Document oejb94XzK0QE8y9YROJ1N8DOo

Message From: Sent: To: Subject: Americans for Limited Government [media@limitgov.org] 3/30/2018 1:17:40 PM Abboud, Michael [/o=ExchangeLabs/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Recipients/cn=b6f5af791al842fladcc088cbf9ed3ce-Abboud, Mic] Time for President Trump to reevaluate India, Brazil inclusion in General System of Preferences Why are two of the larger economies in the world receiving duty-free trade preferences supposed to be for "the world's poorest countries"? March 30, 2018 Permission to republish original op-eds and cartoons granted. Time for President Trump to reevaluate India, Brazil inclusion in General System of Preferences This past week, Congress tucked a renewal of the $21 billion a year General System of Preferences. The program "providefs] opportunities for many of the world's poorest countries to use trade to grow their economies..." according to the U.S. Trade Representative. In 2017, the top recipient was the seventh largest economy in the world, India, at $5.6 billion. The third top recipient was eight largest economy, Brazil, at $2.5 billion. Why are two of the larger economies in the world receiving duty-free trade preferences supposed to be for "the world's poorest countries"? We Pause to Remark Back during the days of the Red Menace when the left was defending Julius and Ethel Rosenberg plus Alger Hiss, those of us who believed the Soviet Union was a threat were labeled right wing extremists who saw Russians under every bed. Liberals now sound more extreme than any member of the John Birch Society ever did. They see Russians under every napkin. Powerline: Congress has defunded AFFH "The omnibus bill Congress passed, and President Trump signed last week is a disaster. However, one positive thing to come out of it, in addition of course to the increase in military spending, was the defunding of President Obama's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation (AFFH). This is a move we've been advocating for some time. Finally, the Republican Congress pulled the trigger. " George Parry: Mr. Mueller, was the PNC Server Actually Hacked by the Russians? "[I]n their coverage, the mainstream media have downplayed the very odd behavior of the DNC, the putative target of the alleged hack. For, when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI learned of the hacking claim, they asked to examine the server. And the DNC refused. Why would the Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00003595-00001 purported victim of a crime refuse to cooperate with law enforcement in solving that crime? Is it hiding. " Time for President Trump to reevaluate India, Brazii inclusion in General System of Preferences Sre*j ntmkmsK.gav. By Robert Romano The past month has seen President Donald Trump significantly toughening up the U.S. stance on trade, enacting a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent on aluminum and then $60 billion worth of tariffs against China for intellectual property theft and steel dumping. The month was capped off by an announcement that South Korea had agreed to concessions reducing exports of steel to the U.S. and an increase in U.S.-made automobile imports. Just this past week, Congress tucked a renewal of the $21 billion a year General System of Preferences. The program "provide[s] opportunities for many of the world's poorest countries to use trade to grow their economies..." according to the U.S. Trade Representative website. Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00003595-00002 It does so by giving participating, poor countries a certain amount of duty-free imports to the U S. Here's the problem. In 2017, the top recipient was the seventh largest economy in the world, India, at $5.6 billion. The third top recipient was eight largest economy, Brazil, at $2.5 billion. If these are two of the larger economies in the world, why do they still qualify for the General System of Preferences as being exclusive for the "world's poorest countries"? The answer is they really shouldn't. And President Trump does not have to continue it. 19 U.S.C. Section 2462(d)(1) provides that "The President may withdraw, suspend, or limit the application of the duty-free treatment accorded under this subchapter with respect to any country." In other words, the President has significant leverage with respect to the General System of Preferences, leading one group to call for a rvaluation of the U S. trade relationship with India: "GSP renewal will help empower the US Trade Representative (USTR) and other US negotiators as they sit down with India's representatives at upcoming commercial discussions," the Alliance for Fair Trade with India said. The same could be said for Brazil. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered the opening speech the World Economic Summit at Davos this year, blasting Trump as he warned, "forces of protectionism are raising their heads." It was the height of hypocrisy. An Americans for Limited Government Foundation report by Assistant Professor of Finance at the College of Business Administration, University of Texas at El Paso Alex Holcomb recently blasted the "Make in India" program as doing nothing alleviate India's trade barriers: "India [is] imposing price controls, demanding technological transfers, and instituting other manifestations of non-tariff barriers once investments are undertaken. The campaign therefore often amounts to little more than regulatory entrapment." In addition, India charges 13.4 percent tariffs on a most favored nation basis, and Brazil charges 13.6 percent. The U S. charges 3.7 percent in comparison. That's not reciprocity. Which is precisely the type of global trade imbalance that President Trump promised to address when he won the election in 2016. Instead of trade preferences, Trump should seek to establish bilateral trade relations with both of these economies. Only then can the goal of fair and reciprocal trade be achieved. Right now, the U S. is giving India and Brazil, two of the larger economies in the world, duty-free treatment and the U S. is getting nothing in return. President Trump should change that. Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government. Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00003595-00003 By Don Todd Whites in general and white males in particular are under attack in our society. We are told by the left that they have too much influence, too much money and that they distort our culture. Ironically these same charges were made against the Jews in Socialist Germany during the nineteen thirties. Mueller marches on. Next he will be indicting Snuffy Smith who parked cars for Trump campaign staffers. The charges will be overdue library books from 2012 and leaving a toilet seat up in 2010 and then lying about it to an FBI agent in 2018. The lesson from the Mueller investigation is never talk to the FBI. Do not give them the time of day. If you do and you are one minute off they will charge you with lying to them and you will have to mortgage your house to pay legal fees for your defense. Back during the days of the Red Menace when the left was defending Julius and Ethel Rosenberg plus Alger Hiss, those of us who believed the Soviet Union was a threat were labeled right wing extremists who saw Russians under every bed. Liberals now sound more extreme than any member of the John Birch Society ever did. They see Russians under every napkin. When Susan Rice sent herself a memo memorializing a meeting she had with Obama where he told to do things, "by the book," she forgot to mention that the book he was referring to was Marxist Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. The nation is justifiably upset of the senseless deaths of seventeen high school students in Florida. In the meantime 2500 children are murdered every day in the country's abortion slaughter houses and the nation goes ho-hum. There was a time when broadcasters would not run advertisements for Preparation H because they felt it was too personal a product. Now you have five years olds asking their mothers, "Mommy what is erectile dysfunction?" When the film, Gone With The Wind, was first exhibited the audience would gasp when Clark Gable said, "Frankly my dear I don't give a damn." This was because they had never hear anyone swear in a movie before. An indication of the coarsening of our culture. Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00003595-00004 Stormy Daniels, an aging floozy who had sex with strangers on video if the price was right is challenging the moral integrity of our President. The reaction of the MSM and the Never Trumpers is, "This paragon must be listened to." The left has always been good at astro-turfing so it is no surprise that they were able to turn out thousands of snot nosed kids to tell us they were too emotionally immature and unstable to buy a gun but were just the people to set gun policy. The same group of teens attacking Second Amendment rights are the ones who often wear tee shirts sympathetic to and bearing the image of psychopathic serial killer Che Guevara. The MSM lives by a simple rule, Democrats good, Republican and Trump bad. The Democrats live in a world in which they can do no wrong which is causing them to live in a false world. They have been led to believe that, "We are going to take your guns and raise your taxes," is a winning platform. The Republicans and Trump on the other hand can do whatever they wish knowing that they will be denounced regardless. Don Todd is the President of Americans for Limited Government Foundation. i ALG m ih it iiew s... 4 j M 0T OFF THE PRESS | ALG Editor's Note: In the following article from Powerline, Vice President of Policy at Americans for Limited Government Robert Romano makes the case for Department of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson to rescind the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation after Congress defunded it from being used to make changes to local zoning ordinances: Congress has defunded AFFH By Paul Mirengoff The omnibus bill Congress passed, and President Trump signed last week is a disaster. However, one positive thing to come out of it, in addition of course to the increase in military spending, was the defunding of President Obama's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation (AFFH). This is a move we've been advocating for some time. Finally, the Republican Congress pulled the trigger. AFFH enables the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to order more than 1,200 cities and counties that accepted any part of annual community development block grants to rezone neighborhoods along income and racial criteria. I have written frequently about this rule -- e.g., here and here. The omnibus provides: None of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to direct a grantee to undertake specific changes to existing zoning laws as part of carrying out the final rule entitled Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing' ...or the notice entitled Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Assessment Tool'. . . Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00003595-00005 There's somewhat less to this than meets the eye. HUD Secretary Ben Carson has already delayed AFFH until 2020. So even without the omnibus, HUD would not be using funds to promote AFFH this year or next. But as long as the regulation remains on the books, it might spring back into play after 2020. Here's what really needs to happen: Ben Carson needs to rescind AFFH. He has been reluctant to do so. Now that Congress has defunded the program, maybe he will take his cue and kill this federal hijacking of local governments. Robert Romano of Americans for Limited Government argues that the AFFH defund facilitates this move. He explains: Without Congress acting, simply rescinding this regulation would have been far riskier for Carson and Trump, In 1983, the Supreme Court decided [in] Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association v. State Farm Mutual that [when] rescinding any regulation issued, an agency is obligated to supply a reasoned analysis "for the change beyond that which may be required when an agency does not act in the first instance. " The outcome was that it is much more difficult to rescind an existing regulation than it is to either modify it or never have issued it in the first place, leaving every single regulatory rescission subject to judicial review. Ultimately, the rescinding agency has to argue not only that rescinding the regulation in question is rational based on the statutory scheme, but prove that enacting it was irrational to begin with. Carson and Trump will now have no problems on that count if they choose to rescind or roll back most of the HUD zoning regulation. The regulation, which absolutely affects zoning, no longer rationally rests within the statutory scheme. It's now illegal to spend money on implementing it as it was written. Click here for the full story. ALG Editor's Note: In the following special report from The American Spectator, George Parry investigates the DNC server hack and the questions that still exist on whether the Russians hacked it or not: ,\( ) THE AMERICAN ' "W SPEC TATO R Mr. Mueller; Was the DNC Server Actually Hacked by the Russians? By George Parry According to NBC News, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team recently began asking witnesses "pointed questions" about whether Donald Trump was aware that the Democratic National Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00003595-00006 Committee's emails had been stolen before that was publicly known, and whether he was involved in their "strategic release" during the presidential campaign. NBC states that the "line of questioning suggests the special counsel, who is tasked with examining whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, is looking into possible coordination between WikiLeaks and Trump associates in disseminating the emails, which U S. intelligence officials say were stolen by Russia." Assuming NBC's report is true, then it would appear that Team Mueller has put the cart before the horse. Before chasing after Trump-Russia collusion in the hacking of the DNC's email server, they need to first establish whether a hack even happened. Consider the following: On June 15, 2016, CrowdStrike, a private computer security company working for the Democratic National Committee, announced that it had detected Russian malware on the DNC's computer server. The next day, a self-described Romanian hacker, Guccifer 2.0, claimed he was a WikiLeaks source and had hacked the DNC's server. He then posted online DNC computer files that contained metadata that indicated Russian involvement in the hack. On July 22, 2016, just days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published approximately 20,000 DNC emails. Much to the embarrassment of Hillary Clinton, the released files showed that the DNC had secretly collaborated with her campaign to promote her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination over that of Bernie Sanders. This caused the Clinton campaign serious political damage at the Democratic convention. Well after the convention, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton's public relations chief, said in a March 2017 Washington Post essay that she worked assiduously during the nominating convention to "get the press to focus on... the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary." We now know that at about the same time that WikiLeaks made its announcement, the DNC and the Clinton campaign were funding efforts by Fusion GPS and its hireling, former British spy Christopher Steele, to dredge up anti-Trump dirt purportedly from Russian sources. Ultimately Steele produced a dossier which former FBI Director James Comey has publicly characterized as "salacious" and "unverified." Nevertheless, for reasons yet to be disclosed, Comey's FBI saw fit to use that same dossier as a basis for obtaining a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign and administration in its quest to uncover Russian ties to Trump. Despite these revelations, the mainstream media have stubbornly clung to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. And central to that the narrative is that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to hack the DNC email server. But, in their coverage, the mainstream media have downplayed the very odd behavior of the DNC, the putative target of the alleged hack. For, when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI learned of the hacking claim, they asked to examine the server. And the DNC refused. Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00003595-00007 Why would the purported victim of a crime refuse to cooperate with law enforcement in solving that crime? Is it hiding something? Is it afraid the server's contents will discredit the Russia-hacking story? The answers to those questions began to emerge thanks to an article in the August 8. 2017 issue of iheNation. By no means a pro-Trump publication, the Nation published an exhaustive report about an exacting forensic investigation of the DNC hack by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), an organization of former CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and military intelligence officers, technical experts, and analysts. As reported by the Nation, VIPS has a well-established record of debunking questionable intelligence assessments that have been slanted to serve political purposes. For example, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, VIPS courageously and correctly challenged the accuracy and veracity of the CIA's intelligence estimates that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that he posed a threat to the United States. Similarly, VIPS has condemned the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on suspected terrorists. In short, VIPS can hardly be described as either a right-wing cabal or as carrying water for the Republican Party. In its analysis of the purported DNC hack, VIPS brought to bear the impressive talents of more than a dozen experienced, well-credentialed experts, including William Binney, a former NSA technical director and cofounder of the NSA's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, former NSA technical director for the Office of Signals Processing; and Skip Folden, a former IBM information technology manager. As the French would say, these are I'hommes serieux, as are the other computer-system designers, program architects, and analysts with whom they investigated the Clinton-DNC hack story. As set forth in the article, VIPS' investigative findings were nothing short of stunning. First, VIPS concluded that the DNC data were not hacked by the Russians or anyone else accessing the server over the internet. Instead, the data were downloaded by means of a thumb drive or similar portable storage device physically attached to the DNC server. How was this determined? The time stamps contained in the released computer files' metadata establish that, at 6:45 p.m. July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes (not megabits) of data were downloaded from the DNC's server. This took 87 seconds, which means the transfer rate was 22.7 megabytes per second, a speed, according to VIPS, that "is much faster than what is physically possible with a hack." Such a speed could be accomplished only by direct connection of a portable storage device to the server. Accordingly, VIPS concluded that the DNC data theft was an inside job by someone with physical access to the server. Click here for the full story. Americansfor Limited Government 10332 Main Street # 326None Fairfax Virginia 22030 United States Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00003595-00008 This email is intended for abboud.michael@epa.gov. Update your preferences or Unsubscribe Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00003595-00009