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A full transcript of Trump's SOTU speech is here Read it all.  I cannot add to it.

Poll results showed that 76% of speech viewers approved of what they heard and 72% approved of Trump’s ideas on immigration.

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President Trump’s big win: 304,000 new jobs, 100 months of growth

President Trump has just scored a win not even boomtime presidents such as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan could beat.

While President Trump was still putting the final touches on his State of the Union speech, he received the one gift he really wanted: spectacular jobs growth figures. Some 304,000 jobs were created in January, marking 100 straight months of job growth.

The jobs growth came despite the controversial partial government shutdown. It represents the longest such period of jobs growth on record in the US.

And it is something Mr Trump can crow about.

The year started off strong, with the blockbuster January jobs gain pointing to expansion of more than three per cent in the first quarter, top White House economist Kevin Hassett says.

While Mr Hassett acknowledged that his office had underestimated the impact on the economy of idling 800,000 federal workers, he was upbeat about the outlook.

He said he got a “fist bump” from President Donald Trump after the January employment report was released, providing the “good news the White House needed.” “My thought is the negative effects we talked about from the shutdown will be very, very hard to see in the data,” he told CNBC. “I think Q1 has got to be well north of two and maybe even north of three per cent” growth, given the momentum from employment.

The White House believes the stimulus provided by 2017’s massive corporate tax cuts is producing “a tax-induced supply shock” that will boost growth without increasing prices.

“So I think we could go forward with a great deal of confidence that the high growth isn’t pushing an enormous amount on inflation,” Mr Hassett said.

Financial markets have become increasingly concerned that despite strong jobs growth the economy will slow this year. And those fears prompted the Federal Reserve to signal clearly that it intends to pause its interest rate increases.

The Institute for Supply Management, an association of purchasing managers, reported overnight that its service index fell to 56.7 per cent last month, down from 58 per cent in December.

The January reading was the lowest since July 2018. But any reading above 50 signals growth. So even with the January decline, the index shows that service industries, where most Americans work, has been expanding for 108 consecutive months.

The US trade war with China also has created uncertainty and threatened to slow both economies.

Mr Hassett said he remained “hopeful” Washington and Beijing could reach an agreement but cautioned that “there’s still a lot of work to do.”

The US will more than double the punitive tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods if no deal is agreed by March 1. The sides held a second round of talks in Washington last week and are expected to meet again in Beijing later this month

“It’s a wait-and-see confidence situation,” said Anthony Nieves, the chair of ISM’s non-manufacturing business survey committee.

SOURCE   

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The Israeli example

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a Tweet on Sunday that the Israeli government this weekend began building a barrier along the Israeli-Gaza border.

“Over the weekend, we began building the above-ground barrier along the Gaza border,” Netanyahu said.

“The barrier will prevent terrorists from Gaza from penetrating into our territory on the ground,” he said. “If the quiet is not maintained in Gaza, we will not hesitate to act.”

Brigadier Gen. Eran Ophir is head of the Israeli Army’s “fence-building administration,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

“On Thursday, we began working on the final component of the barrier project along the Gaza border,” Gen. Ophir said, according to the Jerusalem Post. “The barrier is unique and especially suited to threats from the Gaza strip and will provide a maximum response to prevent entry into Israeli territory.”

The Jerusalem Post additionally reported:

“The smart-fence is the above-ground part of Israel's underground barrier, which has a system of advanced sensor and monitoring devices to detect tunnels. The defense ministry stated that the work on the underground barrier ‘will continue in parallel to the work on the fence.’ …

"‘The barrier is similar to the one on the Egyptian border, but it has significant improvements and includes innovative security elements,’ the Defense Ministry said in a statement, adding that the smart-fence has been specially adapted to security threats and will be an additional component for the defense of communities in the Gaza border vicinity.”

SOURCE 

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Commanding General of U.S. Central Command: U.S. Has Funded Excellent Border Security--in Jordan

Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that Americans would be "very proud" to see the kind of border security their tax dollars have produced -- in Jordan.

Last week I was in Jordan. I had an opportunity to visit the border -- up along the border between Jordan and Syria. And I had an opportunity to witness the investments that our country has made in their border security initiatives -- equipment, training, command and control for this. And what I witnessed there I think would make any member of Congress or indeed, any American, very proud to see.

It was extraordinarily professional, it was very effective; they had very good situational awareness and understanding of what was happening along their border. And everything that they were doing was sustainable. And they'd been doing it for several years, and with the prospect of continuing to do it in the future. This is the kind of investments that we need to be making in these very good partners right here, like Jordan.

According to a 2018 Rand Corporation study, the United States began helping Jordan secure its border in 2008, with a $20 million project to build surveillance towers along a 30-mile stretch of the border with Syria. Rand reported:

This program was expanded to include a fully networked fence running along 275 miles of Jordan’s borders with Syria and Iraq at a cost of more than $300 million. By 2016, the system consisted of an advanced border monitoring network, equipped with an array of remote detection, surveillance, and command and control capabilities, which allowed the Jordanian Armed Forces to detect activity five miles away on either side of the fence. The system funnels into a joint U.S.-Jordanian command center.

The Rand study also examined "lessons learned" from the Jordan experience.

The final lesson in the long list says, "Deploying regular army units to the border to supplement border forces is also helpful."

SOURCE 

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Right-to-Try Laws Help Patient with Terminal Brain Cancer

Earlier this month, a patient with terminal brain cancer gained access to a potentially life-saving experimental treatment. Suffering from glioblastoma, considered to be “the most aggressive and malignant type of brain cancer,” the patient faces little hope of survival with conventional treatment methods.

Fortunately, the patient was able to access a new and promising treatment option named Gliovac. Gliovac helps patients fight cancer by providing a vaccine-like treatment which helps their immune system attack, and even eliminate, tumors or cancerous cells.

However, Gilovac is currently unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration. The patient’s family persevered, contacting Gilovac’s drug provider Enhanced Recovery Company who, with the assistance of the University of California, Irvine, was able to administer treatment through national right-to-try legislation.

Signed into law in May, national right-to-try legislation allows patients with terminal illnesses to access experimental treatments with only the permission of their physicians and the drug provider. The law cuts the Food and Drug Administration out of the process. In doing so, right-to-try provides patients access to potentially life-saving treatment with less regulatory obstacles. A statement released to Cancer Updates, Research, and Education, by the University of California, Irvine notes, “It was believed that (Right to Try) offered a more expedited path to treatment, which UCI (University of California, Irvine) began after meeting regulatory and compliance requirements of state and federal Right to Try laws.”

Remarkably, this is the first time national right-to-try laws have been used to access experimental treatments. Yet it is difficult to imagine a better representation of what right-to-try represents.

The patient is being given a chance to prolong their life when other options to try experimental medication failed. Before utilizing right-to-try laws, the patient was unable to enlist in an ongoing clinical study due to their health.

Clinical trials often will not include terminally ill patients to avoid skewing statistical results. As Daniela Bota, medical director of the UCI Health Comprehensive Brain Tumor Program, explains, “The Right to Try laws may be the only alternative for many patients who may not qualify for clinical trials based on a variety of factors, including progression of disease, comorbidities, existing medications, physical limitations, and others.”

Perhaps more importantly, the patient was not the victim of the sluggish FDA approval process. Gilovac is currently in the second phase of the FDA’s approval, yet to enter the more time-consuming later phases. With more than 23,000 adults developing cancerous tumors in the brain or spinal cord each year, right-to-try provides hope for many in dire situations.

When treatments are unavailable, and prognoses are fatal, the best chance to prolong life is to consider all remaining options. National right-to-try laws recognize this and provide more options for terminally ill patients.

Now that one patient has used the process, more are likely to follow. Let’s hope for the best.

SOURCE 

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USDA Imposes the Worst Regulation Ever

In 2018, the overall cost for Americans to comply with regulations issued by U.S. government agencies decreased for the first time since that burden began to be measured in 2005. But that achievement wasn’t an across-the-board success story, because one federal government department bucked the trend by greatly increasing the regulatory burden on American food producers, where the cost of complying with new regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will ultimately be paid by all Americans whenever and wherever they might shop for food.

The new regulation is the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard (NBFDS), which was imposed by the USDA on December 20, 2018, just ahead of the partial federal government shutdown, which Henry Miller, the founding director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Biotechnology, and Drew Kershen, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, have described as the USDA’s “most bewildering, least cost-effective regulation ever” in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

In July 2016, Congress passed a law mandating that all food containing genetic material that has been modified with recombinant DNA or “gene-splicing” techniques bear labels clearly identifying it as “bioengineered.” The statute acknowledged that bioengineered food is neither more nor less safe than other food, but the new rule—the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard, or NBFDS—won’t help consumers understand that. It will only leave them confused.

Under the NBFDS, two identical bottles of corn oil on a supermarket shelf could be labeled differently—one as bioengineered, one not—even though both were derived from the same field and are identical in processing and quality. Both labels would comply with the regulation because the new rule doesn’t require a label “if the food does not contain detectable genetically modified material.” The NBFDS allows manufacturers to make voluntary disclosures on such products, but not that they “may contain” bioengineered ingredients.

While issuing confusing regulations is nothing new for federal government agencies, what puts the NBFDS into a class of badness all its own is the absence of any positive benefit to go along with the increased costs it will impose on all American food producers, distributors, and consumers.

What elevates the rule from an irritant to an outrage is the USDA’s own admissions about its costs, which will “range from $569 million to $3.9 billion for the first year.” Thereafter, there will be additional costs annually—”in perpetuity,” as the rule says—of “$68 million to $234 million at a three percent discount rate and $91 million to $391 million at a seven percent discount rate.” And those estimates don’t take into consideration the many thousands of hours federal employees will spend fine-tuning and implementing the rule.

The benefit? There is none: “The NBFDS is not expected to have any benefits to human health or the environment.” Nor does the regulation assert any benefit to consumers.

That is not an error. The USDA’s regulators really believe its new bioengineered (BE) food labeling requirements will provide no measurable value to improving anybody’s health, or their pocketbook, or to the environment, where the only benefit they identify to justify the massive new regulatory burden lies in “eliminating costly inefficiencies of a state-level approach in BE disclosure”, where they single out the state of Vermont’s bioengineered food labeling regulations as even more costly.

While the NBFDS might save money in Vermont, the USDA’s new regulation for bioengineered food labeling comes at the cost of imposing new burdens on all other Americans. Since that cost comes with absolutely no benefit, making it perhaps the worst regulation ever, it is completely unjustifiable in any sane world.

If anyone in the U.S. Congress is serious about making the federal government work for the American people instead of against them, they’ll take action to stop the USDA from doing this very stupid thing as soon as possible.

SOURCE 

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Conservative groups support Yoho ‘zero for zero’ bill to end sugar subsidies reciprocally

Americans for Limited Government joined today in a letter with eight free market and limited government groups to support H. Con. Res. 7 by U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) that would end sugar subsidies globally via reciprocal trade agreements with other nations

H. Con. Res. 7 calls for an elimination of “all direct and indirect subsidies that benefit the production or export of sugar by all major sugar producing and consuming countries,” including Brazil, India and Thailand, which are labeled in the letter as “sugar dumpers.”

The letter states, “America’s sugar farmers compete, unfairly, against heavily subsidized foreign producers, justifying the current no-cost, U.S. sugar policy program to stabilize the domestic sugar market… If foreign governments would eliminate their market-distorting subsidies, allowing the U.S. to end domestic support programs, a free market would exist, and America’s sugar farmers could compete effectively in that market.”

“Congress has a made-to-order opportunity to embrace that promise and send a clear message that trade ‘cheating’ will not be tolerated and America will be put first,” the letter added.

The letter was signed by Americans for Limited Government, 60 Plus, Less Government, Citizen Outreach, Institute for Liberty, Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, Hispanic Leadership Fund, Institute for Policy Innovation and Tea Party Nation.

The “zero for zero” bill currently has six co-sponsors.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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