What to Believe and Do About Statin-Associated Adverse Effects

The Statin craze is a long way from dead yet but the medical establishment is gradually coming to terms with the bad side-effects of statin use. At one time they denied any bad side-effects.  So the article excerpted below is interesting.  It is particularly interesting for the two sentences I have highlighted below.  Basically, medical researchers and drug companies just didn't want to know about side-effects from their new wonder drug.

And they still don't.  The summary below does not capture well, for instance, the mental effects of statins.  These are widely reported by patients but are virtually dismissed below.  Statins can give you Alzheimer-type symptoms so it is possible that the upsurge in Alzheimers in recent years is in fact misidentified statin use.

So the report below does serve as a warning but should be regarded as a minimal warning.  The problems are undoubtedly greater than the author, Paul D. Thompson, acknowledges.  Thompson is of course convinced that the benefits of Statins outweigh the problems but on my reading of the literature, that only applies to people who already have experienced heart problems: angina, stroke, heart attacks.  Dosing up people with statins as a general preventive measure seems on my reading to be devoid of ANY benefit and likely to do harm.  As another curent article in JAMA says: Statins for Primary Prevention; The Debate Is Intense, but the Data Are Weak


Possible statin-associated adverse effects include diabetes mellitus, hemorrhagic stroke, decreased cognition, tendon rupture, interstitial lung disease, as well as muscle-related symptoms.1 Statins increase the risk of diabetes consistent with the observation that low cholesterol levels increase diabetes risk.1 Although statins reduce total stroke, they increase the risk of hemorrhagic stroke consistent with the observation that low cholesterol levels are associated with an increase in hemorrhagic stroke.1 Statins appear to reduce or have no effect on cognitive decline.1 Tendinopathies and interstitial lung disease have possible mechanistic links to statins, but their association with statins is based solely on a small case series.1 The frequency of these possible drug-related complications is unknown but is low and outweighed by the vascular benefits of statins therapy.

Statin-associated muscle symptoms are the most frequent statin-related symptoms. Experts agree that statins can cause muscle symptoms with marked increases in creatine kinase (CK) levels, usually defined as 10 times the upper limits of normal because this has been observed in randomized clinical trials (RCTs) with an estimated occurrence of 1 additional case per 10 000 individuals treated each year.2 In addition, statins can cause a necrotizing myopathy with antibodies against hydroxyl-methyl-glutaryl Co-A reductase.1 This condition must be recognized promptly because it can lead to persistent myopathy. These patients present with muscle pain and weakness plus marked increases in CK levels that do not resolve with drug cessation. Statin-associated necrotizing myopathy is newly recognized and rare but may be more frequently diagnosed now that a commercial test for the antibody is available.

In contrast, there is considerable debate as to whether statins can produce milder symptoms such as myalgia, muscle cramps, or weakness with little or no increase in CK levels. Collins et al2 reviewed the possible adverse effects found in RCTs of statin therapy and concluded that statin-associated muscle symptoms without marked CK elevations do not exist or are extremely rare because they are not reported in the statin RCTs. These authors suggested that these symptoms may be inappropriately attributed to statins due in part to patients being warned of such possible adverse effects by their clinicians.

Most clinicians, however, are convinced that these symptoms exist and are caused by statins. The incidence of statin myalgia has been estimated at 10% from observational studies.1 The Effect of Statins on Skeletal Muscle Performance (STOMP) study is the only randomized, controlled double-blind study designed specifically to examine the effects of statins on skeletal muscle.3 The STOMP trial had predefined criteria for statin myalgia, which included onset of symptoms during treatment, persistence for 2 weeks, symptom resolution within 2 weeks of treatment cessation, and symptom reappearance within 4 week of restarting treatment. Nineteen of 203 patients treated with statins and 10 of 217 patients treated with placebo met the study definition of myalgia (9.4% vs 4.6%, P = .054). This finding did not reach statistical significance, but it indicates a 94.6% probability that statins were responsible for the symptoms. This result occurred even though the study participants were young (mean age, 44.1 years), healthy, and treated with statins for only 6 months. Creatine kinase values were not different between the 2 groups. These results not only suggest that the true incidence of statin myalgia is approximately 5% but also support the observation that approximately 10% of patients will report symptoms of myalgia. Collins et al2 reanalyzed the STOMP trial data after including 29 patients treated with atorvastatin and 10 with placebo who discontinued participation because of personal reasons, yielding a P value of .08 and used this finding to support their assertion that statins do not cause muscle symptoms without markedly increased CK levels.

Diagnosing true statin-associated muscle symptoms is difficult. In the Goal Achievement After Utilizing an Anti PCSK9 Antibody in Statin Intolerant Subjects (GAUSS-3) study,4 the presence of statin myalgia was determined by randomly assigning patients with presumed statin muscle symptoms to receive either 20 mg of atorvastatin or placebo each day for 10 weeks followed by a 2-week hiatus before crossover to the alternative treatment. Only 209 patients (42.6%) developed muscle symptoms during atorvastatin treatment. An additional 130 (26.5%) developed muscle symptoms during placebo-only treatment, 48 (9.6%) developed muscle symptoms during both treatments, and 85 (17.3%) did not develop symptoms during either treatment.

Other evidence supports the idea that statins can cause skeletal muscle symptoms without abnormal CK values. Muscle biopsies show differences in gene expression among patients with statin-associated muscle symptoms during statin treatment and compared them with asymptomatic controls.5 Statins also produce slight increases in average CK levels and augment the increase in CK observed after exercise.1 Rhabdomyolysis is more frequent in participants in RCTs who are receiving statins and have variants in the gene for solute carrier organic anion transporter family member 1B1 (SLCO1B1),2 which regulates hepatic statin uptake. The SLCO1B1 gene variants that reduce hepatic uptake allow more statin to escape the liver and enter the extra portal circulation and ultimately skeletal muscle. The SLCO1B1 variants are also associated with mild muscle adverse effects in study participants treated with statins.6

How could the statin RCTs miss detecting mild statin-related muscle adverse effects such as myalgia? By not asking. A review of 44 statin RCTs reveals that only 1 directly asked about muscle-related adverse effects.7 In the STOMP trial, investigators called patients twice monthly to ask specifically about muscle symptoms.

JAMA. 2016;316(19):1969-1970. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.16557

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Trump Plans Ambitious Agenda

Donald Trump has announced an ambitious agenda for his first 100 days in office, but it's becoming increasingly clear that achieving it will be more difficult than he suggested during the campaign.

At the top of his list, which he outlined during the past several months, is repealing President Barack Obama's signature health care law, known as Obamacare. Trump has said the program is costing consumers too much, is damaging the economy and represents an unwise intrusion of the government into the health care system.

Prospects are good that the law could be repealed within several weeks of Trump's inauguration as president because voters this week placed the White House and Congress under GOP control. Political scientist Ross Baker of Rutgers University says repealing Obamacare is one of the issues on which Trump can find common ground with congressional Republicans from day one. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday that repeal is a top priority for the Senate GOP. The House is likely to agree.

There are several sticking points, however, such as what to do about the estimated 24 million Americans who would lose health insurance if Obamacare were abolished. How Trump and fellow Republicans solve this problem remains unclear.

Another area of apparent agreement within the GOP is immigration, one of Trump's biggest talking points during the campaign. The billionaire real-estate developer has big plans, and congressional Republicans seem willing to move forward with the required legislation despite expected Democratic opposition.

Trump wants to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and have Mexico pay the bill. Trump also wants to deport millions of immigrants who entered the United States illegally and have committed crimes since they arrived here. One problem, and it's a vexing one for Trump, is that the government of Mexico says it won't pay for the wall. And specifics are still lacking on the deportation plan.

Trump has talked about temporarily prohibiting the entry of Muslims into the United States because some of them might be terrorists. This Muslim ban, if Trump proceeds with it, is likely to be challenged in court, tying up the plan for many months until it is resolved by the judiciary.

Trump wants to persuade Congress to cut taxes and reform the tax system, but this would also take many months and it's uncertain if Democrats and Republicans are willing to take it on.

Trump wants to reduce federal regulation, and he can do much of this through executive action, bypassing Congress. This is likely to include pulling back a number of Obama's controversial executive actions and reversing or modifying the Environmental Protection Agency's plans to make it much harder to build and operate coal-fired power plants. This was an effort to limit climate change, but Trump has questioned the validity of human-caused global warming.

Trump wants to void trade deals made by Obama, such as renegotiating or withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement. And this appears to be very possible.

Other items on Trump's to-do list will be tougher to implement. Trump favors imposing term limits on Congress but McConnell opposes them. And McConnell is less than enthused about Trump's plan to boost spending on infrastructure, apparently because it would cost so much money.

Another big decision will be naming a Supreme Court nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Trump aides say he will quickly make his choice, possibly on his first day in office. This will set up a major confrontation in the Senate as Democrats are expected to rally against Trump's choice.

SOURCE

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Disenfranchisement, Democrat Style



In an interview with actress Gina Rodriguez, Barack Obama was asked the following question: “Many of the Millennials, Dreamers, undocumented citizens — and I call them citizens because they contribute to this country — are fearful of voting. So if I vote, will immigration [officials] know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?”

Obama replied, “Not true. And the reason is, first of all, when you vote, you are a citizen yourself and there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating, etc. The sanctity of the vote is strictly confidential in terms of who you voted for. If you have a family member who maybe is undocumented, then you have an even greater reason to vote.”

Did Obama just declare that it was ok for illegal immigrants to vote? It seems so, though it’s not case closed because he went on to say illegals are “counting on you to make sure that you have the courage to make your voice heard.” His deliberately ambiguous words are alarming given all that Obama has done to eviscerate Rule of Law on the immigration front.

Meanwhile in Virginia, it was recently learned that Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe has successfully granted 60,000 ex-convicts voting rights in time for voting in the election, helping tip the state in favor of his long-time friend Hillary Clinton. It had been initially reported by his office that he was able to review and sign only 13,000 approvals after the state courts overruled his attempted illegal blanket pardon of more than 200,000 ex-convicts. In fact, those pardoned felons received voter registration forms with a letter from McAuliffe with pre-paid return postage.

It’s clear that Democrats have little problem with the legality of voters, so long as those voters support their candidates. What’s ironic is just how much Democrats wail about voter disenfranchisement, all while disenfranchising citizens with their continued efforts to get votes from illegal immigrants and felons. Is it any wonder that many Americans believed Donald Trump when he talked about the election being rigged?

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Major Douglas and the "Social Credit" cult

I see that there are still some people around who believe in the "Social Credit" movement founded in the 1930s on the madcap ideas of Major C.H. Douglas.  Douglas was a clever engineer with an enquiring mind.  He did not restrict his reading to engineering.  And one day he made a most interesting discovery:  There was far more money in circulation than the government had ever issued.  How come?  He could have asked economists and bankers why but instead he made up his own explanation for it.

He decided that it was the fault of the banks. Bank bashing goes back nearly a thousand years, if you count the expulsion of the Jews from England by Edward Longshanks in 1290 A.D., so it was no wonder Major Douglas eyed the banks with suspicion.

But the theory he came up with was really weird.  He decided that the banks lent out money they did not have.  He decided that a banker could have a ledger with $5,000 lent to Bill Blogs at the top of it and the $5,000 would somehow magically end up in the pocket of Bill Bloggs.

He was aided in this preposterous theory by something known as Fractional Reserve Banking.  Under FRB, banks don't have to keep all their deposits under lock and key.  They can lend out (say) 80% of their deposits because most people leave their money in the bank for safekeeping.  They don't all suddenly  withdraw all their money at once.  On the rare occasion that DOES happen it is called a "run" and is sparked by some panic or other.

So major Douglas opined that the $5,000 to Bill Bloggs came out of the funds that were available for lending after the reserves were set aside.  What the good Major didn't realize was that banks have a legal obligation to lend no more than their deposits minus reserves.  Only the government is allowed to print money and any bank that tried to do so would have the government come crashing down on its head.  The money for Bill Bloggs had to come from deposits.  It could not be conjured up out of thin air.

So how does it all really work?  It's so simple it should be taught in grade school.  What happens on average is that when Bill Bloggs gets his loan from Bank A, he promptly deposits most of it in another bank -- or even the same bank. Say he deposits $4,000 of his $5,000 in Bank B. That bank now has a nice little deposit that it can lend on.  The original depositors who gave bank A the deposit of $5,000 to mind still have $5,000 to their name and can draw on it at any time while Bill Bloggs now has $4,000 to his name in bank B and can draw on that at any time.  Add those two together and the citizens of the place where the banks are located now have a total of $9,000 to their name ($5,000 plus $4,000).  $4,000 of money has seemingly been created out of thin air.

So that was what Major Douglas saw.  There was far more money in the banks than there "should" have been.  And he was nearly right in attributing that extra money to the banks.  It was the banking system as a whole that created the money, not any individual bank. No bank benefited from the "created" money.  Only the community as a whole did.  Economists refer to the whole thing as the "velocity of circulation".

If you Google "Major Douglas"or "Social Credit" you will get up heaps of sites claiming that Major Douglas was right.  What I have just said is usually found only in Economics textbooks.  I taught senior High School Economics for a couple of years so that is why I know about it

The above example is of course simplified.  The money held in reserve is not cash.  Cash only forms a small part of the money supply.  Most of the money supply exists in the form of credit balances.  So banks keep only a minor amount of their deposits in cash.  Most of their reserves are amounts they have to their credit with the central bank.

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I am afraid that the picture below made me a bit teary

The caption on it was: "My veteran grandpa was asked by a little girl if he would do it all again. He said, "Yes, for you.""



I suppose that I am a sentimental old fool but a tiny part of my excuse might be that I am a former member of Her Majesty's Australian Armed Forces.  Would a Leftist be moved by that picture?  I can't imagine it.

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An open confession of Leftist hate

Although he lives in the penthouse high above the crowd, it might be tough for President-elect Donald J. Trump to get some rest when he gets home.

Thousands of protesters chanted “New York Hates You” and “Not My President” in front of Trump’s flagship New York building, the Trump Tower.

Protesters filled 5th Avenue for five blocks, essentially closing down an iconic, much-visited neighborhood of midtown Manhattan. Those who weren’t holding signs raised their middle fingers – many of them taking selfies of the gesture — toward the glassy black 58-story tower that had become a symbol of the Trump candidacy.

The New York protest appeared to be the largest of dozens of anti-Trump demonstrations taking place elsewhere in the country, in Chicago, Boston, Oakland, Portland and other mostly Democratic cities.

The New York crowd was dominated by young people, many of whom had just voted in their first presidential election and were aghast at the results. Tourists in an open-top sightseeing bus that had been surrounded in the clogged street also yelled their opposition to Trump.

"I hate everything about Donald Trump,” said Jaime Reuter, 19, a student at Pace University in Manhattan. "Something has to be done."

SOURCE

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A Blow to the Non-Elite Elite

There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves.

From hacked email troves we received a glimpse of the bankrupt values of Washington journalists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists and wealthy donors. Despite their brand-name Ivy League degrees and 1 percenter resumes, dozens of the highly paid grandees who run our country and shape our news appear petty and spiteful — and clueless about the America that exists beyond their Beltway habitat.

Leveraging rich people for favors and money seems an obsession. They brag about wealth and status in the fashion of preteens.

Journalists often violated their own ethics codes during the campaign. Political analyst Donna Brazile even leaked debate topics to the Clinton team. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank reportedly asked the Democratic National Committee to provide him with anti-Trump research.

Reading about the characters who inhabit the Clinton campaign email trove, one wonders about the purpose of their Yale degrees, their tenures at Goldman Sachs, even their very stints in the Clinton campaign. Was the end game to lose their souls?

One big loser is the Obama Justice Department — or rather the very concept of justice as administered by the present administration. It has gone the tainted way of the IRS, VA and NSA. The Justice Department clearly pressured the FBI to limit its investigation of pay-for-play corruption at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.

Seemingly every few weeks of the campaign, FBI Director James Comey flip-flopped — depending on whether the most recent pressure on him came from rank-and-file FBI agents, the Clinton campaign or his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Lynch met with Bill Clinton in a secret “accidental” encounter on an airport tarmac while Hillary Clinton was under investigation. Immunity was granted to several Clinton aides without the FBI obtaining much cooperation in return. Clinton techies invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify before Congress.

Clinton campaign organizer John Podesta was in direct contact with his old friend, Peter Kadzik, a high-ranking Justice Department official who was tipping off the Clinton campaign about an impending hearing and a legal filing regarding Clinton’s emails. Until he was reassigned, Kadzik was in charge of the Justice Department’s probe of the Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner email trove.

A special prosecutor should have been appointed. But Democrats and Republicans alike had long ago soured on the use of special prosecutors. Democrats felt Ken Starr went way beyond his mandates in pursuing Bill Clinton’s excesses. Republicans charged that Lawrence Walsh’s investigation of the Iran-Contra affair had turned into a witch hunt.

But now, it is clear why there was — and still is — a need for special prosecutors in some instances. In an election year, the Obama Justice Department certainly cannot investigate Obama’s former secretary of state and heir to the Obama presidency — much less itself.

Another election casualty is the practice of extended voting. The recent trend to open state polls early and over several days is proving a terrible idea. Campaigns (think 1980, 1992 and 2000) are often not over until the last week. When millions of people vote days or even weeks before Election Day, what the candidates say or do in the critical final days becomes irrelevant. When a candidate urges citizens, “Vote early,” it is synonymous with, “Vote quickly, before more dirt surfaces about my ongoing scandals.”

Voting should return to a single event, rather than becoming a daily tracking poll.

President Obama lost big time as well. He emerged from his virtual seclusion to campaign on behalf of Clinton in a way never before seen with a sitting president. By Election Day, Obama had resorted to making fun of Donald Trump’s baseball hats, and took the low road of claiming that Trump would tolerate the Ku Klux Klan.

While encouraging Latinos to vote during an interview with actress Gina Rodriguez, Obama seemingly condoned voting by illegal immigrants when he said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not be investigating voter rolls. A Trump victory, along with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, is a repudiation of the Obama administration’s legacy and its effort to navigate around the law.

The high-tech industry and Silicon Valley lost as well. The new high-tech class prides itself on its laid-back attitude rather than its super-wealth — casual clothes, hip tastes and cool informality. But in fact, we have learned from WikiLeaks that the 21st-century high-tech aristocracy is more conniving and more status-conscious — and far more powerful — than were Gilded Age capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

Billionaire CEO Eric Schmidt of Google advised the Clinton campaign to hire “low paid” urban campaign operatives, apparently in hopes that his efforts would earn him some sort of informal Svengali advisory role in a hoped-for Clinton administration. A leaked email from tech executive Sheryl Sandberg revealed that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wanted to meet with people on the Clinton team who could help him understand “political operations to advance public policy goals.”

It became easy to say that a “crude” Trump and a “crooked” Clinton polluted the 2016 campaign. The real culprits were a corrupt Washington elite, who were as biased as they were incompetent — and clueless about how disliked they were by the very America they held in such contempt.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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A meditation on the Trump triumph

A conservative intellectual finds Trump has many things in common with American thinkers of the past

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to take the fight directly to the opposition. For the most part, he does not instigate fights, he finishes them. Only after he is attacked does he go all in and defend himself and (it is important to add, the country) while simultaneously leading a counterattack on his opponent. His penchant to counterpunch aggressively has unhinged his opponents, the Clintons in particular, who literally paid people to harm fellow citizens at his rallies. Only someone like Trump could defend the United States against such thuggery. It was his penchant to defend himself, and this country, that ultimately led to his victory.

Jaffa is right about one important thing in this regard. Great statesmen are those who appeal to a timeless ideal and enduring principle.

As Jaffa noted in Crisis of the House Divided, Lincoln’s argument pertained to the rights we all possess by nature. It is this person who gives “rise to legitimate government.” Against the backdrop of one candidate’s attempt to circumvent consent, one thing the anti Trump people have failed to consider is that Trump is actually persuasive and reviving the twin pillars of safety and happiness. That he has attempted to persuade is a necessary condition to legitimate rule. Jaffa is explicit about this: “the first task of statesmanship is not legislation but the molding of that opinion from which all legislation flows.” He goes on to remind us that the “Constitution and Union were means to an end,” that secures “the equality of all men.”

Trump is a particular figure for a particular time no less than Lincoln was for his. Just glance at any number of his speeches, and you will find that his stated intention is to restore America. We also find that the economy’s dangerous trend of increasing debt has the effect of placing our country into a form of slavery—a slavery that is compounded by forcing people to pay for unusable healthcare insurance. His support of school choice and deliberate non-patronizing appeal to black voters is a direct assault on the academic Jim Crow that presently afflicts this nation.  His remarkable goal is the restoration of our ancient faith by defending without apology our Constitution and those natural rights stated therein. As Ken Masugi noted, his campaign’s focus on the fraudulent and rigged nature of the electoral system was not a complaint, but a defense, of the natural right of the consent of the governed. His opponent sought to overthrow that consent. Trump made the case for the consent of the governed. The voters responded by giving their consent to him.

Trump is thus a restorationist and a Declarationist. This is most obvious in his Lincolnian inspired promise to return the government to one “of the people, and by the people.”

Lincoln believed in building up the Union and re-adopting its idea. The current “conservative” elite believe in burning down the house to save it. But, nothing could be gained from destruction of the Republic by handing it over to what is clearly a criminal crime family. It is imprudent at best to suggest that the country could have been saved by handing it over to a party that does not seek our enlightened consent. Yet, our consent is but one aspect of the American Idea. The other is having the ability to secure the blessings of liberty in order to pursue our own happiness. Trump argued that liberty and happiness is strengthened by the means of gainful employment.

NAFTA is a free trade document of more than 1,700 pages. Almost 700 of those pages are the treaty itself. TPP is another marvel of “free trade” weighing in at more than 2,000 pages. Neither are truly free trade agreements. They are riddled with crony capitalism and side deals that defy the very meaning of freedom. While the agreements are supported by many of the Never Trumpkins, the fact is it has not benefitted the majority of the people of this Union in a meaningful way. Cheap goods may be good for the consumer, but not when the consumer is out of a job. As Decius noted, free trade is not a principle, but, following Jaffa, it should only be a means to realizing our humanity founded in our natural equality.

America’s Founders were not strict free traders. Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” remarks that domestic markets are preferable over foreign markets. He does not mean this in terms of rejecting foreign trade, but as a matter of national wealth, and even as a defensive mechanism so as not to rely on foreign nations for subsistence. The foreign obstacles to domestic business, are impediments so great, Hamilton believed, that they cannot conduct business equally. Foreign trade must exist on “terms consistent with our interest.”

The longest serving treasury secretary after Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, though in theory a proponent of free trade, stated in his “Free Trade Memorial” of 1832 that equal intercourse with Europe was not desirable because it would not encourage “domestic manufactures.” He supported a duty on imports of 25 percent so they fall “equally upon all.”

As it pertains to Trump, he is the first candidate in the 20th century to be in such concord with the Founders not only in his economic policy, but in the reason for such a policy: the defense of the American Republic against trade that harms the nation. In a modern context, free trade means literally the end of America because it is coupled with a borderless politics.

“The preservation of the hope of an equality yet to be achieved, was the ‘value’ which was the absolutely necessary condition of the democratic political process,” Jaffa wrote. “That men may be called upon to fight for such a conviction cannot be called a failure of democracy. It would be a failure only if they refused to fight for it.”

Those who abandoned our ancient faith failed because they did not fight for the heart and soul of our nation and the idea that gave it its birth.

Trump did.

SOURCE

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The Great Liberal Freakout

The Great Liberal Freakout is under way, as we’ve noted below. Here’s my haul:

The head of the Joint Center for Political Studies, which the Washington Post describes as a “respected liberal think tank,” reacted to Trump’s landslide thus: “When you consider that in the climate we’re in—rising violence, the Ku Klux Klan—it is exceedingly frightening.”

Castro, still with us, said right before the election: “We sometimes have the feeling that we are living in the time preceding the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.”

Claremont College professor John Roth wrote: “I could not help remembering how economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism—all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I—to send the world reeling into catastrophe… It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our post-election state with fear and trembling.”

Esquire writer Harry Stein says that the voters who supported Trump were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”

Sociologist Alan Wolfe is up in the New Left Review: “The worst nightmares of the American left appear to have come true.” And he doubles down in The Nation: “[T]he United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.”

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, keeper of the “Doomsday Clock” that purported to judge the risk of nuclear annihilation, has moved the hands on the clock from seven to four minutes before midnight.

Oh wait, did I say this was the reaction to Trump??  Sorry—these are what the left was saying the day after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Some things never change.

SOURCE

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Republicans Maintain Strong Control of State Capitols. Here’s What That Means

Republicans largely retained their grip over state legislative chambers and governorships in Tuesday’s elections.

The Republican takeover of the presidency may have been the biggest election news, but political experts expect states to continue to take the lead on policymaking in the years ahead.

“Despite total Republican control in Washington now, states are where the action is—and will be—for public policy that actually impacts people,” said Dan Diorio, a policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

As of noon Wednesday, with a few results still not confirmed, Republicans have control of 66 of the nation’s 98 statehouse chambers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This does not include Nebraska, which has a nonpartisan legislature.

Before Tuesday’s election, Republicans held 68 of the nation’s statehouse chambers.

Republicans now control both legislative chambers in 32 states, compared to 13 for Democrats.

The GOP also increased its majority of governorships from 31 to 33.

In the most high-profile of the 12 states voting for their chief executive, Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper declared victory over incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in North Carolina.

But Republican governors won in Missouri and Vermont in races that had been considered toss-ups.

And Republicans increased the number of states in which they hold what is known as a “political trifecta”—with one party in control of both legislative chambers and the governorship.

Republicans increased the number of states they fully control from 22 to 24. Democrats have total control of six states.

Combined, the results in the states did not dramatically alter the GOP wave of success that followed Republicans’ redrawing legislative districts in 2010.

Republicans were mostly playing defense in the 2016 elections, since most of the state legislature seats being defended by Democrats were safely blue.

“Democrats were poised to make gains due to the natural return of the pendulum to the other side,” said Tim Storey, the director of state services at the National Conference of State Legislatures. “But they did not make huge gains and Republicans got a couple of [new] chambers. So Republicans remain in a dominant position.”

During President Barack Obama’s presidency, Republican politicians have not been shy about enacting their agenda in states.

More than 900 state legislative seats have switched hands from Democrats to Republicans since Obama took office.

“Republicans have taken full advantage of their position in the states, including implementing tax cuts in a number of places, imposing stricter limits on abortion and voting rights, and combating controversial issues like gun control,” Storey said.

Republicans see more areas for policy gains after Tuesday’s elections.

Jonathan Williams, the vice president of the Center for State Fiscal Reform at The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), was especially enthusiastic about one noteworthy chamber that flipped from Democratic to GOP control—the Kentucky House.

The Kentucky House had been the last state chamber in the South with a Democratic majority.

Republicans gained control of the chamber for the first time since 1922 and only the third time in the history of the state.

Williams said that he expects the newly Republican-controlled Kentucky House to help ease the passage of right-to-work legislation, which is backed by Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, and the GOP-controlled state Senate.

Twenty six states have right-to-work laws, meaning workers have the right to not join a union.

“Right-to-work now becomes a slam dunk in Kentucky during the first 100 days,” Williams said.

Williams also counts Iowa as a state ripe for policy action. The hotly contested Iowa Senate flipped for Republicans, giving GOP total control of the state. Iowa’s Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, and its Republican-controlled House, have been stymied by the formerly Democratic-run Senate in enacting tax cuts.

“With the Republican takeover of the Iowa Senate, I can see Iowa as an area of opportunity for conservatives when it comes to tax cuts,” Williams said.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Trump and America win: A letter to America

By Rick Manning

Dear America:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. You just saved the nation.

All of those unconstitutional pen and phone executive orders to do what Congress rejected — ripped up.

The regulations that are intended to destroy the coal industry and drive up the cost of manufacturing forcing jobs overseas — rescinded.

All the bad, bad trade deals that put the wants of big donor multi-national corporations ahead of the needs of American workers — torn up.

The job killing highest corporate tax rate in the world that has stifled economic growth — lowered.

And the near permanent takeover of the Supreme Court by those who don’t believe that the Constitution should be their guide, but instead hate the idea of individual liberties that come from God Almighty himself — prevented.

America, Nov. 8, 2016 will go down in the history books as the day that the people stood up and remembered that their country is one of laws and not men and women, rejecting the easy temptation of continuing a slide into the recesses of history, instead choosing the more difficult, noble path of freedom.

Your choosing in favor of our common national bond over those who would hyphenate each of us, separated by our race, religion and even sexual preference stops the slide into the abyss of mean-spirited fights that deprive us of our individual and national character.

The very transformation that you rejected is one designed to conform our nation to the world, rather than playing the role that God created for America to be a shining beacon of freedom for all in the world to see and be inspired by.

Donald Trump is just one man. He is flawed like all of us. He will need to be kept in check, just as the Framers intended for all presidents. And he may falter and fail, but the vote of 2016 signals that America is not dead, but instead is a concept that its people still cherish and are willing to fight for.

Hope for the future can now replace the despair of acceptance of a new normal where every day each of us were just a little less free, with a little less opportunity to make our own way without Uncle Sam’s forceful guiding hand.

In the end, that is what America is about, a land of individual opportunities to try, sometimes fail, get up and try again with an eye to becoming the best that each of us can be with the collective result being a strong, vibrant people and nation.

America is about an abiding faith that our freedom comes from God Himself, and cannot be taken away by men. A freedom worth fighting for not only here, but abroad as we help others overcome oppressors to join us in the light.

We were losing that confidence and sense of purpose and vision for ourselves. On Nov. 8, a glimmer has been restored in the lamp of freedom.

Thank you, America, for taking a chance on yourself again. Now, let’s get to work with the hard task of restoring our nation.

SOURCE

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A view from the Left

Mostly pretty factual

Trump defied all expectations on Tuesday, sending shudders around the world by claiming the keys to the Oval Office. It was the crowning moment of a political career built on proving the so-called experts — pollsters, campaign advisers, and pundits — wrong again and again.

And as the results were tallied, it became clear that Trump was redrawing the electoral map in the same way that he said he was going to. He won over white working class voters who have felt abandoned.

Accusations of groping women? Didn’t matter. Deporting immigrants en masse? Not a problem. Repeated claims that he was unfit, ill-tempered, and too erratic? Didn’t change enough minds.

He played it loose with the truth in a way that, in the past, would have been fatal for other politicians. But voters around the country demonstrated on Tuesday that they were so frustrated, so fed up — so mad as hell — that they were willing to roll the dice on the unknown rather than stick with the status quo.

“The country,” Tom Brokaw said on NBC, “is more agitated than we realized.”

Only 37 percent of voters said in exit polls that Trump is qualified to be president, while a mere 34 percent said he had the right personality and temperament for the office. But the overwhelming thirst for change seemed to take precedence. Some 70 percent of Trump voters said the most important attribute in choosing him was he “can bring needed change.”

It was a monumental loss for Hillary Clinton, but it was also an earth-shattering win for Donald Trump. Clinton dramatically underperformed President Obama in 2012, while Trump far out-performed Mitt Romney.

Rural voters turned out in greater numbers. Over and over in exit polls, voters reported they wanted change. But he also won in Florida, a far more diverse state that Hillary Clinton banked on taking by driving up Hispanic turnout.

Trump supporters gathered at a Boston-area F1 track on election night

Pollsters were woefully wrong, and perhaps unable to capture voters who didn’t vote before — or who were afraid to admit they were voting for Trump until they got into the voting booth. Political analysts late on Tuesday night were flabbergasted. “I literally have no idea what to think right now,” said one.

The New York Times’ Upshot had a projection that had Clinton with an 85 percent chance to win — the same probability that an NFL kicker has at missing a routine 37-yard field goal.

Yet Clinton missed. Despite spending twice as much money. Despite running far more ads. Despite a much bigger campaign staff. Despite a popular sitting president of the United States campaigning relentlessly on her behalf.

Those who couldn’t wait for Trump to exit stage left now have to imagine him sitting down in the Oval Office, giving a State of the Union address, and hosting state dinners. Anyone who turned the channel when Trump came on the news because they didn’t want their children to hear now have to talk with them about Trump or stop watching the news for the next four years.

If you can’t stomach a man who built his campaign on chants of “Build a wall!” and “Lock her up!” — or a man who has a Middle East policy that goes little beyond “Knock the hell out of ISIS” — that man is now your president.

He has rocked the Republican Party, but he now will have House and Senate majorities to try and carry out his priorities.

That means Obama’s health care law could be dismantled, and Supreme Court nominees will be filled by Trump. He almost certainly will attempt to carry out his far-fetched plan to build a wall along the southern border, on the Mexican government’s dime. He wants to deport any immigrant in the United States illegally, which could mean tearing families apart and sending some home.

Any Syrian refugees who had been planning to have safe harbor could be turned away. Muslims could face a temporary ban from entering a country with a motto of e pluribus unum, out of many one.

He could also attempt to follow through on his bold — potentially illegal — suggestion during a debate to instruct his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Clinton’s e-mail “situation.”

When Clinton said it was a good thing he wasn’t in charge, he vowed, “Because you’d be in jail.”

Trump defies predictions and polls in unexpected win

Later this month, Trump — the president-elect — is slated to testify in a lawsuit from former students who say they were scammed by his Trump University real estate seminars. The case is being overseen by US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, whom Trump said should recuse himself because he is “of Mexican heritage” (the federal judge was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants).

Trump never went on the traditional foreign trip that most presidential candidates do. Instead, he went to Scotland and opened a new golf course. While he was there, Britain took a stunning vote to leave the European Union. In answering questions during the leadup to the referendum, Trump did not seem familiar with it. But as soon as it happened, he embraced it.

“I think it’s a great thing that happened,” Trump told reporters after getting out of a helicopter. “People are angry, all over the world. People, they’re angry.”

He also drew parallels to his own campaign.

“They’re angry over borders. They’re angry over people coming into the country and taking over. Nobody even knows who they are,” Trump said. “They’re angry about many, many things. They took back control of their country. It’s a great thing.”

Nearly five months later, the United States would do something similar.

SOURCE

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The left brought the rise of Trump on themselves

A concise and succinct letter to the editor below

DONALD J. TRUMP is the natural result of the left’s highly politically correct, anti-white, anti-male, and anti-American rhetoric.

It turns out that if you demonize the people you disagree with, paint them as racists and oppressors, and tell them that any and all of their successes are a result of some unearned “privilege,” they will create a counterrevolution.

Progressives, President-elect Trump is the consequence of your actions, your rhetoric, and the identity politics you brought into American politics. You made your bed, now lie in it.

SOURCE

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Crash? What crash? Stocks defy prediction of a Trump meltdown

Conventional wisdom said Donald Trump couldn’t win the White House. Conventional wisdom said that in the event of an upset, financial markets would crater. Conventional wisdom was wrong.

US stocks rallied Wednesday, as shock over the billionaire’s presidential victory gave way to measured bets that he could stoke economic growth by funding infrastructure and cutting corporate taxes.

Pharmaceutical and biotech stocks rose, freed from Democratic threats to restrict drug prices. Bank stocks gained on prospects of higher interest rates and less regulation.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 1.1 percent, shaking off a 5 percent plunge overnight as global investors had watched Trump claim state after state, despite polls leaning toward Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton.

Investors went into the election with a high degree of confidence that Clinton would come out on top, shaking off an 11th-hour e-mail inquiry by the FBI. Wall Street had favored Clinton as a more predictable hand on the economy.

But instead of taking a Brexit-like nosedive Wednesday, stocks showed surprising resilience after the votes were all counted.

Despite the vagueness of Trump’s plans so far, investors liked the sound of spending on job-creating projects, such as roads and transportation, to provide stimulus to the economy that the central bank can no longer provide with near-zero interest rates. Corporate tax cuts, too, appeared to be a welcome prospect.

“Trump has a mandate to get growth going,’’ said Kathleen Gaffney, a bond fund manager at Eaton Vance Management in Boston. If Trump is able to generate blue-collar jobs and lower taxes, she said, “those are two things that could affect our economy in a positive way.”

Trump helped ease the global markets’ early emotional reaction to his win with a conciliatory tone in his acceptance speech, analysts said. But markets were expected to be choppy in the days ahead, as investors at home and abroad try to discern more about the president-elect’s intentions.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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It's Trump!

I am so happy I could cry.  America has been saved from the psychopathic b*tch and all her ilk who would destroy America.  In my own tiny way, I helped campaign for him so his victory is a victory for me too.  Great blessings and prosperity ahead for America now.

And Trump has singlehandedly reformed and reinvigorates American conservatism.  The Congressional GOP had become just a watered-down version of the Left.  They refused to oppose Muslim immigration because that would be "racist", which is what the Left say.  Trump has turned all that on its head.  The Left no longer rule the roost.  And with both the Senate and the House still in GOP hands, Trump should have little problem getting through any changes to the law that he wants. I am looking forward to his SCOTUS nominee too.

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Donald Trump 'could make the world a safer place', claims former British Army chief

Lord Richards said he believes Trump 'would reinvigorate big power relationships' Former Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Richards said he believes controversial Republican Donald Trump could make the world a safer place if elected.

The ex-head of the British Army said the billionaire’s approach to foreign policy could “reinvigorate big power relationships” and in the process “might make the world ironically safer”.

Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, the chief of defence staff between 2010 and 2013, said: “There is a case for saying that big power politics is what we’re missing.

“If countries and states could coalesce better to deal with these people – and I think Trump’s instinct is to go down that route – then I think there's the case for saying that the world certainly won’t be any less safe.

“It’s that lack of understanding and empathy with each other as big power players that is a risk to us all at the moment.

“Therefore I think he would reinvigorate big power relationships, which might make the world ironically safer.”

Richards, who is now a peer in the House of Lords, said there was no reason to think Trump would cause chaos adding the biggest threat came from such groups as ISIS.

Speaking to The House magazine, he added: “It’s non-state actors like Isis that are the biggest threat to our security."

While on the campaign trail Trump has said he would “make a friend” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

SOURCE

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Want to know why Trump wins? Ask Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton understands the white middle class voter who elected him president over George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992 like few remaining in the Democrat Party.

Wikileaks revealed that Bill Clinton expressed thoughts that sound as if they come straight from a Donald Trump rally to a group of donors in 2015 when he said the following: “We have incredible debates all over America that shouldn’t exist between people in different racial groups because they don’t trust law enforcement anymore.” he said.

“And in the middle of all this we learned, breathtakingly, that middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans’ life expectancy is going down and is now lower than Hispanics, even though they make less money. And the gap between African Americans and whites is closing, but unfortunately not because the death rate among African Americans is dropping but because the death rate among white Americans is rising.” Clinton continued.

“Why? Because they don’t have anything to look forward to when they get up in the morning. Because their lives are sort of stuck in neutral. Because their lives are sort of stuck in neutral.”

And that is why Donald Trump will be elected President of the United States, because he has given those who had previously lost hope, a glimmer of expectation of being able to achieve the future they had hoped for themselves and their family.

Bill Clinton understands exactly why the slogan, “Make America Great Again” resonates with so many voters. They have been left behind, sand kicked in their collective faces by multi-national corporations who are incentivized by their own elected officials to move job opportunities overseas.

Former President Clinton understands why voters who have been failed by the status quo will listen to an outsider who promises to fight for them against the elites who have abandoned them, after all, that was at least part of his appeal that won him the White House.

It was Bill Clinton’s ability to “feel the pain” of voters contrasted with Bush’s seemingly aloof style which helped him connect with those who he grew up with in Hope, Arkansas, even though he had virtually nothing in common with them.

Isn’t it ironic that his wife is now cast in the villain role as the representative of big Wall Street against the aspirations of the average person, as a true celebrity outsider hits all the chords on trade, jobs and guns against her.

The question is whether the political wheel turned 180 degrees on the Clinton family, or have the Clinton family turned their collective backs to the hopes and dreams of average Americans?

SOURCE

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All Americans Now?

A comment from English Libertarian Sean Gabb

For me – and I think for many others – the American presidential election has been a repeat of the European Referendum. I went to bed with a faint hope. The BBC coverage of the results was filled with faintly crumbling Establishment optimism. I woke and turned on the computer, to look at the same shocked faces as last June. It is too early to say for sure if he has won, but it does seem that Donald Trump will be the next President of America.

Now, I make the usual reservation about the Libertarian Alliance that I direct. We are a charity. We take no part in electoral politics. We were, as an organisation, perfectly indifferent between Mr Trum and Mr Clinton. Speaking for myself, I am delighted, and I extend congratulations to all my American friends, who worked so hard and hoped to such to see this result.

The idea that Mr Trump will do all the things he has promised is, and must be, unlikely. It seems to be in the nature of things for politicians to support the people who elect them. But leave that aside. As with the European Referendum, this has been a vote on the New World Order. For generations, the British and American peoples have stood outside a wall of managed democracy. We have been asked to decide between issues that others have defined for us. At best, we have been able to choose between the lesser of evils. Last June, and this November, we given a real choice, and we raced for the exit.

The moral effect of what seems about to happen will be explosive. Two bloated, treasonous Establishments have faced electoral challenges, and have lost. The “loons” and “deplorables” have ignored the big media and the big money, and have voted for their conscience. Cultural leftism is not defeated – it has too great a control of the institutions to vanish overnight. But it has been put on notice of dismissal.

There will not be an escalation of the war in Syria. There will not be a war with Russia. There will be no pressure from the highest points of the American Government for the British Government to fudge our exit from the European Union. There will, almost certainly, be further upsets in the forthcoming elections through Europe.

Speaking personally again, it is too early to be sure. However, I have, for many years, been denouncing the United States as The Great Satan. It was the New World Order. It was the source of all war and unaccountable government. Well, all I can say at the moment, is that the Great Satan appears to have repented, and I shall look on the American flags that I encounter as I go about my daily business in England with far less distaste than at any time this century.

Regardless of our nationality, my friends and I are all Americans this morning.

Via email

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Why Elections Today Are So Contentious

The American people have allowed tremendous power to coalesce in DC

It wasn’t that long ago when national elections were more perfunctory, less volatile and certainly less contentious. Those halcyon days are long gone! Today the bile and vitriol spewing over the airwaves mirrors that of society generally, and the seemingly innocent question, “Can’t we all just get along?”, is body-slammed with a resounding “Hell NO!!” So what happened?

To borrow a meme from infamous Clintonista James Carville, “It’s the power, stupid!” That is, it’s the tremendous power the American people have allowed (demanded, even) to coalesce inside the DC Beltway, and particularly at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Decisions that used to be made by individual states or local governments are now decided somewhere in Washington, DC, often by a single branch, or even worse — and more often the case — an unaccountable sub-entity within that branch. As a result, elections nowadays are “for all the marbles.”

We offer as a case-in-point the Supreme Court of the U.S. One facet of the current election is that it is effectively a referendum on who will replace the late, great Antonin Scalia and give the winning party a 5-4 majority on an otherwise (arguably) evenly divided bench. Less than a century ago, the Court was largely apolitical; now it’s an ideology-based “final arbiter” of national law. Instead of faithfully interpreting the plain text and intent of a given law, many justices skew their judgments to “outcome-based” jurisprudence, in which they decide the outcome they want and then “walk-back” their logic — and, unfortunately, their “law” — to support the desired result. Thus whichever party chooses the next justice “wins,” by-and-large, any issue arriving at the doorstep of SCOTUS. But the problem doesn’t stop there.

No, it worsens exponentially because every branch of the federal government has too much power, in one way or another. For example, the Executive Branch has arrogated to itself the power of all three federal branches, temporarily relenting only when checked by another branch of government. As His Worship is fond of saying, “If Congress won’t act, I will” or, alternatively, “I’ve got a pen and a phone.” Translation: “I don’t need the Legislature: I am the Legislature!” In any case, the current Occupation Force inside the Executive Branch does not consider the Separation of Powers doctrine as an impediment to its reach or effectiveness.

As for Congress, with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment morphing senator selection by state legislature into popular election, senators are no longer accountable to their states, but only to “the people.” That might sound good at first blush, but it crippled states' abilities to check federal government power. Moreover, Congress generally has too much power. The Constitution enumerates specific responsibilities for Congress, the president and the Supreme Court. Those not specifically granted to these branches are supposed to be reserved either to the states or to the people — the Tenth Amendment. Today, the Tenth Amendment is all but a dead letter. Like the Executive Branch, Congress — using the courts as well as the Executive Branch — has assumed far more power than “We The People” ever granted it under the Constitution.

The aggrandizement of power by the federal government was a primary concern of the so-called “Anti-Federalists,” who opposed ratifying the Constitution on the grounds that the federal government would eventually become all-powerful and too distant from those it governed. They were also concerned that the states would become mere conduits through which the federal government would exercise its overwhelming power. Fast-forward to today and the Anti-Federalists have been prophetic. An increasingly distant government brandishes immeasurable power over a vast expanse, over hundreds of millions of people with conflicting ambitions and needs. The input of the average American citizen to the federal Leviathan is so remote that the output — the federal government’s influence upon that individual in daily life — seems totally arbitrary. “No taxation without representation”? What about the case of “no representation,” period?

However, the real issue here is not “who’s right” in a national election, but rather the broader issue of “good governance.” Originally, the Founders viewed the states as individual “experiments” on how to “get along” as a people. The idea was that if a particular state went awry with respect to governance, people would “vote with their feet” and relocate to a better state. With the power of the federal government increasing and the power of the states diminishing over time, these “experiments” became less and less distinguishable: Today all is now “federal.”

The Founders did provide an “out” through which states can bridle an over-expansive federal government: Article V of the Constitution states, in part, “The Congress … on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which … shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress.”

The basic idea behind Article V was — and is — that if the federal government went so off the rails that it was on the verge of becoming uncontrollable, the states could reel it in, via a “Convention of States.” A discussion of the merits and perils associated with such a convention is beyond the scope of this piece, but we’ve written of the merits and risks previously.

Contentious elections are merely a symptom of a much bigger problem: Too much power amassing in the federal government and a discontinuity between its applied power and the will of the people who have no real say in its control. The solution to both problems is to again disperse the federal government’s power by redistributing it across all three branches of the federal government and among the states. But such an act won’t happen from any initiative within the Beltway, which has become so drunk with the mass-accrual of power that the vast majority of today’s members of Congress and senior Executive Branch leaders are millionaires — another clear indicator of the magnitude of the problem. No, it will only happen if the states and the people resolve to cage the tiger.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Could German-Americans install Trump as President?

Some interesting speculation from Germany below.  My translation.  Trump himself has German ancestry

46 million people of German descent live in the US - the majority of them supporting Donald Trump. Many live  in the swing states that could tip the scales in the presumably narrow election.

The "German belt", ranges from Pennsylvania in the Eastern United States to Oregon in the far West. Although Germans have left a deep impact in everyday life (kindergarten, Pretzels), they have  no clear political profile.

Sandra Bullock. Kevin Costner. Kirsten Dunst. David Letterman. Uma Thurman. Christopher Walken. Bruce Willis.  They all have two things in common: They are Americans. And they have German ancestors.

And they are not alone. Every seventh American has at least partly German roots: When asked by the Census Bureau, where their family is from, 14 percent of US citizens give Germany in either first or second place.

In elections this group has been because of their sheer size of great potential. And in the upcoming presidential election this weight could actually come to fruition: According to a survey, German Americans are conspicuously strongly Donald Trump inclined. Over half preferred the Republican candidate - and only a third prefers Hillary Clinton.

46 million people of German ancestry live in the United States. There are more German Americans than Americans of English, Irish or Italian descent.  There are even more German Americans than blacks (43 million) or Mexican Americans (36 million) in the USA.

SOURCE

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Is this the last majority white election?

According to a WalletHub survey on the impact of minorities in America, 2016 is the last chance Republicans stand to win the White House… until 2060:

    "The study used two models based on population projections and matched to the overwhelming 65 percent minority turnout for President Obama in 2012 and the underwhelming 50 percent response for George W. Bush in 2004.

    The bottom line: In no presidential election from 2020-60 do the Republicans win. The closest the Republicans come is 2020 when the Democratic vote under the 2004 model reaches 50.48 percent, WalletHub said. The widest gap is projected for 2060, when the minority population will be its biggest, delivering the Democrats 58.8 percent of the vote."

The analysis pretty much states the obvious: that the growth of liberal-leaning minorities is outpacing the growth of both minority and white Republicans. It’s unclear, however, whether WalletHub’s survey accounted for voter fraud, or even acknowledges that it’s a real problem.

SOURCE

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Why Trump could really win this

A comment from Australia

AS AMERICANS go to the polls in hours, one of the most respected pollsters in the United States, Nate Silver, is giving Donald Trump a 34.6% chance of being elected. That’s about the same chance of tossing a coin three times and getting heads twice. It’s close.

The question is why. To Australian ears, many of the things that Trump supporters say are outside the boundaries of common experience. The anger and resentment they express towards their entire political system is something that has no real equivalent in the Australian political system.

The idea that the whole election is rigged — which so many of them believe — sounds absurd. In Australia, even outliers like Pauline Hanson respect the basic tenet of the democratic system: That the umpire’s decision is to be respected.

Trump has repeatedly said he won’t necessarily respect the results of the election — unless he wins.

The key that helped me understand the Trump phenomenon is that — contrary to the impression that you receive from much of the Australian coverage — Trump supporters are, on average, richer than Clinton supporters.

The first time this was put to me, I was sceptical. We were talking to a merchandise salesperson at a rally for Trump’s running mate Mike Pence, in Wilmington, North Carolina. Proudly wearing multiple Trump badges, a “Make America Great” cap and a “Hillary for Prison” T-shirt, the salesperson looked like a Trump partisan, but the truth was much better. He was simply a capitalist who knew his market.

He was there to make a buck out of, as he put it, “anyone who is looking to get rid of their money”. That afternoon, he was driving an hour across the state to attend a Clinton rally, presumably while proudly wearing his “I’m With Her” badge.
The salesperson explained that in his experience Trump supporters had a lot more money. He said that Trump supporters were crazy for caps, bumper stickers and T-shirts, while Clinton supporters tended to stick to badges.

The idea that Trump supporters were richer ran contrary to all my expectations. Donald Trump sells himself on being the candidate for low-paid white battlers, living in the America’s vast rust-belt: The eastern and mid-Western states that used to manufacture America’s cars, fridges, airconditioners and anything else made of steel, but had, according to legend, become vast wastelands.
Isn’t that the reason that even on election eve, Michigan — once a union-dominated Democratic stronghold — is in the balance, and could provide Trump with one of the oddest paths to victory for a Republican candidate?

I mean, Detroit, right? It’s byword for urban decay. Right?
But from a logical perspective, it makes sense that Clinton supporters are poorer. Trump’s main supporters are white men. From a statistical perspective, that’s a double whammy for prosperity.

In the US, men enjoy 23% more pay on average than women. And white workers tend to be higher paid than black or Latino workers.

But it still runs contrary to Trump’s rhetoric. What about the fabled rust belt that Trump is drawing his support from?
I’m not saying that the rust belt doesn’t exist, but in our travels through two of the biggest rust belt areas in Pennsylvania and Ohio, it was something that people we met talked about in the past tense.

Take Wooster, Ohio, a town of about 30,000 people, that until the early 1980s, had an economy that centred almost entirely around steel. Steel for car doors, steel for washing machines, steel for old-style American-made toys.

At the beginning of the 1980s, it lost seven thousand jobs directly involved in steel manufacturing at one plant alone, and then tens of thousands more that had supported those industries. Crime soared. The rust set in.

This is Trump territory. For a start, it’s white. Very white. City-Data.com puts its whiteness at over 96%. Our hosts in Wooster claimed it was more like 98%.

At a state level, the Democrats have all but conceded the space to the Republican machine. They aren’t even running a state senatorial candidate in this election. But it’s not because people there are poor and dejected.

Today, unemployment runs at less than 3%. And the new jobs aren’t some race-to-the-bottom Wal-Martification of America that you might expect if you listened to Donald Trump. They’re steel jobs.
But instead of just making steel, Wooster now imports it from China, and then crafts it into high-precision goods. They manufacture 85% of the world’s jet blades in Wooster, and VW now makes its steel drive trains for Audi in the city.

It’s a perfect case-study for Economics 101. Low-value manufacturing got replaced by higher-value manufacturing.
Unfortunately, whereas in the textbook, it happens overnight, it’s taken the better part of four decades for Wooster to rebuild. If you were 30 in 1980, then chances are that even though you’re employed now, you spent much of the second part of your career underemployed, waiting for Economics 101 to kick in.

During that time, the promises that politicians, corporations, and even unions made, bred cynicism — for the entire system.
The life lesson was that you can go from being utterly embedded in “the system”, with all the expectations of suburban stability, to being completely abandoned by the very same system: By the corporations and the government who allowed it to happen. Even if you were a white man.

What Trump delivers is a way to explain and put in context that jolting reality, without threatening the idea that there is nothing really that special about being a white man.

He could blame it on Ronald Reagan — who was in charge when it happened. Or he could place the blame on the companies who fled to first Japan, and then Mexico and later, China. And in some senses he does. But mostly he points to a far more tangible threat: Multicultural America.

If you were a white man who just wasted the best years of your life waiting for the next steel boom, it’s not your fault. It’s someone else’s fault — the ones who look different to you, and whose presence has boomed in the past four decades.

Of course, in Wooster, you don’t see many Latinos or blacks at all. But you do see them on TV, and it kind of makes sense. By some estimates, 2016 is the year that whites become a minority in America, in that they now make up less than 50% of the population (they are still the biggest race, by a long margin).

But this is why that for all the crazies that Trump rallies throw together, who seem utterly foreign to the Australian experience, there is an underlying logic that makes Trump such a potent force, and brings out many sensible people.

Sure, his plan — to return America to a pre-1980s world of protectionism and steel manufacturing without the pesky presence of 11 million illegal immigrants — is an unrealistic journey into nostalgia, but it speaks to a very real experience that millions of Americans have lived through (or who’ve watched their parents live through).

Once you understand that, all the policies that may sound absurd at first glance, start to make more sense. A wall between the US and Mexico is a visual metaphor for stanching the flow of jobs south.

His foreign policy is to “make America safe again,” is about trying to find a way to get America to a place where 9/11 never happened.

If stopping Muslims at the border sounds absurd to us, it works for his supporters, because many of them wouldn’t have even met a Muslim in their life.

And if cutting taxes for those on high incomes sounds like a policy that wouldn’t be popular in the rust-belt, think again: His core base are richer than you’d think.

Annual income is one of the best predictors of whether you’ll turn up on election day. Indeed, one of the main reasons that Donald Trump still has a good chance at the Presidency is that his supporters aren’t that poor. If they were, they would be less likely to turn out.

Which, given his rhetoric, is kind of ironic, really.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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The strange way Leftist psychologists measure conservatism

Leftist psychologists have long worked with a concept of conservatism that is very different from what conservatives actually think.  Their idea of conservatism is a caricature.  Their oldest caricature is that conservatives are opposed to change.  Tell that to Trump and his supporters! All the conservatives I know have a whole list of things they would like changed in the world about them.

So where did that strange definition come from?  Easy.  Conservatives oppose LEFTIST changes.  Leftists are all about change and are very authoritarian about it.  Note Mr Obama's aim to "fundamentally transform" America.  If that's not authoritarian, what would be?  So the changes that conservatives oppose are Leftist attempts to boss them around. Mr Trump articulates that.

It's an extreme demonstration of Leftist closed-mindedness that they can conceive of no other explanation for opposition to their policies than a general opposition to change.  The reasons conservatives give for opposing Leftist changes -- e.g. "That has already been tried and it failed" -- are simply not heard or not believed by Leftists.  To them there is no rational reason for opposition to the changes they want.  So opposition to change generally has to be the explanation for what conservatives do and say.

And an inadequate understanding of conservatism leads to dead-ends all the time.  Robert Altemeyer's recent work on "Right-wing authoritarianism" was based on a definition of conservatism as opposition to change and his set of questions ("scale") designed to detect conservatism ended up not detecting it at all.  High scorers on his scale were roughly as likely to be Democrats as Republicans when it came to voting.  Just to rub that in:  The highest scorers on his scale were actually Russian Communists! Altemeyer put a lot of work into his efforts to measure  conservatism but ended up with an abject failure on his hands.  Conservatism is nothing like what he thought it was.

There is actually a larger tradition among psychologists about what conservatives think -- a tradition that goes beyond opposition to change.  Conservatives are also said to have a large body of extreme thoughts about all sorts of things. Some examples:

* Patriotism and loyalty to one's country are more important than one's intellectual convictions and should have precedence over them.

* Treason and murder should be punishable by death.

* The English-speaking countries have reached a higher state of civilization than any other country in the world and as a consequence have a culture which is superior to any other.

* In taking part in any form of world organization, this country should make certain that none of its independence and power is lost.

* Certain religious sects whose beliefs do not permit them to salute the flag should either be forced to conform or else be abolished.

* When the dictator Mussolini made Italy's trains run on time, that at least was an important thing to achieve.

Statements such as the above do draw on tendencies in conservative thought but are expressed in an extreme and aggressive way.  But conservatives are generally rather moderate people so would disagree with such statements.  The first statement could be reworded to attract conservative agreement as:

* Patriotism and loyalty to one's country is important

The last statement would be most likely to attract conservative agreement as:

* "I have never heard of Mussolini"

And so on.  So in their haste to demonize conservatism, Leftists create a set of "conservative" statements that conservatives don't actually agree with!  No wonder then, that agreement with such statements does not correlate with voting conservative.

So the research into conservatism that Leftist psychologists do is not actually about real-life conservatism at all.  They waste their time. They fail to do what they aim to do.  They know nothing about conservatism.

So how come that they keep up such foolish behaviour?  Easy.  Leftists rarely talk to conservatives.  They get their ideas about conservatism from one another.  They live in a little intellectual bubble that is hermetically sealed against the big bad world outside, with all its inconvenient facts.

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Dem donor compares Republican blacks to Nazis

Project Veritas Action released another undercover video Wednesday, and this one may be the most difficult to stomach yet. In the footage, prominent Democratic donor Benjamin Barber compares Republican African-Americans to Nazis at a fundraiser in New York City for North Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Deborah Ross (language warning):

    “Have you heard of the Sonderkommandos? Jewish guards who helped murder Jews in the camps. So there were even Jews that were helping the Nazis murder Jews! So blacks who are helping the other side are seriously fucked in the head,” Barber said. “They’re only helping the enemy who will destroy them. Maybe they think ‘if I help them we’ll get along okay; somehow I’ll save my race by working with the murderers.’”

Project Veritas Action shared the video with some black Republican voters. Needless to say they were shocked and disappointed:

    “I think that Deborah Ross has shown her true colors,”  said Bishop Wooden, another black Republican in North Carolina. “If this is not a, if that…what you just showed me is not racism and condescending and basically calling blacks stupid and ignorant and saying that we are voting against our own self-interest if we support any republican [sic]. I am appalled. I am in incensed. Deborah Ross should be called to task for something like that.”

SOURCE

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James Carville Loses It, Says House GOP and the KGB Are in Cahoots

Since the GOP was the chief opponent of Russian ambition in thre Soviet period, to say that they are now pro-Russian is strange indeed

When you're insisting that MSNBC is too right-wing, you know you've lost your mind. James Carville argued that his interviewer was defending James Comey and the House Republicans, who he says are behind this investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. He also alleged that the KGB is hijacking our election. Is it sad to see a once political mastermind become this insane?

SOURCE. (Video at link)

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Another campaign ends, and my wishes didn't come true

by Jeff Jacoby

"THE MOST dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself," wrote H. L. Mencken. "Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable."

That was in 1922. If the Sage of Baltimore thought the political class during the Age of Harding was "dishonest, insane, and intolerable," God only knows how he would have characterized the Era of Trump and Clinton, or what he would have made of the ghastly presidential campaign of 2016. About the only good thing to be said for it is that it ends on Tuesday, and that one of the two worst presidential candidates in American history will go down to defeat. The other, alas, will go to the White House.

There's no denying that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have been uniquely odious nominees. But in too many ways to count, they have also been depressingly typical examples of American politicians in the modern era. When it came to shallowness, insincerity, and hypocrisy, the 2016 presidential hopefuls (along with most of the contenders who faced off during the interminable primary season) were just more of the same — the latest batch of pettifogging jacklegs greedy for authority, and prepared to debase themselves and the American democratic system by any means necessary to achieve it.

So here we are, on the cusp of another Election Day, dreading the national hangover to follow. If you're like me, you may find yourself wondering why campaigns for the highest office in the land invariably play out at the lowest common denominator.

Just once, I wish I could hear presidential candidates set aside the pandering, and tell voters that there are some problems the government has no business trying to fix.

Just once, I wish candidates could acknowledge candidly that yes, they have changed their position on a slew of issues over the years, and yes, the new position has always been the one polls show to be more popular.

Just once, I wish candidates in a debate would refuse to answer a question posed by the moderator, on the grounds that it raises a subject far too complicated to be answered in two minutes.

Just once, I wish the candidates would remind voters that it's not the president's job to wipe their noses, and that people who make dumb personal choices shouldn't expect Washington to relieve them of the consequences.

Just once, I wish candidates would decline to "approve this message," and would repudiate campaign ads that traffic in the defamation and distortion of an opponent's record.

Just once, I wish candidates would stop bragging about the laws "they" passed, and would point out instead that no bills get passed without the cooperation of scores, or even hundreds, of lawmakers.

Just once, I wish candidates would make a point of reading John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage — or Federalist No. 51 — or Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men — or Abraham Lincoln's 1865 inaugural address — and then deliver a speech explaining what they learned from it, and how it shapes their political understanding.

Just once, I wish candidates would make it clear that merely because they strongly oppose something, that doesn't mean it should be illegal — and that merely because there's some innovation they would passionately support, that's doesn't mean it ought to be mandatory.

Just once, I wish candidates would show that they understand that a course of action can be unwise, undesirable, and unpopular, yet still be perfectly constitutional.

Just once, I wish candidates, while touting their plan to do X or Y, would have the humility to concede that it might not work as envisioned.

Just once, I wish candidates would fairly and respectfully summarize an opponent's position before proceeding to dispute or criticize it.

Just once, I wish candidates would demonstrate that they've given serious thought to some of the tensions built into America's civic culture — such as equality vs. liberty, or individual liberty vs. the common good — and are able to discuss them with more depth than bumper-sticker sloganeering.

Just once, I wish candidates would admit that elected officials and government regulators are as flawed as any other human beings, and as prone to blunders and temptations as people who work in the private sector.

"If experience teaches us anything at all," wrote H.L. Mencken "it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."
Just once, I wish candidates would spend less time crowing about what they'll do on Day 1 — which is usually of little more than symbolic importance — and would instead spend more time outlining what they'll do prepare themselves before Day 1.

Just once, I wish candidates would emphasize that it is nearly always more important to block bad bills than to pass good bills.

Just once, I wish candidates would place as great a premium on maintaining their personal decency as they do on achieving political victory — that they would be intent, in other words, not merely on winning, but on deserving to win.

Ah, well. Somewhere, I suppose, the shade of Mencken is smirking at the naiveté of my wish list. "If experience teaches us anything at all," the old cynic wrote long ago, "it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- mainly about immigrants

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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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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