Donald Trump: 'I'm a Nationalist'

His initial hesitancy in using that term is understandable.  In one sense it can mean a desire to make your country rule other countries -- but it can also mean nothing more than an appreciation of your own country's special characteristics and a desire to promote and restore them.  Trump is clearly in the latter camp.

The Left want to destroy everything that is unique and good about America.  As Obama said to immense cheers from his followers ten years ago, they want to "fundamentally transform" America.  The present hysterical hostility to Trump is hostility to what he stands for:  America and ordinary Americans.  Under Obama they had made a start on destroying much that was American, only to have that snatched away from them by Trump


Washington: US President Donald Trump has declared he's a "nationalist" at a campaign rally on as he appealed to Texas Republicans to re-elect Senator Ted Cruz and help the party keep control of Congress.

Trump ran for president as a nationalist, declaring he would place "America first" in his policies. But he has previously declined to label himself, even telling the Wall Street Journal in an April 2017 interview, "hey, I'm a nationalist and a globalist. I'm both."

At the time, some members of his administration were considered globalists by their critics, including former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn.

Trump's declaration on Monday, US time, came as he criticised Democrats, associating them with "corrupt, power-hungry globalists".

"You know what a globalist is, right?" Trump asked his audience. "A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much. And you know what? We can't have that.

"You know, they have a word - it sort of became old-fashioned - it's called nationalist. And I say, really, we're not supposed to use that word.

"You know what I am? I'm a nationalist, OK - I'm a nationalist,' the President said. 'Use that word."

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Military Poll a Morale Victory for Trump
   
Under Barack Obama, the biggest threat to our military might have been the policies of the man in charge of it. From the toppling of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the rollout of open transgenderism, most service members couldn’t wait to get back to the business of warfighting. In 2016, they got their wish. After eight long years, the new commander-in-chief went to work, rescuing our troops from the radical grip of the Obama years. “I want a very, very strong military,” Donald Trump said. And he is proving it.

It wasn’t easy restoring a sense of pride to a military devastated by two terms of social engineering. But this president didn’t wilt under the pressure. He walked right into the fire and did what was right — whether the issue was the budget, sexuality, faith, gender, or draft-related. Now, almost two years into upending the policies of Obama, Trump’s troops are showing their gratitude. About 44 percent of active-duty troops have a favorable view of the commander-in chief — nine points higher than Obama’s top mark.

Of course, the headlines will be misleading. Even the reporters at the Military Times, who conducted the poll, say the president’s support is “fading.” But barely. Unlike Barack Obama, who watched his approval rating fall through basement — barely cracking 15 percent when he left office — Donald Trump is only 2.8 points off his 46.1 percent mark from inauguration day. That’s almost within the statistical margin of error. Obama’s support, on the other hand, almost completely evaporated, dropping 25 points between 2009 and 2015.

When it comes to Trump’s actual policies, the numbers are night and day. “Troops surveyed continue to give high marks to the president for his handling of military issues specifically,” the survey points out. “More than 60 percent said they believe the military is in better shape now than it was under President Barack Obama, and nearly the same number have a favorable view of his handling of the military.” Only 13 percent think Obama’s military was in better shape than Trump’s. That shouldn’t be surprising. Instead of dismantling the military like the last administration, this president is focused on rebuilding it. And when he does, it’s with an eye on their mission — not his.

“Trump has done some things to win the hearts of the military, whether it has been the budget or just avoiding a foreign policy catastrophe,” said political science professor Peter Feaver. “And he has talked about the importance of the military, making it a focus of his campaign and presidency.” Some of the men and women interviewed agreed. “[Trump’s] definitely improving the readiness of the military and giving us the resources we need to get the mission done, not hamstringing us by cutting our budget,” said Staff Sgt. Kyle Overholser, an airman stationed in Arizona.

And while officers trail in their enthusiasm of Trump, even their favorability ratings have jumped 10 points — from 31 percent a year ago to 41 percent now. In the enlisted ranks, there’s always been a more positive opinion of the president than negative. Gender seems to be the only real divide. Female troops (who made up just 11 percent of the respondents) are much less supportive of this White House than their male counterparts.

Thanks to President Trump, the military is finally fighting something other than the culture wars. And honestly, that’s the difference between his administration and Obama’s. This president uses our troops to advance America’s interests — not his own. And our service members aren’t the only appreciative ones!

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Voices of Reason — and Unreason

Susan Collins put on a clinic in thoroughness and justice
   
What did the Kavanaugh controversy tell us about our historical moment? It underscored what we already know, that America is politically and culturally divided and that activists and the two parties don’t just disagree with but dislike and distrust each other. We know also the Supreme Court has come to be seen not only as a constitutional (and inevitably political) body but as a cultural body. It follows cultural currents, moods, assumptions. It has frequently brushed past the concept of democratic modesty to make decisions that would most peacefully be left to the people, at the ballot box, after national debate. So citizens will experience the court as having great power over their lives, and nominations to the court will inevitably draw passion. And this was a fifth conservative seat on a nine-person court.

But the Kavanaugh hearings had some new elements. There were no boundaries on inquiry, no bowing to the idea of a private self. Accusations were made about the wording of captions under yearbook photos. The Senate showed a decline in public standards of decorum. A significant number of senators no longer even pretend to have class or imitate fairness. The screaming from the first seconds of the first hearings, the coordinated interruptions, the insistent rudeness and accusatory tones — none of it looked like the workings of the ordered democracy that has been the envy of the world.

Two Republican senators this week wrote to me with a sound of mourning. One found it “amazing” and “terrifying” that “seemingly, and without very much thought, nearly half the United States Senate has abandoned the presumption of innocence in this country, all to achieve a political goal.” The other cited “a truly disturbing result: One of the great political parties abandoning the Constitutionally-based traditions of due process and presumption of innocence.”

At the very least, Senate Democrats overplayed their hand.

My bias in cases of sexual abuse and assault, and it is a bias, is in favor of the woman. I give her words greater weight because I have not in my personal experience seen women lie about such allegations, and I know the reasons they have, in the past, kept silent. If you know your biases and are serious, you will try to be fair — not to overcorrect but to maintain standards. On Sept. 16, the day the charges made by Christine Blasey Ford appeared in the Washington Post, I was certain that more witnesses and information would come forward. We would see where justice lay. The great virtue of the #MeToo movement is that the whole phenomenon was broken open by numbers and patterns — numbers of victims, patterns of behavior, and the deep reporting that uncovered both. In this case great reporters tried to nail down Ms. Ford’s story. But they did not succeed. The New Yorker story that followed was dramatic but unpersuasive, a hand grenade whose pin could not be pulled. The final allegation, about rape-train parties and spiked punch, was not in the least credible.

It was Ms. Ford’s story that was compelling, but in need of support or corroboration. It did not come.

It was a woman who redeemed the situation, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In her remarks announcing her vote, she showed a wholly unusual respect for the American people, and for the Senate itself, by actually explaining her thinking. Under intense pressure, her remarks were not about her emotions. She weighed the evidence, in contrast, say, to Sen. Cory Booker, who attempted to derail the hearings from the start and along the way compared himself to Spartacus. Though Spartacus was a hero, not a malignant buffoon.

Ms. Collins noted that she had voted in favor of justices nominated by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She considers qualifications, not party. She reviewed Brett Kavanaugh’s 12-year judicial record, including more than 300 opinions, speeches and law-review articles; she met with Judge Kavanaugh for more than two hours, and spoke with him again for an hour by phone with more questions.

She judged him centrist in his views and well within the mainstream of judicial thought. He believes, he told her, the idea of precedent is not only a practice or tradition but a tenet rooted in the Constitution.

As to Ms. Ford’s charges, since the confirmation process is not a trial, the rules are more elastic. “But certain fundamentally legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.”

“We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.” She called the gang-rape charge an “outlandish allegation” with no credible evidence.

At this point it was understood the Democrats had gone too far.

It is believable, said Ms. Collins, that Ms. Ford is a survivor of sexual assault and that the trauma “has upended her life.” But the four witnesses she named could not corroborate her account. None had any recollection of the party; her lifelong friend said under penalty of felony that she neither remembers such an event nor even knows Brett Kavanaugh.

Ms. Collins said she has been “alarmed and disturbed” by those who suggest that unless Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination was rejected, the Senate would somehow be condoning sexual assault: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The atmosphere surrounding the nomination has been “politically charged” and reached “fever pitch” even before the Ford and other charges. It has been challenging to separate fact from fiction. But a decision must be made. Judge Kavanaugh’s record has been called one of “an exemplary public servant, judge, teacher, coach, husband, and father.” Her hope is he “will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-4 decisions and so that public confidence in our judiciary and our highest court is restored.”

And so, she said, she would vote to confirm.

It was a master class in what a friend called “old-style thoroughness combined with a feeling for justice.”

A word on the destructive theatrics we now see gripping parts of the Democratic Party. The howling and screeching that interrupted the hearings and the voting, the people who clawed on the door of the court, the ones who chased senators through the halls and screamed at them in elevators, who surrounded and harassed one at dinner with his wife, who disrupted and brought an air of chaos, who attempted to thwart democratic processes so that the people could not listen and make their judgments:

Do you know how that sounded to normal people, Republican and Democratic and unaffiliated? It sounded demonic. It didn’t sound like “the resistance” or #MeToo. It sounded like the shrieking in the background of an old audiotape of an exorcism.

Democratic leaders should stand up to the screamers. They haven’t, because they’re afraid of them. But things like this spread and deepen. Stand up to your base. It’s leading you nowhere good. And you know it.

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Top 3% of U.S. Taxpayers Paid Majority of Income Taxes in 2016

Individual income taxes are the federal government’s single biggest revenue source. In fiscal year 2018, which ended Sept. 30, the individual income tax is expected to bring in roughly $1.7 trillion, or about half of all federal revenues, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Bloomberg looked into the 2016 individual returns data in detail for some additional insights:

The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).

The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes.

Top 3% of U.S. Taxpayers Paid Majority of Income Taxes in 2016
In other words, the bottom 50 percent paid 3 percent. Which small percentile of tax payers also paid 3 percent or more? You might have guessed it. It is the top 0.001%, or about 1,400 taxpayers. That group alone paid 3.25 percent of all income taxes.

The individual income tax system is designed to be progressive – those with higher incomes pay at higher rates.

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Global Competitiveness Report: U.S. is World’s Most Competitive Economy, Closest to ‘Ideal State’

The United States has the most competitive economy in the world, according to the 2018 Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum.

“The United States is the closest economy to the frontier, the ideal state, where a country would obtain the perfect score on every component of the index,” the report reads.

The United States obtained a competitiveness score of 85.6% on the scale of zero to 100, which places it in the top spot among 140 countries, states the report.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has not reached the No. 1 spot “since 2008,” when “the financial crisis stalled output and triggered a global economic slowdown.”

Singapore occupies the No. 2 spot (83.5%), followed by Germany in third place (82.8%).

The report “assesses the competitiveness landscape of 140 economies” and “provides insight into the drivers of economic growth in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The new Global Competitive Index (GCI) 4.0, which is featured in the document, includes 98 indicators that are grouped into “12 pillars of competitiveness.” The pillars are “Institutions, Infrastructure, ICT adoption; Macroeconomic stability; Health; Skills; Product market; Labour market; Financial system; Market size; Business dynamism; and Innovation capability.”

Among these pillars, the U.S. ranks the highest in three, including Labour market, Financial system and Business dynamism. It ranks second in Market size and Innovation capability, and third in Skills and Product market.

Despite the U.S.’s glowing competitiveness score, however, the report pointed out that there is still “room for improvement.”

“With a competitiveness score of 85.6, it is 14 points away from the frontier mark of 100, implying that even the top-ranked economy among the 140 has room for improvement.”

Some areas of improvement include Health, in which the U.S. scored 47th, as well as Homicide rate (92), Complexity of tariffs (108) and Imports % of GDP (136).

The median competitiveness score of all 140 countries is only 60.0%, according to the report. Chad, with 35.5%, holds the lowest spot.

According to the report, the GCI 4.0 weighs pillars “equally rather than according to a country’s current stage of development. In essence, the index offers each economy a level playing field to determine its path to growth.”

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