Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer the CNN Republican presidential debate for good questions, serious discussions and enlightening exchanges. They yawn as Chris Christie tries to pretend the people don’t care about a disagreement over the government’s collection of our bulk data. And they have fun with Donald Trump’s change of heart about whether Ted Cruz is a maniac and that he doesn’t know what the nuclear triad is.
A Green Beret on How to Destroy ISIS
A retired U.S. Army special operations officer says the key to eradicating ISIS is a combination of common sense, killing political correctness and beating the terrorists at their own propaganda game.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann served 23 years in uniform, 18 of them in Army special operations. Fifteen of those years were spent with the elite Green Berets. Mann is also author of “Game Changers: Going Local to Defeat Violent Extremists.”
He says a multi-layered approach needs to be undertaken immediately on multiple fronts, starting with clamping down on who we allow in the U.S.
“They’ve made it clear they’re here and they’re coming and they’re going to keep escalating violence. We’ve got to consider that when we look at our immigration policies. For starters, how about securing the southern border. For starters, how about just an honest look at our immigration and our visa policy as it currently stands in relation to what terrorists are exploiting now,” said Mann.
While Mann believes the Donald Trump proposal of placing a temporary ban on Muslim immigration is unenforceable and would feed into the ISIS narrative, he does think we need to be more stingy when it comes to immigrants from certain areas.
“I think we may have to get a little bit draconian on some of the point of origin countries like North Africa and Syria and Pakistan until we sort this out,” said Mann.
While this is just one part of his approach, Mann says it should be a no-brainer and the politics involved in blocking such remedies is maddening.
“There’s a lot we can do on the front end with relation to immigration with just common sense. Get rid of this political correctness because the threat is here and it’s growing,” said Mann.
Another major component of defeating ISIS, according to Mann, is confronting them in cyberspace, where the group’s propaganda and recruitment have proved very successful.
“One, hold a mirror up to ISIS like Frank Capra did with the Nazis in World War II . Show what they really do. I haven’t seen us do that yet. Number two, what is our narrative? What do we stand for here in America. How are we working with the majority of Muslims around the world to help them protect their religion that frankly being hijacked by Tolkien’s version of modern-day Orcs,” said Mann.
When it comes to defeating ISIS militarily, Mann says we need first to understand how ISIS and other radical Muslim groups gain power and territory.
“They go into areas that are beyond the reach of a fragile government and co-opt and manipulate tribes and clans at a community level. That’s how they set up their shop,” said Mann.
He says that’s also the key to crushing ISIS.
“That’s where they’re most vulnerable. The only thing I have seen work in the almost 15 years of this war is when we do something very similar, where we come up in a bottom-up kind of way at a community level and we empower resilient leaders to push back from the inside out and push those guys out,” said Mann.
Mann’s strategy also involves local Sunni tribes leading the military effort. Efforts to train rebels have proven elusive, with a major U.S. program spending many millions of dollars and producing only a handful of fighters. Mann says that doesn’t mean it can’t be done but it needs to be done in a much smarter way than recruiting and training locals in a sanitized, unrealistic way.
“If you’re not willing to work in these dark and tough areas where ISIS and Al Qaeda set up shop then you shouldn’t even do this kind of program. That’s exactly what we did in Syria. We basically brought in and recruited marginally vetted groups. We trained them behind the fortification of where our troops were. Then we basically launched them out and said, ‘Have a nice time storming the castle,'” said Mann.
Before that can happen, Mann says the Obama administration needs to stop trying to deal with ISIS and the Assad regime in Syria at the same time. He says the threat comparison isn’t even close.
“I do think ISIS is the greater threat. I don’t think the Obama administration has done a good job of laying out the threat and prioritizing how we should come at this. As a result of that, this thing has morphed and evolved in a million different angles and it’s really confusing,” said Mann.
“I think if you just step back from it and look at what poses the greatest threat to the United States and its interests both in terms of will and capacity, I think it’s unequivocally ISIS,” said Mann.
‘We’ve Got to Take A Stand Here’
House Speaker Paul Ryan calls the omnibus spending bill a compromise that gives both sides of the aisle some of what it wants, but Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, says the bill is a non-starter because it doesn’t take the steps necessary to keep terrorists from entering the country.
“We took an oath. We’re supposed to protect this country, the Constitution. We’re supposed to provide for the common defense. We’ve got to take a stand here. It’s worth taking a stand to save American lives,” said Gohmert, a former judge and a current member of the House Judiciary Committee.
Of greatest concern to Gohmert is what he sees as Congress continuing to fund the refugee program without meaningful changes or taking a pause to re-evaluate how best to keep Islamic radicals away from our shores.
“The negotiators from the Senate intend to allow the risk of dramatic harm,” said Gohmert. “The Senate is not agreeing to allow a pause in the visa waiver program that would wait until we can be sure that no terrorists are coming in with the refugees since ISIS says they’re sending in terrorists with the refugees,” said Gohmert.
He says keeping the status quo in the face of such a threat is unacceptable.
“We have no way of vetting any of the Syrian refugees. We can ask them questions but we’ve got no way to check their answers. Most Americans get that. It’s only in Washington where we’re having a problem convincing people that are elected how important that is,” said Gohmert.
The legislation does reportedly contain language to significantly tighten the general visa waiver program, which is separate from the evaluation of refugees. Gohmert says on the surface that’s a step in the right direction.
“That means that countries that are allowed to send people directly from their country into the United States without a visa, without us being able to check whether or not they’re actually a terrorist or a threat to us. That needed to be suspended, and apparently there is a provision that will suspend that,” said Gohmert.
However, the congressman says that’s not as much of an improvement as it seems.
“The trouble is it’s now been reported that that has a massive hole in it. Some of the countries like France and Belgium, where we know there are terrorists, they’re not going to be restricted. So they can send people straight from France to the United States without us getting a chance to check out their application,” said Gohmert.
President Obama and many of his Democratic allies are opposed to any pause in the refugee program, with Obama repeatedly questioning the GOP’s purported toughness.
“Apparently they’re scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion,” said Obama last month at the G-20 Summit in Turkey.
The omnibus compromise suggests Obama is not alone in that sentiment. Gohmert strongly bristles at the implication that pausing the refugee program over national security concerns is somehow un-American.
“When it comes to some moron saying, ‘That’s not who we are as Americans,’ traditionally who we are as Americans are people that are glad to have people come in if we knowingly grant them a visa as long as they’re not a threat to America,” said Gohmert.
He continued, “We’re a country where we’ll send people to die to fight for other people’s freedom. But we have not traditionally been a country that was so stupid that we welcomed terrorists in our midst to come kill us.”
Gohmert says President Obama is the first president in centuries to miss the threat posed by Islamic radicals.
“Who we really are is a country that before President Obama’s administration, we didn’t want terrorists among us and we recognized radical Islam. We knew it was a threat to us, going back to Thomas Jefferson. He knew that. It’s time for somebody in this administration to understand radical Islam is a threat,” said Gohmert.
As evidence of the administration’s oblivious approach to the threat, Gohmert pointed to recent reports that the Department of Homeland Security refused to allow immigration officials to examine the public social media postings of people applying for entry into the U.S. It’s drawing fierce criticism after the FBI announced that San Bernardino terrorist Tashfeen Malik pledged her loyalty to ISIS and to jihadism on social media long before coming to America.
“The secretary of DHS (Jeh Johnson) is putting Americans at risk. He has put us at risk. He’s continuing to put Americans at risk. It’s time American leaders were more concerned about the lives and safety of Americans than they are with their political agenda. Right now their political agenda is trumping the safety of Americans,” said Gohmert.
Gohmert says he plans to learn all he can about the omnibus package before votes are held, but right now the contents leave him only one option.
“If we’re not taking these steps in the omnibus to save American lives, then I would have to be a ‘no.’ That’s correct,” said Gohmert.
Three Martini Lunch 12/15/15
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud Gen. Robert Abrams for ordering a general court martial for Bowe Bergdahl on charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. They also groan as the Obama administration refuses to bomb ISIS propaganda centers due to the fear of civilian casualties. And they unload on a columnist for the UK Independent for suggesting the West establish diplomatic relations with ISIS to contain its aggression.
‘It’s A Scam from Top to Bottom’
As world leaders hail a climate change agreement they say will preserve the planet for future generations, one of the leading critics of the movement behind the deal says the plan is simply a massive transfer of wealth that will have no impact on the climate and is calling attention to warming when the earth is clearly in a cooling phase.
Officials from nearly 200 nations reached agreement over the weekend in Paris to move forward in a commitment to reduce carbon emissions, but with no way to enforce the standards. Secretary of State John Kerry says the deal requires all nations to report on their emissions every five years. Kerry says that public exposure will keep nations on the straight and narrow.
The That approach is nothing more than a fantasy for Dr. Tim Ball, former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg. He is also the author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science”.
Ball says the main accomplishment of COP 21, the meeting in Paris that involved the political officials working in concert with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IGCC, was to establish the Green Climate Fund.
“They decided that developed nations had developed by using fossil fuels and the fossil fuel byproduct, CO2, was causing climate change or initially global warming. Therefore, those 23 developed nations had to pay for their sins,” said Ball.
“They had to put money into a fund which was then going to be distributed to the developing nations that were being punished or penalized by those developed nations,” added Ball.
This goal is nothing new. Ball says the climate fund has been a goal of the COP meetings for years, dating back in large part to the Kyoto Protocol in the late 1990’s. It was a supposed to the be the focal point of COP 15 but was scuttled after the East Anglia email scandal revealed emails that critics said was proof of climate science being doctored for a political agenda. He says activists simply waited a year and began pushing again.
“At COP 16, they introduced what’s called the Green Climate Fund. That’s what they were approving in Paris, which is a bank account set up in South Korea under the International Monetary Fund, at which all of these developed nations have to put money in to give out to the developing nations,” said Ball, noting that 23 nations will essentially be bankrolling 175 others.
The agreement from COP 21 calls for nations to strive for zeroing out carbon emissions by 2050 and certainly 2070. That means nations have agreed to keep their carbon emissions at or below what the earth is absorbing by that time.
What frustrates Ball the most is what he calls the “corruption of climate science, including the statistics on carbon dioxide.
“They talk about the CO2 that humans emit. They don’t put into the formula the amount of CO2 we are currently absorbing. For example, of the total we emit (using IGCC data), we remove 50 percent of it through agriculture,” said Ball.
Ball further says even the most ardent proponents of the climate agenda have admitted the wealth transfers and carbon standards don’t make any difference in the health of the planet.
“One of the key scientists involved in the corruption was a guy by the name of Tom Wigley. He said at the time that if we introduce the Kyoto Protocol in it’s original form, that is every country reduced to the amounts that we want, nobody would be able to measure the difference,” said Ball.
“In other words, you could take everybody off the planet, leave one scientist behind and say, ‘Okay, measure and tell us how much the CO2 in the atmosphere’s reduced.’ He wouldn’t be able to do it,” said Ball.
Ball says Secretary Kerry has admitted the same thing.
“He said this is not going to make any significant difference in terms of CO2 but it’s important in terms of political policy and sharing the wealth. So it’s a scam from top to bottom,” said Ball.
In addition to that admission, Kerry stated over the weekend to Fox News Sunday that there is no way to force any nation to abide by the new deal.
“If there had been a penalty, we wouldn’t have been able to get an agreement,” Kerry said, confident that mandatory emissions reporting requirements would keep everyone on target.
Ball is stunned.
“There’s absolutely no point putting in rules and regulations if you can’t enforce them,” he said.
In addition to layers of what he believes to be misguided policies, Ball says the climate delegates are about to inadvertently double their donations to developing nations because they’re not paying attention to the fact the climate is really in a cooling period.
“They’ve got people preparing for completely the wrong thing, which means that cost of preparing for warming will be doubled because then they’ll have to turn around and offset and prepare for the cooling, which is a much greater threat to humanity and food production and energy costs and so on,” said Ball.
Ball says the U.S. is also voluntarily placing itself at a global disadvantage with nations that don’t really buy into the climate alarmism, namely Russia, India and China.
“Those three nations all came out before Paris and said that the global warming science is a fraud. Putin said it publicly,” said Ball., who adds those nations, along with Brazil and South Africa, are poised to economically exploit the U.S. and others who are buying into the alleged threat.
“They have already set up a fund to counter and replace the International Monetary Fund, so there’s a whole economic and power grab going on here,” said Ball.
Three Martini Lunch 12/14/15
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review fume at reports the Department of Homeland Security refused requests from immigration officials to screen the social media accounts of people seeking to enter the U.S. They also groan as the U.S. commits to massive carbon emission reductions while allowing placing no penalties for nations that don’t comply. And they laugh as Donald Trump says Cruz should not be president because he doesn’t have the right temperament and insults people in the Senate.
Battle Over Life in Texas
A Texas mother and pro-life activists are fighting a Houston hospital in court after the facility cited a state law in its decision to refuse treatment for a 46-year-old man, despite the patient’s wishes and those of his family.
Houston Methodist Hospital is standing behind the decision of an administrative panel that ruled it was best to remove life-sustaining care for Chris Dunn, a former sheriff’s deputy who also worked for the Department of Homeland Security. He did not have insurance at the time of his health crisis. The hospital’s decision is final according to the Texas Advanced Directive Act, which has been on the books since 1999.
Dunn suffers from an apparent non-cancerous mass on his pancreas that impact the connection of his small intestine to the pancreas. His liver and kidneys are also negatively impacted, increasingly so after eight weeks of this fight between the hospital and Dunn’s mother, Evelyn.
The decision by Houston Methodist triggered a 10-day notice before life-sustaining care was to be removed. The removal has been delayed twice by the courts while the constitutionality of the Texas Advanced Directive Act is challenged.
Nonetheless, the pro-life community is appalled by the hospital’s actions and is acting by calling attention to Dunn’s case and petitioning the hospital to change course.
“At this hospital and hospitals around the state, we see that they have a different philosophy. They’re using this law to cover up that anti-life ethic and actually to make these decisions against the wishes of the patient,” said Texas Right to Life Legislative Director John Seago.
But in addition to denying treatment, Seago says the hospital is also refusing Dunn to get treatment anywhere else.
“The law only gives you 10 days, so if an ethics committee decides they want to take away the treatment, they only give the family 10 days to transfer to another facility. That is extremely difficult because the hospital decided they don’t want to treat the hospital anymore. However, you can’t transfer without their help,” said Seago.
Seago says the hospital’s attitude towards Dunn was exactly the same since he first arrived.
“Chris showed up in the hospital and instead of figuring out what was wrong with him, instead of doing the biopsies and the tests, it looked like he was in pretty bad condition and the hospital began to have conversations with the family that indicated the hospital was ready to give up, that the hospital did not think it was worth fighting,” said Seago, noting that doctors consulted through Texas Right to Life say Dunn’s case is not hopeless.
“There is a long list of things that physicians who are dedicated to keeping Chris alive and healing him could do a lot of the biopsies that need to be done and treatments that some of the medical experts we went to recommended if he was in a facility that was actually dedicated to keeping him alive,” said Seago.
He says the implied message from the hospital is chilling.
“They said there were a lot of complications in his health and they didn’t think that his life was going to be worth living by the time he gets to the other side of this medical condition,” said Seago.
While Dunn’s family succeeded in winning a couple of court-ordered delays against the hospital, Seago says hospital tried to play some stunning hardball of its own, by requesting that Evelyn Dunn be stripped of medical power of attorney for her son.
“The hospital is actually trying to take that right away from her. She has the medical power of attorney and we see that the hospital wants someone else to be the medical guardian and to make medical decisions for Chris. We know that the first medical decision that they’ll make, if they get it, is to withdraw his ventilator, which will occasion his death,” said Seago.
“It’s very disturbing that Houston Methodist Hospital is not just trying to use this unethical law, but they’re actually going above and beyond, to take the decision making authority out of the hands of Chris’s mother,” said Seago.
He says it’s even more baffling when considering Evelyn Dunn is merely enforcing the decisions Chris himself is making.
“He is capable of making his own medical decisions, but because he has a tube, he can’t verbally say them. He can indicate with his head. He shakes his head yes or no. He uses his hands to indicate whether he wants something or not. He is communicative but because he can’t speak verbally, he has to have a surrogate speak on his behalf,” said Seago.
In addition to championing Dunn’s case, Seago says Texas Right to Life is getting ready to fight for a repeal of the Texas Advanced Directive Act.
“This hospital is using a legal process that we have to withdraw life-sustaining treatment, even if the patient and family are asking for it,” said Seago. “At Texas Right to Life, we consider this Texas Advanced Directive Act to be the black spot on our state’s pro-life record,” said Seago.
‘We’ve Been Down this Road Many Times Before’
The president of the nation’s largest grassroots taxpayer organization says we’re seeing more of the same from Congress on the issues of spending and debt and that lawmakers are even breaking their earlier promises to tackle the nation’s red ink.
This week, lawmakers are passing a very short term spending extension to avoid a partial government shutdown. The extension will only last for a few days, but it means that more than two months after the start of the new fiscal year, the federal government will temporarily continue to spend at levels negotiated when Democrats controlled the U.S. Senate in 2014.
“We’ve been down this road many times before with Congress, not only on budget issues but on tax extender issues as well. The key to the budget fight this time is that Congress, unwisely in the opinion of my organization, decided to lift caps on discretionary spending that were enacted in 2011 and were working to drive down federal deficits,” said National Taxpayers Union President Pete Sepp.
“Members of Congress, for the second time in four years, decided they couldn’t live under those caps so they decided to raise them,” said Sepp, noting that discretionary budget items are those which must be approved on an annual basis.
To Sepp’s frustration, Republican control of Congress has not yet translated into the fiscal discipline needed to restore order to the nation’s balance sheet.
“Unfortunately, we have yet to see the kind of commitment that’s really going to keep the debt as well as annual deficits under some kind of control,” said Sepp.
He says avoiding the looming issue of American debt is only going to put a greater squeeze on our government and on taxpayers.
“Just servicing our national debt in the next decade will run about a trillion dollars a year, one trillion dollars spent just on paying the interest on the entire national debt. That is not fiscal responsibility and Congress has compounded the problem by failing to keep even part of the federal budget, the so-called discretionary part, under control,” said Sepp.
Sepp offered multiple examples of what he would classify as a commitment to reining in spending, starting with discretionary spending.
“Congress needs to go and reset the needle entirely and say we are going to assume that every single federal program does not deserve re-authorization unless we can prove it does. That is a smart approach to budgeting,” said Sepp, who also wants to target savings in the entitlement programs.
“We need to do the same with entitlement programs, figuring out how to curb federal benefits in a way that is fair to recipients and fair to taxpayers. We’ve only begun to have that very, very small debate over the Federal Disability Insurance Program,” said Sepp.
He says the program is on the brink of disaster and no one seems to be acting with much urgency.
“That’s going broke in 2016, next year, and Congress has yet to decide how they’re going to address that, much less the Social Security retirement program or Medicare,” said Sepp.
Finally, Sepp urges Congress to get serious very soon about passing tax extenders on several key provisions. He says putting it off so close to the end of the year is flirting with chaos.
“They’ve already expired. Congress needs to act to restore them before people start filing their returns. Otherwise, we’re going to have a mess on our hands,” said Sepp.
While some tax cuts Sepp wants extended are very specialized for specific businesses, he says others could have a more wide-ranging impact.
“There are other provisions, like expensing for small business or the deduction for state or local sales taxes, that could effect hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. If those go away, we’re going to see a very large increase in tax bills,” said Sepp.
Sepp is encouraged that the House legislation contains permanent extenders, but he is also firing back at Democrats and others who oppose extenders in order to grow the government coffers.
“There are many folks saying that the extenders bill that would pass Congress would cost the U.S. Treasury a lot of money. Well, the treasury has never had this money in the first place. These are tax relief provisions that have expired. What we’re talking about here is that the treasury would gain a windfall if the extenders are not passed,” said Sepp.
Three Martini Lunch 12/11/15
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud the honesty of California Dem Loretta Sanchez, who admits between 5-20 percent of Muslims want a caliphate and to obliterate western norms. They also react to a new CBS poll showing Americans are evenly divided about establishing a federal database of all Muslims. And they unload on a liberal magazine’s call for a complete gun ban, even for police.
Col. West’s ISIS Battle Plan
Retired U.S. Army Col. Allen West says the United States has to lead the fight against ISIS by eliminating the threat of radicals coming to America, giving our pilots the freedom to inflict immense damage and protecting the second amendment rights of all law-abiding citizens.
West, who also served one term as a congressman from Florida, is now president and CEO at the National Center for Policy Analysis. He says the United States better wake up fast because the past few weeks clearly prove ISIS is expanding in power and in reach.
“They’ve been able to conduct command and control attacks outside the areas they control in Iraq and Syria; in Beirut, Lebanon, with the suicide attacks there, the attack that brought down the Egyptian airliner killing 224 Russian civilians and of course what we saw in Paris,” said West, who also pointed to the arrest of an ISIS recruiter in Minnesota and the ongoing probe into the contacts of the San Bernardino terrorists.
Recent days have been full of debate over various plans to limit immigration, from Donald Trump’s call for a complete ban on Muslim immigration until the system can be reformed to Sen. Rand Paul’s push for a ban on immigrants from nations with ties to terrorism.
West also wants to clamp down, but with a slightly different focus.
“First and foremost, we should say the United States is going to restrict the entry of military-age single males and now I think we need to look at military-age single females from entry to the United States of America. We have to make it relevant to what we are seeing occurring on this new 21st century battlefield,” said West.
He also believes it’s time for a a ban on spousal visas until further notice, but West also believes it’s vital to crack down on those already here who enable and defend terrorists.
“There are many different groups that are out there that are nothing more than front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood that are lobbying and advocating our federal government, one of them being the Council on American-Islamic Relations (or CAIR), that has an office right there on Capitol Hill,” said West.
West says it’s also high time for a radically restructured military campaign to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. West, who served in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, says President Obama’s insistence upon staying the course with our current air campaign and other tactics just isn’t working.
“That’s the pure definition, as Albert Einstein said, of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results,” said West.
He says out air campaign is not having much impact on ISIS, even after 16 months.
“This vaunted air campaign is anemic in and of itself. It started back in August of last year and we still have a very strong and viable ISIS that is rooted there in Raqqa. They still own terrain. We continue to see ISIS conducting daytime parades through cities they have taken over. That’s lets us know the air campaign is not being successful,” said West, who says there’s a simple reason our missions haven’t done more damage.
“Pilots have said that 70-75 percent of their ordinance has not been dropped because of the very restrictive rules of engagement that has been placed upon them,” said West.
In addition to American pilots being ordered to avoid civilian casualties at all costs, West says two other rules of engagement are particularly maddening. The first, he says, giving our enemies a heads-up that an attack is on the way.
“[They are dropping] leaflets for drivers who are driving these trucks to give them the opportunity to run away. They are not civilians. Those are people that are supporting ISIS,” said West.
He’s also furious over what he consider’s Obama’s politics trumping our national security priorities as pilots are ordered not to attack the oil infrastructure of ISIS out of environmental concerns. West says the U.S. was able to quickly put out fires in Kuwait after the retreating Iraqis set them ablaze in 1991.
“With the expertise we had in the oil and natural gas industry here in America, we solved that issue. To say that we’re not going to attack a major funding source for ISIS because we’re worried about environmental considerations, that falls in line with a president that believes that climate change is the greatest threat to global security,” said West.
West says another priority overseas should be to sniff out whoever is buying oil from ISIS.
“We should also find out the entities that are purchasing the oil and providing revenue to ISIS and put economic sanctions on them,” said West.
Another frustration for West is the president’s immediate push for new gun control laws after the San Bernardino attacks. He says Obama has it all wrong.
“It is amazing to me that in the wake of the terrorist attack that happened in San Bernardino, that the president would talk about disarming the American people when they concerned about their own safety and security. To me it would be the same if after 9/11, President Obama would stand up and say we’re going to ban all airline travel,” said West.
He’s says Democrats and their gun control allies have a reflexive response after every gun-related atrocity.
“That is part of the rigid, intransigent ideology of President Obama, the liberal progressive socialist left, Hillary Clinton, all of them, instead of focusing on the real issue of protecting the American people from Islamic jihadism that has infiltrated into this country,” said West.