Donald Trump is a man of the people

By Wayne Allyn Root

Every Republican presidential candidate is in Las Vegas for the CNN debate.  They all came in Monday night.  They all had events.

Sen. Ted Cruz had 50 people at the home of a friend of mine. Sen. Marco Rubio had 200 people gathered in a room. I’m sure Ohio Gov. John Kasich had his wife, mom and dad. That’s 3 ... or 4 counting himself.

Donald Trump filled a casino with working class people. They came by the thousands.  I’d guess up to 7,000 showed up to rally for Trump. I know because I was Donald’s master of ceremonies. I was the opening act for Trump.

What a crowd. Thousands and thousands of adoring fans who love Donald Trump.  The new energy of the Republican Party ... not a bunch of old, rich farts. Working class stiffs. God bless them.

This is why Trump leads Cruz 41% to 14% in the latest national poll. The GOP hates him. Big donors hate him. Establishment hates him.  Media hate him. Even Fox News Channel seems to be against him.

Trump is fuelled by working class voters who have either not voted at all in recent elections, or voted Democrat.

Trump is great news for the GOP. He is best thing to ever happen to the rudderless party.  The middle class is struggling and right now their response is Trump.

Big shots in media don’t get what’s happening.  This is nothing short of the Trump Revolution.  And he’s no Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders.

Their adoring crowds never really mattered ... because they had and have no money. Trump will spend $1 billion once this race gets serious.

That’s the story.  Trump is the American Idol of working-class and middle-class Americans. I’m a witness. I saw it. I talked to them.  This is real.

Trump has a great shot to be president of the United States. And after Tuesday night’s debate, more Americans will see that too.

SOURCE

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Will Elites Blow Up the GOP?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

There was a dinner last week at The Source on Capitol Hill where Republican Party elites discussed how Donald Trump, even if he wins the lion's share of votes and delegates, might be denied the nomination in a "brokered convention."

Assume at the GOP convention in Cleveland that Trump runs first, Ted Cruz second, Marco Rubio third and Ben Carson fourth.

Rather than wait for Karl Rove & Co. to tell us whom the party shall nominate, Trump would phone Cruz, offer him second spot on the ticket in return for his delegates, and if Cruz declined, ask for Rubio's phone number.

Candidates who have gone through a yearlong campaign, and sustained the defeats and suffered the abuse, are not going to let a Beltway cabal decide the nominee.

Carson has already warned he will walk away from the party if such a decision were imposed upon the convention.

Moreover, the old establishments are dead. Conservatives killed the GOP establishment in 1964. The Vietnam War and George McGovern killed the Democratic establishment in 1972.

What is left are elites, collectives of office-holders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads.

What the Republican collectivity has to realize is that it is they and the policies they produced that are the reason Trump, Carson and Cruz currently hold an overwhelming majority of Republican votes.

It was the elites of both parties who failed to secure our borders and brokered the trade deals that have de-industrialized America and eviscerated our middle class.

It was the elites of both parties who got us into these idiotic wars that have blown up the Middle East, cost us trillions of dollars, thousands of dead, and tens of thousands of wounded among our best and bravest.

That Republican elites would sit around a dinner table on Capitol Hill and discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America, and decide among themselves who shall lead us, is astonishing.

To borrow from the Gipper, they are not the solution to our problems. They are the problem.

More HERE

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Slaying or at least winging the regulatory dragon

By Martin Hutchinson

The COP-21 global climate talks ended this weekend, with a treaty that won't have much practical effect. Yet regulations to combat "climate change" have already inflicted trillions of dollars of economic damage and there seems no prospect of ending their depredations. In other areas, the regulatory state set up since the 1960s expands steadily, with only modest rollbacks likely if an anti-regulatory President is elected. Since our entire future prosperity depends on not sharing Laocoon's fate from the regulatory serpents, it is thus worth pondering how we might defeat them, and to what extent it is truly impossible.

In general, the U.S. and many global regulators have used the last seven years of pro-regulator government to entrench themselves. U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is confident that they are elimination-proof "You're going to lose and you might as well get over it" she told a Congressional hearing last week. Under the Dodd –Frank Act of 2010 regulating the banks, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was put inside the Fed to prevent Congress overseeing it properly. The statutory and theoretical prohibitions against Congress meddling with the Fed are strong, so the idea was they would protect the CFPB also, even though the authors of Dodd-Frank knew the CFPB would spend its life imposing costs on the financial services industry and impeding the operation of the free market.

As well as the regulators, the years of regulation have produced an appalling group of crony capitalists who benefit from it. This is clearest in the banking sector, where regulation has raised the barriers to entry to prohibitive levels – new bank formation has slipped 97% since before the crisis, from about 100 year before 2007 to THREE a year, in the entire United States, since 2010.

The combination of regulation and foolish Fed monetary policy, allowing banks to receive interest on $2 trillion of reserves kept at the Fed, and granting a permanent 2% yield curve differential between deposit rates and long-term government bond rates, has made the lives of all but the very largest banks very easy indeed. As for the largest banks, they have been subsidized in their investment banking operations, which have made trading profits based on ever-rising asset prices and huge swathes of money sloshing around the system. So when the banks and their top executives turn out to be among the largest donors to Hillary Clinton, who regularly denounces them, they are not turkeys voting for an early Christmas, but fat, corrupted, unhealthy pigs voting for the endless subsidy swill to keep flowing.

Crony capitalists have however spread well beyond banking. Elon Musk, for example, whose Tesla empire depends almost entirely on government subsidies of one kind or another is certainly more plausible than the people who ran the failed Solyndra solar panel company, but his business has yet to be tested by recession or – more difficult still – by an environment in which massive taxpayer handouts to wealthy eco-conscious consumers are no longer available.

Needless to say the crony capitalists, through massive political donations, have bought at least a substantial minority of politicians. When allied with the "green" lobby or the politically correct liberals of the big coastal cities, they are practically unstoppable. We saw their power in the U.S. Eximbank disaster, in which that crony capitalist haven died for more than five months, to the mass cheers of ordinary taxpayers, before mysteriously rising again without significant reform, its survival guaranteed for another four years.

Finally, there is the international dimension. It has now become clear from experience that international bureaucracies are much more dangerous than the domestic kind. They are responsible to nobody, so can allow their instincts for politically correct self-aggrandizement and waste full rein. They are also perpetual. I am not aware of any such body ever having been abolished; there are still League of Nations bureaucracies in Geneva, which have had no real purpose since 1945, but have continued to draw handsome salaries and allowances.

A U.S. President can refuse to fund them, but in an era of massive liquidity such as the present that is no problem; at most they slim down a little, funded by the remaining countries that still support them and possibly by a little low-cost borrowing and wait for the swing of the U.S. political pendulum, after which their full funding will be restored, probably including the arrears. Thus international regulation, especially in areas such as the environment and refugee questions, is even more unstoppable than domestic regulation.

The forces preventing significant pruning of regulations are thus very powerful. Even to consider countering them we must assume a President dedicated to doing so, a Congress in which he has safe majorities in both houses, and eight years in which to operate, during which he is able to maintain his House and Senate majorities for at least six of them. It is a lot to ask, but let assume some miracle brings this lucky combination in the fairly near future. What should this miracle President and his miracle Congress do?

The most important set of regulations to eliminate is that surrounding global warming, and the environment in general.  The reality behind global warming is difficult to establish amid all the fog. A New York Times article as far back as 1956 quoted an estimate by the British climatologist Guy Callendar that carbon dioxide emissions were warming the atmosphere by about 1.1 degree Celsius per century. That now looks a little high; the warming since 1900 is only about 0.8 degrees; in any case it does not suggest that by 2100 we will have suffered anything like the 3-4 degrees Celsius rise from present levels at which damage to our civilization could become significant. Two important factors making global warming less dangerous are that the effects of increased carbon dioxide are asymptotic, not exponential, and that plant feedback also dampens the warming effect.

Global warming is real but the "global warming" hysteria is a leftist and crony capitalist scam. Apart from doctored "hockey stick" graphs of temperature rises and now even doctored temperature observations, it includes such intellectual dishonesties as defining the temperature rise as dating from the beginning of industrialization, a period when we were in a Maunder minimum temperature phase and would thus have had significant warming even if the dinosaurs still roamed. The new Paris treaty that wants to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from the beginning of industrialization is limiting us to warming that has already happened; if there is any warming effect of carbon at all we would have to shut down civilization completely to comply with her absurd benchmark.

The best way of ensuring that global warming and other environmental dishonesty doesn't embed itself in U.S. policy is probably structural: abolish the EPA and embed the environmental regulatory function within the Department of Commerce, whose main function is the promotion of American business. With a suitable Commerce Secretary like the 1980s Malcolm Baldridge, environmental regulations that caused economic damage would be severely pruned back. Add a requirement for proper, non-fudged estimates of regulations' benefits and costs, and a separate audit by the Government Accounting Office before they were put into effect, and you would probably have a system of environmental regulation that could survive even the return of a Democrat administration.

More HERE

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This Might Explain Why Obama Thought ISIS Was Contained

President Obama's assertion that ISIS was contained showed that he was either desperately trying to justify his failures or that he was seriously lacking information. A new report suggests it was the latter:

    President Barack Obama has only attended roughly 40 percent of his daily intelligence briefings throughout his presidency, according to the Government Accountability Institute (GAI).

    In September 2014, the Government Accountability Institute updated an analysis of how much time President Barack Obama has spent attending his Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs), as recorded on the White House official calendar and Politico’s comprehensive calendar. The updated study covered the president’s first 2,079 days in office, running from January 20, 2009 through September 29, 2014. Of those, President Obama attended a total of 875 Presidential Daily Briefs for an overall 42.09% attendance rate.

    The report also found President Obama’s attendance has declined slightly in his second term from 42.43 percent to 41.26 percent.

I'm willing to bet if there was a daily global warming briefing, Obama wouldn't miss a single round of golf for it. This finding is an absolute disgrace, and should remind Americans how unserious Democrats are when it comes to keeping us safe.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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