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Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS By Rick Jensen Obamahasfailedtohelpde- feat islamists in Syria, leading to the growth of The Islamic State (The Radical Islamist Murderers Formerly Known as ISIS) and fails to define a for- eign policy for the U.S. This according to Hillary Clinton, who spoke to well- known foreign affairs reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in the liberal publication The Atlantic. The "new" Hillary flexes her biceps over Iran, saying she was always against Iran having nuclear enrichment (except for when she wasn't) and staunchly defends Israel as no liberal Democrat ever defends Israel, saying, "Israel has a right to defend itself. The steps Hamas has taken to embed rockets and command-and-control fa- cilities and tunnel entrances in civilian areas, this makes a re- sponse by Israel difficult." "Just as we try to do in the United States and be as care- ful as possible in going af- ter targets to avoid civilians, [mistakes are made]", she told Goldberg, who asked if she be- lieved that Israel had done enough to prevent the deaths of children and other innocent people. "We've made them. I don't know a nation, no matter what its values are—and I think that democratic nations have de- monstrably better values in a conflict position—that hasn't made errors, but ultimately the responsibility rests with Hamas." So when did Hillary leave the Democratic Party and become a conservative Republican? More importantly, who is she talking to? Like her husband Bill and her former boss Barack, Hill- ary considers the politics and counts the votes before speak- ing in a controlled public set- ting. That's why this American- centric conservative foreign policy stance is so interesting. The liberal reaction is ex- pected. The influential leftwing or- ganization MoveOn immedi- ately issued a fatwa against any Democrat criticizing Obama and taking a strong policy stance against Iran or enter- taining "policies advocated by right-wing war hawks." Well, she did just that, espe- cially regarding Israel. Her positioning statements are interesting because they presume she will not have a strong far left-wing primary op- ponent more appealing to the liberal base. She certainly isn't trying to appeal to Republicans, is she? The GOP has an elephantine memory of her own crimes dur- ing her husband's presidency including illegal possession of hundreds of her "enemies'" FBI files, campaign financing schemes that put her bundlers in jail, etc. as well as Benghazi. Will a muscular approach to foreign affairs maintain her popularity with women when a liberal contender promising to keep their sons and daugh- ters home away from battles comes forward? That is, after all, the liberal base that voted so enthusiastically for the man she is trying so hard to remove from her political universe. President Obama has simpli- fied his approach to foreign pol- icy as "Don't say stupid (stuff)." He doesn't really use the word, "stuff." We will, though. Hillary takes aim at Obama's lack of any foreign policy, saying, "Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle." How can Democratic pri- mary voters who want the troops home at any price and close Guantanamo pull the le- ver for a woman who says, "The failure to help build up a credi- ble fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were sec- ularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled."? My God, that's what conser- vatives and Tea Party Ameri- cans predicted! How Sarah Palin of her! Hillary talks a good game but remember she was the one who did stupid stuff including tak- ing the embarrassingly ill-fated "Reset" button to Minister Ser- gei Lavrov only to discover it read "Overcharge" in Russian. She's also the giddy Secretary of State who foolishly tried to en- gage her Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki, in a park- ing lot with no preconditions. Can "Hillary the Hawk" win primary votes? She's counting on women voting for her because she's a woman and presuming her more liberal opponent to be a much weaker candidate than Obama was in 2008. Column Whois Hillary talking to? By Phil Kerpen Since 1998 it has been prohib- ited by federal law for states and localities to tax Internet access. This policy, known as the Inter- net Tax Freedom Act, has been extended three times with broad bipartisan support. But it is set to expire again on November 1, and some Senate Democrats ap- pear willing, this time, to allow it to actually expire if they can't use it to leverage an unrelated tax issue. It's a dangerous game that could cost taxpayers bil- lions of dollars and worsen the digital divide by pricing some lower income Americans off of the Internet entirely. The House, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, passed a bill last month to make the ban on Internet access taxes per- manent. It was a voice vote — meaning not a single member objected. "The permanent In- ternet Tax Freedom Act merely prevents Internet access taxes and unfair multiple and dis- criminatory taxes on e-com- merce," Goodlatte explained on the House floor. "It does not tackle the issue of Internet sales taxes." And that, for many senators, is the problem. The Senate has already passed a highly contro- versial bill authorizing states to collect sales taxes on out-of- state purchases called the Mar- ketplace Fairness Act. But that bill — which is popular with re- tailers but not with most con- sumers, for obvious reasons — has not moved in the House. Before the Senate left for its August recess, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas made a motion for the Senate to, like the House, unani- mously pass a permanent exten- sion of the ban on Internet access taxes. "One of the reasons the In- ternet has been such an entrepre- neurial haven is that Congress has wisely decided to keep it free from taxation, not to subject the Internet to taxation," Cruz said. Unlike the House, however, his request was met not just with an objection but a rather emphatic one, voiced by Democratic Sena- tor Heidi Heitkamp of North Da- kota, likely on behalf of Senate Democratic leaders. Heitkamp began with con- cerns that the bipartisan, 18- year policy of banning Inter- net access taxes potentially in- fringed the "sovereign right of States and local governments under the 10th Amendment," an unusual concern from a liberal Democrat who supports national labor, environmental, and health care laws. (It also implies a mis- understanding of the purpose of the commerce clause, which as Cato scholar Roger Pilon often points out was intended to em- power Congress to regulate or "make regular" interstate com- merce by striking down barri- ers. Like Internet access taxes.) Then she got to her real point: holding the successful, wildly popular ban on Internet access taxes hostage to their desire to force the House to authorize In- ternet sales taxes. "I believe we too need to ad- dress the Internet tax morato- rium which expires on November 1," Heitkamp said. "But... we also need to have a discussion in this context of commerce clause re- sponsibility, to give the States the right to decide whether they are, in fact, going to collect State and local taxes and use taxes." (Use tax is the term for a tax owed on out-of-state purchases for which sales tax is not collected.) While the ban on Internet ac- cess taxes enjoys nearly univer- sal support, the idea of facilitat- ing Internet sales tax is widely opposed by the public and is highly controversial in Congress. It is unlikely that issue will be resolved before the November 1 deadline, and therefore bringing it into the discussion is a dan- gerous game that risks allowing the ban on access taxes to expire. That would be a disaster. The liberal Center of Bud- get and Policy Priorities has es- timated the impact of allowing states and localities to tax Inter- net access as a $7 billion tax hike, assuming states and localities tax Internet access like other services. But Katie McAuliffe of Ameri- cans for Tax Reform warns that the tax bite could be much big- ger: "The average sales tax rate on voice services is 17 percent, and 12 percent on video services, while the average general sales tax rate is 7 percent." Higher bills mean many Amer- icans, including children, could lose access to the Internet en- tirely. The Internet Tax Freedom Act has never been controversial be- fore and shouldn't be contro- versial now. Senate Democrats need to stop playing games and approve the House bill imme- diately when they return from their summer vacation. Column A big new tax coming to your Internet bill Another view By Jason Stanford Men might be from Mars and women from Venus, but at least we're in the same solar system. When it comes to poli- tics, liberals and conservatives can't agree on what the prob- lems are much less solutions. We can blame the politicians for not making progress on the big issues of our time, but un- til Americans share a common truth about what those issues are we won't move an inch. An AP poll found that 74 per- cent of Americans had no con- fidence in the federal govern- ment's ability to tackle our big- gest problems, but the fault lies not with the politicians but the idiots who elect them. We have met the enemy, and boy howdy is he us. Take global warming. Liber- als—and virtually the entire sci- entific community—agree that human activity is changing the climate in dangerous ways. Conservatives, such as Louisi- ana state Rep. Lenar Whitney, claim that it is "greatest decep- tion in the history of mankind." This isn't a fight over where to set the thermostat. This is a fight over whether there is a thermostat. Conservatives believed gov- ernment spending was holding our economy back. Others, such as liberal economist Paul Krug- man, argued that we needed a bigger stimulus to replace the hole left by a cautious and wounded private sector. Krug- man has a Nobel Prize in eco- nomic, and conservatives had talking points, but who are you going to believe? Liberals see the border chil- dren as refugees fleeing violent drug gangs in Central Amer- ica. Conservatives see criminals spreading exotic diseases. Con- servatives want to send the Na- tional Guard, liberals the Red Cross. Conservatives think im- peaching the President is a per- fectly reasonable response to Bill Clinton lying about be- ing unfaithful to Hillary. They think impeaching Barack Obama is logical because, in the words of former Gov. Mike Huckabee, "there's no doubt he's done plenty of things wor- thy of impeachment." Liberals think impeachment should be reserved for "high crimes and misdemeanors," that is, violating the oath of of- fice. The list goes on, but I can't. It's too depressing. The impasse seems unmovable. Progress looks impossible when we're seeing the world so differently. There are bad marriages with better prospects for suc- cess and healing than Con- gress, but politicians aren't the problem, just the symptom. It's our fault. We're the rocket sci- entists who put them there in the first place. Republicans and Democrats can't start working together in Washington until we—you, me, your neighbor with the yappy dog, your kid's teacher—have a shared understanding of where we are as a country. We need to agree on the same truth—global warming is real, for example, and it's our fault—before we can compromise on a solution. A future based on coopera- tion and mutual understand- ing is much too sincere, wise, and smart to be my idea, but I did read it in a book. My friend Chris Tomlinson wrote "Tomlinson Hill," a history of his slave-holding Texas family and their former slaves who took the Tomlinson name af- ter emancipation. He wrote this book after covering the election of Nelson Mandela as a journalist for the Asso- ciated Press and witnessing South Africa's peaceful transi- tion from Apartheid to a black majority. "It was inspiring to me to be in South Africa after the elec- tion and to see that reckoning. Bishop Desmond Tutu estab- lished the Truth and Reconcil- iation Commission and at the time, his argument was that before there can be reconcilia- tion, you have to have a shar- ing of the truth and it has to be a common truth. One com- munity can't have one idea of what happened and the other community ... a different idea. If you want them to recon- cile, they have to agree about what happened. And that re- quires — for lack of a better word — confession and contri- tion," Tomlinson said on NPR's "Fresh Air." It's humbling to know that the United States needs to take a page from South Africa if we want to make our democracy work again, but Tutu is right: The truth must come before reconciliation. If we want rel- ative peace and real progress in Washington, we need to all agree—even if we don't like it— on an evidence-based version of reality. If we do that, we shall overcome. US needs truth and reconciliation Cartoonist's take OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Saturday, August 16, 2014 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A4