The only living Trump supporter in Silicon Valley

The most interesting discovery of the week was not that IBM, Citigroup and Microsoft were unwittingly running ads on (and therefore providing funds to) an Indonesian jihadi website – though they were – but that Peter Thiel is supporting Donald Trump in his bid to become the next president of the United States.

“Peter who?” I hear you say. Mr Thiel is not exactly a household name in these parts, but in Silicon Valley he’s a big cheese, as a co-founder of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook. He is therefore rich beyond the dreams of avarice. But he is also: a philosophy graduate; a lawyer; a former bond trader; a hedge-fund manager; a venture capitalist; a philanthropist; a far-out libertarian; and an entertaining author. So what is a guy like that doing supporting Trump?

One answer might be that he’s as much of an irritant to the Silicon Valley crowd as Trump is to the Republican establishment. Although the Valley’s tech titans like to portray themselves as non-statist disruptors, in fact most of them are – politically speaking – Democratic party supporters, albeit of an unusual kind. They may detest trade unions, for example, but they’re very keen on immigration – so long as the immigrants have PhDs from elite Indian or Chinese universities. And they’re not opposed to big government, so long as it’s “smart”, whatever that means.

Peter Thiel doesn’t fit this template at all. In 2009, he published an intriguing essay entitled The Education  of a Libertarian. “I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years”, it began: “to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself ‘libertarian’.” But, he confessed, “over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

So what changed his mind? Answer: the 2008 banking collapse, which Thiel describes as “a financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards – and we know that the response to this crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more government. Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane. The events of recent months shatter any remaining hopes of politically minded libertarians. For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand.”

The emerging theme is that democratic politics is irretrievably broken. “In our time,” Thiel says, “the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms – from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy’. The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it.”

In 2009 Thiel could only see three possible escape routes. The first was cyberspace: “By starting a new internet business,” he wrote, “an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order.” The second was – wait for it – outer space: “Because the vast reaches of outer space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a limitless possibility for escape from world politics.” And finally there was what Thiel called “seasteading” – floating islands in international waters run as libertarian paradises, presumably with free copies of Ayn Rand’s books on every bedside table.

Sadly, none of these ideas has – as yet – borne much fruit. The internet has been captured by governments and huge corporations. Colonising Mars and escaping to other galaxies is a proposition only for Hollywood and the Starship Enterprise. And seasteading, though technically less impracticable, remains the fantasy of dreamers and flakes of Cadbury proportions.

Faced with these cruel disappointments, what is a billionaire fantasist to do? Why, hitch his wagon to that of another billionaire fantasist, of course. And Trump and Thiel have more in common than perhaps they realise. In his 2009 essay, for example, Thiel wrote: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” Trump is hoping to turn that oxymoron into a reality.

SOURCE

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Pittsburgh Insurer Highmark Going to Court in desperate bid  to recover its Obamacare losses

Health insurers have not had much to cheer about lately, when it comes to Obamacare. They have been losing money on exchanges, and there is little hope that will change. So, a large health plan in Pittsburgh has asked judges to give it Obamacare money the Administration promised, but Congress declined to appropriate.

As reported by Wes Venteicher and Brian Bowling of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Highmark lost $260 million on Obamacare exchanges in 2014, and claims it is owed $223 million by taxpayers. Unfortunately, it received only about $27 million. And things are getting worse. To date, Highmark has lost $773 million on Obamacare exchanges.

It is not that Highmark has been singled out by anybody. On the contrary, the Administration announced last year it was only going to pay about 13 cents on the dollar for all insurers’ exchange losses, via Obamacare’s “risk corridors.” This was not the Administration’s preferred course of action. The Administration wanted to pay insurers one hundred cents on the dollar, which it had promised them.

However, it could only pay out monies it had collected from insurers which had profited more on exchanges than expected. Because both the Administration and most insurers badly miscalculated the risk in Obamacare’s exchanges, there were very few winning insurers, and the revenue a fraction of what was expected.

No problem: Taxpayers would cover the rest – or so the Administration and insurers initially claimed. I was among those analysts who recognized Congress needed to appropriate funds to cover the losses. And Congress was not inclined to do so. As a consequence of having dragged Obamacare over the legislative line in 2010, health insurers lost any sympathy from Republican politicians, who now control both chambers in Congress.

No industry which relies on government revenue, which health insurers increasingly do, can afford to be in that position for long. Government-dependent businesses go to great lengths to flatter politicians of both parties in pursuit of so-called bipartisan solutions. When they win, they win big. One recent example is the Medicare “doc fix” of April 2015, through which a broad coalition of health industry lobbyists managed to get near-unanimous Congressional consent for a budget-busting bill that significantly increases the federal government’s control of the practice of medicine.

Health insurance executives likely look back with some regret at their decision to go all-in on Obamacare in 2010 without any Republican support. Once the GOP took over the Congressional majority, its members attacked a number of suspect Obamacare cashflows that were being paid out to insurers, apparently in violation of the law. It was a remarkable development: Republican politicians who opposed the law were demanding it be executed as written, while the Administration and its insurer allies were demanding it be bent, folded, and mutilated to guarantee revenues to insurers in accord with their business plans.

Insurers had a small win last December, when they got a one year delay in a fee levied on employer-based policies, which funds Obamacare.  It can reasonably be expected that the fee will be kicked down the road again this December, and next December, et cetera, as Obamacare becomes just another unfunded liability.

However, insurers also suffered a major loss when a federal judge decided just a few days ago that the Administration was illegally paying insurers from another pot of Obamacare money, so-called cost-sharing reductions. These are subsidies to insurers which enroll Obamacare beneficiaries whose incomes are so low they cannot afford Obamacare’s high deductibles and co-pays, despite tax credits that reduce their premiums. Insurers receive subsidies to reduce these beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket payments.

However, Congress has not appropriated funds to pay out these subsidies, so the Administration cannot pay them, according to the DC Federal District Court. In the wake of this freshly issued judgment, Highmark’s decision to ask a judge to give it taxpayer dollars not appropriated by a Congress which seeks to repeal Obamacare is a real swing for the fences.

On the other hand, taxpayers can be relieved that only Highmark, one other insurer in Oregon, and the Iowa Insurance Commissioner (on behalf of a failed co-operative health plan) have decided to go for a judicial bailout. The rest of America’s health insurers are in the same boat, not having received as much taxpayer money as the Administration promised. Almost all of them have accepted that fact, and moved on from their failed attempts to wring more money out of Congress to prop up Obamacare.

Investors’ Note: UnitedHealth Group (NYSE:UNH), Aetna (NYSE:AET), Anthem (NYSE:ANTM), are among the insurers affected by Congress’ declining to appropriate moneys to subsidize insurers via the Affordable Care Act.

SOURCE

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Class war is making the deficit even worse

This article is about the British situation but the American situation is very similar

There are two very different ways to look at the world. The first is to obsess about inequality, including its psychological impact, and worry endlessly about the fact that some people are doing better than others. The second is to concentrate not on differences but absolutes, and to call for policies that ensure that as many people as possible can earn as much as possible.

For proponents of the first approach, reducing the number of rich people, and cutting their income, is an easy way to make progress. They want the gap between the worse-off and the better-off to shrink, and chopping down the tall poppies can achieve that very quickly. Advocates of the second approach would rather try to make sure that everybody, regardless of their income, can earn more, while helping those who cannot look after themselves.

The first group would prefer the rich to lose 5pc of their incomes even if the poor saw theirs stagnate, or in extremis fall slightly; my camp just wants everybody to have a pay rise, even if that means that the rich are getting richer more quickly. We worry hugely when the poor and middle classes don’t get pay rises, as has been the case at least in part in the US in recent years, but don’t see that as a reason to clobber those who are still enjoying rising wages.

This approach is not just better for the worse-off but also hugely superior for the public finances, as the latest figures on tax payments from HMRC demonstrate. A record 391,000 people earned more than £150,000 in salaries, wages, bonuses and dividends in 2015-16; 347,000 of these paid at least some tax at the 45p top rate (the remainder made use of legitimate tax reliefs). These additional rate taxpayers – approximately equivalent to the top 1pc of income earners – handed over an eye-watering £50.1bn in income tax to HMRC, a sum hugely disproportionate to their earnings as a result of the UK’s progressive tax system.

By contrast, millions of people paid no income tax at all, thanks to the Chancellor’s (sensible) policy of massively increasing the personal allowance. This is good news: it makes no sense to give those on low incomes benefits while simultaneously taxing them. It’s inefficient.

Roughly 19.4m people earned less than £30,000 but more than the personal allowance of £10,600; they paid £30.46bn in income tax. The total amount of income tax collected from the 24.6m basic rate income taxpayers came to £55bn, only just higher than the contribution from the 347,000 highest earners.

Compare that to the 16,000 taxpayers who earned at least £1m last year: they handed over £15.75bn to HMRC, around 40pc of their income. Those on high pay are incredibly useful to the taxman. The 5,000 who earn £2m or more hand over an average of £1.88m each per year in income tax alone.

The answer to the UK’s fiscal problems should therefore be clear: we need those on lower incomes to earn more; and we need a lot more rich people. Imagine if we were able to attract another 16,000 people on £1m or more: at a stroke, that would increase HMRC’s revenues by another £15.75bn, dramatically reducing the deficit. These people would employ staff, invest and boost the economy

in other ways, contributing further to the Exchequer. So why has the Government deliberately put in place policies to chase so many of these people away? Squeezing them may well have reduced the potential tax take from this group, rather than increasing it as planned.

Britain also needs better productivity to allow those stuck on low incomes to make more; and it needs even more upper middle-class jobs. The 4.6m people who earn enough to pay the 40p tax rate contributed £66.2bn in income tax, a massive chunk of the total. The more people earn, the more tax they pay, and the better the state of the public finances.

So forget about inequality. The real challenge is the lack of opportunity facing millions on the lower rungs of the labour market, the sluggish pay rises enjoyed by the middle and the fact that we no longer like hosting top-earners in this country. Simple, 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.

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

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Trump's problem with women

Ann Coulter at her mocking best:

The New York Times' front-page article last Saturday on Donald J. Trump's dealings with women forced me into a weekend of self-examination. As much as I support Trump, this isn't a cult of personality. He's not Mao, Kim Jong-un or L. Ron Hubbard. We can like our candidates, but still acknowledge their flaws. No one's perfect.

I admit there are some things about Trump that give me pause. I'm sure these will come out eventually, so I'm just going to list them.

First -- and this is corroborated by five contemporaneous witnesses -- in 1978, Trump violently raped Juanita Broaddrick in a Little Rock, Arkansas, hotel room, then, as he was leaving, looked at her bloody lip and said, "Better put some ice on that" -- oh wait, I'm terribly sorry. Did I say Trump? I didn't mean Trump, I meant Bill Clinton.

Hang on -- here we go! Knowing full well about Bill Clinton's proclivity to sexually assault women, about three weeks after that rape, Trump cornered Broaddrick at a party and said, pointedly, "I just want you to know how much Bill and I appreciate the things you do for him. Do you understand? Everything you do."

No! My mistake! That wasn't Trump either. That was Hillary Clinton. ... But this next one I'm sure was Trump.

In the early 1990s, Trump invited a young female staffer to his hotel room at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, dropped his pants and said, "Kiss it" -- WAIT A SECOND!

I don't know how this keeps happening. That was Bill Clinton. Please bear with me -- it's late at night and my notes are jumbled.

As CEO of an organization, Trump had a female employee, just months out of her teens, perform oral sex on him while he made business calls. That girl's name was Monica Lewin-- No! Wrong again! That was Bill Clinton, too! Please don't stop reading. Let me find my Trump notes ...

What I meant was that Trump was the one who later smeared that girl as a delusional stalker. She may have volunteered for the sex -- at around age 20 -- but Monica Lewinsky didn't volunteer to be slandered! And yet this fiend, this user-of-women, this retrograde misogynist, Donald Trump, deployed his journalist friends, like Sidney Blumenthal, to spread rumors that Monica was a stalker, trying to blackmail the president.

Oh, boy -- this is embarrassing. This must seem very sloppy. That wasn't Trump either; it was Hillary Clinton.

There must be something here that was Trump ... Here! I have one.

When an attractive woman desperately in need of a job came to Trump's office in 1993, instead of helping, he lunged at her, kissed her on the mouth, grabbed her breast and put her hand on his genitals. He later told a mistress that the claim was absurd because the woman, Kathleen Willey, had such small breasts.

Uh-oh -- you're not going to believe this, but -- yep, that was Bill Clinton.

This one, I'm sure was Trump. In January 1992, Trump went on "60 Minutes" to slime nightclub singer Gennifer Flowers, knowing full well she was telling the truth. He implied she belonged in a loony bin, telling millions of viewers "every time she called, distraught ... she said sort of wacky things."

Dammit! I don't know how this keeps happening. That wasn't Trump! That was Hillary, smearing one of her husband's sexual conquests.

Let's just go back to the Times' story, based on months of investigation and interviews with hundreds of women. I'll give it to you straight: When Trump was at the New York Military Academy as a teenager, one person who knew him said -- and this is corroborated by two other witnesses: "Donald was extremely sensitive to whether or not the women he invited to campus were pretty."

I almost threw up reading that. I am physically ill.

SOURCE

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Graduates face a big challenge

When they go into the Real World, college and high school grads will actually have to THINK

Paul Driessen

As they don caps and gowns, endure commencement speeches and take their diplomas, many high school and college graduates face bleak prospects in an economy that grew a dismal 0.5% the first quarter.

The United States added a meager 160,000 new non-farm jobs in April, a paltry 4,000 of them in manufacturing. First quarter 2016 averaged just 203,000 jobs per month. The labor force participation rate remains stuck at an abysmal 63% – meaning 93 million working age Americans are still unemployed.

Many who are working hold multiple jobs to make ends meet, while others are toiling at temporary, part-time or “gig” jobs, at lower pay, with few benefits and little job security.

They and the graduates may be hoping that Donald Trump will “Make America great again,” Hillary Clinton will “revitalize” our ailing economy, or Bernie Sanders will “invest” trillions of tax dollars to train and employ millions of young Americans in a 100% clean energy economy.

Like the candidates, they may be blaming our economic woes on China, climate change, Wall Street, the one percent, Mexico, inadequate supervision of greedy capitalist corporations, unpatriotic companies fleeing to foreign shores, or insufficient tax revenues to support essential government programs.

All are appealing excuses, but the real answer is much closer to home and involves multiple self-inflicted wounds. Most legislators and regulators are loath to admit any responsibility for our economic woes, and most graduates will find it hard to analyze the problem. However, the analytical process is essential.

The difficulty for students and graduates is that most were not taught how to think. Their teachers too often present mostly liberal-socialist ideology as unassailable fact, discourage or prohibit discussion and debate, and shelter sensitive snowflakes via speech codes, safe zones and bans on verbal microagression.

While raking in millions of taxpayer dollars for climate research, a cabal of RICO-20 university professors has gone even further. It has asked US and state attorneys general to launch racketeering prosecutions of anyone who disagrees with alarmist views on “dangerous manmade global warming.”

World-renowned physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman’s admonition has been largely discarded in the halls of academia. “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered,” he said, “than answers that can’t be questioned.” Sadly, answers that none dare question now dominate classroom life.

And so, as you and graduates in your family or circle of friends leave those institutions of rote learning, and go into the Real World, you will have to undertake your greatest challenge: learning to think.

Examining, questioning, discussing and challenging hypotheses, assertions and accepted “facts” are always absolutely essential for scientific, technological and societal progress. In this election year, it behooves us all to demand details from candidates, honestly assess whether their proposals will improve or worsen our economic situation, insist on and participate in rigorous debates, and cast informed votes.

As you try to understand why our economy has been so anemic, why so few jobs are being created, and why one in three young American voters supports socialism as better than free enterprise – here are just a few realities to ponder.

God gave Moses Ten Commandments. The federal government has given us tens of thousands of commandments, enforced by millions of nameless, unelected bureaucrats who have nearly unfettered discretion to interpret and administer their rules. Complying with them costs American families and businesses $1.9 trillion per year. That’s more than the entire Russian economy, more than the IRS collected in corporate and personal taxes in 2015, and $15,000 in hidden costs for every family.

The Obama Administration has been publishing 80,000 pages of new regulations per year – and is preparing to unleash 3,000 more rules before it leaves office. Small businesses are hurt most, as they cannot possibly read, comprehend and comply with this regulatory tsunami. They thus live in fear that any unknown or inadvertent violation will result in massive fines or even jail time. Indeed, more than 4,500 federal rules carry criminal penalties, and lack of knowledge or intent is no defense.

Coupled with the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world, new hourly wage and overtime rules, and mountains of state and local regulations, these federal edicts dramatically impair hiring and growth.

This unintended job and economic destruction has shrunk middle class family incomes by more than $1,000 per year during the Obama era, sent 3 million more families into poverty, and added over 600,000 black Americans to the overall poverty number. The intentional damage is even more insidious.

The Obama EPA’s war on fossil fuels has contributed greatly to the loss of nearly 50,000 coal industry jobs since 2008. Mrs. Clinton has made it clear that she will “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” if she is elected. Like Senator Sanders, she also wants to eliminate most US oil and natural gas production – while ignoring the fact that fossil fuels still provide 82% of all US energy.

That would mean vastly more land-intensive, heavily subsidized wind, solar and biofuel substitutes. It would send electricity and motor fuel prices skyrocketing to levels now found in California and New York, or even in Britain and Germany: double, triple or quadruple what most Americans now pay.

For hospitals, factories, school districts and other major energy users, that would bring thousands to millions of dollars per year in higher costs – and thus countless more lost jobs and closed doors.

President Obama, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Sanders, most Democrats and even some Republicans justify these self-inflicted wounds by saying they are necessary to prevent catastrophic global warming and climate change. But even if plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is a primary culprit – and thousands of scientists say it is not – even shutting down all US fossil fuel use would bring no benefits, amid tremendous pain.

China alone accounts for 80% of the entire world’s increase in coal consumption so far this century. It now consumes as much coal as the rest of the world combined. The 155 new coal-fired power plants it is currently planning to build will burn twice as much coal as all of Germany’s existing plants do. Coal generates 67% of China’s electricity, oil and natural gas 23%, hydro 10%, and wind and solar combined only 2 percent. Nearly a billion Chinese still exist on less than $5 per day, and the Middle Kingdom will be burning fossil fuels for decades to improve their living standards.

India, Indonesia, the rest of Asia, all of Africa and much of Latin America are in the same situation. All are burning coal, oil and natural gas to lift billions out of abject poverty – and will continue doing so.

America’s political classes always protect themselves. It is poor, minority, middle-class and blue-collar families that will suffer – along with most of you graduates – from these all pain/no gain climate policies.

Politicians always like to show they care, by giving other people’s money to worthy causes, their favorite voting blocs and their campaign contributors. They are far less charitable with their own money. Joe and Jill Biden raked in $333,182 in 2009 – and gave just $4,820 to charity; during the previous decade, they averaged $369 annually. Between 2007 and 2014, the Clintons “earned” $139 million; they gave $14,959,450 to charity – but 98.7% of that went to the scandal-ridden Clinton Family Foundation.

Socialist and anti-energy policies boil down to strangling jobs and wealth creation … making the economic pie smaller and smaller … taking money from hard-working taxpayers and giving it to “less fortunate” people who aren’t working but will likely vote for politicians who promise them “free stuff” … and ensuring “more equitable sharing” of ever greater scarcity, poverty and misery (for non-ruling elites).

As to telling poor countries to stop using fossil fuels, it is an unconscionable crime against humanity to impose policies that pretend to protect Earth’s poor, malnourished and energy-deprived masses from hypothetical climate chaos – by perpetuating poverty, malnutrition and disease that kill millions of them every year, right now.

Think about all of this as you take your diploma, evaluate candidates, and head to the polls.

Via email

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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.

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

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The Shameless New York Times Slimes Trump

The New York Times proclaimed the results of its six-week "investigation" of Donald Trump's behavior with women on the front page of the Sunday paper. It discovered that Trump is kind of sleazy around women. The Times wants us to know this right now — as opposed to six months ago — when it's clear he will be the Republican nominee running against Hillary Clinton.

No Republican is surprised. The New York Times' shameless partisanship knows no bounds.

When Juanita Broaddrick accused President Bill Clinton of sexual assault in February 1999, the Times was not impressed. It never found her story worth publicizing. Times reporters were first told about Broaddrick's allegation near the end of the 1992 presidential campaign, but they regarded it as partisan "toxic waste."

After former White House volunteer Kathleen Willey accused Clinton of sexually harassing her in the Oval Office, columnist Frank Rich criticized her in a column titled "The Liars' Club."

This is the paper where feminist columnist Anna Quindlen dismissed Paula Jones' sexual harassment case compared to Anita Hill's. She said there was "no reason to let right-wing activists, no friends to either the President, women, or the issue of sexual harassment, shame us into foolish lock step."

This is the paper that published columns written by Hill and journalist Gloria Steinem during the Lewinsky scandal, in which they shredded feminism in defense of President Clinton.

As for toxic waste, this is the paper that proudly put columnist Maureen Dowd on the front page on April 7, 1991, as she slimed President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan when discussing biographer Kitty Kelley's uber-sleazy and uber-unsubstantiated tabloid tales. "The new biography also offers sensational claims that the Reagans practiced a morality very different from what they preached. ...that both the Reagans had extramarital affairs, and that Mrs. Reagan had a long-term affair with Frank Sinatra."

Proof? Who needs proof? The fact that Bantam Books was able to publish Kelley's book without being sued was all the proof this rag required.

Now Trump is being accused of behavior much less severe than that of Clinton with Jones, or Willey or Broaddrick. Keep all the Clinton-defending in mind.

On May 14, Times reporters Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey sneered in print: "Donald Trump and women: The words evoke a familiar cascade of casual insults, hurled from the safe distance of a Twitter account, a radio show or a campaign podium. This is the public treatment of some women by Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president: degrading, impersonal, performed."

They began with an account from model Rowanne Brewer Lane, where she described how Trump asked her to put on a swimsuit at a Mar-a-Lago party in 1990. Barbaro and Twohey reacted: "But the 1990 episode at Mar-a-Lago that Ms. Brewer Lane described was different: a debasing face-to-face encounter between Mr. Trump and a young woman he hardly knew. This is the private treatment of some women by Mr. Trump, the up-close and more intimate encounters."

The story quickly blew up in their faces. Brewer Lane appeared on Fox News and CNN, trashing the Times' account as a manipulation of her words. She told them Trump was a gentleman (not "debasing") and that she had told the Times she didn't want her story to be a hit piece. CNN told the Times reporters, "Rowanne has asked for an apology. What do you say?" Barbaro refused to give any ground: "I think we really stand by our story. We believe we quoted her fairly and accurately, and that the story really speaks for itself."

Yes, it does.

It's safe to say that Trump is no one's idea of Mr. Manners. His rudeness toward women was summarized by Fox's Megyn Kelly at the first GOP debate. And the way Trump treated her afterward underlined it. But The New York Times now has no right whatsoever to pass judgment on presidential candidates and their treatment of women.

SOURCE

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The mole-hill hunters



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More regulation vandalism

Many businesses operate under very thin profit margins.  So  this typically dumb Leftist attempt to force them to pay their workers more must have bad consequences.  It's most likely effect is to increase unemployment as businesses can no longer make ends meet and thus have to close

The government’s new rules requiring overtime pay for millions of workers have small business owners facing some hard choices.

The regulations being issued by the Labor Department Wednesday would double to $913 a week from $455 the threshold under which salaried workers must be paid overtime. In terms of annual pay, the threshold rises to $47,476 from $23,660. The rules take effect Dec. 1.

Many businesses like restaurants, retailers, landscapers and moving companies will have to transition staffers, many of whom are low-level managers, to hourly pay and limit the number of hours these employees work. That can increase the workload for other staffers, have everyone scrambling to get work done in fewer hours and hurt morale. Some owners say they’ll have to limit hiring, cut services or other costs. Others are turning to technology to try to get work done in less time. And some say they’ll give staffers a raise to get them out of overtime territory.

The new rules, which will be revised every three years, aim to increase pay for an estimated 4.2 million workers, including many who work 45, 50 or more hours in a week without extra pay. Businesses have been on notice about higher overtime costs since last summer, when the government issued proposed regulations. Companies are on the hook not just for time and a-half, but also for higher Social Security and Medicare taxes employers must pay on all of a staffer’s compensation. The rules don’t cover many employees who are office workers, computer programmers or professionals.

Small businesses lack the large revenue streams and credit lines of bigger companies, so they may struggle to afford the additional overtime costs, particularly those already facing higher minimum wages or increased health care costs.

Some owners will decide that it makes sense to give staffers whose pay is close to the $47,476 threshold a raise rather than face an uncertain overtime bill going forward, says Jonathan Sigel, a labor attorney with the law firm Mirick O’Connell in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Money isn’t the only issue. Managers used to staying at work until a task is done may feel demoralized when forced to leave work unfinished, says Midge Seltzer, president of Engage PEO, a human resources provider based in Hollywood, Florida.

“Most of the workplace consists of conscientious employees. It’s going to be difficult for them to just throw their hands up and say, ‘I’m done,’” she says.

Whether staffers will earn more or less under the regulations depends on the hourly wage each company sets. Many companies who expect to pay more are already looking at their budgets for other expenses that can be reduced or eliminated.

SOURCE

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Getting Back to First Principles

Americans still enjoy freedom of religion. But these days, they’re expected to leave their faith in the pew or at home – not allow it to influence their behavior in the public square.

The founding fathers didn’t take that view. "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” George Washington said. “In vain would that man claim tribute to patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness.”

Yet many do, in fact, work very actively to undermine these pillars. That’s why I was honored to join the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently at its 40th anniversary event. EPPC’s motto is “defending American ideals since 1976.” But what really makes its contributions so invaluable is that it’s defending ideals that date back two centuries before that.

“We take great pride in the fact that people with differing viewpoints can come to the table and be a part of a larger conversation about these very important and very urgent issues,” according to EPPC Vice President Michael Cromartie. At a time when those who take their faith seriously can feel highly marginalized, EPPC is a necessary advocate.

I’m not just talking about cultural issues, where the role of faith seems more obvious. I’m referring to the whole gamut of issues. As EPPC President Ed Whelan has noted, the Center was founded at the height of the Cold War “to counter the myth of moral equivalence” between the East and the West.

Beyond the missile counts and competing proxy battles in far-flung hotspots lay the oft-overlooked fact that the Soviet Union was based on a godless, morally bankrupt system. The intellectual contributions of EPPC helped Cold War generals such as Ronald Reagan break through the malaise of détente, and achieve what EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel calls “the successful endgame of the Cold War – the victory of freedom over Communism.”

Besides foreign policy, there is a wide range of other important issues to be addressed – and EPPC scholars are there. From stem-cell research and Medicare spending to judicial activism and entitlement reform, they provide legislative testimony, hard-hitting op-eds, and timely reports that flout the superficial analysis so common in our sound-bite culture.

And all from an organization that employs fewer than two dozen people. No wonder Weekly Standard co-founder Fred Barnes has said the Center “punches above its weight.”

The goal, as House Speaker Paul Ryan said in his keynote speech at the EPPC event, is to take what we’ve learned from the great thinkers of the past and apply it to the moment. To the issues at hand. We shouldn’t simply react – we should be making informed decisions that adhere to a clearly defined standard.

Because as much as we’re involved in policy-related, day-to-day issues, we always need to go back to first principles. The team at the EPPC – which includes James Capretta, Mona Charen, Pete Wehner, Stanley Kurtz and so many others – is absolutely central to what is really involved in leading the conservative movement. They put the daily news cycle into a larger context.

Perhaps more importantly, they highlight the need for civil society. You’d never know it from the shouting heads on the cable-news stations and on the op-ed pages, but not everything has to be about politics. EPPC knows that.

President Reagan once honored EPPC “for its singular contribution in clarifying and reinforcing the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the momentous problems that confront the United States.” Here’s hoping its next 40 years is even more productive.

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.

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

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Some Sanders fans would rather back Trump than Clinton

Hillary Clinton has tagged Donald Trump as “divisive” and “unpredictable.” But those words could just as easily describe the state of the Democratic race these days.

A Nevada state party convention in Las Vegas Saturday devolved into chair-throwing, shouting, and death threats lobbed at a top party official. The Nevada Democratic Party hit back with accusations that disruptive Bernie Sanders supporters have a penchant for “actual violence” and blamed the Sanders campaign for letting the event get out of hand. On Twitter and other social media sites, vitriol from supporters on both sides ratcheted higher, and many Sanders backers say they will shun Clinton come November.

Every presidential primary creates divisions, but the hostility among Democrats in 2016 sounds like combatants digging in for battle rather than contemplating how to join forces to defeat their common enemy.

Sanders forces are increasingly bitter that the Vermont senator is still winning races but can’t catch up to Clinton, who has an advantage among party leaders and “superdelegates.” Clinton backers, meanwhile, are growing impatient with Sanders’ insistence on staying in the race despite the long odds against him. The conflict has some Democratic insiders worried that their party won’t be able to unite behind Clinton.

Sanders supporters are embracing social media hashtags such as #BernieOrBust and #DropOutHillary. Many say they will write in Sanders on their ballots in November, vote for a third-party candidate, or abstain from voting altogether. Trump gleefully is stoking the anger, repeatedly saying that Sanders is getting a raw deal from a “rigged” Democratic nominating process.

Counting only pledged delegates, Bernie Sanders needs about 105 percent of the remaining delegates for the nomination.

At least some Sanders backers say they’d prefer the former reality TV star to the former secretary of state.

“I definitely will vote for Trump,” said George Massey, a Sanders supporter from New Brunswick, N.J. “I get that Trump is a blowhard, I understand that he just says whatever comes to mind that day, and you can’t believe everything that he says. But Hillary has proven that she can’t be trusted. Trump is a roll of the dice. I would prefer to roll the dice.”

“It saddens me. It really, deeply saddens me,” said Patty Maher of Ypsilanti, Mich., a lifelong Democrat from a family of lifelong Democrats who has always voted for her party’s nominee. But this year, if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, Maher will write in Sanders’ name. “I’m just done with the Clintons completely.”

The conventional wisdom inside the Beltway is that, in the end, the 2016 race will play out like the one in 2008. That contest, too, was a bitter, bruising primary fight, and Clinton stayed in until the very end. So-called “PUMAs” — for “party unity, my ass” — vowed they’d never vote for her rival Barack Obama. But in the end, the New York Democrat encouraged her followers to back Obama – and for the most part, they did.

But there are signs that the rift that’s developed in this topsy-turvy campaign may be deeper than 2008. A March Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed one-third of Sanders voters couldn’t see themselves getting behind Clinton. Exit polls from the West Virginia primary earlier this month indicated close to half of Sanders supporters in that state would vote for Trump in a general election matchup with Clinton.

Diehard Sanders supporters are drawing up plans to mobilize in the streets of Philadelphia, where Democrats will hold their nominating convention this summer. Currently, five of the nine groups that have filed for protest permits during the convention are pro-Sanders organizations, according to city records sent to the Globe, carrying titles such as “March on the DNC 2016” and “March for Bernie.”

“The only way that Sanders supporters are going to get in line is with the active encouragement of Senator Sanders and his top staff, and to date I haven’t seen that,” said Jim Manley, a consultant and former spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the state’s most powerful politician and Senate minority leader.

Sanders did little Tuesday to comfort party leaders looking for an easy turn toward unity. His response to the Nevada brouhaha carried a defiant tone. He critiqued the Democratic establishment broadly and the Nevada state party’s handling of the convention more specifically. “The Democratic Party has a choice. It can open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change . . . or the party can choose to maintain its status quo structure, remain dependent on big-money campaign contributions, and be a party with limited participation and limited energy,” Sanders said.

Turning to the criticisms directed at his campaign, including claims by the Nevada Democratic Party that Sanders supporters have a penchant for violence, Sanders retorted: “That is nonsense,” adding that “[i]t goes without saying that I condemn any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals.”

In interviews, Sanders supporters listed several reasons why they can’t bring themselves to get behind Clinton: her past support of trade deals they feel have decimated the working and middle class, her hawkish foreign policy positions, her use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state, and the hundreds of millions in corporate money she has taken as a candidate.

Many Democrats remain hopeful that the healing will begin as soon as Sanders bows out of the race. Sanders has said he will support Clinton if she is the nominee.

”People right now, they’re very intense and passionate about their commitments. Once the dust settles a bit, they’re going to start thinking about Donald Trump as president, and I think that’s going to be a very powerful push toward voting for Hillary,” said Col Owens, a Democratic Party official in Kenton County, Ky., and a Clinton supporter.

These optimistic Democrats also point to Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is widely expected to endorse Clinton as soon as Sanders concedes. She would play a pivotal role shepherding Sanders voters, who share her progressive views, to the Clinton fold.

And the cold hard math of the matter is Clinton has won more states — clocking victories in 23 to the 19 Sanders has won before Tuesday’s votes. Overall, Clinton has earned more than 12.5 million votes versus less than 9.5 million for Sanders, according to a tally by Real Clear Politics. Some polling supports the Democratic talking point that Trump will help unite Democrats as well: A CNN poll earlier this month found that Sanders supporters favored Clinton over Trump 86-to-10.

“I’ve been saying for awhile that Bernie is the first presidential candidate that I actually felt wasn’t the lesser of two evils since I’ve been voting,” said Patrick Flanary of Louisville, Ky., who voted for Sanders in Tuesday’s primary. “Nonetheless, I do feel that if in a general election it’s Trump versus Hillary, I will definitely vote for Hillary because I think Trump doesn’t stand for anything I stand for.”

SOURCE

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Trump Takes on Wacky Warren



Liberals everywhere are totally freaked out about Donald Trump's presidential nomination. Since liberals first instinct is to find an authority figure to explain it all to them, they've sought out nutty Senator Elizabeth Warren. who's taken to bashing Donald Trump. Trump, an avid user of social media, is probably as sick and tired of seeing Elizabeth Warren on his Facebook feed as the rest of us, so this week he fired back:

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is not reining in his attacks against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked Trump if “he had been chided by any Republicans” for his Twitter war with the Democratic senator, the presumptive nominee said, “You mean Pocahontas?” Trump earlier this week fired off insults on Twitter, calling the senator “Goofy Elizabeth Warren.”

In March, Trump attacked Warren for saying she was part Native American while a professor at Harvard.

“You mean the Indian?” Trump said then when asked about Warren.
Trump's response is indicative of a new way of doing things on the right. For better or worse, he's not interested in winning rigged policy fights with people who, for decades, accused Republicans of things like 1) throwing grandparents out in the cold 2) hating the poor, and 3) wanting children to starve. In the past, Republicans offered the sort of tepid, lukewarm responses that lent credibility to those notions. In writing Warren off as "Pocahontas," Trump is treating her ideology with the total lack of respect it deserves.

SOURCE

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Trump's Secret? Religion

The relationship between crowd and leader  tells us a lot about the charisma of the leader, which is reflected in the enthusiasm of the crowd, and the way that enthusiasm is—or isn’t—expressed by the crowd. The dynamic give-and-take between charismatic leader and enthusiastic crowd had its first modern incarnation in the city of Fiume (now Rijeka) on the Adriatic coast after the First World War.  The city was taken over by a ragtag army following Italy’s greatest war hero, the decadent poet-warrior Gabriele D’Annunzio. I wrote a book about the 18 months when Fiume held out against pretty much the rest of the world.  D’Annunzio’s exchanges with the crowd were clearly based on Catholic rituals, reminding us that political ritual owes a lot to religion.  That remains true today.

I think Rush is right when he tells his listeners that Trump’s popularity has little to do with political issues. Yes, immigration is an important theme, but the main thing about Trump is himself.  He excites a lot of people, there’s a sort of magic at work at his rallies, and his followers are wild about him.  He’s the only candidate who is really charismatic; nobody goes to a Hillary or Bernie rally because they expect to be thrilled and inspired.

Which leaves me with two strong convictions about this election.

First, Trump’s incoherence on issue after issue matters less than it would for the others.  His crowd wants him, not necessarily his platform.  They want the anti-pol.  His chances of success depend on his ability to retain the magic he’s shown to date.

Second, although I’m talking about an intensely emotional and in many ways irrational phenomenon, it is driven by real and very rational contempt for the current ruling class.

Yes it’s funny that a man who doesn’t much care about religion is in large part a religious leader, but it’s quite a common historical phenomenon.  And sometimes such leaders are triumphant.

SOURCE

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How Wendy's is Handling the Raise in the Minimum Wage

Fast-food workers have engaged in the #FightFor15 for quite a while now, but one chain has a different way of ensuring that labor costs remain low without having to raise the cost of a product. Wendy's plans on installing self-service kiosks at over 6,000 locations to replace cashiers. This is in response to laws mandating higher wages.

Wendy’s (WEN) said that self-service ordering kiosks will be made available across its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year as minimum wage hikes and a tight labor market push up wages.

It will be up to franchisees whether to deploy the labor-saving technology, but Wendy’s President Todd Penegor did note that some franchise locations have been raising prices to offset wage hikes.

McDonald’s (MCD) has been testing self-service kiosks. But Wendy’s, which has been vocal about embracing labor-saving technology, is launching the biggest potential expansion.

Wendy’s Penegor said company-operated stores, only about 10% of the total, are seeing wage inflation of 5% to 6%, driven both by the minimum wage and some by the need to offer a competitive wage “to access good labor.”

Yikes. Kiosks, of course, do the job of a human at the cost of $0 per hour.

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.

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

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The poor have more heart attacks

That the poverty is a strong correlate of worse health tends to be ignored in the medical literature so a strong study pointing it out is worth noting. It is more support for the idea that there is a general syndrome of biological fitness

Geographic Variation in Trends and Disparities in Acute Myocardial Infarction Hospitalization and Mortality by Income Levels, 1999-2013

Erica S. Spatz et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance:  During the past decade, the incidence and mortality associated with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in the United States have decreased substantially. However, it is unknown whether these improvements were consistent across communities of different economic status and geographic regions since efforts to improve cardiovascular disease prevention and management may have had variable impact.

Objective:  To determine whether trends in US county-level, risk-standardized AMI hospitalization and mortality rates varied by county-based median income level.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  In this observational study, county-level risk-standardized (age, sex, and race) hospitalization and 1-year mortality rates for AMI from January 1, 1999, to December 31, 2013, were measured for Medicare beneficiaries 65 years or older. Data analysis was performed from June 2 through December 1, 2015. Counties were stratified by median income percentile using 1999 US Census Bureau data adjusted for inflation: low- (<25th average-="" high-="" or="" th-75th="">75th) income groups.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  The effect of income on the slope of AMI hospitalizations and mortality, measured as differences in the rate of change in AMI hospitalizations and mortality by county income and by the 4 US geographic regions, and a possible lag effect among low-income counties.

Results:  In the 15-year study period, AMI risk-standardized hospitalization and mortality rates decreased significantly for all 3 county income groups. Mean hospitalization rates were significantly higher among low-income counties compared with high-income counties in 1999 (1353 vs 1123 per 100 000 person-years, respectively) and in 2013 (853 vs 648 per 100 000 person-years, respectively). One-year mortality rates after hospitalization for AMI were similar across county income groups, decreasing from 1999 (31.5%, 31.4%, and 31.1%, for high-, average-, and low-income counties, respectively) to 2013 (26.2%, 26.1%, and 25.4%, respectively). Income was associated with county-level, risk-standardized AMI hospitalization rates but not mortality rates. Increasing 1 interquartile range of median county consumer price index–adjusted income ($12 000) was associated with a decline in 46 and 37 hospitalizations per 100 000 person-years for 1999 and 2013, respectively; interaction between income and time was 0.56. The rate of decline in AMI hospitalizations was similar for all county income groups; however, low-income counties lagged behind high-income counties by 4.3 (95% CI, 3.1-5.9) years. There were no significant differences in trends across geographic regions.

Conclusions and Relevance:  Hospitalization and mortality rates of AMI declined among counties of all income levels, although hospitalization rates among low-income counties lag behind those of the higher income groups. These findings lend support for a more targeted, community-based approach to AMI prevention.

JAMA Cardiol. Published online May 11, 2016. doi:10.1001/jamacardio.2016.0382

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Vermont college to close due to ‘crushing’ debt incurred by Bernie Sanders’s wife

If you want a sneak peak into what the U.S. economy would look like under a Bernie Sanders presidency, look no further than Vermont’s Burlington College. Sanders’s wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, was president of the private liberal arts school from 2004 to 2011. She must’ve not been very good at her job, though, because the college announced Monday that it will close May 27 due to “the crushing weight of the debt” incurred under Ms. Sanders’s presidency:

At the end of 2010, Ms. Sanders took out $10 million in loans on behalf of Burlington College to purchase a 32-acre swathe of land from the Roman Catholic diocese, which put the land up for sale to help cover the costs of a $17 million sexual-abuse settlement.

As Heat Street reported last month, the college almost immediately fell short on its financial obligations as fundraising pledges and commitments Ms. Sanders cited in the loan agreements never materialized.

Less than a year after leading Burlington College into massive debt, Ms. Sanders resigned, taking with her a $200,000 severance package. By 2014, because of its shaky finances and running deficits, Burlington College found itself placed on probation for two years by the regional accreditation agency.

A Burlington College news release issued this morning called these financial hurdles “insurmountable at this time.”

And if displacing hundreds of college students (the very demographic for which Bernie has claimed to be a champion) and shuttering an institution of higher education isn’t enough, Catholics in Vermont want to investigate Ms. Sanders for fraud:

Catholic parishioners in Vermont have called for an investigation into whether Ms. Sanders committed federal bank fraud by deliberately misrepresenting the amount that the college had secured in fundraising pledges as she sought financing for the land purchase.

As Ms. Sanders pursued financing for the land acquisition, she repeatedly said that Burlington College had received more than $2 million in fundraising commitments and pledges, according to numerous records.

But in fiscal year 2011, Burlington College raised only $279,000—though the college had earlier claimed to have secured $1.2 million in confirmed pledges.

Apparently Bernie isn’t the only Sanders who thinks other people’s money grows on trees.

SOURCE

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Clueless Republicans Don't Realize It's the Democrats Who Have the Problem

 BY ROGER L SIMON

I'm a bit perplexed with the continued resistance of so many of my right-wing brothers and sisters to Donald Trump. If it's just his brash style and vulgar taste, his preference for glittery gold over brushed nickel or flat black for his bathroom fixtures, I could understand it. I'm a flat black guy myself. But it's so much more than that.

The latest "betrayal" is that Trump admitted his tax plan was negotiable  Imagine that—a tax plan being negotiated between the administration and Congress! Never heard of that before.... oh, wait.

Never mind that the Trump plan, even negotiated, would be considerably lower than just about any on offer and well within the parameters of conventional GOP proposals.  (Now be honest—who would you rather have negotiating for you, Donald Trump or Paul Ryan? Who do you think would get a better result?) Nevertheless The Donald, in the opinion of the cognoscenti, once more has shown himself to be a feckless character not worthy of support—and the Republican gulf widens.

Or so we're supposed to believe, even though he has the nomination completely nailed down, signed, sealed and delivered, everything but set in bronze.

Meanwhile,  to almost everyone's surprise, the Democrats are still fighting, their internal enmity growing as Comrade Bernie wins primary after primary, sometimes by large majorities, and Lady Hillary clings to her super delegates like a three-year-old to a blanket. What happens if she loses California? According to West Virginia exit polls, a full third of Democratic primary voters are ready to defect to Trump. In the latest poll of swing states, Donald is already ahead of Clinton in Ohio and neck-and-neck in Florida and Pennsylvania. And the big show is just getting started.

It is the Democrats, not the Republicans, that have the problem, but you wouldn't know it if you watched, say, The Kelly File or had your Internet perpetually wired to National Review or The Weekly Standard, where the writing is as elegant as the thinking, these days, is often fuzzy. The Democrats are fighting a real war of ideas, disreputable though those ideas may be, while the Republicans fight a status war among themselves, a battle over control, not, except in the margins, over ideology.

Am I wrong? Remind me again where Trump, at least currently, is not a conservative? Taxes, check. Deficit, check. Immigration, check. Sanctuary cities, check. Strong defense, check.  Supreme Court, check. Veterans, check. Common core, check. Iran deal, check. Israel, check. Healthcare, check. Pro-life, check.... Oh, yes, Planned Parenthood.  He thinks the part of that operation that treats cervical cancer is okay. What a sin.

But...but...but... he has those whacky ideas on NATO and nuclear weapons and trade.

Are they so whacky? Other nations maybe should pay the part of NATO they contracted to. And the Japanese and South Koreans themselves have been talking about building nukes.  Wouldn't you after eight years of Obama? And then trade, who would doubt it could have been negotiated better, considering how our foreign policy deals have been negotiated?

And of course there's the matter of Muslim immigration. He wants that restricted for now. So do most Americans, according to polls. Again, this is the opening point of a negotiation. Who knows where it will end? But no one, other than the extreme left, would like to see the Syrian refugees pouring in. Trump will have the public on his side in preventing it.

As I said, the real problem is with the Democrats.  They are the ones in true disarray and are likely to remain so through their convention. This is a huge gift to the Republicans if they can only suck it up, shelve their egos, get together and take advantage of it. It doesn't matter whether you are a neocon, a social con, a libertarian, a financial con or just a plain con. Ideology is so last year. (Well not completely, but it doesn't have to be on the front burner all the time, does it?) Just do it.

SOURCE

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More Leftist authoritarianism

Smokers in California from 18 to 20 years old have only three and a half weeks until the state’s new tobacco restrictions kick in. Come June 9—two days after the California primary election—tobacco consumption for the under 21 crowd will be verboten.

Young adults will still be able to make many life-or-death decisions, but they won’t be able to light up legally unless they are in the military. But that doesn’t necessarily mean all will abstain from indulging in tobacco: Many will have access to smokes and chew via the underground market that is sure to emerge. For evidence, observe how black markets arose in New York in response to the Empire State’s tax on cigarettes.

“New York’s experience is instructive,” write Independent Institute Senior Fellow William F. Shughart II and Strata Policy Analyst Josh T. Smith. “Largely because of the titanic tax that it places on cigarettes, almost 60 percent of the cigarettes sold in New York are smuggled into the state, according to the Tax Foundation.”

While experience with other prohibitions (and exorbitant tax hikes) offers strong reasons to oppose California’s new tobacco law, the moral case against it is even stronger. “It is absurd to claim that 18-year-olds are too young to buy a pack of cigarettes, but are mature enough to consent to sex, marry, or vote,” Shughart and Smith write. “It is a double standard that threatens the protection of all personal choices, even the ones still considered sacrosanct.... Lawmakers should let adults be adults and allow them to make their own decisions because they are worthy of our respect as equal, autonomous human beings.”

SOURCE

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America's slide downhill?



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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.

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

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China and the East China Sea

There has been much heartburn lately over China's island building in the East China Sea.  Just about everyone disapproves.  I do not.  I realize that in saying so I am rather like the editor of the Skibbereen Eagle, when he warned the Tsar, but what I think will happen generally does happen so what I have to say on the matter may be a harbinger of things to come nonetheless.

For a start, I think island building is a good thing in general.  The climate of the area is a pleasant one and recovering land from the sea expands the human habitat.  The Dutch would of course agree with that, though Greenies would automatically talk of endangered marine creatures. And China has an enormous population so needs all the living space it can find.  So I hope that in due course there the facilities there will be greater  than the merely military.  Could there even be a tourist industry there one day?  Stranger things have happened

Living space is of course not the motive of the island building concerned.  The motive is a combination of military considerations and resource hunger.  China has a huge need for resources, energy sources in particular, so the prospect of oil reserves in the general area is hugely motivating. And it could  be argued that China deserves those resources in the light of its huge poplulation and that less populous nations have a lesser claim on them.  That is of course a socialist argument but China is officially a socialist country and we live in a socialist world.

And the military argument is orthodox. Many nations have sought and supported buffer states and the worldwide network of military bases maintained by the USA puts it in no position  to claim that China should not maintain bases at a distance from the homeland.

But in the end, the argument is over. China has clearly lost patience with the dithering and debate about ownership of the places concerned and has decided to settle the argument in its own favour in the traditional way, by conquest. And it has stated that it will defend its new bases so the message is basically "Up yours".  The world would do well to accept the new status quo.  It's not going to change. You don't argue with China

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How Trump Could Destroy Hillary Clinton In The Debates

Every once in a while, someone out there says something that a fellow writer has been mulling on for months, but couldn’t find a way to express. This is both frustrating (it was my idea!) and reassuring (it confirms what you’ve been thinking).

This happened to me recently when I was listening to The Tom Woods Show, and Michael Malice described what might happen when Donald Trump debates Hillary Clinton.

Despite demographic trends, I have sensed that Trump had a shot to defeat her. But I have struggled to find a way to explain how “magic” can beat “math.” Well, one way this could happen would be for there to be a big moment. This could come in the form of some sort of disaster (like a terrorist attack, God forbid), or it could simply come in the form of a knockout punch. (Trump is unlikely to win if the fight goes the distance and relies on the judges’ scorecard, but I could imagine Hillary choking, and Trump triumphing.)

Michael Malice provides us with one hypothetical example of how this might occur during one of the presidential debates.

This is a partial transcript of his conversation with Tom Woods:

"[Hillary’s] going to come in with her little smarmy smirk and have some kind of joke about Trump, and he’s going to improv some devastating one-liner… As soon as Trump hits her back, she’s not going to have a comeback on her feet. And she’s going to look weak and pathetic.

He’s going to dare her to say ‘I dare you to say Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism,’ and she’ll either obey him and look weak, or refuse and look cowardly.

And — this is the one — I’m predicting this one right now: If she has one of her coughing fits on stage, he is going to attack her rapid fire. And she’s literally going to be unable to speak. And he’s going to say things like, ‘Look, she’s dying in front of us.’ ‘Look, I like grammas, but they should be in a home, not the president.’ ‘She’s weak. She’s pathetic.’ … And he’s like: ‘Let’s take a break, cause she needs a breather. This woman is not well.’

That will be the moment that destroys her campaign. He’s going to eat her alive in those debates. And, as you know, most people in the middle don’t care about ideology. They just respond like dogs to a visceral way towards strength…and in those debates, he is going to have her in the palm of his hand. There’s nothing she will be able to do"

Sadly, I buy Malice’s theory that most voters are lemmings who will follow the Alpha dog. Hell, some of Trump’s supporters have taken to calling him “daddy.” What is more, Trump is a dangerous fighter, partly because he’s willing to say and do things that most of us would never think of.

Few of us would pounce on a woman while she’s coughing, and there are really two reasons for this. First, it’s unkind and unchivalrous. But second, we also think it would be bad politics — that it would backfire and make us look “mean.”

Trump is unencumbered by the former concerns — and, in terms of the latter — seems to have proven that chivalry went out with the knights.

Based on observation (the way he dispatched of opponents ranging from Jeb Bush to Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz  — not to mention the way he has attacked women ranging from Megyn Kelly to Carly Fiorina), Trump is ready, willing, and able to do this.

Let’s see if he gets his shot at a knockout punch.

SOURCE

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Obama’s Gift of Immunity to Trump

 BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

It is now old wisdom that Barack Obama created Trump—as in the idea of a national pushback to Obama’s out-of-the-mainstream agendas and the unconstitutional way in which he pursued them. Forgotten is the insulation that Obama has also provided for the excesses of Trump as a candidate and, especially, if he were to be president.

Last week, in sober and judicious tones Obama all but warned Americans that they cannot seriously support Trump, who, he implied, is little more than a reality-TV conman. But such admonitions come from a president whose chief foreign policy advisor, a failed fiction writer and D.C. insider, just bragged how he deceived the media and Washington’s insider world by feeding amateurish journalists misleading talking points. Is it serious or in the spirit of reality TV for a president to invite to the White House a rapper whose court-ordered ankle monitor goes off in a presidential ceremony, or to give an exclusive interview with YouTube personality GloZell, noted for her selfies of eating breakfast cereal floating about her in a bathtub? Obama has lectured the media that they have to vent Trump, this from a candidate who never released his medical or college records, whose speech in praise of Rashid Khalidi was suppressed by the media, and whose entire memoir was only belatedly found out to be impressionistic fiction. Obama lowered the bar and Trump skipped over it.

Can Trump mislead much more than did Obama, who assured Americans that they would never lose their doctor or health plan but rather save money and have better care, and that pulling peacekeepers from Iraq would ensure a stable and self-reliant country? Obama, remember, also bragged abroad that he had all but closed Guantanamo within a year and would stop the Bush habit of piling up more debt? After Ben Rhodes and Jonathan Gruber, what exactly are the presidential standards on veracity that we must hold Trump to?

Can Trump act any less constitutionally than has Obama? Will he scan existing law, and order his attorney general to enforce some statutes but ignore others? Will he boast that “I won” and thus has a pen and a phone to sign treaties with foreign countries without Senate ratification?  Will Trump, in Obama fashion, threaten to cut off federal funds to cities that believe in biologically identified male/female restrooms, while encouraging other cities to defy federal immigration law? Sanctuary cities in California, but not in North Carolina? Are we back to 1860 and state nullification of federal law if and when the president wishes it?

How can the media fault Trump as uniquely dense for lacking even basic familiarity with geography or foreign affairs, when they shrugged after the current president of the United States variously believed there are 57 states, there is an Austrian-speaking Austria, and the Maldives islands are the Falklands? When a president declares that Hawaii is in Asia, certainly the media cannot be surprised that Trump is not embarrassed about being clueless about the nuclear triad.

Trump is certainly vicious, but after 2009 viciousness is no longer a mortal sin in presidential politics. If it were, Obama would have been through for his thuggish language, after advising supporters to “get in their faces,” take “a gun to a knife fight” and “punish our enemies.” Trump often ridicules the helpless. But he if stoops to make fun of the Special Olympics or jokes about vaporizing people with Predator drones, what will the New York Times or NPR do? Obama ridiculed the wealthy, who did not build their own businesses, or did not know when to stop profiting, or were clueless about the point at which they had made enough money or needed their money spread around. But then again, Obama made fun of the lower middle classes as well, who clung to their religion and guns and were stereotyped as xenophobes and nativists.

Trump can be polarizing on matters of race, but here again by what standard—when the president and his team have established new lows of racial discourse? Does Trump comment on ongoing criminal cases by suggesting one of the involved might look like one of his possible white offspring? Did Trump smear illegal aliens further by suggesting that they were “typical Mexican persons”? Would he appoint an attorney general who might refer to whites as “my people” and accuse the country of being a “nation of cowards”? Would Trump stoop to wink and nod about shared white racial solidarity with a redneck comedian who shouted out to a President Trump, “Yo, Donny, you did it, my cracker, you did it”? After Obama, there are no rules about racial discourse—and no media sensitivity to racially coarse and offensive language.

Trump, as the media has shown, is certainly a crude narcissist. But will he learn to boast as a smooth egoist that he can lower the seas and cool the planet? Does he insist that he is a better political handler and speechwriter than his handlers and speechwriters? Does he claim that he will be the fourth best president in U.S. history—albeit in an outer-borough accent rather than in an Ivy League mellifluous patois?  “I,”“me” “mine” and “my” are now the normal baggage of a presidential speech.

As for the supposed fanatical Trumpsters, have they gone berserk with wild praise of Trump in near divine terms? Has a Laura Ingraham or Charles Hurt, or any other columnist, historian, talk show host, or journalist said that Trump’s neat pant crease presages that he will be a great president or that Trump makes his leg tingle, or confessed that Trump is a god, or assured that Trump would be the smartest president in the history of the office? So far, I have not read any such embarrassment in the Washington Times or American Conservative. After Obama, biased deification of a presidential candidate is old hat.

Trump certainly has wacky ideas. But will he promise to ensure that the coal industry goes out of business, or electric rates will skyrocket, or will his energy czar hope that our gas prices reach European levels? Does he plan to double the national debt in eight years or dismantle the existing health care system? Will Trump praise and subsidize a failing coal company as iconic of the country’s future in the manner that Obama coronated the soon-to-be-bankrupt Solyndra? Will he brag that setting and then ignoring red lines for Syria were among his greatest foreign policy moments?

The point is not to whitewash Trump’s crudity and outlandishness, but to explain why it so far has not eliminated him as a candidate.  Obama’s outright destruction of presidential protocols created candidate Trump. The media, which in Faustian fashion mortgaged its soul to empower Obama, has now lost all credibility as a legitimate critic and arbiter of the dangers of narcissism, half-educated pop knowledge, polarizing politics, and demonization of one’s critics.

Sadly, nearly every gross thing Trump says or does has had an antecedent in the Obama administration. "Hope and Change" begat "Make America Great," in a tit-for-tat way that Trump’s likely garish convention props will mimic Obama’s Styrofoam Greek columns. After Obama dismissed ISIS as jayvees by invoking Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, we should not be too outraged that Trump cited an endorsement from Mike Tyson.

Yikes: Trump Plans to Run America Like He Ran His Casinos
There may be reasons to vote against Trump, but at least spare us the outrage that he is somehow uniquely demagogic, crude, or ill-informed in a manner that we have not seen over the last eight years from Trump’s greatest enabler.

SOURCE  

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

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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.

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

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Statin side-effects at last being taken seriously

The methodology seems very weak but at least an awareness of the issue is evident

Researchers have launched a new £1million trial to assess whether controversial heart drug statins cause severe muscle pain.

The Government is set to fund the trial which comes after doctors have been overestimating the risk of heart attacks and strokes for some patients.

Research uncovered by the Sunday Express also found doctors had been prescribing the drugs to patients who do not need them.

Those eligible to take the drugs - which are the most commonly prescribed treatment in the UK - has increased to around one in four adults, which equates to 12 million people.

The groundbreaking study, which received a grant from the National Institute of Health Research, will assess the risk of muscle pain and has been backed by health experts.

Professor Jane Armitage, an expert in public health medicine at the University of Oxford, is a key researcher for the trial.  Professor Armitage told the Sunday Express: 'The evidence suggests statins are safe and undoubtedly reduce the risk of heart attacks and stroke.'  The British Heart Foundation also believes statins are safe.

But cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra said: 'I have no doubt millions of people taking statins in the UK will not benefit but are being put at risk of unnecessary harm.'

The new trial will involve 200 patients who have stopped or want to stop using statins due to muscle pain or fatigue.

It will investigate whether muscle issues are more common in those using the statins than those taking a dummy drug.

Concerns about statins were raised earlier this year by the Queen's former doctor, Sir Richard Thompson, who called for an independent inquiry.

SOURCE

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Out of the spotlight, some say there is a softer side of Trump

Andrea Lake, who appeared on Season Five of “The Apprentice,” had every reason not to like Donald Trump. He was a bully, she thought. Too brash. His bankruptcies bothered her, and the way he lied about them bothered her more.

But then she met him. Over the course of a lunch in Manhattan, with other contestants on the show, she came to a shuddering realization: She liked the guy. “He was super charming,” she said. “He was legitimately funny and quick-witted.”

The man who would scream “You’re fired!” in front of the TV cameras would later call some of those same losing contestants on their cellphones to follow up. After firing one contestant on his reality show in Season Six, he even offered her a job in real life.

Interviews with former business colleagues, campaign rivals, and others who have known Trump up close say there is a jarring juxtaposition between the Trump they know and the Trump they see these days on TV.

Trump the presidential candidate is omnipresent, constantly invading TV screens or appearing on stage at big rallies, and it’s hard to see how that arena-sized personality can possibly fit into a meeting room or make small talk with regular folks. It raises the question about who the real Trump is — and how much of his stage persona is a schtick. Also to wonder at is how he manages to condense that outsized personality into someone that many people who’ve met with him describe almost universally as charming — though not the slightest self-effacing. Even in private, he remains his own greatest fan.

While Trump is now the star of a political reality show that has Americans transfixed — or, in some cases, horrified — behind the curtain, he can seem quite a different man. At times, surely, and especially in the company of women, his behavior and remarks can discomfit or offend. He is well known for his blunt comments about women’s bodies, their beauty or the want of it, and was, during his playboy years in the 1990s, no stranger to allegations of unwanted advances.

Still, as Trump begins trying to unite a fractious Republican Party, he is performing some head-spinning shifts, employing the powerful charm many describe to win over today those he insulted yesterday.

Trump — who has called Senator Lindsey Graham a “nut job,” “disgrace,” and “one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen” — was suddenly on the other end of the line last week, in a private conversation with the South Carolina Republican.

“He told a few jokes,” said Graham, who has tossed some choice verbal bombs of his own Trump’s way. “Of all the people running, he’s the guy you’d want to go to dinner with.”

Representative Chris Collins of New York, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump, predicted some of his skeptical colleagues would rally to the real estate mogul once they had the opportunity to meet him one on one. “People will see the Donald Trump I know, not necessarily the one you see in the rallies,” Collins said.  “One on one, Mr. Trump is a listener, not a talker. When he’s got a group of people, he wants to know what’s going on in other people’s districts. . . . He’s a very thoughtful listener, one on one.”

Trump is a man whose public persona can seem like a caricature of himself, and at times it seems like the entire country is privy to his internal monologue — a stream of half thoughts, boasts, unabashed contradiction, and smartly targeted promises. His life has been lived in the tabloids, and he has played up aspects of his life that most people try to downplay, from his antics in the bedroom to the mountain of money in his bank account.

But in private gatherings, he usually doesn’t come on in all caps; he massages the conversation. “He’s methodical. Not extraordinarily aggressive,” said Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who has gotten to know Trump over the years. “He’s good at understanding that getting close to people personally is always good first before you go in for the chess move.”

Trump, as he is for those who approach him after rallies, can be intimidating to people meeting him for the first time. He’s the guy that most know as a celebrity. He’s the one who, if TV ratings are to be believed, we can’t seem to stop looking at.

Trump seems aware of his oversized public persona and works to make sure people aren’t intimidated by the version of him they see on television. Conversations with him don’t feel rushed. When he is approached for photos, he’ll pose for several, asking, “Do you have what you need?”

“He has a commanding presence. When he enters the room, you know Donald has entered the room. He’s magnetic,” said Chelsea Cooley, who won the Miss USA pageant in 2005 and later went to Trump for advice for her business.  “He can walk into the room and not say anything, but it’s palpable,” she added. “That is true confidence. His sheer presence is absolutely powerful.”

But quickly, she and others said, he attempts to put those around him at ease. He’s not one for small talk, but he’ll ask about family members. He repeatedly uses the names of the people he’s speaking with and makes his guests feel as if they are close friends, even when meeting him for the first time. It is, surprisingly to some Trump watchers, typically an insult-free space.

“You can’t become a multibillionaire by giving heads of other corporations unfavorable monikers,” said Hogan Gidley, a longtime Republican consultant. “You’ve got to have some savvy, some charm, some ability to be that successful.”

Gidley has met Trump several times. In their first encounter, Trump complimented him profusely, saying “Hogan! That’s a good name, a strong name. I like that very much.”  “He didn’t look past me, he didn’t look around the room,” he said. “He looked directly at me.”

A key element of Trump’s charm appears to be his ability to adapt to his audience.

When he ran into former presidential contender Mike Huckabee at a hotel in Iowa, he blew him an air kiss and said, “I love you, Mike!” When talking with beauty queens, he would speak in softer tones spliced with “sweetie” (an old-fashioned sort of endearment that is sometimes seen as sexist). When talking with contractors and officials in Atlantic City, he was far more coarse, dropping expletives with natural gusto.

“We called him our Teamster Friend,” said Edward Kline, a former state legislator who represented Atlantic City and is now backing Trump’s campaign. “Because he’d talk like a Teamster. He’s a little tough, and the language he would use, it was like you were talking with a Teamster. But you were dealing with Donald Trump.”

Throughout the Republican presidential campaign, he has tapped into an angry, fed-up slice of the electorate. Violent outbursts have occurred at some of his rallies. He is best known for proposing a wall along the border with Mexico, and insulting essentially all Latinos and Muslims, which makes it hard to imagine him building any bridges.

But when he wants to, it seems he can. The Trump who yells at protesters, requesting that police officers remove them from the room, is not the same Trump that those who have been in more intimate settings with him know. There is a diplomatic side to him that rarely comes across at the podium.

“I cringe sometimes,” says Tyana Alvarado, a former contestant from “The Apprentice” who, as a Hispanic and a woman, fits two of the groups that Trump has often insulted.

“I just feel like I know a different side of him and I need to protect him,” she said. “Sometimes the things he says it’s like, ‘God, you’re making it hard for me to protect you.’ But that’s not the Trump that I know.”

Trump makes a remarkable shift as soon as he gets in front of a camera, say those who’ve seen him both on and off screen.

“It’s almost like multiple personalities,” said Liza Wisner, a former contestant on “The Apprentice.” “I think he actually is genuine. But then he gets before the camera, and he puts on this act.”

Shortly after she was fired, coming in third place on Season 10, Trump invited Wisner to an 18-hole outing at one of his golf courses. He drove the golf cart around for several hours, munching on a sandwich and grabbing drinks from an ice chest.

“I think he knows what he’s doing. I truly believe this is part of his whole scheme to getting elected,” Wisner, who is turned off by his campaign but isn’t yet sure if she’ll vote for him. “There are moments I don’t believe we are where we are right now, considering a USA with Donald Trump as president. But anybody who ever meets him in person cannot say they didn’t enjoy meeting him.”

During the Republican primary campaign, most voters saw Trump only from a distance.  Juliana Bergeron, a Republican national committeewoman from New Hampshire, met Trump with a small group a few months back, in Keene, N.H.

In front of a group of more than a dozen locals, he came across as warm. He was likable. And funny. Nothing like how he would present himself later that day at a rally with 4,000 supporters. And some people left with a feeling they didn’t imagine they’d have: They planned to vote for him.

“He was very pleasant. Not as loud. He took time with each person individually,” Bergeron said. “I just would suspect if you and I were privy to his business meetings, they are not at all like what we see of him on CNN.”

Lake, “The Apprentice” contestant who was prepared to dislike Trump when she first met him, says she despises his politics and thinks he would be a terrible president.  She cannot imagine why anyone would vote for him. But she would be happy, thrilled even, to have him over to her house.

“If you met him, even if you think you don’t like him, you would invite him into your home for dinner,” she said. “He’s charming, one on one. He would win you over. He just would.”

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.

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

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