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Mandatory ‘In God We Trust’ Signs Greet Florida Students at Start of School Year

If they haven’t already, students in Florida are heading back to school soon. When they do, they might notice something a little bit different.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a law in March that requires all public schools to feature signage with the words “In God We Trust,” which is the state’s official motto. The “In God We Trust” measure was part of a larger 207-page education bill, which first passed both houses of the state legislature.

“Each district school board shall adopt rules to require, in all of the schools of the district and in each building used by the district school board, the display of the state motto, ‘In God We Trust,’ the relevant portion of the bill reads, adding that the motto must be displayed in “a conspicuous place.”

State Rep. Kimberly Daniels (D–14), who leads a Christian ministry, introduced the measure, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “This motto is inscribed on the halls of this great capitol and inked on our currency, and it should be displayed so that our children will be exposed and educated on this great motto, which is a part of this country’s foundation,” she said when a House committee took up her measure. “Something so great should not be hidden.”

Florida’s Department of State says that “In God We Trust” has been the state’s motto since 2006. That means it’s already on the state seal, which is imprinted on Florida’s flag. But having a state flag on campus might not be enough. State Rep. Mel Ponder (D–4), who cosponsored the measure, said the motto on the flag may not be clearly visible, depending on how the flag is positioned.

In the lead-up to the new academic year, school superintendents were distributing the required signage to the schools in their districts. As the Northwest Florida Daily News notes, there are about 4,000 public schools in the state.

But some parents aren’t huge fans of the new requirement. “Spending time on this is ridiculous,” Leon High School parent Beth Overholt told WTXL earlier this month. “The flag is up at every single school. That’s all, we can just put it up, it’s on the flag, let’s move on.” Sue Woltanski of Monroe County, who is part of the education advocacy organization Common Ground, agrees. Measures like these “fail to address real issues in education and waste taxpayers’ dollars and time,” she told the Sentinel in March.

Though some argue that requiring schools to display “In God We Trust” violates the separation of church and state, the courts have disagreed. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in 1970:

It is quite obvious that the national motto and the slogan on coinage and currency “In God We Trust” has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion. Its use is of a patriotic or ceremonial character and bears no true resemblance to a governmental sponsorship of a religious exercise.

And just this past May, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled that putting the motto on currency does not amount to a religious endorsement.

Florida isn’t the only state to require that “In God We Trust” be displayed in every public school. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) approved a similar measure in March. And some public school officials in Alabama are pushing for the motto to be displayed on campuses there as well.

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Ben Carson Calls Out Zoning Regulations for Driving Up Housing Costs

Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), wants to pare back Obama-era housing regulations that he says do not do enough to address the real driver of housing costs: zoning regulations.

On Monday, Carson announced that he was looking to revise the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which sought to combat housing segregation by requiring local governments to perform extensive (and expensive) reviews on how concentrated their neighborhoods were along class and racial lines, and then to develop action plans to create more “balanced and integrated living patterns.” Local governments that failed to fulfill either requirement would be cut off from a number of federal housing grant programs.

Carson said on Monday that he wants to replace the 2015 AFFH with new rules that focus on increasing the overall supply of housing.

“I want to encourage the development of mixed-income multifamily dwellings all over the place,” Carson told The Wall Street Journal, saying, “I would incentivize people who really would like to get a nice juicy government grant” to reform their zoning codes.

According to the Journal, Carson specifically called out Los Angeles for its strict single-family zoning rules that limit the number of housing units that can be built in the city. “Of course you’re going to have skyrocketing prices that no one can afford,” he said.

That Carson would want to reform the AFFH rule is not terribly surprising, given that he has been a critic of it long before he was appointed HUD secretary. As far back as 2015, Carson criticized the AFFH rule as an example of “social engineering” and “failed socialism.” As HUD secretary, he has already taken steps to weaken it, such as pushing back compliance deadlines for local governments until 2020.

What is surprising, however, is Carson’s suggestion that the AFFH be retooled to tie HUD grants to localities loosening their zoning regulations.

This is a complete 180 from Carson’s 2015 criticism of the AFFH rule, in which the then-presidential candidate fretted that the Obama administration’s focus on housing desegregation would do too much to undo local zoning laws.

“The [AFFH] rule would fundamentally change the nature of some communities from primarily single-family to largely apartment-based areas by encouraging municipalities to strike down housing ordinances that have no overtly (or even intended) discriminatory purpose—including race-neutral zoning restrictions on lot sizes and limits on multi-unit dwellings,” wrote Carson in a 2015 Washington Times op-ed.

Carson’s change of heart has raised eyebrows and even caused some commenters to question the sincerity of his new talk about tackling restrictive zoning rules.

Nevertheless, the shift in thinking at HUD—even if it is just a rhetorical shift at the moment—is still cause for cautious optimism, says Vanessa Brown Calder, a housing policy expert at the Cato Institute.

“I do think that shift in attitude at HUD is huge, and I hope that it translates into educating local municipalities that these things are related, zoning restrictions and housing affordability,” says Calder. “It does sound like there is going to be some attempt made to connect HUD subsidies to relaxing or reforming zoning regulations, so that I think that could be really important.”

That this might come in conjunction with a paring back of the Obama-era AFFH rule is heartening as well, says Calder, given both the costs and shaky legal foundations of the 2015 regulation.

The original AFFH, she notes, cost cities some $55 million in compliance costs. Indeed, these costs were burdensome enough that many localities decided it would be cheaper to just not comply with the rule and forfeit HUD funding.

The legal basis for the 2015 AFFH rule—which is based on the 1968 Fair Housing Act—is also pretty thin, says Calder. The 1968 law, she notes, is focused on eliminating racial discrimination by landlords, not on creating a delicate racial and income balance across whole cities, as is called for in the Obama administration’s 2015 rule

“Zero times in the Fair Housing Act do they talk about segregation. That seems kind of damning considering that’s what [the AFFH rule] is all about,” Calder tells Reason.

Carson has so far avoided calling for an end to the AFFH rule altogether, instead suggesting that it be revised so as to reduce the overall regulatory burden on local governments. That approach is in line with many of the Trump administration’s other deregulatory actions, which emphasize reducing and streamlining federal regulatory burdens, rather than eliminating rules in their entirety.

Nevertheless, any reduction in the regulatory state is welcome, as is anything that draws attention to restrictive zoning laws that have reduced supply and raised prices in cities across America.

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Venezuelan Pirates Spread Fear Across The Caribbean

Authored by Joseph Lafave via The Daily Caller,

Vessels sailing in the vicinity of Trinidad and Tobago are now under threat of being the victims of piracy for the first since the 1700s. According to a report from the Washington Post, in the wake of Venezuela’s economic and societal collapse, criminals desperate to earn a living have taken up the centuries-old crime and are attacking yachts and fishing vessels along the coast of South America.

Jeremy McDermott of Insight Crime, a nonprofit that studies organized crime in the region told the Washington Post that “It’s criminal chaos, a free-for-all, along the Venezuelan coast.”

Although there hasn’t been much research into piracy in the Caribbean, one study from the nonprofit group Oceans Beyond Piracy found that pirate attacks in the region rose by 163 percent between 2016 and 2017. Some experts fear that pirate activity and other crimes in the Caribbean Sea will increase as conditions in the socialist country continue to deteriorate.

“This reminds me of how the problems started off the coast of eastern Africa,” said Roodal Moonilal, a politician from Trinidad and Tobago while speaking to the Washington Post. “What we’re seeing – the piracy, the smuggling – it’s the result of Venezuela’s political and economic collapse.”

While the region has seen traffickers use ports in Trinidad to move drugs from Colombia and Venezuela to North America in the past, the new pirates are ratcheting up the violence to levels that haven’t been seen by mariners in the region since the time of Blackbeard.

One witness recounted his experience of being attacked by the pirates to reporters and stated that they were “doused with hot oil, hacked with machetes and thrown overboard, then their boats were stolen.”

Although Venezuela has a coast guard, one anonymous Venezuelan port official told the Washington Post that ” Venezuelan coast guard officers have been boarding anchored vessels and demanding money and food,” leaving merchant ships and fishing vessels no choice but to anchor further away from the coast.

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Strzok GoFundMe Raises $250,000 Within Hours

A GoFundMe launched by the “Friends Of Special Agent Peter Strzok” has raised over $250,000 from over 6,000 people in less than 24 hours, after the fired FBI agent tweeted a link to the campaign yesterday. The campaign, which originally sought to raise $150,000 has now raised its goal to $350,000 – and at this rate, it won’t take long to get there. 

Strzok was fired after anti-Trump text messages between he and his FBI mistress, Lisa Page, were discovered by the DOJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz. While Page left the agency in May, Strzok was demoted to the HR department, where he collected a paycheck until last Friday. 

“Peter Strzok is a proud husband and father, a veteran of the U.S. Army and counterintelligence Special Agent,” reads the GoFundMe page – which managed, in less than a day, to raise the same $250,000 his wife Melissa Hodgman makes in an entire year at the SEC!

“Unlike those who typically become the focus of partisan investigations in Washington, Pete is not politically connected, he’s not a wealthy lobbyist and he’s not interested in using his notoriety for personal gain,” the campaign continues. “Because of this, he doesn’t have deep pockets that allow him to pay for the significant legal bills he has incurred to defend himself and the FBI against these political attacks, or to easily cover the expenses incurred by his lost income.”

After Strzok’s firing was announced, President Trump fired off two tweets, stating “The list of bad players in the FBI & DOJ gets longer & longer. Based on the fact that Strzok was in charge of the Witch Hunt, will it be dropped? It is a total Hoax. No Collusion, No Obstruction – I just fight back!” 

Followed by: “Just fired Agent Strzok, formerly of the FBI, was in charge of the Crooked Hillary Clinton sham investigation. It was a total fraud on the American public and should be properly redone!”

Strzok’s attorney, Aitan Goelman, issued the following statement which reads in part:

Late Friday afternoon, the Deputy Director of the FBI overruled the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and departed from established precedent by firing 21-year FBI veteran Peter Strzok.

…

This decision should be deeply troubling to all Americans. A lengthy investigaiton and multiple rounds of Congressional testimony failed to produce a shred of evidence that Special Agent Strzok’s personal views ever affected his work.” 

And while Democrat Rep Steve Cohen (D-TN) can’t give Strzok a purple heart, perhaps he’s donated to the former FBI agent’s defense fund. 

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Cooperate Or Die: In Private Meeting, Top Facebook Exec Threatened News Outlets

Authored by Jake Johnson via Common Dreams,

During a closed-door and off-the-record meeting last week, top Facebook executive Campbell Brown reportedly warned news publishers that refusal to cooperate with the tech behemoth’s efforts to “revitalize journalism” will leave media outlets dying “like in a hospice.”

Reported first by The Australian under a headline which read “Work With Facebook or Die: Zuckerberg,” the social media giant has insisted the comments were taken out of context, even as five individuals who attended the four-hour meeting corroborated what Brown had stated.

“Mark doesn’t care about publishers but is giving me a lot of leeway and concessions to make these changes,” Brown reportedly said, referring to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “We will help you revitalize journalism… in a few years the reverse looks like I’ll be holding hands with your dying business like in a hospice.”

As The Guardian reported on Monday, Facebook is “vehemently” denying the veracity of the comments as reported by The Australian, referring to its own transcript of the meeting. However, Facebook is refusing to release its transcript and tape of the gathering.

Brown’s warning about the dire prospects for news outlets that don’t get on board with a future in which corporate giants like Facebook are the arbiters of what is and isn’t trustworthy news comes as progressives are raising alarm that Facebook’s entrance into the world of journalism poses a major threat to non-corporate and left-wing news outlets.

As Common Dreams reported in July, progressives’ fears were partly confirmed after Facebook unveiled its first slate of news “segments” as part of its Facebook Watch initiative.

While Facebook claims its initiative is part of an effort to combat “misinformation,” its first series of segments were dominated by such corporate outlets as Fox News and CNN.

Reacting to Brown’s reported assertion that Zuckerberg “doesn’t care about publishers,” Judd Legum, who writes the Popular Information newsletter,  argued, “Anyone who does care about news needs to understand Facebook as a fundamental threat.”

“In addition to disputed quote, there are also Facebook’s actions, which are fully consistent with the quote,” Legum added.

“We desperately need to develop alternative delivery mechanisms to Facebook.”

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Tesla Model 3 Bumper Falls Off After 30 Minutes And “Heavy Rain”

With Tesla scrambling to produce as many Model 3s as possible to meet Wall Street expectations, it is no surprise that the company has recently been plagued with anecdotal reports of shoddy workmanship and quality control issues. And what just happened over the weekend to the (formerly) delighted owner of a brand new Model 3 confirms many of these stories.

A person bought a Tesla Model 3, and, within the first 30 minutes of driving the car back home, the rear bumper cover falls off, Jalopnik reported. The owner, Rithesh Nair, tweeted a picture of his car, directly letting Elon Musk know about his new exposed behind: “1/2 hr, bringing Model 3 home, run in to heavy rain on the streets & bumper comes off.“

While it was not immediately clear if there were any “mitigating” factors to explain why the bumper fell off, Jalopnik notes the “hint” in the environmental conditions of this Model 3’s inaugural drive: heavy rain. Which led to the following snarky observation: “cars are generally pretty good at retaining their body panels in the rain, even bottom-of-the-market cars like the Mitsubishi Mirage, but it seems to be a challenge for this Model 3.”

Or perhaps it wasn’t the rain to blame, but merely crappy production quality as another Model 3 owner responded with a picture of his own car which had similarly lost its rear bumper.

Jalopnik notes that according to speculation of other tweeters, the issue seems to be related to a bit of cloth-like shielding under the car, which would deflect water and debris around and below the bumper.

If this bit of shielding gets torn or loose, water can be forced into the bumper cover, which would act like a big water catch-basin, eventually being pulled off its mounts from the weight and/or pressure of the water being directed up inside the bumper cover.

Still, while Tesla fanboys may be quick to explain away any defect, the fact that this is happening at all “is pretty incredible.” And not just once on a car that has repeatedly gotten the highest marks from “independent” industry observers.

Keeping your bumper cover on in pretty much all weather is a very, very solved problem in the automotive industry.

In response to the article, Tesla – which these days is busier coming up with LBO narratives than making sure its “factory gated” cars are usable in the real world – made the following statement:

We’re setting an extremely high bar for Model 3, and what happened in this situation is not how we build our cars. We’re investigating the issue to understand what caused it, and we are contacting our customers to resolve this and ensure they are satisfied.

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Press Goes Wild Over President ‘Snubbing’ John McCain But Barely Blinks Over $82 Billion Boost to War Spending: Reason Roundup

On Monday, President Trump signed over another $82 billion in spending for the U.S. military. This money comes in addition to the Pentagon’s existing budget, mind you, bringing the Pentagon’s total annual budget up to $717 billion. As Eric Boehm noted in this space yesterday, it’s “a spending increase that dwarfs the entire military budgets of most other nations on Earth. Russia, for example, will spend an estimated $61 billion on its military this year. Total.”

Why do we need this? And where will the money go? Those are two questions the chattering classes haven’t had much interest in tackling since yesterday, as the drama between Trump and fellow reality-star-turned-White-House-worker Omarosa Manigault-Newman has commanded attention. And what interest the military budget boost has commanded has largely centered on the fact that Trump didn’t thank Sen. John McCain while signing the bill into law.

Because the Arizona Republican’s love for warmongering is so renowned, Congress named this particular spending increase the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act. But ever the petty bastard, Trump omitted McCain’s name from the bill’s title at yesterday’s signing spectacle. And people. Are. Aghast.

In an especially sad sign of establisment fealty, even some journalists have been personally calling out the ommission, because we all know it’s the job of the free press to see that senators get properly thanked for spending our money to do more damage overseas. “Jake Tapper thanks McCain after Trump didn’t,” CNN titled its particularly bootlicking segment.

And here’s NBC anchor Andrea Mitchell:

Overall, the Pentagon gets to blow $700 billion in 2019. Trump called yesterday’s allowance increase “the most significant increase in our military and our war-fighters in modern history,” and added that “it was not very hard” to get Congress to pass it.

“Indeed, it was not very hard. Democrats are quick to condemn nearly everything Trump proposes and many Republicans are less than enamored with the current occupant of the White House, but partisan animosity vanishes when defense spending comes up,” points out Boehm. “The final House vote on the NDAA…was 359-54, while the final Senate roll call was 87-10, with only two Republican senators opposing the bill and three declining to cast votes.”

In a statement, McCain said he was “humbled that my colleagues in Congress chose to designate this bill in my name.”

FREE MINDS

Title IX tables turn. A Title IX inquisition at New York University has found “world-renowned female professor” Avital Ronell guilty of sexually harassing Nimrod Reitman, a male graduate student who had been in one of her classes. Ronell was suspended from teaching for one year over emails exchanged with Reitman in which she called him pet names like “my most adored one,” “Sweet cuddly Baby,” “cock-er spaniel,” and “my astounding and beautiful Nimrod,” according to a Title IX report obtained by The New York Times. Reitman also accused her of kissing and touching him, texting and emailing him frequently, and forcing him to lie in her bed when they worked.

From the evidence available, it seems Ronell’s actions go beyond the sort of linguistic mishaps, racy jokes, or uncomfortable subject matter that can run some university professors afoul of federal policies against sex-based discrimination in education. But according to the Times, NYU’s decision to dicipline Ronell has “raised a challenge for feminists” and “roiled a corner of academia.”

A letter from academics around the world testified to Ronell’s character and cast aspersions on her accuser. “We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation,” said the letter.

The fact that Reitman is a gay man and Ronell a lesbian further complicates things, and has been used as evidence that Ronell’s behavior was not sexual. But whether that’s the case or not, Title IX trials seldom dwell on the intentions of an alleged harasser. In countless cases before this one, the fact that someone perceived the actions of someone else on campus as harassing has been enough to get professors and students alike booted. If folks are upset over how this case went, they should take issue with the whole Title IX farce that’s been playing out on college campuses this decade.

FREE MARKETS

Crypto keeps falling. The cryptocurrency market has hit a new low for the year, down 70 percent from its worth near the start of 2018. “A broad selloff in digital currencies has pushed the value of the entire market below $200 billion for the first time this year,” The Wall Street Journal reports, citing a CoinMarketCap analysis. “At $191 billion on Tuesday, the total market value of cryptocurrencies world-wide is now at its lowest since November.”

The worth of cryptocurrency leader Bitcoin has fallen 5 percent recently, “dropping back below $6,000 for the first time since late June,” and almost 70 percent since the end of last year. Meanwhile,

Ether, the second biggest cryptocurrency by market value, tumbled 17% over the past 24 hours, falling below $300 for the first time since November. XRP, the currency offered by San Francisco startup Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash both dropped 15%. EOS fell 14%. All but two of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market value were in the red over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.

QUICK HITS

  • After checking to make sure there is no recorded evidence of him using racial slurs, the president wants to make it clear that he would never use racial slurs.
  • Irish police are reopening a sexual assault case brought by sex-worker rights campaigner Laura Lee, who died in February.
  • “The ‘get Trump at any cost’ legal posse has come up with a theory that puts not only the First Amendment at risk, but also the rights of voters to receive information about presidential and other political candidates,” writes Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.

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Trump Flouts the Law to Screw Law-Abiding Immigrants: New at Reason

Once upon a time six years ago Donald Trump lambasted Republican GOP presidential nominee for losing the election by his harsh talk about denying instatew tuition to Dreamers. Now he is hatching a plan to make it all but impossible for immigrants who are playing by every rule in the book to obtain green cards, citizenship or otherwise upgrade their immigration status if they or their American family are “likely” to qualify for public benefits.

But Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia notes that this is not just wrong but also wrong-headed. Trump is abusing the “public charge” law to screw immigrants. It is he who is not playing by the rules.

View this article.

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Pat Buchanan On America’s Lengthening Enemies List

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Friday, deep into the 17th year of America’s longest war, Taliban forces overran Ghazni, a provincial capital that sits on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar.

The ferocity of the Taliban offensive brought U.S. advisers along with U.S. air power, including a B-1 bomber, into the battle.

“As the casualty toll in Ghazni appeared to soar on Sunday,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “hospitals were spilling over with dead bodies, corpses lay in Ghazni’s streets, and gunfire and shelling were preventing relatives from reaching cemeteries to bury their dead.”

In Yemen Monday, a funeral was held in the town square of Saada for 40 children massacred in an air strike on a school bus by Saudis or the UAE, using U.S.-provided planes and bombs.

“A crime by America and its allies against the children of Yemen,” said a Houthi rebel leader.

Yemen is among the worst humanitarian situations in the world, and in creating that human-rights tragedy, America has played an indispensable role.

The U.S. also has 2,000 troops in Syria.

Our control, with our Kurd allies, of that quadrant of Syria east of the Euphrates is almost certain to bring us into eventual conflict with a regime and army insisting that we get out of their country.

As for our relations with Turkey, they have never been worse.

President Erdogan regards our Kurd allies in Syria as collaborators of his own Kurdish-terrorist PKK. He sees us as providing sanctuary for exile cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan says was behind the attempted coup in 2016 in which he and his family were targeted for assassination.

Last week, when the Turkish currency, the lira, went into a tailspin, President Trump piled on, ratcheting up U.S. tariffs on Turkish aluminum and steel. If the lira collapses and Turkey cannot meet its debt obligations, Erdogan will lay the blame at the feet of the Americans and Trump.

Which raises a question: How many quarrels, conflicts and wars, and with how many adversaries, can even the mighty United States sustain?

In November, the most severe of U.S. sanctions will be imposed on Iran. Among the purposes of this policy: Force as many nations as possible to boycott Iranian oil and gas, sink its economy, bring down the regime.

Iran has signaled a possible response to its oil and gas being denied access to world markets. This August, Iranian gunboats exercised in the Strait of Hormuz, backing up a regime warning that if Iranian oil cannot get out of the Gulf, the oil of Arab OPEC nations may be bottled up inside as well. Last week, Iran test-fired an anti-ship ballistic missile.

Iran has rejected Trump’s offer of unconditional face-to-face talks, unless the U.S. first lifts the sanctions imposed after withdrawing from the nuclear deal.

With no talks, a U.S. propaganda offensive underway, the Iranian rial sinking and the economy sputtering, regular demonstrations against the regime, and new sanctions scheduled for November, it is hard to see how a U.S. collision with Tehran can be avoided.

This holds true as well for Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Last week, the U.S. imposed new sanctions on Russia for its alleged role in the nerve-agent poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the British town of Salisbury.

Though the U.S. had already expelled 60 Russian diplomats for the poisoning, and Russia vehemently denies responsibility — and conclusive evidence has not been made public and the victims have not been heard from — far more severe sanctions are to be added in November.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is warning that such a U.S. move would cross a red line: “If … a ban on bank operations or currency use follows, it will amount to a declaration of economic war. … And it will warrant a response with economic means, political means and, if necessary, other means.”

That the sanctions are biting is undeniable. Like the Turkish lira and Iranian rial, the Russian ruble has been falling and the Russian people are feeling the pain.

Last week also, a U.S. Poseidon reconnaissance plane, observing China’s construction of militarized islets in the South China Sea, was told to “leave immediately and keep out.”

China claims the sea as its national territory.

And North Korea’s Kim Jong Un apparently intends to hold onto his arsenal of nuclear weapons.

“We’re waiting for the North Koreans to begin the process of denuclearization, which they committed to in Singapore and which they’ve not yet done,” John Bolton told CNN last week.

A list of America’s adversaries here would contain the Taliban, the Houthis of Yemen, Bashar Assad of Syria, Erdogan’s Turkey, Iran, North Korea, Russia and China – a pretty full plate.

Are we prepared to see these confrontations through, to assure the capitulation of our adversaries? What do we do if they continue to defy us?

And if it comes to a fight, how many allies will we have in the battles and wars that follow?

Was this the foreign policy America voted for?

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