you.  There’s been no rise.

“Even if you try to put on a graph the months in which Trump did well – he announced his candidacy, or won the nomination, or won the presidency – and then look at several months after, there’s just no change in the continuity of the data,” said Camarota.

According to Camarota, the evidence just isn’t there to suggest returning the question to the census will skew the results.

“That would tend to undermine the idea that putting this question on is going to make much difference one way or the other.  I think it is harder and harder to gather data.  I think that has to do with the decline in trust for government.  It has to do with the decline in civic mindedness.  People don’t see it so much as their civic responsibility anymore.

“I think those things are true, but I don’t think it has much to do with the citizenship question,” said Camarota.

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Pence Hammers Heitkamp, Heidi’s Lame Abortion & Guns Parallel, Wolff vs. Truth

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Alexandra DeSanctis of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America cheer Vice President Pence for going to North Dakota and hammering Sen. Heidi Heitkamp for her liberal votes on health care, taxes, abortion, energy and more – in a sign the Republicans are getting on message early in the states with the best pickup opportunities.  They also take aim at Heitkamp’s attempt to look strong on the second amendment after the senator makes a pathetic attempt to liken passion for gun rights similar to passion for abortion rights.  And they slam “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff, who is now admitting he is an observer rather than a journalist and says his job “has nothing to do with the truth.”

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GOP Targeting Obamacare Again

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Reports of Republicans giving up on repealing and replacing Obamacare are greatly exaggerated, according to Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner, who is not only confident the GOP will address the issue again this year but is part of the team trying to make it happen.

Republicans have achieved a few wins on the health care front over the past year, namely the repeal of the individual mandate in the tax legislation, the repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board in a spending bill, and the end of cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies through executive action from President Trump.

When Republicans tried but failed to restore funding for the cost-sharing reduction payments in exchange for removing burdensome regulations from the individual health insurance market in the recent omnibus bill, many feared the GOP was giving up on addressing health care in a meaningful way this year.

Turner says that’s not the case.  First of all, she says the failure of Republicans to restore the subsidies to insurers was a major blessing.

“The measures that they were considering as part of the omnibus spending bill were really just papering over the problems.  And with Obamacare, they were ready to throw tens of billions more dollars into this black hole of Obamacare.  It was not going to fix anything,” said Turner.

But Turner also insists Republicans are ramping up for another legislative push to dismantle Obamacare this year.

“Congress is going to have to come back to a full repeal and replace measure and we have been working every week since October to refine this legislation at the behest of the Senate.  (Former) Sen. Rick Santorum has really been the energy behind this effort,” said Turner, who also explained the other players in the effort.

“Heritage Foundation, Ethics and Public Policy Center, the American Enterprise Institute, a lot of state-based think tanks and a lot of experts from around the country have been putting together a proposal that we believe cannot only get majority support in the Congress but majority support of the American people to fix  this for good,” said Turner.

In 2017, the House of Representatives passed reform legislation but the Senate failed on several different bills.  Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John McCain voted down all GOP bills.  Since then, Republicans lost a Senate seat in Alabama and McCain has been home battling cancer.  On most days, the GOP holds a 50-49 voting majority.

Turner says the focal point of this effort will look less like the bills that tanked last summer and more like the Graham-Cassidy bill that failed to advance in September.  the sponsors were Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana.  Cassidy is a longtime physician.

“That bill was based upon a different approach, a federalist approach to return money and power to the states to ultimately empower individuals to have more choice and more control over their health insurance,” said Turner.

“We’ve got to devolve power to the states and they need resources in addition to new flexibility to be able to provide people with the kind of policies they actually want  to buy instead of what they’re forced to purchase.  They would use the money to make sure that they purchase private coverage and that they have many more choices and that the coverage is more affordable,” said Turner.

She says Obamacare is a proven disaster and is only getting worse because more people are getting out of the system and leaving older and sicker people to deal with soaring premiums.

“Obamacare is becoming one big high risk pool.  That means millions, probably tens of millions of people, are being shut out of health insurance.  They need a different place to go.  That’s what states can do.  States can figure out how they can revive their individual and small group health insurance markets,” said Turner.

But Republicans have a problem besides finding a majority to support any legislation.  The budget reconciliation rules that allowed them to attempt passage with a simple majority expired in September.  Right now, they would need 60 votes to get anything done.

Turner is confident the Senate GOP leaders could ramp up support for another budget reconciliation rule, and she believes this time they would do it right.  Turner says a big problem with the process last summer is how the rules were structured.

“They did it backwards last time.  This time we’re going to do it the right way, starting with good policy and then create a vehicle to get that enacted,” she said.

So what happened last time?

“What they did is pass budget reconciliation instructions to create the pathway for the repeal and replace legislation they wanted to pass.  And they had to fit it in to that channel and it didn’t really fit,” said Turner.

“As one of my colleagues said, they just kept having to pull limbs off of it until it would fit through that process.  At the end, nobody really liked the product.  We’re doing this differently.  We’re starting out by creating a product that we believe can work and that people will like and then they’ll write the budget reconciliation instructions around that,” said Turner.

Turner says the polls consistently show health care is the number one concern of voters and the GOP must make another push this summer.

“How can they go back to their voters and say, ‘Oh, sorry.  We know we told you for four election cycles we were going to repeal and replace Obamacare but it was just too hard.’  They can’t do that,” said Turner.

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Dems Tied to Hillary, Stevens vs. Constitution, NYT Discovers Pro-Life Goal

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Alexandra DeSanctis of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America enjoy watching new Republican ads tying incumbent Senate Democrats to Hillary Clinton’s trashing of Trump voters.  They also respond to former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who says individual gun rights should have vanished at the same time as state militias and that the second amendment ought to be repealed.  And they get a kick out of the New York Times breathlessly revealing that state laws designed to limit abortion are all part of an effort by pro-life activists to reverse Roe v. Wade.

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Twin Wins for Christians in Military

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Advocates for religious freedom in the military are mostly cheering President Trump’s policy on transgenders serving in the military and are breathing a sigh of relief as the U.S. Navy rejects the push for an theist chaplain.

On Friday, President Trump issued a memo reversing the Obama administration policy on transgender service.  The president believes there are legitimate concerns about the impact of transgenders – particularly those transitioning from one identity to another – on military readiness.

“In my judgment, the previous administration failed to identify a sufficient basis to conclude that terminating the departments’ longstanding policy and practice would not hinder military effectiveness and lethality, disrupt unit cohesion, or tax military resources, and there remain meaningful concerns that further study is needed to ensure that continued implementation of last year’s policy change would not have those negative effects,” reads the memo.

The move is largely applauded by Christian voices in the military community.  Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty Executive Director Phil Wright says Trump did the right thing.

“The Chaplain Alliance affirms the commander-in-chief’s decision.  The number one priority for the military is to be ready to deploy and engage in and win the nation’s wars as well as defend our allies,” said Wright,a  retired U.S. Army colonel who served as a chaplain while in uniform.

He says it’s time for the government to stop using the military to advance cultural and political goals.

“The military is not (designed) to engineer social change.  It’s not a club.  It’s not to reflect America.  It is to win the nation’s wars, to defend the nation and our allies,” said Wright.

The memo largely restricts military service from people undergoing surgeries or therapies that make them undeployable if they get sent somewhere they won’t have access to those medical options.

However, it does not call for a total ban on transgenders serving in the military, and Wright says some aspects of the lingering policy leave him concerned, including safety for women in uniform.

“When you have men alleging to be women and having access to female billeting, barracks, showers, bathrooms, we think that is an issue that has not been addressed appropriately,” said Wright.

Wright says there are numerous complaints from women being forced to share quarters with men transitioning to a female identity and that those women not only fear for their safety but are deeply concerned that their superiors will have little regard for their privacy.

He’s also concerned about whether chaplains and other personnel will be pressured to stifle their beliefs on transgender issues.

“We are very concerned that the constitutional protections afforded our service members as far as religious liberty are not addressed when those who continue to serve seem to have all of the rights,” said Wright.

However, Wright is fully thrilled to see the U.S. Navy once again reject the application of a humanist to join the chaplain corps.  Jason Heap was rejected once during the Obama administration but tried again this year.  The effort met swift resistance on Capitol Hill from 45 Republicans in the House and 22 in the Senate.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., led the effort to quash Heap’s application.  Both serve on the respective armed services committees in the House and Senate.

“We’re very fortunate that we have people in our civilian leadership, which is part of our military, having oversight.  We were glad that they were able to step in and make such a cogent argument,” said Wright.

Wright says the idea of an atheist chaplain boggles the mind.

“By definition, humanists or human secularists or atheists could not be a military chaplain is to be religious.  Their very first comment will be that they are not religious and have no intention of being religious.  They’re actually hostile to religion,” said Wright.

He does not see Heap’s application as an effort to water down the chaplains’ corps but the exact opposite.

“It seems to be more aimed at doing away with the chaplain corps than it is to minister to those soldiers of that particular belief system,” said Wright.

Wright points out the chaplains were first ordered into the Army by Gen. George Washington and that chaplains play a far more critical role in combat than many people realize.

“Having served myself, I know many commanders would not go downrange into combat without a chaplain in their ranks because of what the chaplains provide for those commanders and the men and women that they lead and the family members left behind,” said Wright.

“You have someone who understands authority.  You have someone that’s disciplined.  You have someone who has a high view of life, and in those murky fog-of-war situation, I think you would want someone, whether it’s a soldier who’s pulling the trigger or a chaplain who is trying to instruct them about just war and about doing right at the right time for the right reason.

“That’s who you want in your formation and not someone who does not have an informed worldview like that,” said Wright.

With atheists wanting to join a unit specifically for people of deep faith and people wanting to join the military while identifying as a different gender than their biology indicates, how challenging is it for chaplains and other believers in the service today?

“You have a biblical worldview on the one hand that our chaplains hold to and that a lot of Americans hold to and then you have other worldviews which lead to some of these other kinds of belief systems or facts that aren’t really truth.

“You get into, ‘Well, maybe that’s your truth not my truth.  There is one absolute truth,” said Wright.  “This is an ongoing challenge that has always been around ever since Jesus walked the earth.”

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Trump Boots Russians, Two-Faced Gun Control March, Obama’s Boundless Ego

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America applaud the Trump administration for evicting dozens of Russian officials from the U.S., many of whom were intelligence personnel posing as diplomats.  They also dissect the March for Our Lives, as the Parkland teenagers insist one moment that they’re not after anyone’s guns and the next minute blame the NRA for the deaths of children.  They also discuss how the gun control push may be the one thing that saves the GOP from a midterm election disaster.  And they react to former President Obama’s saying he wants his foundation to be a way to connect activists and innovators and create a million more Barack Obamas in the process.  David and Greg then discuss how de facto worship of politicians is bad for America on both sides of the aisle.

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The Cost of Spending and Tariffs

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The $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill and new tariffs announced by President Trump will not only drive up our national debt, but could greatly reduce the economic benefits otherwise expected through the recent tax reform bill.

On Thursday, Republican majorities in the House and Senate approved the bill to ward off a partial government shutdown and President Trump signed it after briefly considering a veto.  The omnibus plus Trump’s embrace of  steel and aluminum tariffs and this wee’s targeting of China for unfair trade practices has fiscal conservatives are furious with the GOP at both ends of Pennsylvania Ave.

National Taxpayers Union President Pete Sepp sees the omnibus as a disaster.

“We’re talking about an increase of $80 billion in defense spending, $62 billion in non-defense spending, a gimmick called the Overseas Contingencies Operation Account.

“Bottom line, amid rising interest rates, the additional debt that’s going to finance this bill is going to have headaches down the line, because servicing that debt is going to get costlier in addition to this spending,” said Sepp.

Sepp says fiscal conservatives really weren’t asking that much of the GOP-led Congress.

“In addition to passing tax relief and tax simplification, we were expecting them to at least hold the line on federal spending,” said Sepp.

“Congress decided earlier in the year to break the spending caps for a third time that were established in a 2011 bill called the bipartisan Budget Control Act.  Congress has not kept that promise.

“For the third time, they’ve broken the caps and by deciding to do that, they had to consciously pass another law.  This do-nothing Congress, as it’s been criticized for, needed to do nothing to hold the line on spending, but they wouldn’t do that.  They actively plotted to undermine the caps, and this omnibus spending bill seals that deal,” said Sepp.

Both Trump and many of the congressional Republicans who backed the omnibus counter by saying only defense spending was still under the caps and the military is suffering badly as a result of austerity aimed specifically at the Pentagon during the Obama years.

They further assert the only way they could get the votes for greater military spending from Senate Democrats was to bump up non-defense spending as well.

Sepp isn’t buying it.

“That’s the politics of the deal but as policy it is rotten.  Unfortunately, our defense spending establishment has had years of bloated practices, bad management and unauditable financial statements.

“If we were to demand better fiscal accountability from the Pentagon, I have the feeling, we would find a lot more resources to get to our service people who really need them, instead of just approving a huge spending increase with very, very little accountability to go along with it,” said Sepp.

However, Sepp says the omnibus could have been far more expensive and that there are a few bright spots for taxpayers tucked in there.

“The omnibus spending bill could have been a lot worse considering some of the riders that were being proposed: a new tax on travelers – a passenger facility surcharge if you will, a new act that would have empowered states to collect sales taxes on internet transactions,” said Sepp.

Sepp also says there are also elements of greater government transparency in the bill.  However, he says those positive nuggets don’t outweigh the negatives of the bill and adding in Trump’s proposed tariffs make our economic outlook less rosy.

The steel and aluminum tariffs alone could be major job killers.

“There are some reports estimating that the steel and aluminum tariffs alone could cost up to 180,000 jobs in our economy, because while we’re protecting steel and aluminum manufacturing workers, other types of industries that use the steel and aluminum in their own manufacturing will be badly hit by higher prices,” said Sepp.

We can debate how many jobs might be at stake here, but at that upper level of 180,000 jobs, you’re talking about giving back as much as half of the jobs created by the tax cut act,” said Sepp.

Sepp hopes Trump’s new chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, will be able to pivot the president away from tariffs.  He says Kudlow is clearly on the record as opposing such policies.

“He said, essentially, that when we impose tariffs on another country’s imports, we’re imposing sanctions on our own consumers.  That’s exactly what’s going on here and the amount of sanction could be very significant,” said Sepp.

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Bolton Replaces McMaster, GOP’s Ugly Omnibus, Millennials Love Doing Taxes

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Teddy Kupfer of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America cheer President Trump’s selection of John Bolton as National Security Adviser and look forward to his tough stance on North Korean nukes and the Iran nuclear deal while liberals fear that Bolton will start bombing everyone.  They also unload on the bloated $1.3 trillion omnibus that the majority of Republican representatives and senators approved, much to the delight of Democrats and the fury of fiscal conservatives.  Teddy and Greg understand the desire of Republicans to rebuild the military but find the reckless spending in other areas unacceptable.  They scratch their heads trying to figure out why more than half of millennials actually enjoy doing their taxes.  And they offer a champagne toast to the late Democratic Georgia Gov. and Sen. Zell Miller and reflect upon his memorable keynote address at the Republican convention in 2004.

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