Perils of being a health nut

A doctor reports:

A lady came to me with renal failure many years ago, and was indignant because she was a health nut and took great pride in all the vitamins she took to "stay healthy." At that time a kidney angiogram was standard (injecting dye directly into the kidney through the blood vessels). Before I injected the first drop I noticed on the fluoroscope that both kidneys looked like great, white stones.

I asked her, "How much Vitamin D do you take?" She proudly announced that she took about 75 times the recommended dose. "Well, I said, you have turned your kidneys to stone." She pronounced me a quack and we terminated the procedure. Last I heard of her, she was on dialysis.

SOURCE

*****************************

The wrong-headed war on salt again

Another shot at the salt nonsense below.  Excerpt only.  The term "sodium" below refers to NaCl, table salt

Since Dahl's work in the 1960s, a steady stream of high-quality evidence has shown that dietary sodium can indeed influence blood pressure. But most showed a surprising, but statistically insignificant inverse correlation between salt and blood pressure, as well. That means some people with higher dietary sodium also had lower blood pressure.

More recent work has demonstrated that, even though groups of people averaged together may show a uniform trend in the association between sodium and blood pressure, there are wildly different blood pressure responses to dietary sodium within populations. For example, research indicates that about 25 percent of the population is "salt sensitive," meaning their blood pressure rises as dietary sodium is increased. However, most-perhaps upwards of 75 percent-are insensitive to moderate increases and decreases in dietary salt. A small percentage, an estimated 11 to 16 percent, however, are "inverse-salt-sensitive," and will experience higher blood pressure as dietary sodium is decreased. The cause of this heterogeneity in response to dietary sodium is not yet known but may be related to the other components of a person's diet, their genetic background, and other lifestyle factors.

Furthermore, an increasing body of research has shown that decreasing salt consumption-even if it does lower blood pressure-may not be associated with better health. Blood pressure is, of course, merely a marker of health not an outcome; people don't die as a result of high blood pressure, but rather from the conditions closely associated with blood pressure like heart attack and stroke.

What does all this mean? Frankly, it means the research is inconclusive for population-wide sodium recommendations. For certain individuals, like those who are salt-sensitive and consuming higher than average sodium intakes, sodium restriction may make sense. On the other hand, for certain groups, such as those who are inverse salt-sensitive, or those who are diabetic (for whom studies have found lower salt increases mortality risk) it might not be the best approach. Put more simply: the research doesn't support sodium restriction in the general population consuming average sodium levels as a means to reduce blood pressure.

Perhaps the most interesting finding, however, is that the literature has been quietly affirming the effectiveness of other-possibly more appropriate-ways to lower blood pressure. At the top of the list is dietary potassium, which researchers had identified as lowering blood pressure at nearly the same time they began studying the effects of sodium on blood pressure. Consistently, almost without fail and on both sides of the sodium debate, studies have shown that doubling dietary potassium is as effective as halving dietary sodium. More importantly, the effect has been observed in almost every population in which it has been studied, regardless of race, sex, age, location, and other genetic and lifestyle factors.

SOURCE

***********************************



**********************************

Covered California Misery Still Getting Worse

Since the dawn of Covered California, the state's wholly owned subsidiary of the federal Affordable Care Act, health journalist Emily Bazar has tracked the dysfunctions. The skyrocketing premiums, cancellations and "glitches" of the $454 million computer system were responsible for "widespread consumer misery," not exactly a ringing endorsement. Covered California also dropped 2,000 pregnant women from their plans, causing them to lose their prenatal appointments. More recently, victims of Covered California protested a massive "bait and switch" trick that makes glowing promises then sticks them with expensive, inferior coverage. On the other hand, victims who think Covered California can't get any worse are sadly mistaken.

In her most recent column, Emily Bazar charts how Covered California slammed victims by nearly doubling their premiums and depriving them of their tax credits. Covered California boss Peter Lee cited "systems issues that had never occurred before," an allusion to the $454 million computer system that Covered California blames for everything. Lee helpfully added that "real people" have been affected. One of them is Mike Connelly, 62, of Granite Bay, who like others was mistakenly kicked over to Medi-Cal. "After they have you," Connelly told Bazar, "they won't let you go," and that is not a good thing. Medi-Cal service is shaky and as Bazar noted, they "demand posthumous payback from enrollees 55 and older for a broad range of medical costs," even if they didn't use any medical services. All victims of the ACA, meanwhile, should understand that actual health concerns are secondary.

The Affordable Care Act is perhaps the greatest "taking" in U.S. history. It takes away the plans the people like and gives them only what the government wants them to have. The ACA increases the size and power of government and lays the groundwork for government monopoly health care, the "public option." The people ought to beware because once that system has you, it won't let you go. Even if you don't like the plan, you have to keep it.

SOURCE

********************************

Replace Obamacare, Don't "Repair" It

Rumor has it that many Republicans in Congress are rethinking "repeal and replace" in favor of "repair." This is both unnecessary and unsound. According to Independent Institute Senior Fellow John C. Goodman, GOP lawmakers can replace Obamacare without leaving anyone behind. All they need to do is to enact legislation such as the proposal that Senator Bill Cassidy introduced in the Senate and that he and Representative Pete Sessions introduced in both houses of Congress.

"The Sessions/Cassidy proposal in particular is designed to encourage employers to help their employees get health insurance," Goodman writes in Forbes. It does this through five main features: a refundable tax credit, access to group insurance, access to limited-benefit insurance, a reliable safety net, and reform of the individual market.

"Interestingly, a model for reform is the small-business section of the CURES Act, which passed with huge bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress," Goodman writes. "One way to think about the Sessions/Cassidy legislation is to see that it will extend these same features to the rest of the healthcare system."

SOURCE

*******************************

The West was protectionist before Trump

Obama and the EU pursued trade wars long before The Donald arrived. Tariffs are only one way of burdening producers in other countries

Is Trump intent on starting a trade war? After proclaiming, in his inaugural address, that `protection will lead to great prosperity and strength', Trump has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He may impose a 20 per cent border tax on imports, starting with Mexico. He wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. He's promised to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to 45 per cent of their value, and wants US manufacturers to reshore production back to America. Now commentators fret that Trump is walking in the `ominous' and `dark' footsteps of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which taxed some imports at 60 per cent of their value and is today widely seen as contributing to the international disorder of the 1930s.

We will have to see what Trump does. But nobody should be under any illusions: over two terms, Obama's own protectionism, much of it directed against the EU, fully prepared the world for the Trumpian protectionism of today. So too did the protectionism emanating from Brussels. The narrative that Trump is a qualitative break from a previous era of peaceful, liberal, free-trade globalisation is simply untrue.

In trade and investment, Obama always played hardball. He took sanctions against Russia and Syria. He only eased sanctions against Iran in January 2016, and left the historic US sanctions in place around Cuba. Obama also imposed tariffs of more than 500 per cent on some Chinese steel products. In the World Trade Organisation, his representatives aggressively pursued `enforcement' actions against trade rivals.

Yet Obama also played a new kind of softball. For decades, economists used to lament growing `non-tariff barriers to trade' - niggly regulations that would, for example, bar foreign carmakers if their bumpers weren't right. And for decades trade has been growing in services, where national technical regulations and standards are especially tricky for foreign firms to adhere to (the EU Single Market, for example, does not work well for services). What's more, foreign direct investment (FDI) is actually more important than trade. Apart from the imposition of old-fashioned sanctions and a few harsh tariff barriers, then, Obama repeatedly engaged in other unilateral, arbitrary and intimidating actions against foreign firms active in the US.

His people fined Britain's BP billions of dollars for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, and Obama himself castigated BP as British Petroleum. In 2012, Obama's Department of Justice (DoJ) fined UK pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline three billion dollars for bribing doctors to prescribe anti-depressants to children. On a much smaller scale, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined Dutch auditors KPMG in 2014 for iffy accounting, going on to fine Ernst & Young for much the same in 2016. Last year, too, the Supreme Court awarded Apple $399million in damages against Korea's Samsung for making smartphones with `a rectangular front face with rounded edges and a grid of colourful icons on a black screen'. Obama's DoJ also fined Volkswagen $4.3 billion for faking its diesel emissions, arranging for a German VW executive to be shackled in Miami and threatened with life in jail. Finally, in its dying days, the Obama DoJ fined Britain's Rolls Royce $170million for bribery.

Obama's fierceness toward inward investors was only `soft' in that it singled foreign companies out for longstanding Democratic Party anti-corporate gripes around the environment, safety and corruption. In this sense, we can say that Obama initiated trade wars under the guise of culture wars against the bad behaviour of foreign firms.

The EU has replied in kind. Brussels might not agree that its measures amount to a trade war, but it has been unrelenting in its pursuit of US companies - especially IT companies. The EU issued anti-monopoly fines against Microsoft ($731million, 2013), Intel ($1.4 billion, 2009) and Google (up to $7.45 billion, 2016), and attacked Apple for not paying enough tax. It now has Google, Apple, Facebook and WhatsApp in its sights over internet privacy.

US IT companies remain, in the eyes of the EU, just a little too big for their boots. They lack the finesse of, say, European companies. In this way the EU's politically correct protectionism can distract from its failure to build a computer and software industry like the US.

The `Trump means trade war' narrative gets still more shallow when people say that just as Trump will make trade hard, so other authoritarian national leaders - not just Trump, but also Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India's Narendra Modi, Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping - will promise to do the same. Thus Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott believes that `just as in the 1930s, there is a prevailing cult of the strong man' around the world; so if Trump could `bring the globalisation of the past quarter of a century to a juddering halt', he might be aided and abetted by multiple Trumps abroad.

This is preposterous. Even Thomas Carlyle, the father of the `Great Man' school of history, would blush at such a personalised, almost Freudian account of world trade. By focusing on easily disliked dictatorial figures, this knowing whitewash completely exonerates liberal politicians, on both sides of the Atlantic.

It is all far too convenient. Trump may well like the brutish, tariff-based protectionism of the pre-war era. But he will also continue the modern, righteous protectionism pioneered by Obama and the EU. The forces of world economy and politics are bigger than any one man.

SOURCE

****************************

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

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

***************************

How Obama is scheming to sabotage Trump’s presidency

WHEN former President Barack Obama said he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval to his troops.

Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two kilometres from the White House.

In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.

He’s doing it through a network of leftist nonprofits led by Organizing for Action. Normally you’d expect an organisation set up to support a politician and his agenda to close up shop after that candidate leaves office, but not Obama’s OFA. Rather, it’s gearing up for battle, with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country.

Since Donald Trump’s election, this little-known but well-funded protesting arm has beefed up staff and ramped up recruitment of young liberal activists, declaring on its website, “We’re not backing down.” Determined to salvage Obama’s legacy,” it’s drawing battle lines on immigration, ObamaCare, race relations and climate change.

Obama is intimately involved in OFA operations and even tweets from the group’s account. In fact, he gave marching orders to OFA foot soldiers following Trump’s upset victory.

“It is fine for everybody to feel stressed, sad, discouraged,” he said in a conference call from the White House. “But get over it.” He demanded they “move forward to protect what we’ve accomplished.”

“Now is the time for some organising,” he said. “So don’t mope.”

Far from sulking, OFA activists helped organise anti-Trump marches across US cities, some of which turned into riots. After Trump issued a temporary ban on immigration from seven terror-prone Muslim nations, the demonstrators jammed airports, chanting: “No ban, no wall, sanctuary for all!”

Run by old Obama aides and campaign workers, federal tax records show “nonpartisan” OFA marshals 32,525 volunteers nationwide. Registered as a 501(c)(4), it doesn’t have to disclose its donors, but they’ve been generous. OFA has raised more than $40 million in contributions and grants since evolving from Obama’s campaign organisation Obama for America in 2013.

OFA, in IRS filings, says it trains young activists to develop “organising skills.” Armed with Obama’s 2012 campaign database, OFA plans to get out the vote for Democratic candidates it’s grooming to win back Congress and erect a wall of resistance to Trump at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

It will be aided in that effort by the Obama Foundation, run by Obama’s former political director, and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, launched last month by Obama pal Eric Holder to end what he and Obama call GOP “gerrymandering” of congressional districts.

Obama will be overseeing it all from a shadow White House located within two miles of Trump. It features a mansion, which he’s fortifying with construction of a tall brick perimeter, and a nearby taxpayer-funded office with his own chief of staff and press secretary. Michelle Obama will also open an office there, along with the Obama Foundation.

Critical to the fight is rebuilding the ravaged Democrat Party. Obama hopes to install his former civil-rights chief Tom Perez at the helm of the Democratic National Committee.

Perez is running for the vacant DNC chairmanship, vowing “It’s time to organise and fight ... We must stand up to protect President Obama’s accomplishments;” while also promising, “We’re going to build the strongest grassroots organising force this country has ever seen.”

The 55-year-old Obama is not content to go quietly into the night like other ex-presidents. “You’re going to see me early next year,” he said after the election, “and we’re going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff.”

Added the ex-president: “Point is, I’m still fired up and ready to go.”

SOURCE

**********************************

Undermining Our Republic, One Lawsuit After Another

A lawless judiciary is running amok as leftists take to the courts to get their way.

In 1996, California voters approved a ballot initiative known as Proposition 209. It banned all preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity and gender in public education, employment and contracting. The decision was anathema to the progressive bean-counters and quota-mongers who did what progressives always do when the will of the people conflicts with their agenda: they found U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, who issued a temporary restraining order preventing the law's implantation. Henderson's reasoning? Because the elimination of preferences disadvantaged women and racial minorities, it violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

Henderson's affront to logic was eventually overturned, but this saga illustrates two things that afflict the nation to this very day: Leftists remain utterly contemptuous of the democratic process when the results of that process conflict with their "enlightened" worldview; and far more important, Americans have becoming increasingly inured to Abraham Lincoln's warning that "if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers."

Would that it were solely the Supreme Court. As usual, leftists were able to secure a ruling from federal district judge James Robart of Seattle restraining the Trump administration's efforts to temporarily suspend visas for aliens "who cannot be realistically vetted for security risks because their native countries are either sponsors of anti-American terrorism . or have been left with dysfunctional or nonfunctional governments because of war," as National Review aptly explains.

This is judicial abuse, and nothing makes it clearer than Section 1182(f) of immigration law, granting the president the power to "suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."

That leftists have twisted Trump's order into an attack on religion is unsurprising. It is even less surprising that a judge with a track record of left-leaning activism would oppose it.

But this is just the beginning of the Left's effort to employ "useful" jurists willing to preserve their agenda, even if it thwarts the will of the electorate, a congressional majority and/or the Trump administration. Fred Lucas reports that there are more than a dozen lawsuits challenging Trump's executive order, and they "largely stem from organizations bankrolled by billionaire leftist George Soros and Democratic state attorneys general" have been filed for exactly that reason.

The results of Robart's injunction alone are as predictable as they are infuriating. "Lifting of Travel Ban Sets Off Rush to Reach U.S.," proclaims a New York Times headline. The Times also refers to a "vigorous" vetting process that can take as long as two years.

Not exactly. "Because of a spike in Middle Eastern refugees needing placement, the Obama administration has decided to rush their vetting process to three months, from the original 18-24 months," the Washington Times revealed - last April.

Americans should be clear about what is really happening here: progressives are once engaged in the process of finding judges willing to elevate the interests of aliens and their progressive enablers over Americans and national security.

Americans should also understand this particular battle is only the beginning of a war in which leftists will flood the courts with lawsuits aimed at undermining every facet of Trump's agenda.

In what may have been one of his most misguided assumptions, Thomas Jefferson argued "for the permanency of the judicial offices" based on the idea that "few men in the society . have sufficient skill in the laws to qualify them for the stations of judges. And making the proper deductions for the ordinary depravity of human nature, the number must be still smaller of those who unite the requisite integrity with the requisite knowledge."

The rise of moral relativism, essentially the idea that one man's "depravity" is another man's "lifestyle," has given the nation a plethora of judges completely bereft of anything resembling the union of requisite integrity and requisite knowledge. Thus, for example, Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt is quite comfortable wearing her "pussy hat" while sitting on the bench. It's apparently OK because her job is largely administrative, and her judicial powers are limited to conducting marriages and administrative hearings.

Yet the ultimate judicial divide in our nation is the chasm between judges who believe the Constitution means what it actually says, and those who believe it is a "living" document rife with "penumbras" or implied rights necessitating interpretation. For the latter group, it is completely irrelevant the Framers fought over every word contained in our founding document. Moreover, members of the liberal wing of the U.S. Supreme Court have expressed their comfort with using decisions produced by foreign and international courts to inform their rulings.

The concept known as judicial supremacy began with Marbury v. Madison, the first time SCOTUS voided congressional legislation. It has now evolved to the point where Americans have been led to believe the Constitution "was deliberately framed in terms of heroic generalities precisely to give federal judges a wider scope for discretion," as Stanford Law Professor Michael McConnell put it.

Columnist Clarke D. Forsythe echoes Lincoln. "Judicial supremacy fundamentally contradicts self-government," he writes.

Sadly, America's governance is often determined by who sits on our courts rather than who sits in our legislatures. This makes the selection of judges far more critical than it should be, to the point where Harry Reid invoked the nuclear option to stack the DC Court of Appeals with Democrats. Thus, Democrat hysteria surrounding the elimination of the filibuster to ultimately appoint Neil Gorsuch to the seat vacated by Antonin Scalia rings exceedingly hollow.

Article III of the Constitution grants Congress to create - or eliminate - every federal court but SCOTUS, a power that could be used to rein in much judicial overreach. But if Congress did put the judges on notice that unconstitutional rulings might cost them their jobs, Americans' focus would be on our elected representatives when divisive political outcomes arose. "Can't have that," columnist Selwyn Duke writes. "Federal judges don't have to be reelected - congressmen do."

Again, the short-term implications are clear. Progressives will employ every opportunity to use the judiciary as a bulwark against a president they despise, and an electorate that has decimated Democrat legislative power at both the federal and state level. Moreover, as SCOTUS made clear on rulings from Roe v. Wade to Obergefell v. Hodges, jurists will continue to "discover" laws that have "no basis in the Constitution," as Chief Justice John Roberts characterized the latter decision in his dissent.

That would be the same Chief Justice Roberts who also "discovered" ObamaCare's individual mandate - argued as such by the Obama administration itself - was actually a tax, making passage of the health care law possible. A law giving the federal government control over one-sixth of the nation's economy.

Long term, Americans are facing the ever-increasing reality that "five lawyers can determine what law means for 320 million Americans," Duke explains. That system of governance may be many things. A constitutional republic isn't one of them.

SOURCE

****************************

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

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

***************************

Donald Trump backs down over 'one China policy' in call with China's Xi Jinping

By first making it clear that U.S. policy cannot be taken for granted, Trump has gained kudos by agreeing to the status quo after all.  Good negotiation tactics.  China does now to a degree owe him a favor.

The Leftist media don't or won't understand his tactics so are  full of scare stories about what Trump MIGHT do.  But his actions have been very conservative -- including his immigration restrictions, which are little different from actions by previous Presidents, such as Obama and Carter

There is a long article here by Daniel McCarthy, editor at large of The American Conservative which is headed: "Donald Trump: the method behind the madness. How the unorthodox US president may be one step ahead of his critics".  So some people at least do get how Trump works

Note also the following comment on Trump's travel ban order:

"Trump could have executed this better, and the courts absolutely got it wrong. But it's important to realize that this was also strategically calculated to play out in one of two ways: Either Trump got his way with the order (he didn't), or his base is (rightly) fired up about an activist judiciary just in time for Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Trump wins either way. And along the way, Trump successfully diverted media attention to a very temporary travel moratorium - i.e., not the most critical issue. The charitable view is that this is an example of one of Trump's deal-making trademarks, "managed chaos," in which he keeps his opponents off balance, distracted and unaware of the right hook that is, ultimately, going to win the match"


Donald Trump has backed down over his confrontational stance towards Beijing, committing to the `One China policy' in his first phone call with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, since taking office.

In a move that is certain to ease tensions between the United States and China, the US president "agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honour our `one China' policy," the White House said in a statement.

The "lengthy telephone conversation" on Thursday evening was "extremely cordial" and the two leaders "extended invitations to meet in their respective countries," the statement added.

Mr Xi told Mr Trump that he appreciated the president's reaffirmation of the policy, China's state news agency Xinhua reported.

Mr Trump angered Beijing by accepting a congratulatory call from the President of Taiwan in December, breaking decades of diplomatic protocol.

He has since suggested there could be a renegotiation of the One China policy, in which the US recognises Beijing's rule over the island. Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway province, which will be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.

Observers had questioned Mr Trump's apparent willingness to use the Taiwan issue as a `bargaining chip' with China, and they believe his decision to back down over the issue is the correct one.

Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy in Beijing, said: "Trump played with the notion of using this arrangement as leverage, but I think he ultimately came to the right conclusion that this is not where the US Administration can get leverage.  "The One China Policy is not a card on the bargaining table - it is the table itself.

"Taiwan is also a vital US partner and thriving democracy of 23 million people. Its future is not ours to bargain away," Mr Haenle, who served on the National Security Council under Mr Bush and Barack Obama, told The Telegraph.

Bonnie Glaser, senior advisor for Asia at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: "The US-China relationship has been on hold as Beijing waited for Trump to make this statement.

"Now the two countries can get down to business and discuss how to manage their differences on a wide range of issues," she told The Telegraph.

SOURCE

******************************

The pendulum swings from left to right to left and now, back to right again

Joel Ross writes below.  He is a futurist and a Democrat with no love for Trump, but his predictions about Trump are interesting and plausible.  Below is from a subscription newsletter called The Ross Rant from New York City for real estate investors

The black swans held a massive victory party last night.  Not because Trump won, but because they showed the world that they are the real rulers.

Being a NY real estate guy, I have always known Trump is a terrible person. My former partner who at one time was worldwide head of real estate at Citibank, hated him. She and he had bitter battles when he was bankrupt and she was seizing assets. I know other bankers, lawyers and contractors who have had dealings with him, and nobody had good things to say.

However, now he is president and we need as a nation to be fully supportive or the world will come apart. As I feared, the press is already on the attack with their usual rhetoric.  CNN today was its usual self - attacking him and having Chris Cuomo and Amanpor make stupid statements, still blaming the Russians.  MSNBC actually had Al Sharpton on as a commentator.

Shows you how out of touch the media is. Kelly Ann told Cuomo to stop the negativity and he went on to try to claim "it is not us, it was the campaigns". The press just does not get it. The NY Times was a loser for the last several years, and it will continue to decline at a faster pace.  CNN has lost the battle to Fox and will likely have to change out the commentators who are now completely discredited.

Many years ago Connie Chung made a luncheon speech I was at, and she said the press had devolved into a bunch of lazy unprofessional kids who just rush out a story without bothering to check veracity. She decried how the press had become rumor mongers and unprofessional. They sure have. They will probably not change much until they realize the world has moved on to social media and the press has minimal credibility now.

 If you have been reading The Rant for a long time you know I have been saying the world is changed and very high risk, and the black swans are circling. We just entered a major inflection point in history.

I have been reporting that in Europe the right wing is ascendant. LePen is likely to win the French election next year. The EU is going to come apart once that  happens and now with Trump in power that trend will accelerate. The EU will realign into blocs and there will be massive turmoil as things sort out over the next several years.

The French will go back to the Franc. Germany will shift right as the refugees create social, crime and fiscal issues. As ISIS gets destroyed they will try to wage war in Europe thru more terror attacks.

You do not want to invest in Europe. The world is rapidly shifting right and the changes will be generational. Brussels will be neutered. NATO countries will invest much more in defense and will be forced to build up their armies.

Here is what I believe will happen in the US. Trump has two years to make massive changes and this is what I believe they may be:

Obamacare is replaced with some type of more free market plan that Ryan already has. Corporate taxes will be reduced to maybe 15% or maybe a bit higher. Personal taxes will be reduced. All executive orders by Obama will be reversed.  Most of the massive regulation Obama put in place will be cancelled.

The Supreme Court will get a conservative justice right away and Ginsburg will try to hang on until she dies in office to try to deny him her seat.  She will not last 4 years. Trump will get at least 2 and maybe 3 judge picks. The Supreme court will decide by what strict constructionists think the constitution says not the left wing politics of Sotomayor. It will be much more pro-business. Antitrust cases will go away.

Sanctuary cities will lose funding and San Francisco and Berkley and Boulder will go nuts. The border will somehow be secured and Mexico will not pay. Border Patrol will be materially increased. Gang members will be arrested and deported but everyone else will get to stay here. Ryan will stay as Speaker. Trump will do what any good NY real estate guy does, he will not get up from the table until he gets a deal close to what he wants.

That is key to a lot of what Trump will be able to do. If you listened carefully to what he said, it was I will redo NAFTA and will walk from the table if I do not get what we need.

There will be a revised NAFTA but Mexico will suffer a lot because many US companies will not move plants there until they see what revised NAFTA says.  They will also not defy Trump early on and risk his wrath. Mexico takes a big hit.

The Pentagon and US defense contractors are big winners. Defense spending will ramp up by huge numbers.  The military will add over 200,000 people over the next two years. Weapons spend will dramatically increase. This will add a lot of new jobs between the additional military and the added jobs in defense plants.

Private equity will take a big hit with carried interest going away and this will make a small part payment for the tax cuts. Estate taxes will mostly go away. Cops will be respected again And racial strife will end as Trump tries new ideas to build charter schools, and rebuild the ghettos.

There will be no more honoring the families of the thugs like Brown and Travon the way Obama and Hilary did.  He will honor the cops. The downtrend in crime will get reinstated. Transgender anything will go away.

 The military will be told to go win wars and not be social experiments with transgender soldiers. Rules of engagement will be changed to kill the enemy instead of cater to political correctness. There will be an infusion of another 5,000 US soldiers into Iraq and more into Syria to back up the destruction of ISIS. The bombing campaign will be stepped up to what it should be.

By March ISIS will have been defeated. They will try to carry out major terror attacks, but now the world will call Islamic terror what it is and there will be a more aggressive fight and coordination.

Putin and Trump are from the same mother and will get along. Putin is like all bullies - he will realize he cannot push Trump around like he does Obama and he will work out a modus vivendi because he knows he has at least 4 more years to deal with a new US president. Bullies back off if they find they cannot intimidate the other guy.

The Iran nuke deal will get torn up and Iran will find itself back under sanctions. The Germans will scream but Merkel is now in a very weak position so she will not be able to stop Trump from re-imposing them at least for US companies and anyone wanting to do business in the US, especially banks. This will be world changing. The Saudis won big on this, Israel won huge.

Developers win because the EPA will be defanged. Climate change legislation is dead and the Paris pact will be defunct.

 College campuses will no longer have the threat that unless they find a bunch of young guys to charge with sexual whatever they lose funds. PC on college campuses will be pressured to end although for quite a while there will be protests and other such things.  Today professors are telling students they do not have to take exams because they are so upset. Give me a f-ing break.  This is exactly what is wrong with American colleges today. It is just telling kids boo hoo if you feel bad you get excused from work.

I still think Trump is nuts and a really terrible person, but he is president now so we need to deal with reality of what next. Paul Ryan has already reached out to heal the rift and they have already planned a quick special session to pass repeal of Obamacare and undo the regulations and do other things quickly. Ryan will remain as speaker. The SCOTUS vacancy will be filled immediately.

 Most important the entire world is about to change. We will see if for good or bad but change it will in massive ways.  The tide of anti-socialist, anti PC, anti-diversity, anti-entitlement, anti-establishment of the past 70 years is washing across the world and Trump is simply the ultimate example of what had already been happening with Brexit and in Europe.

As far as the stock market- it will now rise.  Taxes will get cut, the Supreme Court will not be activist, anti-trust will end, some type of infrastructure program will be instituted, defense spending will jump, banks will be free to lend, regulations will be drastically reduced, and corporate profits will rise.

 Go all in now. You already see the market reaction is up after the shock. Wall Street elite misplaced their bets, Hollywood and the press way over played their hands, and college professors and administrators will have to get over it. Hilary and crew go to jail.

Via email

****************************

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

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

***************************

Leftist hate shows its face

David Horowitz

You may have seen what happened last week when conservative Milo Yiannapolous tried to give a speech at UC Berkeley...

In a portent of things to come, a mob of masked, black-garbed left wing thugs went berserk. U.S. flags were torched, university equipment was destroyed and windows smashed – over $100,000 damage in all.

Bystanders waiting to hear Milo's speech were attacked with truncheons, one of them bloodied so badly that he lay unconscious on the ground, as the campus police stood by, ordered by administrators not to interrupt the rampage.

It was a scene out of Hitler's Germany – hatred and bloodlust on the loose; hatred at war with free speech and expression; hatred looking for someone to hurt.

But this shouldn't surprise us. Hatred has always been the lifeblood of the Left. Hate has always been the Left's political homeland and its reason for being. For the Left, hatred is never having to say you're sorry.

You see, one of the biggest of the Left's Big Lies is that conservative political groups and movements are universally motivated by hatred – of blacks, Hispanics and other ethnic groups; of homosexuals, transsexuals and other gender minorities; of immigrants, Muslims and others who are "marginalized" and therefore vulnerable.

This Big Lie is an exercise in what Freud called "projection" and which psychologists define as denying abhorrent emotions in oneself by attributing them to others.

There are indeed haters on the Right, but for the most part, they are on its fringe – demented individuals or tiny groups whose political apparatus consists of little more than an obscure post office box and a toxic website.

For the Left, however, hatred is a mass movement. Left hate groups swim successfully in the American mainstream.

And because of the Left bias in our culture and media, their followers, like those at the women's marches, can posture as idealists and protectors of the downtrodden while spewing hate. For them, hatred is no fault.

Via email. See new e-book titled Left Wing Hate Groups. 

****************************

Just another Jew-hating Muslim

Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.) said that Jews wanted to "oppress minorities all over the world" and referred to them as "slave traders," according to a former classmate interviewed by Mother Jones.

Ellison, one of the front-runners to be elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee in an election later this month, is one of the most liberal members of Congress and has been a vocal critic of the Jewish state of Israel throughout his decade in the House of Representatives.

Michael Olenick was the opinions editor at the Minnesota Daily at the time that Ellison, who then went by Keith Hakim as a student at University of Minnesota Law School, was submitting numerous op-eds defending Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Olenick, who is Jewish, told Mother Jones that Ellison's argument at the time was that "an oppressed group could not be racist toward Jews because Jews were themselves oppressors."

"European white Jews are trying to oppress minorities all over the world," Olenick said, recalling Ellison's argument. "Keith would go on all the time about ‘Jewish slave traders.'"

Ellison began attending a mosque when he was 19 and became more politically radical, according to the Mother Jones piece.

SOURCE

**************************

Rogue government employees need to go

If most of us defied our bosses on social media we would be fired, yet apparently when it is the federal government being mocked by self-proclaimed rogue employees, it is an apparent act of patriotism. Liberal media are touting the prevalence of @RogueNASA and @AltEPA, Twitter pages aimed at delegitimizing the Trump administration; but these accounts are treading a thin legal line and simply acting as a liberal microphone.

The drama apparently began when the National Park Service’s official Twitter account was temporarily shut down by the Trump administration after it engaged in political tweets against Trump.

In an apparent response, Death Valley National Park, a government managed federal park, took to Twitter to seemingly comment on President Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policies on Jan. 25. The Death Valley Park Service tweeted a picture of a Japanese man sent to internment in the 1940s with a quotation advocating for looser immigration restraints.

The Death Valley Park Service’s decision to tweet immigration advocacy rather than their usual traffic updates and facts about flowers has spurred government employees from several other agencies to similar sponsorship of the cause.

The same day, accounts such as @RogueNASA, @AltUSNatParkSer, @AltEPA and @Alt_NASA started popping up, all claiming to be run by active or former employees of their respective departments in order to act in resistance to the Trump administration.

For example, on Jan. 25, @RogueNASA tweeted, “How sad is it that government employees have to create rogue Twitter accounts just to communicate FACTS to the American public?”

As these pages attempt to replicate the existence of real national park accounts, several have taken official logos and avatars from their official agency counterparts. Yet government trademark laws such as 18 U.S.C. Section 701 specifically prohibits the use of government insignia on non-government websites and pages.

That law states, “Whoever manufactures, sells, or possesses any badge, identification card, or other insignia, of the design prescribed by the head of any department or agency of the United States for use by any officer or employee thereof, or any colorable imitation thereof, or photographs, prints, or in any other manner makes or executes any engraving, photograph, print, or impression in the likeness of any such badge, identification card, or other insignia, or any colorable imitation thereof, except as authorized under regulations made pursuant to law, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.”

While the copyright and trademark law does provide latitude for instances of parody however; As Kalev Leetaru explained on Forbes.com on Jan. 25, “The accounts in question have positioned themselves less as satiric and humorous parodies of the official accounts they mimic, but rather as resistance accounts that purport to offer the true story of those organizations. In particular, the accounts have positioned themselves in their tweets as alternative authoritative resources for those interested in their respective agencies’ research, replacing the official accounts.” This led several accounts to switch to new images.

This is a desperate attempt by liberal, apparent, government employees to resist Trump’s authority and dismiss his policies on immigration, energy, and the environment.

The worst part, as Leetaru notes, is that it is unknown if these are actual government employees from any of these agencies. They could be fakes. Although since they used real agency logos, even briefly, that would still probably violate the statute.  It could be anyone hosting these “rogue” Twitter pages and, still, social media has given them a platform.

Politico writer Nancy Scola believes that the National Park employees felt particular angst surrounding Trump’s election due to his stance against EPA’s policies designed to combat climate issues. Unfortunately for these employees, Trump is president. And while they have the privilege of working for the federal government each day, thousands of Americans have been struggling due to the regulations of the Obama Administration. By whining on social media about the election, they are delegitimizing the plight of every American who lost their job because of government policies.

The presence of these rogue accounts is not only legally dubious, it demonstrates a larger problem of bureaucrats out of control — who believe they are entitled to their positions of power. This is legitimate not whistleblowing, it’s a temper tantrum.

Ironically, the whole controversy underscores the reason while millions of Americans voted for Trump to drain the swamp. Liberal government employees may believe they are creating a resistance, but in reality they are only resisting the positive change that the American people have been asking for to get the economy moving again.

SOURCE

******************************

Congress Moves to Cut Immigration to U.S. By Half

New bill would limit the number of refugees, lower total immigration levels

Leading senators on Tuesday unveiled landmark immigration reform legislation that would limit the number of refugees permitted into the United States each year and eventually cut total immigration to America by 50 percent, according to a preview of the legislation viewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Sens. David Perdue (R., Ga.) and Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) revealed the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act, or RAISE Act, which aims to boost wages for Americans by slicing immigration levels and recalibrating the system to accommodate those seeking employment in the American workforce.

The legislation seeks to build upon President Donald Trump’s immigration vision and his recent executive order placing a temporary hold on immigration for individuals coming from several countries designated as primary terrorism hotspots.

The bill would cap the number of permanent refugees permitted in the United States to 50,000 per year, which the lawmakers say is in line with average numbers during the past 13 years.

Within its first year of implementation, the immigration plan would reduce the number of individuals granted legal status by 41 percent and then steadily rise to a 50 percent reduction by its tenth year, according to a statistic provided by the senators and based on models established by Princeton and Harvard professors.

Overall immigration would be lowered to 637,960 within the first year of implementation and to 539,958 by year 10, according to these models. This would account for a 50 percent reduction over 2015 levels, which topped out at 1,051,031, according to information provided by the lawmakers.

“We are taking action to fix some of the shortcomings in our legal immigration system,” Perdue said in a statement to the Free Beacon. “Returning to our historically normal levels of legal immigration will help improve the quality of American jobs and wages.”

The goal of the legislation is to shift the immigration system in the favor of skilled workers. The net benefit of this recalibration would be to the advantage of all American workers with lower-skilled jobs, the lawmakers maintain.

Employment-based visas would become the main priority under the new plan.

Deference would be given to family households seeking to immigrate to the United States, according to the legislation, which would favor the spouses and minor-aged children of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.

Immigration priority would no longer be given to the extended family and adult family members of U.S. residents under the bill. This means that adult parents and siblings of current citizens would no longer receive preferential treatment.

The bill additionally would eliminate the contested visa lottery system, which allowed individuals from any country around the world an equal shot at obtaining a U.S. visa in an expedited manner.

The 50,000 visa slots allocated under the program would be eliminated and folded back into the larger immigration system, according to the bill. The lawmakers maintain that the lottery system is outdated and beset by fraud.

The legislation also would move to create a temporary visa program for elderly parents or those in need of caretaking. This would allow citizens to more easily bring a parent into the country.

Under the new legislation, an elderly parent eligible for a U.S. visa would not be permitted to work or access any public benefits.

SOURCE

****************************

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

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

***************************

A Toast to California’s Secession

Robert Ringer has a "modest proposal"

There’s been a lot of talk recently about California seceding from the union. It’s akin to Hollywood celebs vowing to move out of the country if a Republican wins the White House. Meaning that it’s all bluster. Those who extol the virtues of the People’s Republic of California love to make hollow threats, but they possess neither the courage nor the financial resources to back them up.

If California were ever on its own, within six months of its “independence” it would be unable to function at even a survival level. Though it boasts the sixth largest economy in the world (larger than that of both Brazil and France!), there’s no economy big enough to keep a Marxist country afloat. This has been demonstrated time and again in such failed nations as Cuba, the Soviet Union, Mozambique, and every other country that has experimented with socialism/communism in any of its hideous forms.

The majority of California’s adult population consists of adult-children whose brains have never developed beyond adolescence. They cling to a stunted Woodstock mentality that makes them incapable of rational thought, which, if not addressed professionally, has the potential to be fatal. They live in an Oz-like land of constant frustration, which causes them to resort to tantrums and violence as the combined solution to every perceived problem.

The bottom line to all this is that a majority of Californians are not able to function as self-sustaining adults in the real world, so they irrationally dedicate themselves to the impossible task of trying to remake our imperfect world into a perfect world they create in their soiled minds.

Such an immature and naïve mental state can have dire consequences not only for the individual who is saddled with it, but for rational people of goodwill who live in the same societal space as they do. It’s dangerous to everyone, because those who are part of the Radical Left, in particular, employ lies, slander, and violence day-in-and-day-out in an attempt to achieve their impossible goal of creating the perfect world they envision in their minds.

I lived in Southern California for about 20 years, and I loved it for about ten of those years. It was a period when seemingly everything that happened was wonderful — meeting and marrying the most beautiful, kindest, most caring woman in the world, enjoying my four children as they progressed through grade school, middle school, and high school, rising from oblivion to the pinnacle of the book-publishing world by writing and self-publishing two New York Times #1 bestsellers, and much, much more.

But as we rolled into the eighties, the glitzy lifestyle of Los Angeles began to lose its appeal for me. Being surrounded by millions of Hollywood types and, worse, wannabe Hollywood types, became a painful daily task. I grew tired of seeing people with no visible means of support driving Rolls-Royces and living in rented mansions.

Above all, the left-wing political craziness and political correctness began to wear me down. I got tired of debating low-information people — and, worse, no-information people — and increasingly found myself withdrawing from the outside world.

I slowly faced up to the reality that people in Southern California had a collective mental disorder that caused them to talk and act in ways that was completely foreign to how the rest of the nation thought or behaved.

I remember many years ago Paul Newman saying that “Los Angeles is like a beautiful lady dying of cancer.” Notwithstanding his liberal credentials, Newman nailed it. For sheer luxury and beauty, it’s hard to beat Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, and Bel Air, but, with just a few exceptions, most of the rest of Los Angeles is a sewer.

I became convinced, and today am certain, that California cannot be saved. It long ago passed the tipping point, and is now a giant left-wing cauldron boiling over with hatred, intolerance, and violence. It’s gigantic GDP can’t save it, because when GDP in California increases, it always brings with it an increase in welfare benefits. The Sacramento beast has an insatiable appetite for vote-buying entitlements, regulations, and illegal schemes.

That said, given that the national debt can never repaid — and, in fact, is going to increase dramatically in the coming years — I favor killing two birds with one stone and settling our debt with our largest creditor, China, by giving it title to the state of California outright — lock, stock, and illegal immigrants. Then, let Sacramento figure out how to deal with its new Asian rulers who don’t take kindly to liberal ideas like sanctuary cities, rioting, and welfare fraud.

As I’ve written about before, it’s inevitable that the United States will ultimately break into several nations, but right now just getting the People’s Republic of California out of our lives and out of our pocketbooks would be a real boost to the average American’s morale.

So, with that delicious thought in mind, I invite you to join me in a toast to California’s secession — voluntarily or forced, I’m not particular.

SOURCE

*******************************

An Oxymoron: 'The Left's Tea Party'



With the all of the protesting and rioting across the country since Donald Trump’s election, some in the mainstream media suggest that this is evidence of a leftist grassroots political movement akin to a “progressive tea party.” While there is little question these protests and riots attract a lot of media attention, is this really an organized grassroots cohesive movement? Not exactly.

There is a profound and fundamental difference between the Tea Party movement and the current leftist “resistance” temper tantrum. The Tea Party is truly a grassroots movement born out of serious individual concerns over the ballooning national debt, government regulations and the need to lower taxes — the very ideas of Liberty that lit the fires of the American Revolution. It is a melting pot of traditional socially minded conservatives and libertarians — both concerned about the loss of individual liberty and the growing creep of socialism. It was the passage of ObamaCare that saw the Tea Party come into its own as a truly potent political force that helped lead to GOP majorities in both the House and Senate. These Republicans took office with the goal of being reformers, not revolutionaries.

Leftist malcontents currently protesting and rioting aren’t interested in connecting with traditional American values, though they like to throw around terms like “un-American.” Quite the contrary; they see traditional American values as simply codes for racism, bigotry and sexism. To this leftist grievance class everything is about “equality” or the lack thereof — an inequity of outcome, not opportunity. In reality, what the Left is after is neo-Marxism. When they talk of a grassroots movement, they are speaking of the rise of a new proletariat. They seek a complete re-ordering of society around their leftist concepts of “social justice.” In reality, these protesters are hoping to birth a red revolution, not a reformation.

It’s individual freedom versus collectivism. American history has shown time and again that Americans prefer individual Liberty with its Rule of Law over and against collectivist tyranny and its rule of men. It seems to us there is no comparison between these movements, only contrast.

SOURCE

*************************************

Navy’s Depleted Aircraft Will Take Years to Rebuild After Obama-Era Defense Cuts

Nearly two-thirds of Navy strike fighters unable to fly

The Navy's aircraft arsenal is so depleted it would take several years to rebuild the fleet even if the Trump administration allotted the funding needed to repair inoperable aircraft, according to a policy expert and former Air Force pilot.

John Venable, a senior research fellow for defense policy at the Heritage Foundation, cited a report released Monday that found two-thirds of the Navy's strike fighter jets are unable to fly due to maintenance problems exacerbated by several years of military budget cuts.

Thirty-five percent of grounded fighter planes are waiting for parts, while 27 percent are undergoing major depot work, according to the report published by Defense News. A full 62 percent of F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet strike fighters are out of service, a concerning figure because of the essential role the planes fill in the fleet's combat power.

In all, more than half of the Navy's planes are grounded, including some 1,700 combat transport aircraft, patrol aircraft, planes, and helicopters.

"The throughput right now is so far behind and has such a backlog that it'll take them several years to refit, refurbish, and repair the F-18s that are in unserviceable condition," Venable told the Washington Free Beacon. "They can't catch up even if the Trump administration gave them all the money they need."

Naval and Air Force pilots have been unable to train adequately due to a shortage of operable aircraft in both services, impacting readiness levels and depriving the military of pilots who are unable to log needed flight hours.

With five months left in fiscal year 2017 and a readiness deficit across all four military branches, Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) has advocated an emergency $26 billion supplemental spending bill that would direct some of the funds to readiness training for pilots.

Cotton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Monday the funding has become necessary after eight years of defense cuts under former President Barack Obama.

"Trying to cut our defense spending to get a peace dividend as we did in the 1990s or to pay off domestic constituencies as Obama did is a self-defeating effort," Cotton said during a panel at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

"Your enemies get wind of what's going on, their aggression becomes vulgar, and you have to pay more to rebuild the capabilities and capacity that you lost just to get back to where you were,” he continued.

Cotton said Congress needs to increase the defense budget by at least 15 percent in fiscal year 2018 to recoup the military’s losses.

SOURCE

********************************

Fake news about Trump nominee

People will believe silly things when it fits their ideological preconceptions. Even when they have been debunked and are contradicted by first-hand information and news reports.

A handful of mostly left-leaning publications repeated a British tabloid’s wild claim that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch started a “fascism forever club” in high school. This bizarre smear of Gorsuch was debunked by Snopes.  It was also debunked by teachers at his school, as liberal-leaning America magazine noted. And it was also debunked by a lawyer in National Review.

Neil Gorsuch is a well-respected judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he has been a judge for more than 10 years, without a hint of scandal. He was unanimously confirmed to the Tenth Circuit by a bipartisan vote, even as other, controversial judges faced filibusters. Nothing in Gorsuch’s judicial opinions or writings is in any way radical, nor does he have a history of saying radical things. Even lawyers like Radley Balko who detest President Trump think that Gorsuch is a well-qualified, judicious, and reasonable man who should be confirmed.

So there was no reason to believe this bizarre claim even before Snopes debunked it. But when I emailed two publications that repeated this bizarre claim, asking them to correct the error, one took a day to fix it, and the other one has yet to do so. Neither of the writers I emailed responded to my email. Even the publication that did fix its error dragged its feet for a day, then made the correction only after a law professor who writes blog posts for the Washington Post told them he planned to write about their false claim.

When a claim is debunked, and was implausible to begin with, those who made the claim should immediately correct what they have written – not drag their feet, or ignore emails pointing out the error. Internet rumors based on false claims like this tend to take on a life of their own. Gorsuch’s reputation is already damaged, since countless people have read these false articles or tweets linking to them.

SOURCE

****************************

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

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

***************************

Fake news from the NYT

During the recent election campaign, a false story about Hillary Clinton and a NY pizza joint made news.  The Left instantly called it "fake news" and were enraged at the very idea of false stories  being treated as news.  But misleading "news" from Leftist sources has long been common, with both outright misreporting and a relentless tendency to report only one side of a story. So it behooves us all to use the current interest in fake news to point out that fake news is an overwhelmingly Leftist phenomenon.  A recent example is below

On February 2, 2017, the New York Times published on its front page above-the-fold a hit-piece under the headline, “A Sinister Perception of Islam Now Steers the White House.”  The principal targets of this unflattering article were President Trump, his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his “chief strategist,” Stephen Bannon.  But at the article’s end were five paragraphs and a picture with a caption that amounted to the journalistic equivalent of a drive-by-shooting aimed at Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney.

Specifically, Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg distorted and falsely reported comments made by Frank Gaffney in the course of two recorded interviews conducted in December 2016.  His article and an accompanying photo’s caption respectively asserted that Mr. Gaffney regarded “Islam” and “Muslims” as “termites [that] hollow out the structure of the civil society and other institutions for the purpose of creating conditions under which the jihad will succeed.”

Actually, as transcripts of the two conversations spanning roughly 2.5 hours make clear, Mr. Gaffney was characterizing the modus operandi of the Muslim Brotherhood, not “Muslims” or “Islam.”  The misrepresentation serves the interest of the Brotherhood – which has long been determined to silence him and the Center for Security Policy – but not the interests of the New York Times’ readers or the paper’s responsibility to report the facts.

As a public service and in the interest of holding the so-called “nation’s newspaper of record” accountable, the Center today released the full transcripts of the two interview conversations between Messrs. Gaffney and Rosenberg, together with the transcript of a phone call and an exchange of emails between the two after the publication of the article on February 2nd.  Together, they constitute a case study of mainstream media malfeasance that, deliberately or not, has the practical effect of helping America’s foes.

SOURCE

*****************************

It's the Seattle judge who is ignoring the law



Challenges to Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily banning travel for people coming from seven nations have little legal support, irrespective of the recent actions by U.S. District Court Judge James Robart to block the order. The Justice Department has ably defended Trump’s EO, providing solid and substantive arguments based upon sound legal precedent — Trump’s actions were well within both constitutional parameters and the common practice of prior presidents. But honestly, that is not what all the fuss is about.

In reality, two battles are being waged. One is in the courts and the other is in that ever-shifting realm known as public opinion. The Leftmedia has long fought for control of the latter by appealing to people’s emotions rather than by presenting a rational argument. But the courts are supposed to be above this changing whim of public sentiment; in fact, they were designed to be as best as possible impervious to it, since it is the role of the courts to seek justice in an impartial manner.

Trump, unlike prior Republican presidents, is more than willing to jump into the fray. That’s good given how poorly the mainstream media has treated him and Republicans for years.

SOURCE

************************

The Case for Judge Neil Gorsuch

It is with some justice that Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called Neil Gorsuch, the president’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, outside the “legal mainstream.” Given the murkiness of that water, however, this is not a bad thing. According to Independent Institute Research Fellow William J. Watkins, Jr., author of Crossroads for Libertyand Reclaiming the American Revolution, it is precisely because Judge Gorsuch does not subscribe to the ruling legal orthodoxy that sitting him on the Court is a simple, open-and-shut case.

A judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, Neil Gorsuch holds a judicial philosophy that is distinctly (and oddly) in the minority: He strives to interpret provisions of the U.S. Constitution according to their original public meaning. This is anathema to many in the legal mainstream. Influential legal thinker Ronald Dworkin, for example, implores judges to make their decisions by striking some sort of “balance” among competing core principles. In practice, this approach opens the floodgates to subjectivity. Judges who, in Watkins’s words, “employ a creative interpretation of the law that eschews original intent” end up making laws and crafting social policy—in other words, imposing their own values. It is the rightful job of the judiciary, however, to interpret laws and the Constitution objectively, not to treat them like a de facto Rorschach inkblot on which they can impose their own meaning.

“As a man outside the legal mainstream, Neil Gorsuch is a needed addition to a Supreme Court that is too often engrossed with its power and authority,” Watkins writes. “Confirmation will be a fight, but this herculean battle will be well worth the effort.”

SOURCE

********************************

Rogue Federal Bureaucrats Threaten Trump’s Agenda

Recent scandals in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Internal Revenue Service demonstrated that it’s almost impossible to fire federal employees, many of whom reportedly intend to go rogue by not implementing President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“It’s hard to argue we have an accountable government when someone can’t be fired for years at a time,” @bgwilterdink says.

Conservatives are hopeful the time has come for civil service reform that would rein in this permanent class of government workers who have voiced outright hostility to the new administration. Some have even called it the “fourth branch of government” or “alt-government.”

“This is a situation where people voted and elected a president who is lawfully trying to complete those tasks [he promised in the campaign], while unelected bureaucrats are willing to overturn the will of the people,” Ben Wilterdink, director of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) Task Force on Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development, told The Daily Signal.

Among federal employees, about 95 percent of political contributions went to Democrat Hillary Clinton during the presidential race, according to an analysis by The Hill.

Some of those federal workers are now in consultation with departed Obama administration officials to determine how they can push back against the Trump administration’s agenda, The Washington Post reported last week.

At the State Department, for example, nearly 1,000 government workers signed a letter protesting Trump’s executive order on refugees. A few days later, Trump had to fire acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she announced she wouldn’t defend the administration’s refugee policy.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said State Department employees who oppose the policy “should either get with the program, or they can go.”

“If a federal employee doesn’t like the ideological foundation or likely outcomes of a presidential directive, it doesn’t mean that the directive is not legal. It means that the views of the federal employee are in conflict with the views of the president who runs the federal government,” said Neil Siefring, vice president of Hilltop Advocacy and a former Republican House staffer, in a column for The Daily Caller.

“In that instance,” Siefring added, “the solution should not be to resist the actions of the president in their professional capacity as a career civil servant in the workplace. The solution is for that federal employee to honorably resign, not actively or passively hamper the White House.”

What if an employee won’t resign? Addressing the problem with the federal workforce won’t be easy, according to experts interviewed by The Daily Signal.

“You can fire federal employees, it’s just that nobody wants to put up with the process,” Don Devine, former director of the Office of Personnel Management during the Reagan administration, told The Daily Signal.

Multiple appeals can be made through the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the National Labor Relations Board.

“It’s almost impossible to discipline employees because it can be appealed to through the merit system, the labor relations systems, or through the EEOC,” Devine said. “We don’t have a civil service system; we have a dual civil service-labor relations system.”

During the Obama administration, two of its biggest scandals involved the IRS and Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2013, a Treasury Department inspector general report determined the IRS had been targeting conservative groups. In 2014, a VA inspector general’s report revealed falsified appointments in which some veterans died while waiting for care.

Years later, conservatives remain frustrated that federal workers weren’t held accountable.

“I will take your IRS employees and raise you the EPA, where story after story, a worker was viewing porn on work time and couldn’t be fired because the process is fraught with appeals,” Wilterdink said. “It’s hard to argue we have an accountable government when someone can’t be fired for years at a time.”

Earlier this year, the U.S. House revived the Holman Rule, named after a Democrat congressman who introduced it in 1876. It would allow lawmakers to cut the pay of individual federal workers or a government program.

There are other proposals for holding federal workers accountable. House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, introduced a bill in January to hold seriously tax delinquent people ineligible for federal civilian employment, federal contracts, or government grants. This bill was proposed in response to IRS data that found more than 100,000 federal civilian employees owed more than $1 billion in unpaid taxes at the end of fiscal year 2015.

Adding to the challenge is the process commonly known as burrowing. Frequently, political appointees from one administration convert to a career position that comes with civil service protections, allowing them to continue implementing policy—or resisting the new administration’s approach.

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 was passed to stop raw political party appointments from securing federal government jobs, or a spoils system. The law introduced the merit system into hiring practices and made numerous civil service positions untouchable after they were filled.

However, burrowing has caused a de facto spoils system, Wilterdink said, because, “the pendulum has swung so far to protecting federal employees” that it allows administrations to keep their people in office long term.

Significant reform doesn’t mean recreating a spoils system, according to Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation who was an assistant Office of Personnel Management director during the Reagan administration. Moffit said a balanced approach would be more desirable.

“You need to have strong managers in each agency to make sure the president’s agenda is properly executed,” Moffit told The Daily Signal. “You must also have a bright line between career and non-career staff so there is no politicization of the merit system.”

Moffit also supports legislation to allow the president to order the firing of career officials who either “broke the law or severely undermined the public’s trust.”

“Even President [Barack] Obama referred to what IRS officials did as outrageous and nothing happened,” Moffit said. “The VA matter is still unresolved. The people responsible for those waiting lists aren’t accountable and people died.”

SOURCE

****************************

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

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

***************************

A major foreign policy triumph:  Trump brings improved relationships with problem countries

Hillary talked about a "reset" but it took Trump to deliver one.  The various leaders appear to see Trump as a strong man where Obama was just a spineless nagger. They respect strength

Suddenly, leaders who have previously expressed nothing but contempt for the US are showcasing a desire to engage rather than intimidate or retract, and establish common ground with President Donald Trump.

The New York Times suggests some of the world’s most brutal autocrats could be welcoming the rise of Mr Trump as a chance to avoid being held accountable for their authoritarian tendencies and poor human rights records.

Others, it says, may wish to forge new alliances and a new geopolitical order, which could effectively restructure the world as we know it.

“Many appear to see a Trump presidency as an opportunity to engage with a like-minded leader who has stated nationalist aims,” the article states. “Others may hope for respite from criticism over their human rights records or authoritarian tendencies.”

Mr Trump already has a history of praising harsh dictators — both dead and alive.

In 2015, he said the Middle East would “100 per cent” have been better today if Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein were still in power.

Later that year, he said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is “getting an A in terms of leadership”, comparing his leadership favourably with that of Barack Obama.

He even once retweeted a Mussolini quote.

Evidently some of the world’s more hostile global figures see this as a positive thing.

They seem more keen to collaborate with the US leader and get on his good side — even those who were contemptuous of him when he was considered unlikely to win.

Writing in The Guardian, historian Timothy Garton Ash said Mr Trump’s election win signifies he now joins “a score of other nationalist leaders around the globe”, saying “the nationalists are giving one another the Trumpian thumbs-up across the seas”.

So who are these non-western leaders taking an interest in Mr Trump?

VLADIMIR PUTIN (RUSSIA)

The seemingly-cozy relationship between Mr Trump and Vladimir Putin has been well-documented over the past two years.

Throughout the election, the pair frequently exchanged compliments and expressed visions of a mutually-agreeable future, bonding over their shared interests in their own countries and power.

Mr Putin first praised the US President publicly back in 2015, describing him as “talented” and the “absolute leader” in the GOP race for the White House.

Mr Trump has in turn described the Russian autocrat saying: “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country. I think our country does plenty of killing also.”

After the election, Mr Putin expressed an interest in a form of Russia-US alliance, saying he hopes him and Mr Trump can “work together to lift Russian — US relations out of the current crisis”.

On November 14, the pair had a phone call. According to a Kremlin press release, during the call they “expressed support for active joint efforts to normalise relations and pursue constructive co-operation on the broadest possible range of issues”.

According to the Times, Mr Putin may see this relationship as a way to further Russian aims and build a new geopolitical order.

KIM JONG-UN (NORTH KOREA)

North Korea’s regime has declared itself a sworn enemy of America, and its leader Kim Jong-un has made numerous nuclear threats over the years.

Despite threatening the isolated country and describing its leader as a “maniac”, Mr Trump has expressed an interest in meeting Mr Kim.

He even once praised the swift way the dictator took power after his father’s death, saying he deserves “credit” for that.

“You’ve got to give him credit. How many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden ... he goes in, he takes over, and he’s the boss,” Mr Trump said. “It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. I mean this guy doesn’t play games. And we can’t play games with him.”

Now, Mr Kim is apparently experiencing a change of heart towards his country’s relations with the US. According to The Yong Ho, the most senior North Korean diplomat to defect in almost two decades, Mr Kim wishes to have a civil conversation with the US President and potentially work together.

That said that after his initial surprise that Mr Trump won, Mr Kim now sees it as “a good opportunity for him to open a kind of compromise with the new American administration”.

Not even Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Putin have met with Mr Kim, and the US does not officially recognise North Korea as a state.

Mr Trump has been urged to make North Korean human rights a key part of his policy going forward, but his plan here remains unknown.

RODRIGO DUTERTE (PHILIPPINES)

Rodrigo Duterte — also known as The Punisher — cast the future of traditionally strong US-Philippines relations into doubt when he came to power.

He was openly critical of the Obama administration, described the former US leader as “a son of a wh*re” and publicly allied himself with China and Russia on the South China Sea.

He publicly announced his “separation” from the US last year, saying a three-way alliance with China and Russia is “the only way”.

But since Mr Trump came to power, Mr Duterte seems to have taken a positive step back towards the US.

He acknowledged he called Mr Trump following his election win, and sang him glowing praises.  “I said, ‘Mr. President, this is President Duterte. May I be privileged to congratulate you?’”

At the birthday party of Philippine National Police chief Ronald deal Rosa, Mr Duterte said of Mr Trump: “He is a billionaire. His wife is very beautiful. I envy him. “If you’re a billionaire, you speak like that, you became a president, and you have a beautiful wife, then you’re like in heaven already. That’s his edge over me.”

He’s praised Mr Trump’s tough stance, saying: “Look at his inaugural speech. He will stop drugs. We’re no different,” he said, implying the US had its own problem with illegal drugs. “He’s also tough. He will also kill you.”

RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN (TURKEY)

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the controversial leader of Turkey. He arrested and fired more than 100,000 opponents to his leadership and jailed 40,000 more following a military coup midway through last year. He’s also jailed more journalists than any other leader over the past year.

When Mr Trump first proposed his Muslim ban during his presidential campaign, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded with outrage.

He demanded Mr Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers Istanbul, blasting the then-candidate for having “no tolerance for Muslims in America”.

“They put that brand on his building and it must be swiftly taken down,” he said, according to the website of Turkey’s state broadcaster.

But Mr Erdogan, once a fierce critic of the Republican billionaire, appears to have changed his tune since November.

Earlier this month, he said he believes Turkey’s dialogue with the United States will gain pace under Mr Trump’s presidency and they will reach a consensus on regional issues. “I believe we will accelerate dialogue when Mr Trump takes office. I believe we will reach a consensus with Mr Trump, particularly on regional issues, and make rapid headway,” he told Turkish ambassadors gathered in Ankara.

While he did describe Mr Trump’s recent travel ban confirmation as “disturbing”, he just said Turkish authorities are “watching” his statements.

Oh, and the name of Trump Towers in Istanbul remains unchanged.

NURSULTAN A NAZARBAYEV (KAZAKHSTAN)

The Kazakhstan leader’s human rights record has been described as abysmal.

According to Human Rights Watch, the central Asian country “heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech, and religion, and torture remains a serious problem”.

The human rights organisation describes Mr Nazarbayev’s rule as “heavy-handed”, criticising highly-restricted media freedoms, the pressing issue of torture and a poor record on civil and workers’ rights.

Despite this, Mr Nazarbayev claimed Mr Trump called him in December to say he’d accomplished a “miracle” over his 25 years of governance. “U.S. president-elect brought congratulations to the Head of State on the 25th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s Independence,” the Kazakh presidential press office’s readout said.

“D. Trump stressed that under the leadership of Nursultan Nazarbayev our country over the years of Independence had achieved fantastic success that can be called a ‘miracle.’”

The Trump administration did not acknowledge the term “miracle”, simply saying the pair had “addressed the importance of strengthening regional partnerships”.

The Times suggested Mr Trump’s presidency could provide a respite from criticism for governments like Mr Nazarbayev’s.

But that also depends on how long the cosiness lasts, and whether these warm relationships are sustainable or not is yet to be seen.

SOURCE

*******************************

Selectivity is normal



********************************

Trump Puts Sanctuary Cities on Notice

As we’ve noted already this week, President Donald Trump has taken the issue of immigration head on. First it was the border wall. Then came Trump’s executive order on interior enforcement, which includes pulling funding from so-called sanctuary cities. According to The Washington Times, the order “calls on Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly and the new attorney general to cut off all federal funding they control under existing federal laws.” Anything further will require congressional action. Trump also ordered DHS to create a “name and shame” list of sanctuary cities, including publicizing the names of aliens who’ve been released and the crimes they’ve committed.

“Cities” is an understatement. California, Colorado, Connecticut and New Mexico do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities, as is the case with cities and counties in 25 other states and DC. Yes, that’s right, the seat of the federal government is a “sanctuary city.” Leftists in these jurisdictions like to frame their actions as simply not cooperating — as in police not checking immigration status when making arrests or traffic stops. But it’s far more insidious. These cities often actively resist when federal authorities come looking for specific illegal aliens.

The horrific results are clear, as illustrated by the widely reported murder of Kate Steinle by a five-time-deported illegal alien felon two years ago in San Francisco. But that’s just one case. The Obama administration released thousands upon thousands of illegal alien criminals. Over a two-year period, more than 66,000 illegal alien criminals were set free — and there were 166,000 convictions among them, including 11,000 rapes and 395 homicides. Thousands of them were rearrested after committing further crimes.

Yet leftists insist they’re the compassionate ones.

It’s important to note that Trump isn’t making law here. Everything he’s called for is already the law — the wall, deportation, all of it. Enforce the law and you solve most of the problem. He’s off to a good start.

SOURCE

****************************

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

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

***************************