Turkey's President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spooked investors in Turkey by trying to dictate policy to the country's central bank. With the currency plummeting, his meddling in the central bank process is only making things worse. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board writes: Turkey’s lira fell as much as 5% on Wednesday, and it’s lost more than a fifth of its value this year, adding to a long decline that is forcing extreme monetary measures to compensate. Much of the blame lies with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as Turkey has been running a current-account deficit that Meanwhile, … [Read more...]

Small-towns are the casualties of globalism. Industries have been shuttered. Big government, meaning both sides of the aisle, have failed America. Just take a look around on your next road trip. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, explains in the WSJ’s Weekend Interview why he had students visit a failed middle America town:  “I wanted the students to go to a place that had experienced industrial decline,” he says. “And they came back with a clear sense that there’s no silver bullet to our problems, but that people there had real points—that a lot of what you read about their … [Read more...]

Kimberley Strassel, writing in her column at The Wall Street Journal, slays the narrative pushed by former CIA Director John Brennan as only she can. She writes: Mr. Brennan has taken credit for launching the Trump investigation. At a House Intelligence Committee hearing in May 2017, he explained that he became “aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons.” The CIA can’t investigate U.S. citizens, but he made sure that “every information and bit of intelligence” was “shared with the bureau,” meaning the FBI. This information, he said, … [Read more...]

Imagine your summer just ended. It’s time for Americans to get back to work. Picture yourself on that Tuesday night after Labor Day watching President Trump deliver the following speech from the White House including the words “Robert Mueller, you’re fired.” Angelo M. Codevilla senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University writes the speech: President Trump’s September Surprise: My fellow Americans, Traditionally, this is the day when the country ends summer fantasies, gets back to work and to school—when we get serious. And … [Read more...]

An army of the elite Silicon Valley tech workers with extra time on their hands are fighting hard to impose their political views on the heartland of America. The group, known as Tech for Campaigns, is carpetbagging its way into elections all around the country to back candidates approved by the West Coast liberal orthodoxy. After watching Brad Parscale of the Trump campaign trounce the high-powered, big spending Clinton campaign with his tech savvy, Democrats in Silicon Valley decided they needed to get involved to help candidates who can't help themselves. When in Ohio, and … [Read more...]

In rural Georgia, school administrators are encouraging teachers and other school employees to arm themselves. With schools spread far and wide in the sparsely populated county of Laurens, it could take a long time for police to engage an intruder at the schools. Those minutes could equate to many lives. School personnel are being asked to be the first responders to any threat. Arlinda Smith Broady writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Laurens is a rural county with a population of less than 50,000, with about 25 percent of those under 18. The spread of the county — its 807 square … [Read more...]

Coffee has been grown in Venezuela since the late 1800s, but today a minimum-wage employee in Venezuela can afford only 5 cups of coffee a month on their wages, with nothing left over. The trouble with Venezuelan socialism, just like all attempts at socialism, is that it misallocates resources. Now, after years of a fictional economy, reality is hitting Venezuela hard. The government is attempting to literally paper over the problem by inflating the currency, and as always that is making things worse. Terrible reports are coming out of Venezuela. Parents are giving away their children, … [Read more...]

For years retirees have flocked to Florida for its warm weather, and more importantly to many, its low taxation. But with the flood of people have come high home prices and subsequently, high property taxes. Now, many retirees are looking deeper into the American South for low cost places to live. A group of them, known as "halfbacks," are putting down stakes in Appalachia, where land and property taxes are cheap, and they can be surrounded by the beauty of the mountains. Cameron McWhirter explains this accelerating phenomenon in The Wall Street Journal, writing: The halfback phenomenon—so … [Read more...]

According to the National Right to Work Committee, unions' ability to elect their own bosses leaves states open to political capture. Union bosses amass huge campaign warchests which they use to fund sympathetic candidates. In fact, "in the nearly two dozen states where government-sector forced union dues and fees are still authorized and promoted, union chiefs funnel a large portion of the conscripted money they collect from civil servants into efforts to influence the outcomes of state and local elections." Strong Right to Work laws protect workers from being forced to unionize, and also … [Read more...]

President Trump, at a recent rally in Montana, was on his “A” game. At one point, he referred to the phrase “thousand points of light” wondering out loud what the heck that meant. And then he said: “Make America Great Again”. People know what that means. It’s simple. Because deep down in their gut Americans know that our greatness has been wasted on foreign endeavors by the former and current elites of the old GOP. As Pat Buchanan points out in The American Conservative: With never-Trump conservatives bailing on the GOP and crying out for the Party of Pelosi to save us, some painful truths … [Read more...]