New Zealand gets its own Donald Trump

New Zealand has an odd electoral system which tends to help  minor parties to get seats in parliament in addition to the two main parties. Which often means that no one party has a majority of seats.  So it is usually necessary for two or more parties to enter into an agreement to govern together. 

After the recent inconclusive election, the support of a small populist party -- chiefly supported by Maori and the elderly --  was crucial to forming a new coalition government.  The populist leader, Winston Peters, has policies very similar to Trump and is determined to implement them. He is however entering into an unlikely coalition with the Leftists and the Greens. His coalition partners wildly disagree with him, however. But they can't do without him. 


Peters.  He is half Maori

So it should be interesting from now on.  We may see Trump-like policies being enacted with the support of Leftists and Greens! He should at least be a restraining influence on Green/Left idiocy.  Some details below
 

SHE’S enjoyed the kind of stardust-scattered rise most politicians only dream of.

Four weeks ago, Jacinda Ardern was at home painting the fence in her trackpants, trying to work off the “nervous energy” of waiting for an election result.

On Thursday, the 37-year-old was crowned Prime Minister-elect following a month of negotiations to form a coalition government with the Greens and New Zealand First.

Like Emmanuel Macron, 39, in France and Justin Trudeau, 45, in Canada, Ardern has ridden a wave of euphoria over her likability, relaxed style and fresh approach to politics.

She shut down radio hosts who asked about her baby plans, took selfies with school kids and even admitted she had been handed a “hospital pass” to the leadership. In seven weeks she reversed Labour’s slide to gain 37 per cent of the national vote, leaving her competing with National’s Bill English on 44 per cent, for the attentions of New Zealand First leader Winston Peters to form a coalition government.

The deal struck will offer Peters the role of Deputy Prime Minister and four cabinet posts. However it could also include major policy concessions and become an Achilles’ heel given Peters’ experience as a kingmaker and the party motto of “refusing to accept defeat in any cause we believe in”.

Act Party leader David Seymour said it leaves a “weak Left coalition beholden to a madman on the loose.”

The man whose party scored just 0.5 per cent of the vote said the “perverse marriage” that Labour and the Greens had created threatens millenials, immigrants and businesses.

“The silver lining for the centre right is that the three-ringed circus is likely to fall apart — perhaps even before its three years are up,” he said.

“The Greens and New Zealand First despise each other, and Winston Peters has caused chaos in every government he’s joined. New Zealanders may face an election sooner than they think.”

United Future MP Peter Dunne echoed that sentiment to Green Party leader James Shaw, saying he was now in charge of keeping an “unruly new partner” in line.

Peters said he decided to pair with Labour and the Greens because they offered the best way to mitigate what New Zealand is expected to face in the years ahead.

“It’s time for capitalism to regain its human face,” he said. “Our perception was the people of this country did want change and we’ve responded to that.”

But the political marriage could prove an uneasy alliance for the parties that have starkly different platforms on immigration and business.

Peters wants a ban on foreign ownership of residential and farm land, net migration slashed to 10,000 per year and to create a low tax environment.

In contrast, Labour campaigned on New Zealand being a country “built on immigration” and wants to increase the refugee quota to 1500. It also wants to crack down on foreign property speculators and has planned to build 100,000 new homes across the country.

What's more, at 72 Peters thinks it’s “now or never” to leave a mark on New Zealand after nearly 40 years in politics. “Frankly, of late, I’ve been asking myself that question because we’re coming to an election and I kind of think it’s now or never,” he said in August.

“If we don’t turn it around, and you’ve all got your different views, but if you were remotely neutral and you examined New Zealand — where it once was as a country in the Western world to where it is now ... you’d have to admit we’ve done very badly.”

While supporters celebrate smashing a decade of right-wing rule, if Ardern wants to avoid the popularity slumps seen by Trudeau and Macron since they took office, her greatest political challenge yet may come from within.

SOURCE

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The Trump Nominee Poised to Be Point Man on Draining Government Swamp

President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the federal government’s bureaucracy could be a key player in reforming it, and in keeping the president’s campaign pledge to “drain the swamp.”

“We don’t see any major draining of the swamp with the massive bureaucracy,” Robert Moffit says.

Trump last month nominated Jeff Tien Han Pon, 47, to be director of the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources agency. Pon served in the administrations of both President Bushes—with jobs in the White House, OPM, and Energy Department—and held information technology and human resources positions in several private companies.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was scheduled to hold a confirmation hearing Wednesday on Pon’s nomination.

Pon is largely unknown to those who seek reform of the civil service, said Robert Moffit, a former OPM assistant director under President Ronald Reagan who is now a senior fellow for health studies at The Heritage Foundation.

“The OPM director has enormous authority and can help the president staff the administration, and would be welcome at a time when we don’t see any major draining of the swamp with the massive bureaucracy,” Moffit told The Daily Signal. “Every day, career bureaucrats are issuing decisions on guidelines and making interpretations of regulations. We need management there to take the bull by the horns.”

Trump’s previous nominee, George Nesterczuk, withdrew in August after relentless opposition from federal employee unions.

However, Pon seems less controversial and gained the backing of the Senior Executives Association, a nonprofit that advocates for top federal government officials. In a letter to the Senate, SEA President Bill Valdez wrote:

While serving at the Department of Energy, I had the privilege of working with Jeff on a project he initiated to improve human capital processes at DOE. The thought leadership he brought to that project is indicative of the skills and experience he will bring to his new role at OPM. Jeff’s expertise in human capital management has only grown since I worked with him in government, as evidenced by senior roles with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), Futures Inc., and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Pon also doesn’t face outright union opposition.

“While it is early in the nomination process and we reserve final opinion, we appreciate the consideration to name a nominee with a diverse and rich professional history in federal human capital,” Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, said in a statement early last month to the publication Government Executive. “We look forward to learning more about Mr. Pon and we hope that he, if confirmed, will view employee organizations as valuable and significant partners.”

Trump is nine months into his administration without an OPM director, the official charged with managing the federal workforce. Moffit and other conservatives have criticized the president for not filling key political positions, which they contend is how he can control career federal employees who have civil service protections.

However, Trump recently told Forbes: “I’m generally not going to make a lot of the appointments that would normally be—because you don’t need them. I mean, you look at some of these agencies, how massive they are, and it’s totally unnecessary. They have hundreds of thousands of people.”

Trump’s vanquished Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, recently urged federal employees to stay, asserting: “I don’t want to lose decades—really, if you added it all up, the thousands of years—of experience in the EPA, in the State Department, in the Labor Department. … If [Democrats] can take back one or both houses of Congress in 2018, you will have people you can talk to again.”

Pon has been the chief human resources and strategy officer for the nonprofit professional membership organization Society for Human Resource Management, where he has worked since February 2012.

For about 18 months before that, he was chief operating officer for Futures Inc., which helps members of the military transition into the civilian workforce.

At barely 21, Pon worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison under President George H.W. Bush from 1991 to 1992. He returned to Washington to work for President George W. Bush as deputy director for e-government at the OPM from June 2003 to December 2005. He left to work as chief human capital officer at the Energy Department from January 2006 through August 2008.

In between the two Bush presidencies, Pon worked in information technology and human resource jobs at Federal Express, Williams Sonoma, PetCo, and Burger King. He has a doctorate in psychology from the University of Southern California.

SOURCE

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More Cases of Voter Fraud Pile Up as Liberals Look the Other Way

The Heritage Foundation added another round of cases this week to its ever-growing Voter Fraud Database.

Accounting for these new additions, the database now documents 1,088 proven instances of election fraud, including 949 cases that have resulted in criminal convictions, 48 that have ended in civil penalties, and 75 that have seen defendants enter diversion programs.

Americans should be alarmed, not only because Heritage has compiled so many examples of fraud—impacting nearly every state and elections for all levels of government—but because this figure is likely just the tip of the iceberg.

The Heritage database is not a comprehensive tally of election fraud. That figure would almost certainly be substantially larger.

Most states, after all, lack the robust procedures needed to detect fraud when it occurs. Even when fraud is detected, prosecutors often opt not to pursue cases because their priorities lie elsewhere.

Put simply, American elections are vulnerable and fraudsters know it. Not content to leave their ideological causes or their own careers up to the unpredictable will of voters, many fraudsters choose to act on this knowledge.

MORE HERE

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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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Another mess that Obama left for Trump to clean up

Bill Nutter was very sick. Not only had he just lost his second leg to diabetes, but he also suffered from a condition that could cause his heart to stop beating without warning.

But his daughter, Brigitte Darton, felt reassured because her mother had found a bed for the ailing Vietnam veteran and retired police detective at the Bedford VA Medical Center. He would be under the watchful eyes of the staff at a hospital ranked by the Veterans Administration as one of its best nationwide.

So Darton went on a long-planned family vacation in July 2016, only to get a shocking call from her mother the next day. “Your father passed away,” Carol Nutter said. “He didn’t wake up.”



A doctor eventually told Carol Nutter that a staff member on the night shift had failed to check on him hourly, as she should have.

But that was not the full story: The aide, Patricia Waible, eventually admitted that she was playing video games on her computer and didn’t check on Nutter at all, according to someone with firsthand knowledge. And when a nurse discovered Nutter dead the next morning, the hospital’s internal report shows she announced it to her boss with a crude gesture signifying a slit throat.

Now, the VA inspector general has launched a criminal investigation, working with the US attorney’s office and the FBI to identify systemic failings that may have led to Nutter’s death.

And after the Globe contacted Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s office about the case on Sept. 22, the agency suspended Waible with pay from her job in the cafeteria where she had been transferred after Nutter’s death. The secretary’s office plans to seek her permanent removal.

But Brigitte Darton can’t understand why it took the hospital so long to take action — and why she discovered what happened to her father from a journalist.

“I hold the VA responsible for all of this. They’re responsible for their employees,” said Darton. “How many other people did this lady cause issues with?”

Waible has not returned multiple text messages and phone calls from the Globe.

The revelations about Bill Nutter’s poor care threaten to open a Pandora’s box of problems for the Bedford VA Medical Center. Although the hospital has received the highest possible five-star rating from the VA, the Globe reported last month that several employees have come forward to raise serious patient-safety concerns.

Whistle-blowers and families of veterans have claimed that relatively healthy patients deteriorate within months after being admitted to the Bedford VA. Others say that veterans living in long-term care buildings on the campus sometimes go without food for many hours, or they’re left in soiled clothes or bed linens. And buildings are laced with asbestos, a Bedford electrician charges, exposing everyone to the cancer-causing material.

In written responses to some of the whistle-blowers’ complaints and other outside reviews, the Bedford VA leaders acknowledged some of the problems but said they are working to improve conditions, where improvement is warranted. Bedford VA spokeswoman Maureen Heard declined to comment on Nutter’s care.

Shulkin has already demonstrated that he’s willing to take tough action if he believes veterans are not getting high quality care. Within 24 hours of a Spotlight report this summer detailing serious problems at the Manchester, N.H., veterans hospital, Shulkin dismissed the top two administrators.

“Secretary Shulkin has made clear that VA will hold employees accountable when the facts demonstrate that they have failed to live up to the high standards taxpayers expect from us,” said a statement from Shulkin’s spokesman, Curtis Cashour, in late September, citing Waible’s suspension as proof.

In Vietnam, Nutter was a door gunner, shooting at the enemy from the open door of a helicopter. On the ground, Agent Orange, a highly toxic herbicide used to strip foliage from the trees to make it harder for the enemy to hide, poured down like rain, his wife said, and he and his fellow soldiers would seek protection under a tarp. Even then, they feared the chemical was dangerous.

When he returned to the United States in 1969 he was greeted by jeers from anti-war protesters and was so traumatized he would sleep with his arm poised as if he were holding a gun. “He’d literally shake and I’d hold him.” said his wife. “During his last year, he started getting the flashbacks back.”

He channeled his anguish into hard work and enrolled at Northeastern, where he received a degree in criminology and made the dean’s list. He worked as a detective and photographer at the Concord Police Department and started an investigation business on the side.

But after 20 years, the effects of his Agent Orange poisoning surfaced and his health began to deteriorate. He got diabetes, a condition the VA presumes was caused by his exposure to the herbicide. The diabetes, in turn, badly damaged Nutter’s kidneys and forced the amputation of one leg years ago and the second leg in 2016 at the West Roxbury VA. He also suffered severe respiratory problems, which his doctors also attributed to Agent Orange.

But when he was finally stabilized and sent to the Bedford VA in early June, his family thought he had turned a corner.

“He seemed fine, healthy,” said Brigitte Darton. He was just getting out of Lowell General Hospital after fighting off a severe case of pneumonia and his family thought the Bedford VA was the best place for him, in part because Darton was a civilian working with the Air Force and had just returned from a tour of Afghanistan.

“I was hoping the VA would give him the care that non-VA facilities didn’t,” said Darton, who was working nearby at the Hanscom Air Force base and could visit him daily for lunch. “My dad and I were very close.”

But Bill Nutter, 68, was a very vulnerable patient, in danger of cardiac arrest at any given moment due to an arrhythmia. He couldn’t get out of bed on his own, and his hands were so crippled with neuropathy as a result of his diabetes that it was almost impossible for him to press the call button if he was in trouble. Plus, his wife said, his voice was barely a whisper after the surgery, and his roommate was deaf. Even if he could have tried to summon help, no one would have heard him, she said.

His doctors agreed that someone should check on him at least once an hour.

A nurse beginning her morning shift on July 3, 2016, found Bill Nutter unresponsive in his bed, according to the hospital’s report. When she saw her supervisor, she slid her fingers across her throat, indicating he was dead, according to internal hospital reports. “Mr. N9041 is gone,” the nurse explained, using Nutter’s VA patient number.

Carol Nutter recalled that someone from the hospital called that day to tell her that her husband had died, giving her the impression that his heart stopped between one scheduled check and the next, and that his death could not have been prevented.

”They said he went into cardiac arrest and [they] couldn’t do anything about it,” recalled Carol Nutter.

However, a few days later, a doctor called and gave her a better idea of what had actually happened, though he wasn’t specific. Nutter said the doctor was repeating what a woman in the background was telling him.

The woman said “they weren’t doing their job, and if they had done what I told them to, he could have possibly been alive because I told them to check on him once or twice an hour,” Nutter quoted her as saying.

The official medical records described the conversation this way: “Condolences were offered to wife and she was informed that we were calling because we did not believe care was up to our standards.”

Carol Nutter said she heard the words, but didn’t fully grasp what she was being told. Though the report said she was informed of her right to file a “tort claim,” or a potential lawsuit, she insisted she was never given that information.

Bedford VA officials immediately reassigned Waible, who had failed to check on Nutter, while the nurse who made the “cut-throat” sign, still in her probationary period, was terminated. The Office of the Inspector General launched an investigation.

At first, Waible insisted she had made the required checks on Nutter, even initialing paperwork that purported to document her visits. But she eventually confessed when an OIG investigator told her the hospital’s cameras showed she never left her computer for her entire shift, according to someone with direct knowledge. None of these facts were shared with the Nutters, family members said.

Now, Nutter’s family has consulted a lawyer and is trying to figure out whether to take legal action against the VA, after all.

SOURCE

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Dreamers, or the American Dream Killers?

Illegal immigration is an increasing tax burden on Americans, while at the same time undercutting their wages

As Congress considers legislation regarding DACA and the so-called “Dreamers,” it’s worth noting the effect immigration — illegal immigration in particular — has on the American Dream.

Recently the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) released its latest study on the financial cost of illegal immigration on American taxpayers. While the mainstream media often touts illegal immigration as being a boon for the economy, the actual burden of the growing illegal population on Americans is conveniently ignored. FAIR’s study calculates that illegal immigrants are costing taxpayers $116 billion annually even after the economic tax revenues associated with illegal alien labor have been factored in.

These expenses are borne out in three primary areas: Medical care, public education and law enforcement. Another factor often ignored is that state and local governments bear the brunt of these expenses. An estimated $88.9 billion falls on state and local government, while the federal government bears $45.8 billion annually. Once again, the legislators in Washington are insulated from the consequences of their own policies.

Another example of illegal immigrants’ impact on American workers is via the federal government’s immigrant worker permit programs. In fiscal year 2017, the fed doled out nearly two million permits, with approximately 1.5 million going to illegals. Matthew J. O'Brien, research director at FAIR, stated, “This [H-1B worker permit program] creates an incentive for people to accept lower wages in exchange for being in the United States and having a shot at an employment-based green card.” So, both American workers and immigrants are being taken advantage of by these programs, as wages have effectively been driven down. So much for the American Dream, right?

Thus, an increasingly heavy tax burden is being foisted onto the American worker as a result of a growing illegal population while at the same time Americans’ wages are being undercut by the fed granting a massive number of work permits to illegals. Is it any wonder why Americans are so frustrated with their government?

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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New Report: GOP Tax Reform Could Boost Household Income by $4,000

A study released Monday by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers found that congressional Republicans’ tax reform framework would produce thousands of dollars in income growth for American households. 

“Reducing the statutory federal corporate tax rate from 35 [percent] to 20 percent would … increase average household income in the United States by, very conservatively, $4,000 annually,” says the report from the advisory agency within the Executive Office of the President.

Income increases could reach as much as $9,000, according to the report. 

Using 2016 household income as the baseline, these effects translate into an increase in average household income from $83,143 in 2016 to between $87,520 and $92,222, an increase of $4,000 to $9,000 in wage and salary income alone.

According to the nonprofit Tax Foundation, the U.S. “has the fourth-highest statutory corporate income tax rate in the world.” The foundation’s September report continues:

“The U.S. rate of 38.91 percent (comprised of the federal statutory rate of 35 percent plus an average of the corporate income taxes levied by individual states) ranks only behind the United Arab Emirates (55 percent), Comoros (50 percent), and Puerto Rico (39 percent).”

“The main reason that wages increase is that the lower tax rate reduces the total cost of a firm that’s investing in a capital asset, like a machine, here in the U.S., and more assets like machines let workers produce more,” Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in comments released Monday. “And when workers can produce more, businesses can afford to pay their workers more.”

The GOP tax framework presented Sept. 27 by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and other GOP leaders seeks to significantly simplify the tax code.

It calls for roughly doubling taxpayers’ standard deduction (an individual’s first $12,000 of income would become tax-free, as would the first $24,000 for married couples) and for condensing the current seven tax brackets to three.

Depending on their income, individual taxpayers currently are taxed at one of these percentages: 10, 15, 25, 28, 33, 35, or 39.6 percent. The three brackets in the Republicans’ proposed framework are 12 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent.

The GOP tax reform framework slashes the current corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.

“The  increases recur each year, and the estimated total value of corporate tax reform for the average U.S. household is therefore substantially higher than $4,000,” the report says. “Moreover, the broad range of results in the literature suggest that over a decade, this effect could be much larger.” 

Researchers at Boston University found the tax reform framework increases the gross domestic product.

In a report Monday from Boston University scholars Seth G. Benzell, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, and Guillermo Lagarda, “Simulating The Republican ‘Unified Framework’ Tax Plan,” the scholars found the GOP plan would raise the gross domestic product by between 3 percent and 5 percent.

The researchers also found that real wages, the value of wages adjusted for inflation, are expected to rise by between 4 percent and 7 percent. “The Boston University analysis shows that the GOP’s Unified Framework will raise wages by [4 percent to 7 percent], translating into a $3,500 wage increase for an average American household,” says Adam Michel, a tax-policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation.

SOURCE

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DeSantis: Trump Tax Plan Provides 'Immediate Relief' for Families

The rate reductions that are part of President Donald Trump's tax code plan, combined with the call to simplify the tax process, will provide "immediate relief" for American families, Rep. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday.

"The simplicity of the tax code going from 75,000 pages down to a simple system will also give families more time and resources to spend on other things other than tax prep," the Florida Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" program. "By incentivizing companies to locate and stay here, bring profits from overseas back here, I think there will be more employment opportunities for the American people."

DeSantis said he thinks that some of the senators who caused problems with healthcare will also have their own views on tax reform.

"Some of them have opposed tax relief in the past and just really aren't engaged in wanting to cut taxes," DeSantis said. "I think the case needs to be made to them that we're really laying a foundation for sustained growth far into the future. It will have immediate benefits for families."

SOURCE

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ObamaCare Is Still Obama's

While Trump made some welcome changes to the law, its failure still belongs with one party: Democrats.

It’s been said that since ObamaCare became law, the U.S. government is now a health insurance company that fields a military. Sadly, that’s not far off the mark and is an affront to those who understand the Constitution and personal liberty.

Pitifully, a growing population turns first to the government to solve their problems, such as health insurance coverage, despite the enumerated powers laid out by the Law of the Land. Now we have a very large sector of America’s economy that is manipulated by government rules, regulation and control that standardizes inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, not to mention inflates costs.

The good news is President Donald Trump acted last week to halt illegal subsidies paid from the U.S. Treasury to insurance companies to cover their losses and, ostensibly, to keep premiums lower. Naturally, the #VeryFakeNews media has been in hyper drive to frame the narrative of the Hateful Republican President who is killing people by taking away their health care through the wrongful use of an executive order.

Let’s apply the truth to the hyperventilating Left and the insurance companies who spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for this failed policy, and who are now trying to cover up the need for billions in taxpayer bailouts — a.k.a. in bureaucratic-ese, cost-sharing reduction payments.

Fact: In the original “Affordable” Care Act, a risk pool of funding was created to pay insurance companies for potential losses and subsidize low-income patients. But, when the losses were totaling hundreds of millions of dollars because young, healthy individuals didn’t take the carrot/stick to pay high premiums for insurance with an enormous out-of-pocket deductible to finance the expansion of Medicaid and artificially lower premium costs for the sick, that risk pool ran dry. This explains the sky-high annual premium increases since ObamaCare took effect.

Fact: Since the risk pool was woefully inadequate to cover losses and to reimburse commercial insurance companies for the mandated low-cost premiums for some, Barack Obama made an appropriation request of the Congress that was not approved. In response, he used his pen to do it anyway — an action deemed illegal by DC district court in 2016. The ruling came after a 2014 lawsuit filed by the House challenging the cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments as lacking a specific, legal appropriation.

With his phone and his pen, Obama, the once-constitutional lecturer, overstepped the Constitution’s declaration that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law…” The Appropriations Clause, as he should know, enumerates the power of the purse to lie in Congress, not by an imperial attempting to salvage his signature legislation.

Fact: These cost-sharing reduction payments, being illegal, were rightfully halted by President Trump with the issue returned to Congress to address. So, despite the dripping hatred from leftists who cannot get over the loss of their coroneted queen, Trump acted in a constitutional manner to correct a wrong.

Relentless in their aim, the Left parrots false statements to grip the GOP with fear. That includes the usual Democrat/media claims that Republicans hate poor people and are trying to kill them just as the November 1st sign-ups begin for ObamaCare coverage in 2018.

Again, the antidote to a plague of lies is a big dose of truth with the disinfectant of sunshine.

In news accounts that began seeping into the public back in the summer as insurance companies were making premium cost projections, the “uncertainty” of the cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments pushed some state insurance regulators to have commercial insurers include in their projected premium cost increases the absence of these subsidies or at least submit two projections — one with the CSR one without.

So, another fact: According to the American Academy of Actuaries July publication, these adjusted projections to address this uncertainty attributed to much of the requested increases already made this year for next year’s premium costs. Get that? States like Tennessee approved premium increases this summer to account for the elimination of the CSR payments.

But here’s the part that really disrupts the narrative of folks like those who penned the Oct. 12 Bloomberg editorial, “Trump’s Healthcare Wrecking Ball.” The hypoxic-inducing tantrums that Trump’s move will hurt the poor by shifting costs to the sickest patients, while schizophrenically declaring in the same article that the healthy subsidize the sick, are simply false.

Back to the July American Academy of Actuaries, which notes, “Although those who receive premium subsidies would be insulated from the full increase in premiums, nonsubsidized enrollees would face the full increase, potentially affecting their enrollment behavior and therefore the morbidity of the risk pool” if the CSR payments were to be eliminated.

While President Trump eliminated the illegal payments from the U.S. Treasury to insurance companies, the law still demands that insurance companies offer lower premiums based on income. So, by law, insurance companies must keep prices artificially low for some with the nonsubsidized enrollees paying full price. Again, according to the Actuaries, those forced into buying government-sanctioned insurance with no subsidies “would face the full increase.”

Let’s sum this up. A law empowering government to control health insurance is failed policy and law. Using taxpayer money to make illegal payments to private insurance companies to correct flaws in the law and has rightfully been halted with the issue returned to Congress for action. Failing ObamaCare is still in place despite more than seven years of GOP promises to repeal and replace the law, and despite the president’s smart moves to inject free-market, consumer-driven controls into the health insurance market.

ObamaCare should now be called ObamaScare considering the frightful tactics of the Left to attempt to affix wrongful blame. But notwithstanding attempts to hang it around Republican necks, this law will forever be the dud prize of Obama and Democrats. It’s now up to Republicans to restore the order of a constitutional government and work with a president whose agenda is overwhelmingly supported by Americans to replace a failed law with effective policy.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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What Progressives Really Want- They Are All Grubers

Newt Gingrich in his excellent book  Understanding Trump has used Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s formulation of IYI (Intelligent Yet Idiot) to describe the class of Elitists, intellectuals and “experts” who typify the heavily credentialed but mostly incompetent policy charlatans, intellectual shamans and academic planners against whom the Tea Party, Brexit, and Trump/Make America Great Again movements have reacted. This is a very useful observation and a good starting point if you want to really understand who Progressives are and what they want.

In the most general sense, they want to rule us and decide everything for us. They want to put their policies into effect, as Jonathan Gruber so aptly put it, by writing their laws in such “tortured” (read: deceptive) ways that the “stupid American voters” would just let them do it. They think we need them because they are educated and knowledgable. They have studied and attained degrees and other credentials that supposedly entitle them to say whatever they feel is necessary to get control of us and our lives. If they really understood what they were doing, it would not be so so bad. All their education has endowed them with a great deal of knowledge about certain things and yet it has not given them (or allowed them to develop) a true understanding.

The great inventor and researcher, Charles F. Kettering once said, “Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.” When Kettering was running the research group at GM, he made a point of retraining any PhD that the company hired. He would train him not to (as most PhDs do) proceed to try to fit the problem to what he already knew but to “,…encounter a problem without preconceptions and to let the problem teach him to both know and understand it. In this way the problem becomes its own solution. The only difference between a problem and a solution is that people understand the solution.” Kettering had a sign hung in the laboratory. It read simply, “Let the problem be the boss.”

But no, the Progressives want to rule us with knowledge not understanding. I don’t want to create the impression that I am picking only on Gruber, its just that he and his guileless truth-telling about his methods and aims give us the perfect example of how disastrous Progressiveism is as an approach to government. Mr Gruber has a complex and subtle knowledge of computer models and economic systems. About human nature and our economic behavior, however, he is as clueless and callous as a robot with Asperger’s Syndrome. Not only does he think we are stupid, he thinks that no matter how abjectly his designed programs fail, he can point to us as the problem- not his failure to understand. When, in 2016 Gruber was questioned on CNN about the incipient failure of the marketplaces he was ready to double down:

“There’s no sense in which it needs to be fixed,” Mr. Gruber said. When questioned further about why the insurance companies were pulling out of the exchanges he blames the companies for not being prepared for a “new kind of insurance market” and goes on to say, “The law is working as designed. However, it could work better. I think probably the most important thing experts would agree on is that we need a larger mandate penalty. We have individuals who are essentially free-riding on the system. They’re essentially waiting until they get sick and then getting health insurance.”

Which is to say, that he wants to see people bullied with higher penalties to force them into the Obamacare plans. When someone like Gruber refers to “experts”, you can bet that he is talking about PhDs and knowledge mongers like himself.

One last example from Gruber comes from an interview he did with Maria Bartiromo- and this is the quintessential knowledge vs understanding argument. when at 7:30 of this interview Bartiromo tells Gruber that ten CEOs of corporations have told her that, from their personal experience, they know that Obamacare is hurting job growth because they have had to halt hiring in their companies, he replies that they and she are wrong and that Obamacare is not hurting job growth. He claims to have data and equations that disprove it. I am reminded of one of my favorite cartoons by S Harris:



These people are not our “betters” they are smug, self-important fools whom we have allowed too much power in our nation and our lives. On top of it all Gruber has been exposed _ at least by the State of Vermont as a thief and a fraud for over billing and billing for work that he claimed had been done by a (probably) non-existent research assistant.

It is just this kind of bald-faced denial of true understanding- this shoveling of data points and “expert” opinion invalidate the real experience of real people- that has finally alerted so many people here and in Britain, at least, that Progressives don’t want to understand anything they just want to find ways to force us to do what they “know” we should be doing. How do they know that? Well, they are experts. What makes them experts? -Credentials earned in sterile, politically correct universities and experience producing essays, books and research that get approval from journalists, others like themselves and (most importantly) political “buy-in” by politicians who know more about how to get elected and re-elected than they understand about their constituents.

The funny thing is, for all that they call themselves Progressives, “progress” is also something they know but do not understand. If their idea of progress is equality, they do not stop at equality of opportunity. They want to to find ways to insure equality of outcome- and that means socialism at the least and communism at the worst. But then, for decades they have been making policy to foster the economic advancement of racial minorities and the black family has been gravely wounded and inequality of outcome is worse than it ever was.

In spite of all their failure, they want the world to work the way they “know” it “should” work and if it doesn’t they are prepared to bully you for “the common good.” and if bullying fails on the first try they will feel - as Gruber does about mandates- to move to coercion and beyond.

There is a Gruber in your future. The rise of this form of charlatanism has been stalled by President Trump but make no mistake, the Progressives are still coming on. They are not just Democrats the Bush administrations were full of them. Many of them are now in the ranks of the “Never Trumpers”. Emboldened over the thirty years since Reagan’s presidency there are too many academics, PhDs, consultants and authors without understanding who have been elevated with riches, position and praise.

By the way, I understand this myself because for the first few years after I got my Master’s Degree, I worked in the belly of that beast. I was a statistical programmer at, what was at the time, one of the premier social science and public policy research companies in the nation. That was a long time ago - Gruber was still in grade school. Since then, I have been in business for myself in honest, productive work but every time I read or hear what “The Establishment” wants to do or prevent, I recognize it as Progressivism and have come to think of it as The Voice of The Gruber.

They are not all without understanding but if they have never done any real work or had to really solve a problem, they should not be trusted to tell us how to live.  Know him or her for who they are, they are all “Grubers”. As is written in Isaiah 56:11 Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter.

SOURCE

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Hollywood Actors Who Condemn Trump but Were Silent on Weinstein

Just about all of them but here are some examples

Ashley Judd is the absolute worst.

I want to like her, I really do. Sometimes she chooses a good cause, like speaking up for trafficked and abused children. Those are the activities she should stick to. Unfortunately, Judd had to go to the "Women's March," where hundreds of thousands of women wore pink "pussy" hats while claiming to be upset that Trump had used that word once. She performed ridiculous slam poetry, screeching defamatory accusations about the president wanting to have sex with his daughter and about other terrible things about which she had no first-hand knowledge.

But at no time did she ever discuss a man who she did know did horrific things. No "by the way, Harvey Weinstein is a dirtbag who tried to get me to watch him shower for a part." Why didn't that come up?

I find it very difficult to believe Judd is this angry at Donald Trump, a man who has never done anything to her, or provably to anybody, when there is a man who did do something horrible to her whom she could be screeching about. She needs therapy. And possibly tranquilizers.

Jennifer Lawrence was recently interviewed for her epic fail of a movie, Mother, and gave Democratic talking points like "equality for women in the workplace," blamed Trump for hurricanes, and rattled off the same tired Leftist arguments we've heard forever. During another interview, she claimed that she is terrified of Trump and wanted to make a video of herself saying "F*** you!" to him.

Lawrence claimed she felt she could be a spokesperson for women who are underpaid:

I felt like I had a voice, people look at me and listen to me, and to not say anything, that's never sat well with me.
That seems disingenuous, because she kept quiet about the creepy mogul who everyone in Hollywood appears to have known was abusing women. Why stay quiet over that? Don't you have a responsibility to alert other women that there is a serial sexual predator in their midst? Lawrence hasn't alleged any harassment from Weinstein, although she is seen looking awkward in many photos with him while he holds her too close to his massive girth. It wouldn't surprise me if she had first-hand knowledge of his depravity.

Angelina Jolie penned a letter to the New York Times slamming Trump's travel ban because she claimed refugees were victims of terrorism. At the same time, she knew Harvey Weinstein was terrorizing young women trying to make it in the business -- but she said nothing.

Like Paltrow, she is also Hollywood royalty. The daughter of the very well-known Jon Voight should not have been scared into silence by a creep like Weinstein. If either Jolie or Paltrow had come forward, especially together, Weinstein could have been fired years ago. Instead they stayed quiet -- and allowed him to prey on women who didn't have the luxury of saying "no."

SOURCE

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A tax so stupid that it lasted only two months

Almost entirely paid by the poor, who tend to shop locally

On Wednesday, the commissioners of Cook County, Illinois, repealed the controversial soda tax that went into effect in August of this year. December 1, 2017, will be the first day residents of Cook County will no longer be required to pay a one-cent-per-ounce tax on sugar sweetened beverages—and they’re better off without it. Although some of the costs are irreversible—one vending machine company estimated the tax cost them about $75,000 to reconfigure their machines—Cook County is now on a better path.

At one cent per ounce, Cook County’s soda tax was smaller than many of the soda taxes enacted elsewhere, which range from one and a half cents to two cents per ounce. Still, the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI), an independent but libertarian-leaning think tank, estimates that the tax effectively raises the price of soda by 50 percent. IPI reports that the after-tax price of a 12-pack of soda has risen from $4 to $5.97. That’s more than five times the local tax on beer, a stunning retail price hike confirmed by the professional fact-checkers at Politifact. A well-known principle of public finance is that some of the burden of a tax imposed at any link in the supply chain eventually gets shifted forward to consumers.

Cook County’s officials, like many other politicians, justified the soda tax as a means of improving public health by reducing sugar consumption. Academic research suggests, though, that consumers may not respond to selective excise taxes in the ways soda tax proponents think they will. Consider the soda tax in Berkeley, California. One study found a 10 percent after-tax reduction in soda purchases within the city’s limits. That is the line trumpeted by soda tax advocates, who should, however, read on. The same study also found a nearly seven percent increase in purchases of soda outside of Berkeley’s taxing jurisdiction. Several letters to the editor have chronicled just the same kind of behavior from consumers in Cook County.

From the start, Cook County’s soda tax was unlikely to improve the health of its citizens and was instead just a way of raising revenue on the backs of the poor. People shopping across borders and substituting other unhealthy foods for higher priced soda render such taxes as worse than useless.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Another squirm about IQ

The Left hate the whole idea of IQ.  It offends against their absurd doctrine that all men are equal.  So when intelligence becomes a topic, they always do their best to denigrate and misrepresent it.  The article below arises from Trump's assertion that he has a higher IQ than Tillerson. It appeared in "LiveScience", which might as well be called "HalfDeadScience".

The whole aim of the article is to show that IQ score is not fixed and does not matter.  But in claiming those things they show how unscientific they are by not looking at the numbers.  Numbers are the inescapable tools of science.  And that matters.  Psychometricians are well aware that the correlations between different measures of ability are not perfect and that some situational factors can influence an IQ score.  But how strong are those influences?  Could the effect of situational factors be entirely trivial, for instance?

To answer that you have to look at the numbers that have emerged from research into IQ.  And they are revealing.  IQ tests are made up of a number of different types of puzzle that are not obviously related to one-another.  And the whole concept of IQ originated from the observation that some people are good at all sorts of puzzles that are not obviously related to one another.

So how strong is that effect?  When scores on the different tests are analysed a very strong first eigenvector arises, which shows that scores on all the different tests are strongly related to one-another.  Correlations between the various puzzles run as high as .70, which is a rare magnitude in psychological research.  So there is a single strong trait in existence that we call IQ and which tells us that a high scorer on an IQ test will be good at solving all sorts of problems.

So IQ is real and important.

What about the various influences described below that can influence an IQ score?  Again the numbers are instructive.  Nutrition, for instance, can have an effect.  A person eating a diet that is seriously deficient in important ways will get a reduced score -- but only by about 5 IQ points.  That is not negligible but it is mostly irrelevant in Western society.  Western diets generally do not harm IQ.  Reduced scores on dietary grounds are generally found in very poorly fed populations in India and Africa.  And IQs in Africa are so disastrously low that no feeding would bring them anywhere near European standards.

Let me look very briefly at some more of the influences trotted out below.  IQ correlates with Birth order.  Yes. It does appear to.  The research is not unanimous but that is probably because the effect is so small:  About 1 IQ point.

The Howard Gardner theory of "multiple intelligences" -- eight of them, would you believe? There is a very clear and simple demolition of the whole Gardner theory here -- which points out that the Gardner theory not only ignores the data but that its criteria for calling something "an intelligence" are so loose that sense of humour, sense of smell, musical ability, athletic ability etc could all be called "intelligences". By adopting similar rules I could say that all cats, dogs and horses are birds -- but that would still not make them so.

I could go on but will finish with one outright misrepresentation below.  An article titled "Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents" is described below as showing that "IQ scores also change with the test taker's level of self-discipline and personal motivation and grit".  But the article did not show that.  It showed only that academic performance, not IQ, was influencible by grit etc.  That hard workers do better at school is hardly news but it does not vitiate the fact that High IQ scorers also perform well academically.

So the article below is an exercise in deception, not science


The IQ, or the intelligence quotient, is a measure of a person's mental age divided by their actual age, multiplied by 100. So, a person who is exactly as "mentally old" as one might expect for that individual's chronological age would score a perfectly average 100. People who deviate from that score in either direction are considered to be of above- or below-average intelligence. These scores can change with age and can fluctuate from one testing session to another, according to researchers.

But intelligence is a many-faceted beast. While it is colloquially associated with math and reasoning skills, psychologists assert that there are many kinds of intelligence, with Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist at Harvard University, classifying seven distinct types, including bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial and linguistic.

Given that it's so hard to pin down exactly what intelligence is, the task of measuring it with a standardized test is particularly difficult, experts say. One of the standard IQ tests used today is called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (used for adults and older teens), which measures verbal and nonverbal cognitive skills, or as the psychologist who developed the test put it, the ability to "adapt and constructively solve problems in the environment."

Trump might not get the clear-cut result he's hoping for, since this test and others like it, including the Stanford-Binet test, don't present some unified quantity of a person's "smartness."

Test results are affected by several confounding variables, such as smoking habits, hours spent playing computer games and various aspects of one's personality, according to past research. IQ scores also change with the test taker's level of self-discipline and personal motivation and grit — all things that can change from testing session to testing session — according to a 2005 study that surveyed the IQ test results of 140 eighth-graders.

"Indeed, IQ tests are influenced by many factors," Cornell University developmental psychologist Stephen Ceci told Live Science. "For example, schooling affects IQ test performance," he added, explaining that for each year that a student falls short of finishing high school, there is a drop of between 1.8 and 4 IQ points compared to peers who did finish high school.

In Vietnam, Ceci explained, people who had a higher risk of being drafted stayed in school longer as a means to defer service compared to those with safer draft numbers. IQ testing revealed that those who stayed in school longer had higher scores — not because they were smarter, but because they had greater exposure to the conditions that would help them answer IQ test questions such as "who wrote Hamlet," Ceci said.

IQ test scores even correlate with birth order among siblings, according to two 2007 studies, as reported by The New York Times.

Therefore, IQ tests measure not just intelligence (however that is defined), but also the environment and context of one's life.

SOURCE

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Republicans Will Only Succeed if They ‘Get Behind the Trump Agenda’

Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) told Breitbart News that Republicans will only succeed in the midterm elections if “they get behind the Trump agenda.”

The congressman said that the Freedom Caucus remains committed to passing a dynamic tax reform package for middle-class families as well as repealing and replacing Obamacare. Meadows also cheered the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed repeal of Obama’s Clean Power Plan. An EPA analysis revealed that repealing the Clean Power Plan will save roughly $33 billion in compliance costs in 2030.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) cheered the EPA’s repeal of the Clean Power Plan. Meadows said, “Well it’s a good day for businesses across the country and not just in coal country when we really look at the compliance costs and economics of compliance a lot of times the cost benefits that was done under the previous administration would take credit for things that the rules and regulations accounted for and yet really didn’t take consideration for the cost and emphasize of that particular administrative action. I look at this repeal as a welcome day not just for coal country but all businesses in making sure that we have proper accounting for the cost-benefit analysis.”

Meadows added, “We should really focus on an American First agenda, and these climate pacts and climate regulations have been designed to not necessarily give American workers and the American environment a head start. It really gives our competition a greater ability to compete internationally and disadvantage American companies. I look forward to a reset that still emphasizes clean air and clean water.”

Meadows told Breitbart News that he remains optimistic about Congress’ ability to pass a tax reform package.

One thing that Washington D.C. does not do well is cut spending. We have to get the economy going again and getting tax cuts to wage earners and make sure that our businesses are competitive again. I’m optimistic that despite the rhetoric that we’re hearing, we’re going to be deliver finally on a major campaign promise that the president made to the American people, and that is to put more money back in Americans’ pockets.” Meadows said. “It is critically important that we deliver on tax reform. I believe it is bold and aggressive it may increase the deficit in the short-run, but over the long-term, the economic growth and the power of unleashing economic power of the American worker will certainly help us balance our budgets that Congress has never been able to do with just cutting the budget and limit the spending.

The House Freedom Caucus chairman then revealed that he and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) will try to find Democrats to work with and who want to pass a tax reform package. The North Carolina congressman explained, “I can tell you that Jim Jordan and I are working to identify a number of Democrats in the House and the Senate to work with that will truly tax reform bipartisan which will put more money in the middle-income wage earner’s pockets. This should be a bipartisan topic. I want to make sure that we have a tax code that makes sure that everyone benefits, including those in poverty and those middle-income wage earners and those that have already lived the American dream as well as making sure that everyone can receive the benefits of a robust economy and not just the select few.”

President Trump worked with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on an executive action that would expand Association Health Plans (AHPs) that would allow small groups, small businesses, and individuals to band together to create their own health insurance pools.

Chairman Meadows cheered Sen. Pauls’ initiative to lower Americans’ health care costs. Meadows told Breitbart News:

Rand Paul has done a very good job of focusing on association plans, and that goes back for eight or nine months. It has been my belief that since we did not get it done through the legislative initiatives that the president through the rulemaking authority that exists under the Affordable Care Act can put forth the ability for associations to provide insurance policy. It will put down real pressure to bring down premiums I applaud the effort and fully support it.

I will tell you that the president is serious about making sure that premiums get lowered so whether it is executive action on association plans or other executive actions, this administration continues to contemplate other actions as a backup in case Congress failed on repeal and replacement efforts.

Breitbart News reported on the “league of extraordinary candidates,” which consists of populist Republican candidates who remain committed to accomplishing the president’s agenda. Meadows argued that the only Republican candidates that will succeed in the midterm elections are those that “are willing to get behind the Trump agenda.”

Meadow told Breitbart News:

The fundamental question for Republican running all across the country is: are you going to stand with the American people like the president campaigned on and won on November 8? Or are you going to just talk about standing with the American people? The American voter is not going to accept talk any longer. It’s time to show the real proof of each candidate is made of and how they will fulfill that promise.

I think that the anger and the frustration that is prevalent still on the main streets across America will have a profound effect on the midterm elections and Republicans will only succeed if they get behind the Trump agenda.

Meadows explained that the Freedom Caucus remains committed to passing tax reform and passing an Obamacare repeal package. Meadows told Breitbart News that some Freedom Caucus members continue to look towards attaching an Obamacare repeal bill in must-pass legislation. Meadows said, “Well we’re obviously focused on tax reform, and we got to push even harder for a repeal and replacement effort, and there’s a number of us that are working on other ways to make sure that we attach repeal bills to must-pass legislation. Another emphasis for the Freedom Caucus is trying to support the president and identifying those regulations that have to be rolled back.”

Meadows concluded, “It’s all about representing the forgotten men and women, to make sure that they have a voice and members of the Freedom Caucus take that very seriously.”

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Trump is driving the Left insane

Leftist columnist Michael A. Cohen’s writes in the Boston Globe that "Trump is everywhere and Americans are getting buried". Trump's amazing achievement of getting himself high in the news asgenda every day is deeply painful for the Left.  Some excerpts from Cohen:

It’s impossible to keep up. It’s all-consuming. For millions of Americans, Trump has become an unbearable, infuriating, enraging, and draining presence in our national life. As a political columnist, there’s no escaping him. Going on two years he’s become an omnipresent force in my life. But what about the rest of America? What about those not afflicted by the need to constantly be spinning on the news cycle hamster wheel and those who don’t count themselves part of the MAGA crowd?

I surveyed friends and threw the question out to my Twitter feed about the emotional toll of Trumpism. The responses speak to the extraordinary and largely underreported national trauma — and increasing pessimism about America’s future — that Trump’s presidency is creating.

“There are no grown-ups in charge, no protectors, no one to make sense of things, no one to assure us it will be OK,” said a professor who lives in Las Vegas. “It is so deeply, and continuously, disturbing, that I sometimes doubt our country will survive him.”

A former Obama administration official said, “I am exhausted. All. The. Time. I simply can’t keep up.” A friend and former member of the intelligence community told me he is “utterly exhausted from having my humanity and standing attacked. Wary and anxious that we can’t change it.”

Others struggled for the right words. “Nausea is difficult to describe succinctly,” said an old friend who lives in a blue island in Kansas.

In all the responses I received to this query there was extraordinary and debilitating sense of hopelessness that I’ve never seen before in American politics. “My sense of political efficacy of being able to have any larger impact in the world individually or even as part of a group, has been radically diminished,” a close friend and fellow New Yorker vented. That is, she said, “a bad thing for me and a very bad thing if it gets multiplied out to all of us.”

Many expressed fears of nuclear conflict; others of losing their health care if Republicans succeed in gutting Obamcare. Some talked about moving out of the country, while some compared Trump’s presidency to being in an abusive relationship. People report weight gain, increased anxiety and depression, and sleeplessness.

SOURCE

After all the frustrations and heartburn the Left have visited on everyone else with their insatiable demands for political correctness, it is deeply pleasing to hear that the Left are getting some of their own back

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The Scandalous Truth about Obamacare Is Laid Bare

A government program that is ruined by permitting more choice is not sustainable.

It’s not just that Obamacare is financially unsustainable. More seriously, it is intellectually unsustainable, even though this truth has been slow to emerge. This has come to an end with President Trump’s executive order.

What does it do? It cuts subsidies to failing providers, yes. It also redefines the meaning of “short term” policies from one year to 90 days. But more importantly–and this is what has the pundit class in total meltdown–it liberalizes the rules for providers to serve health-coverage consumers.

In the words of USA Today: the executive order permits a greater range of choice “by allowing more consumers to buy health insurance through association health plans across state lines.”

The key word here is “allowing” – not forcing, not compelling, not coercing. Allowing.

Why would this be a problem? Because allowing choice defeats the core feature of Obamacare, which is about forcing risk pools to exist that the market would otherwise never have chosen. If you were to summarize the change in a phrase it is this: it allows more freedom.

The tenor of the critics’ comments on this move is that it is some sort of despotic act. But let’s be clear: no one is coerced by this executive order. It is exactly the reverse: it removes one source of coercion. It liberalizes, just slightly, the market for insurance carriers.

Here’s a good principle: a government program that is ruined by permitting more choice is not sustainable. The New York Times predicts:

"Employers that remain in the A.C.A. small-group market will offer plans that are more expensive than average, and they will see premiums increase. Only the sickest groups would remain in the A.C.A. regulated risk pool after several enrollment cycles"

Vox puts it this way:

"The individuals likely to flee the Obamacare markets for association plans would probably be younger and healthier, leaving behind an older, sicker pool for the remaining ACA market. That has the makings of a death spiral, with ever-increasing premiums and insurers deciding to leave the market altogether"

The Atlantic makes the same point:

"Both short-term and associated plans would likely be less costly than the more robust plans sold on Obamacare’s state-based insurance exchanges. But the concern, among critics, is that the plans would cherry-pick the healthiest customers out of the individual market, leaving those with serious health conditions stuck on the Obamacare exchanges. There, prices would rise, because the pool of people on the exchanges would be sicker. Small businesses who keep the more robust plans—perhaps because they have employees with serious health conditions—would also likely face higher costs"

CNBC puts the point about plan duration in the starkest and most ironic terms.

"If the administration liberalizes rules about the duration of short-term health plans, and then also makes it easier for people to get hardship exemptions from Obamacare's mandate, it could lead healthy people who don't need comprehensive benefits to sign up in large numbers for short-term coverage"

Can you imagine? Letting people do things that are personally beneficial? Horror!

Once you break all this down, the ugly truth about Obamacare is laid bare. Obamacare didn’t create a market. It destroyed the market. Even the slightest bit of freedom wrecks the whole point.

Under the existing rules, healthy people were being forced (effectively taxed) to pay the premiums for unhealthy people, young people forced to pay for old people, anyone trying to live a healthy lifestyle required to cough up for those who do not.

This is the great hidden truth about Obamacare. It was never a program for improved medical coverage. It was a program for redistributing wealth by force from the healthy to the sick. It did this by forcing nonmarket risk pools, countering the whole logic of insurance in the first place, which is supposed to calibrate premiums, risks, and payouts toward mutual profitability. Obamacare imagined that it would be easy to use coercion to undermine the whole point of insurance. It didn’t work.

And so the Trump executive order introduces a slight bit of liberality and choice. And the critics are screaming that this is a disaster in the making. You can’t allow choice! You can’t allow more freedom! You can’t allow producers and consumers to cobble together their own plans! After all, this defeats the point of Obamacare, which is all about forcing people to do things they otherwise would not do!

This revelation is, as they say, somewhat awkward.

What we should have learned from the failure of Obamacare is that no amount of coercion can substitute for the rationality and productivity of the competitive marketplace.

Even if the executive order successfully liberalizes the sector just a bit, we have a very long way to go. The entire medical marketplace needs massive liberalization. It needs government to play even less of a role, from insurance to prescriptions to all choice, over what is permitted to be called health care and who administers it.

Freedom or coercion: these are the two paths. The first works; the second doesn’t.

SOURCE

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West Point Digs Deeper Hole on Cadet Communist

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a West Point 2016 graduate, now-2LT Spenser Rapone, who, despite his brash history displaying contempt for our nation, and his advocacy for communism, was allowed to graduate. As I noted, now-retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Heffington, an Academy history professor in 2015, had issued a sworn affidavit alerting senior USMA command about Rapone.

In his complaint LTC Heffington concluded, “I cannot reconcile the image of a first class cadet at West Point with the things he has posted online for the world to see. To me, these are red flags that cannot be ignored, and I fail to see how this individual can possibly graduate and become a commissioned officer in six months.”

But they did ignore it.

More recently, Rapone, now assigned to the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Drum, has boldly posted his hatred for his commander in chief, SecDef James Mattis, and other senior military leadership on public social media accounts. That constitutes a clear and overt UCMJ Article 88 violation: “Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense … shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

West Point command responded to the exposure of Rapone’s insubordination and UCMJ violations with an official statement asserting, “Rapone’s actions in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Army,” and that “Rapone’s chain of command is aware of his actions and is looking into the matter.”

Responding to that lame assertion, LTC Heffington sent a letter to his USMA class of 1997, noting his “intense devotion and loyalty to West Point,” but detailing the inaction over Rapone and how that reflected the degraded “leadership” culture at West Point.

Heffington wrote, “I firmly believe West Point is a national treasure and that it can and should remain a vitally important source of well trained, disciplined, highly educated Army officers and civilian leaders. However, during my time on the West Point faculty … I personally witnessed a series of fundamental changes at West Point that have eroded it to the point where I question whether the institution should even remain open. The recent coverage of 2LT Spenser Rapone — an avowed Communist and sworn enemy of the United States — dramatically highlighted this disturbing trend. Given my recent tenure on the West Point faculty and my direct interactions with Rapone, his ‘mentors,’ and with the Academy’s leadership, I believe I can shed light on how someone like Rapone could possibly graduate.”

However, Rapone’s case is just the latest indicator of military academy degradation under Barack Obama’s regime. Recall that The Patriot Post took on the command staff at the Air Force Academy in 2012, when Obama’s appointees there quietly endeavored to remove “So Help Me God” from oaths in the cadet handbook “to Support and Defend” our Constitution.

Bottom line: The investigation that needed to be done was two years ago, based on LTC Heffington’s original affidavit concerning Rapone. The investigation that really needs to be conducted now is why that didn’t happen — and of much greater significance, determining how deep Obama’s deep-state socialists have been imbedded in the ranks of American military leadership.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Republican civil war is spreading (?)

Below is the opening salvo of an article by Leftist writer, Paul Waldman.  Its very first sentence is dubious. The Trump administration has seen an upwards leap in all sorts of economic statistics, from job numbers to the stock exchange. Unemployment claims for instance, have just fallen to the lowest level in 43 years, despite hurricanes. And nearly a million new jobs were created in September.  Trump is keeping his core promise spectacularly well. "Things" are in fact going extraordinarily well for the GOP.

Broadly, the article is just the latest of the almost daily declarations from the Left saying that the  Trump administration has just doomed itself to extinction.  Never has any death been more prematurely announced.

But it is of course true that Trump has upended American conservatism by injecting national pride as one of the desired policy outcomes.  Cries of "racism" from the Left had bullied the GOP into completely abandoning all mention of national pride -- thus taking away one of their most important rallying cries.  And in a patriotic nation like the USA, losing that rallying cry was epic.  The Left did extraordinarily well to take that weapon out of the hands of American conservatives for so long

So Trump has indeed been a disrupting force in the GOP -- a long overdue disruption.  But the Leftist control of America's political discourse does seem to have seeped into the bones of some GOP figures.  They are genuinely uncomfortable with Trump's loud declarations of America's national interests.  They were comfortable with their old go-nowhere talking points and have not warmed to more red-blooded ones.  And there is no doubt that Trump's personal style grates on them as well.  Trump has  redefined what it means to be "Presidential", rather to the amusement of many who support his policies.

So Waldman is tapping into a genuine ferment in the GOP.  But it is just assertion that the ferment is escalating.  The GOP establishment was not comfortable with Trump from the word "Go".  But many Trump opponents have gradually come over to his side.  And the recent outbreak of amity between Trump and Rand Paul over healthcare regulations is surely epic.



So, as I see it, unity is spreading among the congressional GOP, not civil war. Adjusting to Trump is still far from complete but it has come a long way.  It probably needs good results in the next mid-terms to cement the Trump transition.


Parties don't descend into vicious civil wars when things are going well for them. So the fact that it's happening now to the GOP tells you a lot about what Republicans are facing, even though they control the White House, Congress, and a majority of state houses and governorships. They are beginning to tear themselves apart over the question of who is to blame for their current difficulties, with one side saying it's the fault of a feckless establishment that is insufficiently loyal to President Trump, and the other side saying — mostly sotto voce, but occasionally out loud — that the responsibility lies with Trump himself.

If the president was right in his repeated insistence that his administration has been a smashing success, there wouldn't be anything to fight about. But in truth, things could hardly be worse: No major legislation has been passed, the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act was a spectacular failure, Trump's approval ratings are abysmal and a majority of Americans say he's not fit to be president, one Republican officeholder after another is choosing not to run for re-election, polls show Democrats headed for a dramatic win in 2018, and even the one goal Republicans were all supposed to agree on — a big tax cut for the wealthy and corporations — looks like it might be in trouble.

All of which leads to dissension from within, as White House staff rush to tell reporters that the president is an infantile rage-monster whom they have to trick into not burning down the world. When Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) expressed his concerns about Trump's erratic behavior, none of his colleagues came out to contradict him and say that in fact Trump is a wise and careful leader who is performing his duties successfully, no doubt because Corker was only saying publicly what the rest of them say privately.

But to some on the right, this all smacks of a slow-motion coup by quisling Republicans who lack the courage to stand behind Trump and testify to his greatness. Which is one of the reasons that this week, the hardline conservative group FreedomWorks wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell demanding that he and his leadership team resign for their failure to produce a sufficient quantity of conservative legislation. While the signatories were a little on the has-been side (few are dying to hear what Brent Bozell and Ken Cuccinelli have to say these days), it was evidence of a disgruntlement in conservative circles.

SOURCE

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Think tank finds difference between parties greater than ever

A new study from the Pew Research Center shows a growing partisan gap in opinions on major issues, driven in part by Democrats' leftward drift.

Pew found Democrats have moved substantially left on a variety of issues while Republicans' views remain relatively constant. That was true across social and economic issues; Pew claimed that the split between Republicans and Democrats is more pronounced than any divides by race, gender, or socioeconomic status.

"This poll and some other recent ones show that Democrats are pulling more strongly to the left and Republicans are not pulling quite as strongly to the right as a general matter," said Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in American public opinion.

One such leftward shift came in Pew's question about welfare. As to whether or not the government "should do more to help the needy, even if it means going deeper into debt," 71 percent of Democrats respond affirmatively, up 17 points over the past six years.

Republicans' opinions have barely shifted, down slightly from 25 to 24 percent. Additionally, some 76 percent of Democrats say "poor people have hard lives because government benefits don't go far enough"—the highest proportion of Democrats since Pew started asking the question in 1994.

Democrats have also substantially increased their support for attending to the interests of U.S. allies. Overall, the number of Americans saying as much has increased eight points since last year, a change which "has come entirely from Democrats," Pew says. Democrats and Democrat leaners have increased their concern about allies from 62 to 74 percent since President Donald Trump took office.

In the case of immigration, while Americans of both parties have grown more liberal, Democrats still lead the trend. When asked if immigrants are more a burden or a boon to the United States, 42 percent of Republicans say they strengthen the country, up from 30 percent in 1994. Over the same time period, the percentage of Democrats saying immigrants were a net benefit grew from 32 percent to 84 percent.

Other areas that have seen conspicuous change among Democrats and no concurrent change among Republicans include racial discrimination—64 percent of Democrats say black Americans cannot "get ahead" because of racial discrimination, up from 28 percent in 2010—and the belief that religion is required for morality—the number of Democrats saying "no" has risen 13 points since 2011, while the number of Republicans has remained roughly constant.

Pew's findings reflect a long-running and growing divide in American beliefs, Bowman said.

"On social issues, those changes have been happening for a very long time," Bowman said. "I think it's actually been moving for quite some time, and the Pew charts just document more recent, faster movement in the last couple of years, but it's certainly been happening for a long time."

Democrats' leftward shift helps to exacerbate an overwhelming partisan divide. Across ten questions Pew has asked of survey respondents since 1994, the difference between Democrats and Republicans averages 36 points. That is the highest rate ever, though the gap has been growing continuously since 1994, when the average difference was just 15 points. The gap between Republicans and Democrats "far exceeds divisions along basic demographic lines, such as age, education, gender and race."

"In nearly every domain, across most of the roughly two dozen values questions tracked, views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and those of Democrats and Democratic leaners are now further apart than in the past," Pew noted.

Particularly pronounced is the partisan split over President Trump. Eight percent of Democrats approve of Trump's performance in his first year, compared to 88 percent of Republicans who approve. That makes Trump's first-year approval ratings, "the most polarized of any president dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953."

Distaste for Donald Trump and the leftward shift may go hand-in-hand, as Democratic leaders move the party's overall politics left in reaction against the president.

"The party is being pulled in a more liberal direction, there's no question about that," Bowman said. "I mean Elizabeth Warren's comment a few weeks ago essentially that this isn't Bill Clinton's party, we're not the party of welfare and crime. I think she's reflecting the views of many of the people in her party. And I think a lot of it happened during the Obama years."

SOURCE

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Trump dumps UNESCO, aka the UN Erasure, Slander, and Cover-up Organization

The Trump administration announced Thursday that it plans to withdraw from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization because of the agency's "anti-Israel bias." That's putting it mildly.

You'd think an institution with the motto "building peace in the minds of men and women" couldn't help but be a positive influence in the Middle East. Leave it to a UN agency to figure out how to parlay that mandate into an assault on Jews. UNESCO has become the tip of the spear in the UN's assault on Israel and earned a more appropriate name: the UN Erasure, Slander, and Cover-up Organization.

"E" is for UNESCO's efforts in recent years to erase Jewish history in the Holy Land. It does this by ignoring the original millennia-old Hebrew names of locations in Israel and using their much-newer Arabic names. UNESCO refers to the Temple Mount (Solomon's Temple) as "Haram al-Sharif" and the Western Wall as the Al-Buraq Plaza ("Buraq" being the mythical flying horse with a woman's head that Islamic tradition says took Mohammed up to heaven for a visit). This phenomenon has become known as temple denial.

In what Miriam Elman calls "a bid to usurp Jewish history," statements by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee have also denied Jewish historical links to the Cave of the Machpelah and its Tomb of the Patriarchs (Jewish patriarchs, that is) in the Old City of Hebron (which UNESCO calls "Al Khalil"). On July 7, UNESCO erased Judaism from both the Old City and the tomb, declaring them parts of "Palestine."

Showing an awareness that the public is increasingly onto his agency's delegitimation of Israel, UNESCO Director of Public lnformation Neil Ford insists unconvincingly that it is "not trying to replace Israeli heritage with Palestinian heritage."

"S" stands for UNESCO's campaign of slander against Israel. It slanders Israel by including ancient Jewish historical sites safely under Israeli control on its list of "Endangered World Heritage Sites," while portraying its legitimate care and maintenance of sites sacred both to Jews and Muslims as attempts to destroy Islamic heritage. In April 2016, UNESCO accused Israel of planting "fake Jewish graves" in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. In 2012, it approved a request by the Palestinian Authority to list the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as an endangered World Heritage Site because of ostensible Israeli threats.

Furthermore, UNESCO slanders Israel as an occupier of Palestinian territory – territory that includes Israel's capital, Jerusalem, as well as the ancient Jewish kingdoms of Judea and Samaria. One infamous 2016 UNESCO Executive Board decision, titled "Occupied Palestine," contains 13 repetitions of the phrase "Israel, the occupying power."

"C" is for "cover-up." UNESCO pointedly ignores Palestinian actions threatening Jewish and Christian historical sites not under Israeli control. Joseph's Tomb in Nablus was torched by Palestinians in 2000 and again in 2015. Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem has been the target of numerous Palestinian attacks, including fire in September 1996, bombings on April 10, 2005, and December 27, 2006. In 2010, UNESCO declared Rachel's Tomb was really the Bilal ibn Rabah Mosque.

More HERE

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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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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