The war on salt

More ill-informed regulation.  It completely ignores academic research results which show that only LOW salt levels are harmful.  See e.g. here and here.  There is even a natural experiment that shows big doses of salt to be harmless:  Japan.  They have huge salt intakes but are also known for longevity

Almost everyone believes that lowering salt in the diet can lower a person’s blood pressure, but despite that belief and decades of warnings from government agencies, health organizations, and our doctors, Americans still eat about 1,000 mg of sodium a day more than the recommended limit of 2,300 mg. So this summer the U.S. Food and Drug Administration responded by unveiling “guidance” for how the food industry could lower sodium in their products over the next decade. As well-intentioned as the plan might be, it has many problems.

First, the mission of the FDA is supposed to be protecting consumers from dangers in the food supply - not protecting us from our own choices.

Second, while the FDA call them “voluntary guidelines,” the reality is that manufacturers will be under immense pressure to comply. After all, the agency that is the gatekeeper, and possibly the single biggest impediment, between their products and the market.

Most importantly, the FDA plan—even if it successfully reduced sodium in the food supply—is unlikely to result in a healthier population. In the meantime, the focus on salt overshadows better approaches to lowering blood pressure and improving health.

Evidence shows that most human beings consume salt within a relatively narrow range and that our sodium intake has remained more or less stable for at least the last fifty years. That’s pretty amazing considering how much more processed (and heavily salted) foods we consume today compared with previous generations. When you consider our proven inability to reduce our own sodium intake, despite constant warnings, and the worldwide consistency in sodium intake, despite cultural differences, that’s a strong indicator that we don’t merely decide to eat more or less salt. Rather, we are unconsciously and physiologically driven to eat a certain amount of sodium. This means that even if the FDA succeeds in lowering salt in the food supply, people will probably just add it back into their food or add in other salty foods to their diet.

But, let’s say the FDA plan works and we all end up eating less salt. It’s unclear that this would result in better health for the majority of people. While most of us accept the idea that lowering salt in the diet will lower blood pressure, the actual scientific research shows that only a small percentage of the population—an estimated 17 percent—are “salt sensitive” or will see blood pressure rise with increased dietary sodium. For everyone else, even significant sodium reduction will have no measurable effect on blood pressure.

You might be thinking: well, it can’t hurt to cut out some salt…right? The troubling answer is: that’s not clear, either. Emerging evidence suggests that populations with diets that have lower-than-average sodium are at a higher risk for worse health outcomes (as are those with higher-than-average sodium levels). Why might groups with lower sodium in their diet be more likely to die? Unknown. But we must demand that regulators proceed with serious caution before making blanket recommendations regarding salt or trying to push the entire population toward behavioral changes that have unknown risks.

Perhaps worst of all, the FDA’s sodium reduction plan, with all its accompanying hype, reinforces the idea that salt is the be-all, end-all of hypertension prevention. While salt restriction can certainly be an effective way for some people to lower their blood pressure, for most people it will have no effect. On the other hand, there is strong evidence that losing weight or increasing potassium in the diet are just as effective at lowering blood pressure as moderate salt restriction. In addition to being effective, these approaches to hypertension risk reduction might be easier for people to adhere to, especially for those who find salt restriction difficult.

Unfortunately, while most people know that eating more fruits and vegetables would be good, few realize that doing so might lower their risk of hypertension, heart attack, and strokes. This ignorance is, in part, due to the government’s continued myopic focus on salt. Rather than perpetuating public health policy that has failed for nearly forty years, we urged the FDA to focus instead on protecting the food supply from real threats and to allow the appropriate health agencies and physicians to advise the people on nutrition that makes our lives longer and healthier.

SOURCE

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The Left's Gambles with all our lives

Thomas Sowell

Sometimes life forces us to make decisions, even when we don’t have enough information to know how the decision will turn out. The risks may be even greater when people make decisions for other people. Yet there are some who are not only willing, but eager, to take decisions away from those who are directly affected.

Something as personal as what doctor we want to go to has been taken out of our hands by ObamaCare. What job offer, at what pay rate, someone wants to accept has been taken out of their hands by minimum wage laws.

Sick people who are dying are prevented from trying a medication that has not yet completed all the long years of tests required by federal regulations — even if the medication has been used for years in other countries without ill effects.

One by one, innumerable decisions have been taken out of the hands of those directly affected. This is not just something that has happened. It is a central part of the agenda of the political left, even though they describe what they are doing in terms of the bad things they claim to be preventing and the good things they claim to be creating.

Minimum wage laws are described as preventing workers from being “exploited” by employers who pay less than what third parties want them to pay. But would people accept wages that third parties don’t like if there were better alternatives available?

This is an issue that is very personal to me. When I left home at the age of 17, going out into the world as a black high school dropout with very little experience and no skills, the minimum wage law had been rendered meaningless by ten years of inflation since the law was passed. In other words, there was no minimum wage law in effect, for all practical purposes.

It was far easier for me to find jobs then than it is for teenage black high school dropouts today. After the minimum wage was raised to keep up with inflation, for decades the unemployment rate for black male 17-year-olds never fell below TRIPLE what it was for me — and in some years their unemployment rate was as much as five times what it was when I was a teenager.

Yet many people on the left were able to feel good about themselves for having prevented “exploitation” — that is, wage rates less than what third parties would like to see. No employer in his right mind was going to pay me what third parties wanted paid, when I had nothing to contribute, except in the simplest jobs.

As for me, my options would have been welfare or crime, and welfare was a lot harder to get in those days. As it was, the ineffectiveness of the minimum wage law at that time allowed me time to acquire job skills that would enable me to move on to successively better jobs — and eventually to complete my education. Most people who have minimum wage jobs do not stay at those jobs for life. The turnover rate among people who are flipping hamburgers was found by one study to be so high that those who have such jobs on New Year’s Day are very unlikely to still be there at Christmas.

In short, the left has been gambling with other people’s livelihoods — and the left pays no price when that gamble fails.

It is the same story when the left prevents dying people from getting medications that have been used for years in other countries, without dire effects, but have not yet gotten through the long maze of federal “safety” regulations in the U.S.

People have died from such “safety.” Police are dying from restrictions on them that keep criminals safe.

San Francisco is currently trying to impose more restrictions on the police, restrictions that will prevent them from shooting at a moving car, except under special conditions that they will have to think about when they have a split second to make a decision that can cost them their own lives. But the left will pay no price.

One of the most zealous crusades of the left has been to prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns, even though gun control laws have little or no effect on criminals who violate laws in general. You can read through reams of rhetoric from gun control advocates without encountering a single hard fact showing gun control laws reducing crime in general or murder in particular.

Such hard evidence as exists points in the opposite direction.

But the gun control gamble with other people’s lives is undeterred. And the left still pays no price when they are wrong.

SOURCE

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People are still voting with their feet

The blue states of America are in a depression. I don’t mean the collective funk of liberal voters because they lost the election to Donald Trump.

I’m talking about an economic malaise in the blue states that went for Hillary Clinton. Here is an amazing statistic courtesy of the just-released 2016 edition of “Rich States, Poor States,” which I co-authored with Reagan economist Arthur Laffer and economist Jonathan Williams: Of the 10 blue states that Democrats won by the largest percentage margins — California, Massachusetts, Vermont, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Connecticut — every single one of them lost domestic migration (excluding immigration) between 2004 and 2014. Nearly 2.75 million more Americans left California and New York than entered these states.

They are the loser states. They are all progressive: high taxes rates; high welfare benefits; heavy regulation; environmental extremism; high minimum wages. Most outlaw energy drilling. The whole left-wing playbook is on display in the Clinton states. And people are leaving in droves. Day after day, they are being bled to death. So much for liberalism creating a worker’s paradise.

Now let’s look at the 10 states that had the largest percentage vote for Trump. Every one of them — Wyoming, West Virginia, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Dakota and Idaho — was a net population gainer.

This is part and parcel of one of the greatest internal migration waves in American history, as blue states, especially in the Northeast, are getting clobbered by their low-tax, smaller-government rivals in the South and the mountain regions.

By the way, pretty much the same pattern holds true for jobs. The job gains in the red states that Trump carried by the widest margins had about twice the job-creation rate as the bluest states carried by Clinton.

The latest “Rich States, Poor States” report, published by the American Legislative Exchange Council, shows a persistent trend of Americans moving from blue to red states. The best example is that from 2004-2014, the two most populous conservative states — Florida and Texas — gained almost 1 million new residents each. The two most populous liberal states — California and New York — saw an equal-sized exodus.

It’s easy to understand why people might want to leave gray and rusting New York. But California? California has, arguably, the most beautiful weather, mountains and beaches in the country, and yet people keep fleeing the state that is supposed to be a progressive utopia.

What doesn’t make California and New York paradise is the high cost of living — thanks to expensive environmental regulations, forced union policies and income tax rates that are the highest in the nation, at 13 percent or more. Florida and Texas are right-to-work states with no income tax. Is it really a shocker that people would choose zero income tax over 13 percent? New York politicians know that their record-high tax rates are killing growth, which is why the state is spending millions of dollars on TV ads across the country trying to convince people that New York has low taxes. Sure. And Chicago is crime-free.

Even when it comes to income inequality, blue states fare worse than red states. According to a 2016 report by the Economic Policy Institute, three of the states with the largest gaps between rich and poor are those progressive icons New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Sure, Boston, Manhattan and Silicon Valley are booming as the rich prosper. But outside these areas are deep pockets of poverty and wage stagnation.

The lesson to be learned from the experimentation of the states is that the “progressive” tax and spend agenda leads to much slower growth and benefits the rich and politically well-connected at the expense of everyone else.

Trump is now promising that on a national scale, he will cut taxes, deregulate and cut wasteful government spending. In the presidential debates, Clinton disparaged this agenda as “trumped up, trickle-down economics,” and she said it had never worked.

Yet prospering red states such as Florida, Tennessee, Texas and so many others keep stealing jobs and growth from blue-state America.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Trump’s Taiwan call wasn’t a blunder. It was brilliant

Marc A. Thiessen

Relax. Breathe. Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president-elect unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy. It was a deliberate move — and a brilliant one at that.

The phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was reportedly carefully planned, and Trump was fully briefed before the call, according to The Post. It’s not that Trump was unfamiliar with the “Three Communiques” or unaware of the fiction that there is “One China.” Trump knew precisely what he was doing in taking the call. He was serving notice on Beijing that it is dealing with a different kind of president — an outsider who will not be encumbered by the same Lilliputian diplomatic threads that tied down previous administrations. The message, as John Bolton correctly put it, was that “the president of the United States [will] talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it’s in the interest of the United States, and nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.”

Amen to that.

And if that message was lost on Beijing, Trump underscored it on Sunday, tweeting: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” He does not need Beijing’s permission to speak to anyone. No more kowtowing in a Trump administration.

Trump promised during the campaign that he would take a tougher stand with China, and supporting Taiwan has always been part of his get-tough approach to Beijing. As far back as 2011, Trump tweeted: “Why is @BarackObama delaying the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan? Wrong message to send to China. #TimeToGetTough.” Indeed, the very idea that Trump could not speak to Taiwan’s president because it would anger Beijing is precisely the kind of weak-kneed subservience that Trump promised to eliminate as president.

Trump’s call with the Taiwanese president sent a message not only to Beijing, but also to the striped-pants foreign-policy establishment in Washington. It is telling how so many in that establishment immediately assumed Trump had committed an unintended gaffe. “Bottomless pig-ignorance” is how one liberal foreign-policy commentator described Trump’s decision to speak with Tsai. Trump just shocked the world by winning the presidential election, yet they still underestimate him. The irony is that the hyperventilation in Washington has far outpaced the measured response from Beijing. When American foreign-policy elites are more upset than China, perhaps it’s time for some introspection.

The hypocrisy is rank. When President Obama broke with decades of U.S. policy and extended diplomatic recognition to a murderous dictatorship in Cuba, the foreign-policy establishment swooned. Democrats on Capitol Hill praised Obama for taking action that was “long overdue.” Former President Jimmy Carter raved about how Obama had “shown such wisdom,” while the New York Times gushed that Obama was acting “courageously” and “ushering in a transformational era for millions of Cubans who have suffered as a result of more than 50 years of hostility between the two nations.”

But when Trump broke with decades of U.S. diplomatic practice and had a phone call with the democratically elected leader of Taiwan, he was declared a buffoon. Well, if they didn’t like that phone call, his critics may hate what could come next even more. Trump now has an opportunity to do with Taiwan what Obama did with Cuba — normalize relations.

There are a number of steps the Trump administration can take to strengthen our military, economic and diplomatic ties with Taiwan. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Derek Scissors has suggested that Trump could negotiate a new free-trade agreement with Taiwan. “Taiwan’s tiny population means there is no jobs threat,” Scissors says, but Taiwan is also the United States’ ninth-largest trading partner. A free-trade agreement would be economically beneficial to both sides and would send a message to friend and foe alike in Asia that, despite Trump’s planned withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the United States is not withdrawing from the region.

On the military front, Trump could begin sending general officers to Taipei once again to coordinate with their Taiwanese counterparts and hold joint military exercises. On the diplomatic front, Bolton says the new administration could start “receiving Taiwanese diplomats officially at the State Department; upgrading the status of U.S. representation in Taipei from a private ‘institute’ to an official diplomatic mission; inviting Taiwan’s president to travel officially to America; allowing the most senior U.S. officials to visit Taiwan to transact government business; and ultimately restoring full diplomatic recognition.”

Beijing would be wise not to overreact to any overtures Trump makes to Taiwan. When China tested President George W. Bush in his first months in office by scrambling fighters and forcing a U.S. EP-3 aircraft to land on the Chinese island of Hainan, its actions backfired. After the incident, Bush approved a $30 billion arms package for Taiwan, announced that Taiwan would be treated as a major non-NATO ally and declared that the United States would do “whatever it took” to defend Taiwan. His actions not only strengthened U.S. ties with Taiwan but also set the stage for good relations with Beijing throughout his presidency.

China does not want to make the same mistake and overplay its hand with Trump. Trump’s call with Taiwan’s president was a smart, calculated move designed to send a clear message: The days of pushing the United States around are over.

That may horrify official Washington, but it’s the right message to send.

SOURCE 

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Pence: Obama Can Reach Out to Cuban Dictator, But Trump Can't Take Call From Taiwan's Leader?

The American people are "encouraged" to see President-elect Trump "taking calls from the world, speaking to the world," including the democratically elected leader of Taiwan, Vice President-elect Mike Pence told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday.

"But I think it all begins with relationships, and...that was nothing more than taking a courtesy call of congratulations from the democratically elected leader of Taiwan."

China, which claims Taiwan as its own, has complained about Trump's contact on Friday with the leader of Taiwan, a breach of longstanding diplomatic protocol. The United States, under President Jimmy Carter, broke off formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, in deference to communist China, but the U.S. maintains unofficial ties with Taiwan to this day.

Pence told "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos, "It's a little mystifying to me that President Obama can -- can reach out to a murdering dictator in -- in Cuba in the last year and be hailed as a hero for doing it and President-elect Donald Trump takes a courtesy call from a democratically elected leader in Taiwan and it's become -- it's become something of a controversy, because I think the American people appreciate the fact that -- that our president-elect is taking calls from and reaching out to the world and preparing on day one to lead America on the world stage."

Appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," Reince Priebus, Trump's incoming chief of staff, said Trump did not believe he was talking to the leader of a sovereign state when he accepted the congratulatory phone call from the leader of Taiwan.

"No, of course not," Priebus said. "He knew exactly what was happening. But, look, we have got a lot of problems to solve in this country, and we're not going to solve them by just making believe that people don't exist. This was a two-minute congratulatory call. He talked to (Chinese) President Xi over two weeks ago. I'm sure he'd be willing to talk with him again.

"This is not a massive deviation of our policy," Priebus continued. "But President Trump has made it clear that he's going to work with China, PRC, to make sure that we have a better deal, that we have better trade agreements, and that we do a better job in protecting the American worker. And he's going to continue to do it.

"So, courtesy call, not a change in policy?" host John Dickerson asked.

"Exactly," Priebus said.

On Friday, Trump tweeted: "Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call."

SOURCE 

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The best cure for corruption

If you ask what worries me about the incoming Trump Administration, I’ll immediately point to a bunch of policy issues.

    Will Trump be too timid to deal with the huge entitlement problem?

    Will Trump do a business-as-usual pork-filled infrastructure deal?

    Will Trump’s tax cut be feasible without concomitant spending discipline?

Others, though, are more focused on whether Trump’s business empire will distort decisions in the White House. Here’s what Paul Krugman recently wrote about Trump and potential corruption.

    "…he’s already giving us an object lesson in what real conflicts of interest look like, as authoritarian governments around the world shower favors on his business empire. Of course, Donald Trump could be rejecting these favors and separating himself and his family from his hotels and so on. But he isn’t. In fact, he’s openly using his position to drum up business. …The question you need to ask is why this matters. …America is a very rich country, whose government spends more than $4 trillion a year, so even large-scale looting amounts to rounding error. 

What’s important is not the money that sticks to the fingers of the inner circle, but what they do to get that money, and the bad policy that results. …what’s truly scary is the potential impact of corruption on foreign policy. …someplace like Vladimir Putin’s Russia can easily funnel vast sums to the man at the top… So how bad will the effects of Trump-era corruption be? The best guess is, worse than you can possibly imagine"

I’m tempted to ask why Krugman wasn’t similarly worried about corruption over the past eight years? Was he fretting about Solyndra-type scams? About the pay-to-play antics at the Clinton Foundation? About Operation Choke Point and arbitrary denial of financial services to law-abiding citizens?

He seems to think that the problem of malfeasance only exists when his team isn’t in power. But that’s totally backwards. As I wrote back in 2010, people should be especially concerned and vigilant when their party holds power. It’s not just common sense. It should be a moral obligation.

But even if Krugman is a hypocrite, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. At least not in this case. He is absolutely on the mark when he frets about the “incentives” for massive looting by Trump and his allies.

But what frustrates me is that he doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion, which is that the incentive to loot mostly exists because there’s an ability to loot. And the ability to loot mostly exists because the federal government is so big and has so much power.

And as Lord Acton famously warned, power is very tempting and very corrupting. Which is why I’m hoping that Krugman will read John Stossel’s new column for Reason. In the piece, John correctly points out that the only way to “drain the swamp” is to shrink the size and scope of government.

    "…today’s complex government allows the politically connected to corrupt… most everything. …In the swamp, no one but taxpayers pays for their mistakes. …it’s well worth it for companies to invest in lobbyists and fixers who dive into the swamp to extract subsidies.For taxpayers? Not so much. While the benefits to lobbyists are concentrated, taxpayer costs are diffuse. …Draining the swamp would mean not just taking freebies away from corporations—or needy citizens—but eliminating complex handouts like Obamacare. Candidate Trump said he would repeal Obamacare. Will he? He’s already backed off of that promise, saying he likes two parts of the law—the most expensive parts"

As you can see, Stossel understands “public choice” and recognizes that making government smaller is the only sure-fire way of reducing public corruption.

Which is music to my ears, for obvious reasons.

By the way, the same problem exists in many other countries and this connects to the controversies about Trump and his business dealings. Many of the stories about potential misbehavior during a Trump Administration focus on whether the President will adjust American policy in exchange for permits and other favors from foreign governments.

But that temptation wouldn’t exist if entrepreneurs didn’t need to get permission from bureaucrats before building things such as hotels and golf courses. In other words, if more nations copied Singapore and New Zealand, there wouldn’t be much reason to worry whether the new president was willing to swap policy for permits.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Welcome to the Party of Trump

I agree with Stephen Moore below but think he missed an important contrast.  The party of Trump is the first working class party with CONSERVATIVE ideas.  Other working class parties have been socialist.  That is a huge step-change that will have far reaching results.  Most importantly, the Trump party will be the first working class party that actually will BENEFIT the worker -- by increasing prosperity instead of sabotaging it


I stirred up some controversy last week when I told a conference of several dozen House Republicans that the GOP is now officially a Trump working-class party. For better or worse, I said at the gathering inside the Capitol dome, the baton has now officially been passed from the Reagan era to the new Trump era. The members didn't quite faint over my apostasy, but the shock was palpable.

I emphasized that Republicans must prioritize delivering jobs and economic development to the regions of the country in the industrial Midwest - states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. These are places that, for the most part, never felt the meager Obama recovery and where blue-collar Reagan Democrats took a leap of faith this election and came back to the Republican party for the first time since 1984. The GOP will be judged in 2018 and in 2020 on whether they deliver results for this part of the country and for the forgotten middle-class men and women ("the deplorables") whom Democrats abandoned economically and culturally. This is all simply a political truism.

What roused the ire of some of my conservative friends was my statement that "just as Reagan converted the GOP into a conservative party, with his victory this year, Trump has converted the GOP into a populist, America First party."?

One friend lamented that I must have been drunk when I said this.

No. I meant exactly what I said, but I will clarify.

First, let me lay to rest the idea that this was a backhanded slam against Reagan's legacy. Hardly. I worked for the Gipper. He rebuilt the American economy and caused a quarter-century-long boom in wealth creation and prosperity nearly unrivaled in American history. He won the Cold War and vanquished the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. He belongs on Mount Rushmore.

But this is 2016 not 1986. The world is a different place. The concerns and priorities of the American people are different today from what they were 30 years ago. The voters spoke with a thunderclap. Trump squashed his 16 GOP rivals - a group that was touted as the most talented field of contenders in modern history - as if they were bugs crashing into his windshield. Republican voters opted for his new breed of economic populism. Republicans who were Never Trumpers and who insisted with absolute certainly that Trump could never win the primary, let alone the general election, can pretend that a political sonic boom didn't happen.

Guess what? It did. ?A realignment occurred while all the high-falutin' intellectuals and political consultants were napping.

So yes, this means we have awoken to a new party that will be a lot tougher on illegal immigration. A lot more skeptical of lopsided trade deals. A lot warier of foreign entanglements. More prone to spend money on infrastructure. ?I don't approve of all of these shifts, but they are what the voters voted for. Trump was hardly ambiguous about what he intended to do. Trade and immigration are in my view unambiguously good for the country - but new policies on these issues will have to be done in ways that are supported by the American people, not shoved down their throats by the elites. In this regard, I am a populist. The elites in both parties have not understood Trumpism and have often been contemptuous of the intellect and lifestyle of the Trump loyalists.

Conservatives should go back and read Jude Wanniski's classic, The Way the World Works. Wanniski reminds us over and over again of the lesson of history that there is great collective wisdom in the decisions made by the American voters. ?It's not often wise to second-guess them; it's better to listen to what they are saying.

A lot of good things come with the Trump package: probably three conservative justices on the Supreme Court, the biggest tax cut and assault against regulatory overreach since the Reagan era, spending cuts, Obamacare repeal, enterprise zones for inner cities, vouchers for kids in failing schools, and so on. But it's a package deal, folks. If you want purity, vote for Ron Paul for president again and see where that gets you.

I have always tried not to oversell Donald Trump to voters because I've been so bitterly disappointed by politicians time and again. ?You never know how it will turn out, and it's folly to render a verdict on a President-elect Trump who hasn't yet notched a single policy victory on his belt. Maybe I'm guilty of jumping the gun.

But it is a new Republican party and a new political and policy era has begun. What Donald Trump achieved on Election Night was to topple the legacies of one sitting president and two  dynasties all at once: the Clintons, the Bushes, and President Obama. They were the troika of big losers in 2016. Trump didn't topple the Reagan legacy of growth, optimism, and peace through strength. If the Age of Trump is to be a success, he will build on and modernize that legacy.

SOURCE

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Finally, a Real Opportunity to Repeal ObamaCare

Trump's pick of Tom Price to head HHS is a good sign

The GOP has promised (and tried) for years to scrap the disastrous and utterly unaffordable "Affordable" Care Act. That promise may finally come to fruition now that Donald Trump has picked House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price of Georgia to be Health and Human Services Secretary.

Price, who spent 20 years as an orthopedic surgeon before going into Georgia politics, is perhaps the most qualified person in government to take on the beast that is ObamaCare. He has been a staunch opponent of the law since it was being debated in 2009, but Price stood out because he had a viable and reasonable alternative to the top-down federal behemoth that became ObamaCare.

Republicans have always been against the ACA, but it was never enough to simply repeal ObamaCare without having something with which to replace it. Now that the law is entering its sixth year, it is unfortunately dug so deep into the nation's health care system, ripping it out now without putting something in its place would create even more chaos.

Price knew this back in 2009, and he has been fine-tuning a suitable replacement since. His plan, "Empowering Patients First," seeks to continue offering broad coverage, but without the invasive, and ultimately unworkable, federal involvement that is the hallmark of ObamaCare. Price's plan offers tax credits based on age to people in need of securing insurance. It also takes into account House Speaker Paul Ryan's suggestion of offering federally subsidized high-risk pools for each state so that people with pre-existing conditions would not be frozen out of the market. Insurers would also be able to sell policies across state lines so as to increase competition.

Ramesh Ponnuru points out that despite the attractive aspects of Price's plan and the resounding animosity toward ObamaCare, replacing the law is not a foregone conclusion. Sure, all Republicans can get behind repealing ObamaCare, and through some well-placed executive orders and various defunding tactics, they will be able to undo a lot of the law. But it will be much harder to come by a consensus on what the replacement law looks like.

The tax subsidy may be the biggest issue of contention. It would be more expensive to provide tax credits than offering a straight-up tax cut, but tax cuts would not have any impact on low income families that already pay no taxes. And these are the people that are in the greatest need of decent insurance coverage and protections that offer coverage in the case of pre-existing conditions.

There is also the Democrat response to contend with. Though Republicans have a Senate majority and the option of using reconciliation to pass some changes with a simple majority vote, they will need a filibuster-proof majority sooner or later to wipe the slate clean of ObamaCare and put in place meaningful, lasting changes to the health care system. That being the case, Republicans are going to have to play ball, and there will need to be some compromises that some factions may not be willing to make.

Trump, Price, Ryan and the rest of the GOP will be doing the country a favor by repealing and replacing ObamaCare with a system that puts choice back in the hands of patients and their doctors, and makes insurance accessible and affordable to all Americans. The vast majority of the public will be behind them so long as they can produce results, and live up to two promises that Barack Obama never intended to keep: You can keep your doctor, and your insurance premiums won't rise.

SOURCE

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Liberal mob strikes again, torches Trump supporter's home

The Fascism of the modern Left again

In yet another example of liberal political violence, Navy veteran Matt Smith's home in Plant City, Fla., was vandalized with anti-Trump graffiti and set on fire on Monday night:

    Smith flies three flags in front of his house: the American flag, the POW flag, and the Navy flag.

    "We supported Trump from when he started running for office," says Matthew's wife Brittany. "We never made it public. We never had a sign in our backyard, so no one really knew we were pro Trump."

    But Matthew says he's been very active on Facebook, with posts supporting Trump, the Second Amendment, and other conservative causes.

Thankfully, the Smiths were spending the night with relatives the night their home was set ablaze. Investigators are looking into possible connections with anti-Trump graffiti that was sprayed onto mobile homes near Mango, Florida in mid-November.

Meanwhile, the MSM continues to push its false narrative that hundreds of hate crimes are being committed across the country by bigoted Trump supporters.

SOURCE

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More evidence of why the Left scorn history

It's just too awkward for them. Trump got an award for his contributions to inner-city black kids with Rosa Parks but 'Fake News' has pinned him as a horrible racist.



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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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More Than 800,000 Noncitizens May Have Voted in 2016 Election, Expert Says

Any numbers are rubbery but it is clear that there is a big problem

An election expert projects more than 800,000 noncitizens voted in the 2016 election and overwhelmingly for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

While substantial, that number doesn’t overcome Clinton’s 2.2 million popular vote lead over Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who won a decisive Electoral College triumph of 306 to 232.

On Sunday, the president-elect tweeted he would have won the popular vote had it not been for illegal votes cast. The Trump transition team on Monday cited nonpartisan studies on noncitizens voting and of faulty voter registration across the country. Only citizens 18 or older can legally vote.

“Extrapolating on data from several years ago certainly doesn’t substantiate the claim that Trump is making now,” Jesse Richman, an associate professor of political science at Old Dominion University, told The Daily Signal. “That could change. If there is a recount in Michigan and Trump loses by a few votes, then it’s very plausible that noncitizen voting made a big difference. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that.”

Richman was the co-author of a 2014 study that looked at noncitizen voting in the 2008 and 2010 elections. In the comparable presidential election year, the Old Dominion study determined 6.4 percent on noncitizens in the United States voted in the 2008 presidential election, and about 81 percent of those voters backed Democrat Barack Obama.

Richman applied those numbers to 2016:

The basic assumptions on which the extrapolation is based are that 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted, and that of the noncitizens who voted, 81.8 percent voted for Clinton and 17.5 percent voted for Trump. … 6.4 percent turnout among the roughly 20.3 million noncitizen adults in the U.S. would add only 834,318 votes to Clinton’s popular vote margin. This is little more than a third of the total margin. … Is it plausible that noncitizen votes added to Clinton’s margin? Yes. Is it plausible that noncitizen votes account for the entire nationwide popular vote margin held by Clinton? Not at all.

A December 2015 study led by Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard University argued the 2014 Old Dominion study was flawed and that “the likely percent of noncitizen voters in recent U.S. elections is zero.” Richman responded to the criticism and said suggesting zero percent does not hold up.

Trump transition team spokesman Jason Miller cited the Old Dominion study reported on in The Washington Post in 2014, as well as a Pew Research Center study from 2012 about problems with voter registration across the country.

“An issue of concern is that so many have voted that are not legally supposed to,” Miller told reporters in a conference call Monday.

He said this warrants more attention than the “shiny object” Jill Stein and the Green Party are using to push recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that have no chance of overturning the election.

Beyond the noncitizens voting study from Old Dominion, Miller pointed to the Pew study from 2012 that found 24 million voter registration records in the United States, or about 1 in 8, were “significantly inaccurate or no longer valid.”

The Pew study further found “1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters,” that “12 million records contain an incorrect address,” and that “2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.”

It would take a very high percentage of noncitizens voting to overcome the Clinton popular vote lead, said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors strong enforcement of immigration laws.

“If 10 percent of noncitizens voted, it would likely make a popular vote difference,” Camarota told The Daily Signal. “It’s not the Electoral College [Trump] is upset about. It’s the popular vote. I wish he wouldn’t focus on it. Bill Clinton got just 43 percent of the vote in 1992. How many states did he win more than 50 percent of the vote in?”

Trump could be correct about the number of illegal votes, but there is no way to know, said Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation who focuses on voter integrity issues.

“It’s possible he’s right, but we don’t know because there is no way to quantify, no system in place to identify noncitizens voting,” Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “The Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security should obtain state voter registration lists and check against noncitizen database. And the DOJ should start prosecuting noncitizens who are voting.”

Prosecuting voter fraud will have to be a higher priority under the Trump administration than under the Obama administration, said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog.

“It has got to be a priority I would think based on Mr. Trump’s rhetoric,” Fitton told The Daily Signal. “At least, make sure that only citizens are registered to vote. We need basic reforms to reassure people that elections are free and fair.”

SOURCE

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The National Tantrum

It’s hard to tell which group has lost its grip on reality more – liberal activists or their brothers and sisters in arms in the media. The activists are protesting, marching, rioting and vandalizing their way across lefty America, because conservative America wouldn’t tolerate it. Meanwhile, journalists are almost acting worse.

The activists are trying a multi-pronged approach. They are protesting/rioting. (It’s often hard to tell them apart with the alt-left.) Then they have organized a largely astroturf #NotMyPresident hashtag on Twitter. Next, they have begun to threaten and intimidate electors to overturn the election. And then, they’re claiming the electoral college win is illegitimate because they lost it. The alt-left even pushed a meme that pretended Mike Pence was gay.

Former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Symone Sanders (no relation) told CNN that the future of the Democratic party is without white leaders. Sanders told the world in her special bigoted way, "we don't need white people leading the Democratic party right now." I’m sure Trump’s communications team is sending her a Christmas card.

The tantrum among the major media is almost worse. News outlets did their goose-stepping best to pretend the neo-Nazis were somehow influential when they could barely muster a Producers remake. (Original, please.) Politico’s national editor Michael Hirsh resigned after publishing home addresses of an alt-right moron. Hirsh wasn’t done. He also said, “Our grandfather’s brought baseball bats to Bund meetings,” and then asked if people wanted to “join” him. That was a bit more mob-inciting than Politico wanted.

The global left has freaked out so badly that George Monbiot just wrote a piece listing, “The 13 impossible crises that humanity now faces.” Trump is No. 1 and his cabinet choices and impact are scattered throughout.

SOURCE

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Widespread Coverage of Liberal Hate Crimes ‘Study’ Shows Media’s Fake News Problem

So much for taking America’s “fake news” problem seriously.

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, there’s been an abundance of hand-wringing over the “fake news” that supposedly is rampant on social media.

Yet missing has been any kind of serious searching among the mainstream media about whether it could learn any lessons from this election—and whether reporters and editors are holding themselves accountable to their supposed values of objectivity and rigorous reporting.

And a new “study” presents Exhibit A as to why the mainstream media should reconsider its own practices.

The Southern Poverty Law Center—an organization that calls the Family Research Council an “extremist group” because of its socially conservative views on LGBT matters—reported Nov. 29 that “in the 10 days following the election, there were almost 900 reports of harassment and intimidation from across the nation.”

“Many harassers invoked Trump’s name during assaults,” the report continued, “making it clear that the outbreak of hate stemmed in large part from his electoral success.”

Cue the widespread coverage:

    “Nationwide, there have been more than 867 incidents of ‘hateful harassment’ in the first days following the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center says,” reported CNN.

    “In the 10 days following the November election, SPLC said it collected 867 hate-related incidents on its website and through the media from almost every state,” wrote the Associated Press.

    NBC News headlined its piece on the study “Southern Poverty Law Center Reports ‘Outbreak of Hate’ After Election.”

    The Washington Post’s headline blared, “Civil rights group documents nearly 900 hate incidents after presidential election.”

There’s just one issue: The Southern Poverty Law Center didn’t confirm these “nearly 900” incidents actually happened.

“The 867 hate incidents described here come from two sources—submissions to the #ReportHate page on the SPLC website and media accounts,” the SPLC report states. “We have excluded incidents that authorities have determined to be hoaxes; however, it was not possible to confirm the veracity of all reports.”

In other words, who has any idea if these incidents actually happened or not?

Yet, the fact that there was no verification of these incidents didn’t stop the media from covering this “study.”

And let’s not pretend there’s no to very little chance that a Trump opponent would make up a hate crime story.

Just consider this reported hate incident in November: “The men used a racial slur, made a reference to lynching, and warned him this is Donald ‘Trump country now,’ according to the report he gave police,” reported the Boston Herald.

Yet the man wasn’t telling the truth. The Herald reported that Kevin Molis, police chief of Malden, Massachusetts, said “it has been determined that the story was completely fabricated.”

“’The alleged victim admitted that he had made up the entire story,’ saying he wanted to ‘raise awareness about things that are going on around the country,’” the newspaper added, continuing to quote Molis.

So maybe 867 hate crimes happened in the first 10 days after the election. Or maybe 5,000 did. Or maybe five did.

Maybe 10,000 did—and most of them were directed at Trump supporters, not opponents. (Let’s not forget the man beaten in Chicago while someone said, “You voted Trump.”) Who knows?

The SPLC should realize that playing around with facts is no laughing matter.

In 2012, a gunman entered the headquarters of the Family Research Council “with the intent to kill as many employees as possible, he told officers after the incident,” reported Politico. The 29-year-old man, identified as Floyd Lee Corkins II, did shoot and wound a security guard. His motivation?

“Family Research Council (FRC) officials released video of federal investigators questioning convicted domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins II, who explained that he attacked the group’s headquarters because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified them as a ‘hate group’ due to their traditional marriage views,” the Washington Examiner reported.

Ultimately, regardless of what the Southern Poverty Law Center does, the media shouldn’t be giving a platform to faux studies like this.

But maybe it’s not surprising, given attitudes like President Barack Obama’s. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine published Tuesday, the president griped about the reach of Fox News Channel—and then complimented Rolling Stone: “Good journalism continues to this day. There’s great work done in Rolling Stone.”

Yes, that Rolling Stone—the news outlet that published the completely discredited University of Virginia gang rape story. In early November, “jurors awarded a University of Virginia administrator $3 million … for her portrayal in a now-discredited Rolling Stone magazine article about the school’s handling of a brutal gang rape [at] a fraternity house,” the Associated Press reported.

It’s tough to hold the media accountable when even the president seems willing to brush aside true instances of fake news.

SOURCE

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From my Twitter feed

Ann Coulter: With his reckless Taiwan phone call, Trump has wantonly placed America's interests ahead of China's.

Paul Joseph Watson: The media is freaking out because Trump spoke to a democratically elected leader, and this might offend a dictatorship. Let that sink in.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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British Politics reshaped by issues of national identity

As in the Trump revolt, issues of national identity and loyalty are shaping British politics too. In Britain, the old guard want to remain connected to the EU, while those who want to make Britain great again want out of the EU as soon as possible

Labour faces being crushed between Ukip [out] and a resurgent Liberal Democrat Party [in] in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, senior allies of Jeremy Corbyn [British Leftist leader] admitted last night.

The party suffered humiliation in the Richmond Park by-election yesterday, losing its deposit in a London by-election for the first time since 1909.

The victorious Lib Dems, who overturned Zac Goldsmith’s 23,015 majority after running a strongly pro-European campaign, vowed to supplant Labour as the main opposition to a hard Brexit.

Labour figures fear that the party faces electoral crisis as it loses votes to the Lib Dems in pro-Remain urban and southern seats, while Ukip builds support in its working-class heartlands of the north and Midlands.

Chuka Umunna, the former leadership hopeful, warned that there were now “no safe Labour seats”.

Even those close to Mr Corbyn said that Brexit “has unleashed a dynamic that none of us quite understood” — with voters increasingly ditching old party loyalties and instead defining themselves as pro-EU or anti-EU.

A senior Corbyn ally said: “We do have two different strong pulls. There are metropolitan seats, in London, Manchester and Leeds; they are strongly pro-EU. Then equally, there are dozens and dozens of seats which are working class, where many did not vote to remain. There’s no doubt it’s difficult to balance the two.”

Labour’s dismal showing in Richmond, where it polled just 1,515 votes — fewer than the local party has members — led Clive Lewis, the shadow business secretary, to call for it to consider electoral pacts with other parties.

“It’s quite clear that the usual political playbook parties use isn’t necessarily going to work in the situation we find ourselves in now,” he told the Politico website.

Other senior party figures dismissed that, insisting instead that Mr Corbyn had to move urgently to formulate a more coherent response to the referendum. Labour has vowed not to thwart Brexit but wants Theresa May to set out her plans to allow “proper scrutiny”.

Mr Goldsmith’s humiliation has also killed speculation that Mrs May could hold a general election next year. Senior Conservatives said it proved that voters punished unnecessary polls and the result underlined the fluidity and volatility of the present political climate.

An analysis by the British Election Study in October revealed that people identified more strongly with how they voted in the EU referendum than a political party. The researcher warned that “this new cleavage could yet disrupt British politics”. “The EU referendum revealed a more fundamental divide,” Chris Prosser, of Manchester University, said.

Labour is braced for another by-election humiliation next week in the Tory-held seat of Sleaford and North Hykeham in Lincolnshire. With Ukip the main challenger, Mr Corbyn’s party faces being driven into fourth place.

Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, called on Sleaford voters, 40 per cent of whom voted Remain, to underline the message to Mrs May that they opposed an “extreme Brexit” as he sought to capitalise on his party’s by-election win.

SOURCE

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British national assertiveness is being expressed in a very traditional way

With mockery of France.  The following rather savage cartoon about the President of France appeared in "The Times", of all places. The frog hopping off probably refers to the fact that M. Hollande has decided not to run for a second term as President.  The nude on the scooter refers to this



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National sentiment strong in Austria too


Hofer

If Europe’s first far-right president since the Second World War is chosen by voters in Austria tomorrow he will prove that he is “a far cry from a Nazi”, one of his closest political friends said yesterday.

Norbert Hofer, 45, the Freedom Party (FPO) candidate, has been narrowly ahead in most opinion polls against his Green Party rival Alexander Van der Bellen, 72, after an annulled vote in May and a postponed rerun in October.

A victory for Mr Hofer would be seen as continuing the Continent’s lurch to the nationalist right and a further blow to the European Union, with the FPO threatening its own membership referendum in certain circumstances.

Nearly 125 miles west of the capital, Vienna, in the “blue city” of Wels — so called because it is the largest metropolitan area under FPO control — anger over immigration fuelled support for the party founded in the 1950s by former Nazis.

The office of president does not carry much direct power but opponents are worried that Mr Hofer would use it to precipitate a general election and propel his party to government, perhaps in coalition with the conservative Austrian People’s Party (OVP), just as they are in Wels.

FREEDOM PARTY KEY POLICIES

Limited immigration and asylum

Social housing “primarily” for Austrians

Oppose gay marriage

All foreign criminals deported

Compulsory national service

EU referendum in certain circumstances, for example if EU takes more powers

Andreas Rabl, 44, the mayor of Wels, who came to power last year on a surge of support during the migration crisis, said that the country needed to refocus on “Austrian values”, like his city.

He has begun intensive German language training for schoolchildren, half of whom he said could not understand the teacher when they started school, and has required all state-funded nurseries and schools to celebrate Christian festivals and eat traditional food. He has blocked a planned new refugee centre, arguing that the town has enough foreigners, with 24 per cent of citizens from outside Austria.

“There is this constant message that the FPO is a Nazi party, the new fascism and dictatorial,” Mr Wels, a long-standing friend of Mr Hofer, said. “The foreign media report about right-wing radicalism and the far right in Austria, I hear that all the time. I ask myself, what are they talking about? We have not killed anyone, we were in the government [from 2000 to 2005] and relinquished power voluntarily, there was no civil war and no other violent military clashes.”

He added: “New fascism — I do not see it. Mr Hofer as president would have the opportunity to correct this view. We are a normal right-wing party, correct, but we are a far cry from a Nazi party.”

In the first round of the election, the mainstream parties were eliminated by an electorate fed up with the government coalition of centre left and centre right. In the run-off in May Mr Van der Bellen beat Mr Hofer by just 30,863 out of 4.47 million votes. The FPO then won a case in court to have the result overturned due to procedural irregularities.

Supporters of Mr Van der Bellen in Wels claim that, like their mayor, Mr Hofer is the smiling face of a divisive and xenophobic party and tones down his message when he is not among core supporters.

Meanwhile Mr Van der Bellen, a chain-smoking former leader of the Greens, is distrusted by conservative voters. Walter Teubl, a Green member of the Wels city authority, said: “The OVP always portrayed the Greens as an ultra-left party. There were many lies about us — that we would legalise cannabis or ban car driving.”

SOURCE

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The clash of the campaign managers


Kellyanne Conway (left), Trump-Pence campaign manager, sat next to Robby Mook, Clinton-Kaine campaign manager, prior to a forum at Harvard University on Thursday.  So the "Sexist" Trump team was led by a woman while the Clinton team was led by a man.  So much for Leftist accusations about Trump's biases. It would be more plausible to say that Clinton was the biased one.  How come she could not find a female campaign manager?  And the Donks are still relying on conspiracy theories to explain their loss.  Dumb.

The presidential campaign manager conference, held at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government every four years since 1972, is usually a place for insider war stories, shared and documented for history.

However, three weeks after this year’s divisive election, in a conference room with a half-dozen aides from both sides facing each other, the conversation quickly took a remarkably combative turn, highlighting just how deep the enmity between the Trump and Clinton camps remains.

“Do you think you could have just had a decent message for white working-class voters?” Conway asked the Clinton team, then sarcastically offering a message: “How about, it’s Hillary Clinton, she doesn’t connect with people? How about, they have nothing in common with her? How about, she doesn’t have an economic message?”

Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist, responded: “There were dog whistles sent out to people. . . . Look at your rallies. He delivered it.”

Conway accused the Democrats of refusing to accept their loss.

“Guys, I can tell you are angry, but wow,” she said. “Hashtag he’s your president. How’s that? Will you ever accept the election results? Will you tell your protesters that he’s their president, too?”

At a forum that was less heated than the earlier encounter, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and Conway offered starkly different explanations for the election’s outcome.

Mook said that outside interference — including meddling by Russian entities — tilted the results Trump’s way, while Conway portrayed broader strategic decisions as behind the GOP win.

Conway, who took increasing control of the Trump campaign over the summer, said that she prevailed upon Trump to play “the happy warrior” and encouraged him to draw energy from his public rallies. That, she said, contrasted with the public image of Clinton.

“I said to Mr. Trump, ‘You know, you’re running against one of the most joyless presidential candidates in history,’ ” Conway said.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Justin Trudeau: Baby-Faced Commie Apologist Unmasked

Wasn’t one vapid pretty boy named Justin from Canada enough?

At least Justin Bieber is eye candy without the heartburn. Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, is the twinkly-eyed boy toy who makes informed adults wanna hurl.

For more than a year, the liberal Canadian prime minister enjoyed drool-stained global press coverage as the “hot hipster” and “dreamy sex symbol” with great hair and a tribal Haida tattoo. He basked in Ryan Gosling-esque memes about his commitment to feminism and touched off “Trudeau-mania” with a series of shirtless selfies and photobombs.

But this weekend, the sane world saw the baby-faced Commie apologist for the naked twit he truly is.

Mourning the death of repressive dictator Fidel Castro, Trudeau hailed his longtime family friend as a “larger than life leader” who “served his people for almost half a century.” Actually, El Comandante ruled with an iron fist and firing squads — serving himself to all of the island’s land, private businesses and media, along with his own private yacht, private island, 20 homes, fleet of Mercedes limos and bevy of mistresses.

Trudeau’s ridiculous mash note to the “legendary revolutionary and orator” caused the social media backlash of the year. The hashtag #TrudeauEulogies erupted to mock Trudeau’s soft-soaping of tyranny.

“As we mourn Emperor Caligula, let us always remember his steadfast devotion to Senate reform,” one Twitter user jibed in Trudeau-speak. “Although flawed Hitler was a vegetarian who loved animals, was a contributor to the arts & proud advocate for Germany,” another joked. “Kim Jong Il will always be remembered fondly for his leadership and contributions on climate change,” another chimed in.

Stung, the Canadian tundra hunk’s office announced Monday that he will not attend services for his beloved Uncle Fidel, who had served as a pallbearer at his former Canadian PM father’s funeral. But if Trudeau thinks the damage to his celebrity brand is temporary, he has another think coming.

Our neighbors to the north are now discovering what disillusioned Barack Obama worshipers realized too late: Beneath the shiny packaging of supermodel progressivism lies the same old decrepit culture of corruption.

Political watchdogs have been buzzing about Trudeau’s shady fundraising ties to Chinese communist moguls. Like Obama, Trudeau promised unprecedented transparency in government — “sunny ways” that would shed open light on how the Liberal Party was conducting the people’s business. Dudley Do-Right’s party declared there would be “no preferential access, or appearance of preferential access” in exchange for campaign cash and purported to ban favor-seekers with direct business before the government from attending political fundraisers.

Behind closed doors, however, Trudeau was selling out to wealthy Chinese-Canadians and Chinese nationals seeking government green lights for their business deals. According to his conservative critics, Trudeau and the Liberal Party have held 80 such cash-for-access fundraisers crawling with lobbyists and access traders over the past year.

The Globe and Mail newspaper revealed last week that Trudeau and his Liberal Party fundraisers had secretly organized one tony $1,500-per-head private residential gala in May attended by Chinese billionaires and bankers gunning for federal approval of projects. Echoing the operations of the Clinton Foundation pay-for-play money machine, the nonprofit Trudeau Foundation and the University of Montreal raked in $1 million from a wealthy Chinese businessman a few weeks after the fundraiser. The donation includes funding for a statue of Pierre Trudeau, who once wrote a book hailing Chairman Mao.

The self-aggrandizing Commie fanboy apple doesn’t fall far from his cultural Marxist tree.

SOURCE

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Let's Fight Tyranny

For more than a half-century, it has become abundantly clear that our nation faces increasing irreconcilable differences. At the root is the fact that there is one group of Americans who mostly want to be left alone and live according to the rule of law and the dictates of the U.S. Constitution while another group of Americans wants to control the lives of others and ignore both the rule of law and constitutional restraints on the federal government. Should those Americans who favor the rule of law and constitutional government fight against or yield to those Americans who have contempt for the rule of law and constitutional government? Let’s look at a few of those irreconcilable differences.

Some Americans prefer to manage their own health care needs. Others wish to have the federal government dictate their health care. Some Americans want their earnings to be taxed only for the constitutionally mandated functions of the federal government, which are outlined in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Others think American earnings should be taxed for anything on which Congress can muster a majority vote. Though there is no constitutional authority for federal involvement in public education, some Americans want the federal government involved. The list of irreconcilable differences among the American people is nearly without end. These differences survive because of the timidity of those offended and the brute power of the federal government.

I think reconciliation is impossible; therefore, separation is the only long-term peaceful solution. Separation and independence do not require that liberty-loving Americans overthrow the federal government any more than they required Gen. George Washington to overthrow the British government in order to secede or required his successor secessionist, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, to overthrow the U.S. federal government.

You say, “All those government acts that you say violate the rule of law and the Constitution have been ruled constitutional by the courts!” That’s true. The courts have twisted the Constitution, but Thomas Jefferson warned, “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions (is) a very dangerous doctrine indeed and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”

State governors and legislators ought to summon up the courage our Founding Fathers had in their response to the fifth Congress' Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Written by Jefferson and James Madison, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 stated that those states' legislatures considered the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional. They said, “Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government … and … whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” The 10th Amendment to our Constitution holds, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The federal government should not be permitted to determine the scope of its own powers. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 28, said, “The State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.” One response to federal encroachment is for state governments to declare federal laws that have no constitutional authority null and void and refuse to obey them. In other words, they should nullify federal laws that violate the Constitution. In good conscience, liberals could not object to nullification. There are hundreds of so-called sanctuary cities in the U.S. — liberal places that have chosen to nullify federal immigration laws and harbor immigrants who are here illegally.

Former slave Frederick Douglass advised: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. … The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” We Americans appear to have very limited endurance in the face of tyrannical oppression.

SOURCE

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GOP Has Golden Opportunity to Expand Liberty

For those who work to restore constitutionally limited government — as we in our humble shop do daily — a recent Quinnipiac poll is daunting. It shows large majorities or pluralities of Americans oppose reducing regulations, oppose across-the-board tax cuts, and favor increased federal spending on infrastructure and other goodies.

Leaving aside the accuracy of the poll (Quinnipiac had Hillary Clinton +7 nationally less than two weeks before the election), the polling reveals a paradox in the mindset of the American electorate. Every American — Republican and Democrat, men and women, young and old, black, white, Hispanic or Asian, rich or poor — wants government to mind its own business ... except for their preferred program or regulation.

John Stossel writes, "Few people bother to go to Washington to ask for spending cuts. Even though America is heading toward bankruptcy, 90 percent of congressional testimony comes from people who want more stuff."

What far too few Americans understand is that to empower government is to restrict individual liberty, and once you agree to grant government power over A, you have opened the door to granting government power to do B, C and D.

That is why the Founding Fathers strictly limited the power of the federal government, forbidding it from any and all actions not specifically authorized under the U.S. Constitution and, for emphasis, declaring in Amendments IX and X the primacy of the individual and the states over every sphere not listed in those enumerated powers.

The Founders understood the truth and wisdom in George Washington's declaration: "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master!"

Few Americans, for example, would disagree with the idea that everyone should have access to health care, but the devil is in the details. Without the vote of a single Republican, arrogant Democrats, invigorated by their electoral victories, passed ObamaCare, ostensibly to guarantee health care to every American. As a result, the IRS was granted access to our medical information, we were forced to buy an outrageously expensive product whether we wanted it or not, we faced a bevy of new taxes and burdensome regulations, and tens of millions of Christians were forced to fund abortion through their insurance.

Government is necessary to protect the rights of individuals, but it is the nature of government to expand and acquire power, and that power is acquired at the expense of individual liberties. As another Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, so eloquently put it, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

Ironically, the very government that we empower to do our bidding against our neighbor ends up being the government that becomes our master.

Disagree? Keep in mind that when the 16th Amendment (the income tax) was proposed, its proponents promised that it would only affect the very rich. The bottom bracket was a 1% tax on income over $20,000 ($488,341 in 2016 inflation-adjusted dollars) and a top bracket of 7% for income over $500,000 ($12,208,535 in 2016 inflation-adjusted dollars). It was a way, its proponents argued, to make the rich pay their "fair share" (sound familiar?). Yet in a very short time the rates went up and the entry point for the bottom bracket went down, eventually capturing many more Americans in its web, and creating the IRS, possibly the most feared institution in American government, with the power to ruin your life and take everything you own.

Government is a necessary evil. As a third Founder, James Madison, argued in Federalist No. 51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."

Thus, individual liberties are safest when government is smallest, and when the power of government is closest to the people. As constructed by the Founders, the vast majority of government is enacted at the local and state level, with only a small portion belonging to the federal government.

When they held the White House, Senate, and House under George W. Bush, the Republicans blew a golden opportunity. Instead of reducing the size and scope of government, they doubled government spending and gave us Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and an expansion of nearly every federal department and agency.

In 2016, Republicans get a do-over. While Democrats claim the GOP has no mandate because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, Republicans can counter with the fact that the GOP won a 3.2 million national popular vote majority in House races, and under Barack Obama, Republicans have won a net 11 Senate seats, 63 House seats, 14 governorships, and roughly 1,000 state legislative seats.

Republicans have a rare opportunity to reduce the size and scope of government at every level, and return to the form envisioned by the Founders, where government is limited and individual liberty is vast. It's in the best interests of every American to encourage them to do just that. Our job is to educate our fellow Americans accordingly.

SOURCE

CHRIS BRAND is now out of intensive care so we have good hopes for him

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Thank You, Jill Stein

Over the long holiday weekend, the radical left and their poodles in the Democrat Party announced a move to force recounts in the Presidential election in three states; Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  The move, endorsed and supported by Madame Clinton, received breathless coverage from a corrupt mainstream media that is still in deep shock over the defeat of their globalist apparatchik.

What the instigator of this futile move, Mrs. Clinton and the media do not understand is that they are doing Donald Trump and the American people a huge favor.  Yes, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who is formally calling for the recounts, has collected millions of dollars from grieving leftists across the country.  She is building a donor file that will enable her to pay for the recounts but also form a funding base with which she and her ilk can attack the few remaining rational people inside the Democrat Party structure.  So, thank you, Jill Stein, for seizing the opportunity to build infrastructure that will push the Democrat Party further to the Left and over the cliff.

But the benefits don’t stop there.  Given the cumbersome process of recounting millions of votes in three large, industrial states, it is possible that the mandated meeting of the Electoral College on December 19 will fail to elect a President.  With the 46 votes of the three states not being counted, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton will receive the required 270 votes.  So, what happens then?

In early January when the 115th Congress is sworn into office, one of the first orders of business will be the election of President and Vice-President.  The Senate is sure to elect Mike Pence and the House is a lock to elect Donald Trump.  But, look at how Trump will be elected.  Each state gets one vote and a winner must get 26 votes.  So, how many votes will Trump get?  There are 30 states that voted for Trump that have Republican majorities in their delegation.  There are two more states, Colorado and Virginia, where a majority of the delegation is Republican but the state voted for Clinton.  So, assuming Colorado and Virginia are let off the hook, Donald Trump will be elected President with 30 votes to Clinton’s maximum possible of 18 votes.

Some will say this is a useless exercise, but I disagree.  This is how the Founders intended it to be.  The Executive is not elected by majority vote, it is elected by the states.  The Congressional vote will show in stark detail that there are sovereign states that make up the United States; that despite eight years of Obama working to “transform” the situation, we are not and never were a nation ruled over by an executive tyrant.  This demonstration to the people is a tremendous opportunity to drive home the point that we are a federal republic and what that means.  So, thank you Jill Stein, for giving us the ultimate “teachable moment” to destroy the concept of the totalitarian unitary state.

And finally, the venal attempt to stall the formal election process and rake in millions of dollars from deluded partisans has one additional benefit to the country.  There have been literally thousands of articles and opinion pieces published claiming that Donald Trump must not “go too far,” that he must let Clinton off the hook for her multiple felonies, that he can in fact work with the structure of the Democrat Party.  All he needs to do, this simpering line of “advice” goes, is play nice, give the globalists something, don’t rock the boat.  The grassroots — the tens of millions of Americans who elected Trump and hate the professional GOP — will just have to sit down and shut up.  We, the “professionals” know what is best.

Jill Stein, and by her aggressive posture forcing Hillary Clinton to join her, have shown Donald Trump and the American people that the left and their internationalist-masters have no intent to give one inch.  They have one goal, the destruction of Donald Trump and the people who stand with him.  America is their target and enemy. Even a child can see that exporting tens of millions of jobs, importing millions of illegal aliens to lower wages and corrupt our systems, and slavish adherence to a globalist agenda of surrender of nationhood is nothing more than suicide.

By making this contest stark and clear, Jill Stein has undercut the whispering snakes that would pollute the Trump administration’s thinking.  So, for exposing the truth of the real battle, thank you, Jill Stein.

So, let Stein and her radical leftist cronies collect millions of dollars because most of it will be deployed against the Democrat Party structure.  Let her force the election into the House of Representatives.  The people will get a lesson in federalism that otherwise would never have been available.  And let the globalists make clear to Donald Trump and his incoming Administration the true nature of the fight.  It will only put more steel — U.S. made by the way — into their resolve.  So, for all of these reasons, Thank you, Jill Stein, keep it up.

SOURCE

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In the Proud Tradition of Leftist Domestic Terrorism…

Water is wet. The Sun rises in the east. And large swaths of the Left engage in heinous acts of violence in the name of politics.

For our purposes here today, we’ll ignore the 94 million or so people Communism has murdered around the world. This is about the domestic Left.

We’ll begin just after the Civil War – with the Democrat Party’s creation of the Ku Klux Klan. A racist outfit that murdered and terrorized blacks and sought to overthrow southern Republican governments.

Let us move forward to the radical 1960s. With the creation of groups like the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground (ne the Weathermen). Who engaged in murder and mayhem of all sorts.

The Weather Underground liked planting bombs in places like police stations and the Pentagon. Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers ran in the same Chicago political circles as current outgoing Democrat President Barack Obama.

In the modern era, we have an evolving amalgam of violent Leftist entities. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have each engaged in…un-peaceful activities. The protests of candidate Donald Trump and now President-elect Trump haven’t been pleasant.

Which brings us to today – and the lovely expanses of North Dakota. Well, they were lovely – until the Left arrived.

Currently underway in the Flickertail State is a fracking petroleum revolution. Thanks to capitalism and its industry creations, we are extracting massive amounts of oil from the shale fields.

But we need to get that oil somewhere – hence the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The four state governments through which it will travel and the federal government have all already approved it.

So it’s good to go, right? Of course not – because we have the Left. Who have engaged in all manner of actions to block DAPLs construction. They have of course filed a lawsuit (because if there’s one thing the Left has more of than violent actors – it’s lawyers).

But that wasn’t near enough – so they are physically blocking the construction site. And are oft doing so in very, very violent fashion: “(I)nvestigators say they have found materials behind the protest line used to make Molotov cocktails, including 1-pound propane cylinders, glass bottles and rocks.”

Peaceful. How about this?: “(P)olice released a statement saying that the protesters ‘attempted to flank and attack the law enforcement line from the west,’ describing their actions as ‘very aggressive.’…Law officers were there to keep protesters from crossing the bridge, which the sheriff’s department said was closed for safety reasons ‘due to damage caused after protesters set numerous fires’ on it in a separate incident.…”

Tranquil. How about this?: “’Any suggestion that this was a peaceful protest is false. This was more like a riot than a protest,’ said Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier. ‘Individuals crossed onto private property and accosted private security officers with wooden posts and flag poles.’”

Sounds an awful lot like domestic terrorism. But let’s check the Patriot Act definition:

“(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;

“(B)appear to be intended—(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping;”

Yep. The Leftist DAPL protestors are in fact engaged in domestic terrorism.

The latest installment in a long, proud tradition of Leftist domestic terrorism.

Peace, Man.

SOURCE

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Populist-Nationalist Tide Rolls On

Now that the British have voted to secede from the European Union and America has chosen a president who has never before held public office, the French appear to be following suit.

In Sunday's runoff to choose a candidate to face Marine Le Pen of the National Front in next spring's presidential election, the center-right Republicans chose Francois Fillon in a landslide.

While Fillon sees Margaret Thatcher as a role model in fiscal policy, he is a socially conservative Catholic who supports family values, wants to confront Islamist extremism, control immigration, restore France's historic identity and end sanctions on Russia.

"Russia poses no threat to the West," says Fillon. But if not, the question arises, why NATO? Why are U.S. troops in Europe?

As Le Pen is favored to win the first round of the presidential election and Fillon the second in May, closer Paris-Putin ties seem certain. Europeans themselves are pulling Russia back into Europe, and separating from the Americans.

Next Sunday, Italy holds a referendum on constitutional reforms backed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. If the referendum, trailing in the polls, fails, says Renzi, he will resign.

Opposing Renzi is the secessionist Northern League, the Five Star Movement of former comedian Beppe Grillo, and the Forza Italia of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a pal of Putin's.

"Up to eight of Italy's troubled banks risk failure," if Renzi's government falls, says the Financial Times. One week from today, the front pages of the Western press could be splashing the newest crisis of the EU.

In Holland, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders, on trial for hate speech for urging fewer Moroccan immigrants, is running first or close to it in polls for the national election next March.

Meanwhile, the door to the EU appears to be closing for Muslim Turkey, as the European Parliament voted to end accession talks with Ankara and its autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In welcoming Muslim immigrants, Germany's Angela Merkel no longer speaks for Europe, even as she is about to lose her greatest ally, Barack Obama.

Not only Europe but the whole world President-elect Trump is about to inherit seems in turmoil, with old regimes and parties losing their hold, and nationalist, populist and rightist forces rising.

SOURCE

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A Great Candidate for Secretary of State — John Bolton

Donald Trump has begun fleshing out his Cabinet and has made a series of tough choices that will not only help determine his success, but the future of the country. So far, so good.
One candidate for Secretary of State stands out as singularly capable of helping President Trump make America great again: former UN Ambassador John Bolton.

He is an experienced and principled public servant and diplomat - a brilliant advocate for freedom, with a proven record of putting America first as it leads the world.

John Bolton also knows how to compel the State Department bureaucracy to carry out presidential direction. Absent that, its denizens will sabotage Mr. Trump at every turn.

Consequently, they and their allies will make a Bolton confirmation process difficult. But it is far better to fight them now, than under some less-capable Secretary throughout a Trump presidency.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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