Trump economy set to roar in 2018

By Robert Romano

When it comes to the economy, observers are often loath to make predictions. After all, it is not a hard science, where a hypothesis is formulated, and observations are made to prove or disprove the hypothesis. What will U.S. economic growth be in 2018?

Who knows? It could be faster than 2017. But maybe it will be slower.

But what we can do is take into consideration certain factors that might serve to either hamper growth, or to foster it. And when we consider the economy being fostered under President Donald Trump’s first term, there are things to be bullish about.  After all, Trump promised we would start winning again.

Well, the past two quarters’ growth have come in over an inflation-adjusted 3 percent annualized, with a solid fourth quarter hoped for. If it does, even if 2017 does not produce 3 percent growth — a number not seen since 2005 — the U.S. economy will be well-positioned in 2018 to get there. Why?

The biggest reason just happened, and that’s President Trump and Congress’ $1.5 trillion tax cut plan, which will account for an average 1 percent of Gross Domestic Product each of the first four years, making it the largest tax cut since Reagan’s 1981 plan as a percent of the economy.

It will put hundreds of billions of dollars back into businesses and individuals each year, which can be spent, invested or saved. It’s going to have a major impact. To be clear, even if we were to experience an unforeseen economic slowdown right now — Reagan had a major recession even after the 1981 tax cuts — the recovery could still be magnificent.

Other considerations are the regulatory environment that is now being fostered. Trump has left the Paris climate accords and his EPA head Scott Pruitt is tearing up the new and existing coal power plant regulations. He has ended the practice of sue and settle whereby the agency would agree to a left-wing environmentalist group’s lawsuit in exchange for expanding the regulatory mandate of the EPA. The Waters of the United States rule regulating every puddle in America is being rescinded.

Federal lands are being reopened. The aforementioned tax cut bill also contained a provision that will allow for oil drilling in previously prohibited areas of Alaska.

On trade, Trump has put forward an America first policy, cancelling the TPP and renegotiating NAFTA, all the while getting tough on trade enforcement against South Korea and Mexico.

Since Trump took office, 171,000 new manufacturing jobs have been created.

The number of 16-to-64-year-olds who have entered the labor force has increased by 879,000, increasing labor participation to 73.3 percent for that group. There still remain 8 million of this age group out of the labor force had participation remained at the same rate as it was in 2000. Meaning there is a lot of room to grow.

Labor market conditions remain a key consideration and considerable headwind, as the expansion of the workforce tends to correlate with economic growth. So, if the Trump economy is successful in attracting new investment and the creation of new businesses and business expansions, leading to major new hiring, things could be looking up.

Whether it comes in 2018 or later remains to be seen, but by giving the American people more of their own money back, rolling back onerous regulations, setting a new paradigm on trade and lowering the cost of doing business in the U.S., after Trump’s first year in office, the recipe for robust growth is there. Let the winning begin.

SOURCE

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Voter suppression? Alabama election exposed a myth

by Jeff Jacoby

AFRICAN-AMERICANS constitute 26 percent of Alabama's people, but they accounted for 29 percent of the voters in this month's special election for the US Senate. Whites make up 69 percent of the state's population, yet they were only 66 percent of those who voted. Black voters, in other words, punched above their weight on Election Day, turning up at the polls at a rate that exceeded their share of the general public. Whites, by contrast, underperformed.

But surely that's impossible! Haven't we been told time and again that Deep Red states like Alabama engage in voter suppression, cynically disenfranchising minorities through outrageous election rules that, as Jay Michaelson wrote in The Daily Beast, "just coincidentally happen to disproportionately hit communities of color"? Weren't we reminded in the weeks leading up to the election that Alabama's rules amount to "a naked attempt to suppress the voting rights of people of color" and that black electoral clout is undermined by all the hurdles the state's Republican politicians have devised to deter minorities from casting ballots?

What angry critics decry as voter suppression, Republicans defend as precautions to ensure the integrity of elections. In Alabama, as in many other states, voters are required to show a photo ID. There is no same-day registration and no early voting, and citizens with convictions for felonies of "moral turpitude" are barred from participating in elections.

Are these outrageous infringements on a core American right — or are they reasonable safeguards of that right? There are sincere arguments on both sides.

But there's plenty of cynicism on both sides, too.

Voter fraud, rampant in earlier eras, is essentially a nonissue in contemporary America; states without voter ID laws seem to have no trouble conducting fair elections. GOP lawmakers have sometimes admitted that there is a racial and partisan component to their support for such measures: The lack of an ID law, an Alabama state senator once confided in an interview, "is very beneficial to the black power structure and the rest of the Democrats."

On the other hand, voter ID laws are extremely popular across the political, racial, and geographic spectrum. In a 2016 Gallup poll, 63 percent of Democrats supported voter ID laws. So did 77 percent of nonwhites. So did large majorities in every region of the country. To denounce voter ID laws as racist abominations when nonwhite voters favor those laws as overwhelmingly as white voters do is more than a little disingenuous.

It's also condescending. For most of American history, black citizens really were disenfranchised, excluded from elections by violence and intimidation, humiliating "literacy" tests, and defiantly segregationist politicians. If anyone has reason to value the right to vote, it is African-Americans. For people with historical memories of Bull Connor and the Freedom Summer martyrs, having to show an ID when voting is a trivial detail, not "disenfranchisement."

And that is just what the data show. Far from being suppressed, black voters routinely show up on Election Day at roughly the same rate as white voters. And — as with any other voting bloc — when they are especially motivated, they turn out at even higher rates.

One such motivation was Barack Obama's 2012 reelection, which so energized black voters that their turnout not only hit an all-time high, but surpassed white turnout by 2.1 percentage points. Another motivation was this month's race in Alabama, and the exceptionally distasteful candidacy of Roy Moore. Alabama's election rules, bewailed by so many as an obstacle to minority turnout, didn't keep black voters from flocking to the polls.

Nor have similar rules elsewhere. Even in Republican-dominated states with voter ID laws, black turnout has risen. When the Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley made that claim in a 2014 column, PolitiFact put it under the microscope — and confirmed its accuracy: "Census data shows that . . . black voter turnout was higher nationally than white voter turnout," the fact-checkers concluded, "and at least as high in the states with strict voter ID laws."

This doesn't mean that Republicans who champion such laws don't expect them to yield political dividends. It only means that voter suppression is more of a bugaboo than a real phenomenon. At the same time, that very bugaboo may be helping Democrats. The louder they howl about Republican attempts to keep minorities from voting, the more fervently their base may be galvanized to get to the polls. That too helps explain why ballot-integrity laws haven't impeded black voter turnout.

To repeat, politics is a cynic's game. Republican strategists push for voter ID rules for the same reason Democratic strategists push for automatically registering people to vote when they sign up for welfare benefits or a driver's license: Each camp believes it will work to their party's benefit.

Ultimately, though, elections come down to voters, who have minds of their own and routinely upset the experts' calculations. Alabama is only the latest reminder that when elections are free and fair, outcomes aren't guaranteed. In the Heart of Dixie, as in the rest of 21st-century America, voter suppression is a thing of the past.

SOURCE

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Iran As I See It

By Rich Kozlovich

Yesterday I linked to this article, Western media are ignoring a revolution in Iran, commenting:

"These pensioners are old enough to remember how life was when the Shah of Iran was in charge, and when they were young, impetuous and....well....stupid. Now all a sudden the Reza Shah wasn't so bad after all." "Admittedly, he was a tyrant, but the freedoms under the Shah were far greater than anything going on in Iran right now." 

"They traded a beneficent tyrant for an insane group of clerics who've done nothing but suppress them, murder them, abuse them and rob them for decades, and now - they've discovered they've robbed them blind. And now they're shocked! Imagine that!"

I followed that up with this link: Iranian Women Defy Islamic Dress Code as Anti-Government Protests Sweep Nation, with the author stating:

"Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which established Islamic rule in the once free and prosperous country, women have been historically oppressed. However, brave women are now taking to the streets in defiance of Sharia law. These protests are reminiscent of 1979 when thousands of women publicly condemned the government imposed veiling of women."

We should remember that Iran was very westernized under the Shah, and the transition to an Islamic state had to have been a shock to a great many Iranians - who also dared not say anything for fear of what might happen to they and their families.

Which brings us to the important question: How important are these protests?

First, this isn't an isolated incident. These demonstrations are breaking out all over the country and the numbers are substantial, so substantial security forces have used tear gas and water cannons to break them up.

It's hard to know for sure just how big a deal this will become, but one thing is clear. These people know their leader's obsession with foreign involvement in the affairs of Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and their obsession with their nuclear program, and their obsession to defeat or control these non Shiite Muslim countries has absolutely been of no benefit to the people of Iran, and has impacted their economy adversely.

And the foreign investments the government promised hasn't materialized, and I'm sure Trump's decision not to recertify their nuclear program may have been part of the reason for that. It seems to me investors really understand - there's a new sheriff in town - and Iran may not be the best place to put their money.

Yet their oil production is way ahead of where everyone anticipated it to be, but the price of oil isn't what it once was and the Middle East can't make demands any longer - we now have fracking - the world doesn't need them.

I don't know what happened to the billions of dollars Obama sneaked into Iran, but it didn't go to the people of Iran who suffer from high unemployment, especially among the youths of the nation. A demographic that can explode with little provocation, especially when the entire nation knows governmental corruption is massive.

There are two things that aren't talked about in the news much, or at all, and that's the problem with Iran's geography and demography. Geographical boundaries of a nation don't necessarily create a national identity. Societies are made up of communities, and in this case - tribes. Tribes who may self identify in ways Iran's leaders may not like.

Modern Iran, once known as Persia, is mostly useless desert, but it's also a mountain country. And Iran has no navigable rivers - an important component to capital generation - the ability to move goods quickly and cheaply.

Mountain farming is difficult, but that's the only areas in Iran where they're high enough to get enough moisture to grow crops, but the rains are inconsistent, thus making Iran's agricultural economy a feast or famine cycle.

Being a mountain nation makes it difficult to invade, but it also makes it difficult to control. These mountain populations are populations separated by valleys, and those populations don't necessarily identify with people in the next valley, much less those further on.

In spite of the fact Iran has between a 90 and 95 percent Shiite Muslim population, this is not a demographically homogeneous nation. Not only do these mountains create separate identities, sixteen percent of Iran's population are Azerbaijanis, and they have a large Kurdish population, neither of which are easy to deal with. Over half of the Iranians don't even consider themselves Persian.

What will happen? At some point economic reality will have to set in on this nation. It's too small, too land locked, it has no ability to be a real capital generator outside of its oil, and that value is dropping by the minute, the United States is going to cause them as many problems as they can, and their single port could easily be destroyed by a deep water Navy. They are not in a position to enforce their will against anyone, ergo, they use proxy forces - terrorists - and that will come back to haunt them.

Their options are running low, their credibility is non-existent, they're despised throughout the region, and now they're dealing with a President of the United States who isn't going to be bluffed or intimidated. It would seem to me there's going to be a regime change of major proportions, and the clerics will not be a part of the change, and Islam - as it's being imposed on Iran now - will be in for a shock.

SOURCE

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

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

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Conservatives’ taking on Silicon Valley

Conservatives have found the latest mark in their long-running assault on cultural elites: Silicon Valley.

From Steve Bannon railing against the "lords of technology" to Donald Trump Jr. using Twitter's "blue check mark" as an insult, anti-tech tropes are ricocheting around the right, painting the internet industry as an unaccountable monolith that looks down on so-called mainstream Americans.

For tech companies, flush with cash and facing little risk of regulation from Republicans, the intensifying rhetoric poses minimal short-term danger in Washington. But a sustained assault could, over time, turn the tech industry into a conservative punching bag, like Hollywood or the news media. And that threatens to alienate parts of tech's vast user base that spans the ideological spectrum.

Conservatives say their disdain stems from suspicions that tech companies are biased against their views — as well as from the industry's usefulness as a symbol of the establishment amid the populist backlash unleashed by President Donald Trump.

“They’re looking out for themselves, and building technologies for themselves, while giving the short end of the stick to the rest of the country,” said Garrett Johnson, co-founder of the right-of-center tech group Lincoln Network, adding that many fellow conservatives are eager to "pick a fight" with Silicon Valley.

Fueling the dynamic is the fact that many executives in the tech industry espouse socially liberal views and rallied around Hillary Clinton's White House bid. While the industry does have a libertarian streak, few in the tech sector self-identify, at least in public, as Republican.

Bannon, the former Trump White House adviser and current Breitbart executive chairman, is one of the leading voices on the right to have latched onto tech as an adversary.

At an October state GOP convention in Anaheim, California, he told the assembled Republicans they should start worrying about the danger swelling within the borders of their own state, a force Bannon branded “the lords of technology in Silicon Valley.”

Pacing back and forth across the stage, Bannon called the industry a challenge to the country itself, run by so-called globalists with no particular affinity for the U.S. From there, he made the leap to California’s “sanctuary cities” and to those who he says feel free to pick and choose which U.S. laws they’re willing to follow.

“Trust me, if you do not roll this back, 10 or 15 years from now, the folks in Silicon Valley and the progressive left in this state are going to try to secede from the union,” warned Bannon.

The tech industry says such attacks are misplaced. "The internet is not a partisan issue, and American voters of both parties value the high-quality products and services internet companies provide at little or no cost to consumers," said Noah Theran, spokesman for the Internet Association, a trade group whose members include Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Theran said that Internet companies help people to connect, small businesses to compete and nonprofits to raise funds, adding, "the sound bites coming from inside-the-Beltway do not ring true to voters who care deeply about their access to internet platforms."

Perhaps because conservatives have so actively adopted Twitter as a forum to push their ideas and debates, the site’s perceived missteps have also been a particular target of their scorn — especially about the ways the company goes about verifying selected users of the platform.

Twitter has said that verification, signified by a blue check-mark badge appended to a user’s screen name, is just mechanics. It’s a visual cue that lets users know when accounts of public interest belong to who they say they belong to. But some on the right see it as a signal of social status the company hands out willy-nilly — and rarely to conservatives.

After then-Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos was stripped of his check mark under Twitter’s policy against abusiveness in January 2016, he brought up the issue at a White House press briefing.

“My verification check was taken away for making jokes about the wrong group of people,” Yiannopoulos complained to Obama press secretary Josh Earnest. Earnest replied: “I’m not sure exactly what sort of government policy decision could have any influence on that.”

From there, the concept has developed such currency in conservative circles that it serves as a broad-brush putdown dropped into conversation without any other context.

“If only blue check mark SJWs [social justice warriors] cared as much about terrorists attacking us as they do about me attacking socialism,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr. in November after taking heat for a joke about giving away half of his daughter’s Halloween candy.

Other constructions include “blue check-mark mafia” and “blue-check MSM,” a reference to the mainstream media.

Twitter’s verification program is currently “paused,” the company announced last month. That move came after the company was criticized for verifying the account of the chief organizer of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which a counter-protester was killed.

That organizer had celebrated by tweeting, "Looks like I FINALLY got verified by Twitter. I must be the only working class white advocate with that distinction."

More recently, Twitter moved this month to remove what it called “hateful conduct and abusive behavior” from its platform, beginning with booting the leaders of far-right and white nationalist groups. Some on the right warned that conservatives are widely at risk of being silenced by what was quickly branded the "#twitterpurge."

Conservatives are still in the early stages of figuring out how to use the cultural complaint against tech to their political advantage. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is on the cutting edge of that effort.

In October, Twitter rejected as "inflammatory" a Blackburn video ad, meant to kick off her Senate run, in which she says, “I fought Planned Parenthood and we stopped the sale of baby body parts, thank God.” Rather than asking the company to reconsider or reworking the spot, Blackburn’s camp immediately spun it into an fundraising opportunity. Her campaign sent out an email to her list saying, “Silicon Valley elites are trying to impose their values on us.”

Twitter’s refusal to run Blackburn’s ad reverberated on the right. And when Twitter reversed its decision a day later, Fox News ran it with a “breaking” banner.

Twitter’s yanking of Blackburn’s ad was such a gift from the company to the candidate, joked one conservative commentator, that it should count as an “in-kind donation.”

The idea that Silicon Valley is biased against conservatives goes at least as far back as May 2016, when Facebook was condemned on the right for filtering conservative news sources from its "trending news" scroller. That led to a sit-down meeting between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and more than a dozen conservatives — among them Glenn Beck, Jim DeMint and S.E. Cupp — in the company’s sprawling Menlo Park, California, complex.

What's newer is the right's effort to craft cultural framing around the tension.

Some attribute the push to Trump himself. The president has proved himself willing to take the gloves off against Silicon Valley. “Facebook was on her side, not mine!” he tweeted in October, in what appeared to be an attempt to counter reports that Russia used the social network to boost Trump’s candidacy against Hillary Clinton.

Of course, critiques of the tech industry’s biggest players are not limited to conservatives. In recent months, there's been considerable talk on the left that Silicon Valley’s power is disturbingly unchecked.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), for example, has criticized Twitter, Facebook and Google for what he says is their generally ineffectual response to Russian manipulation of their platforms around the 2016 election. And other Democrats — like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — have argued that the country needs to confront big tech companies’ overwhelming power to shape what people see, say and shop for online.

But conservatives are ahead of the game when it comes to turning it into a cultural argument. And some of them are looking to see whether it can carry weight at the ballot box.

Paul Nehlen, who is challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan in the Republican primary in his Wisconsin district, announced in mid-December that if elected he’d push for a bill that would ban the big online companies from blocking speech.

Nehlen said he’d battle against “shadowbanning,” the practice of websites hiding what some users post without letting them know. Facebook-owned Instagram in particular has been criticized for the practice, which conservatives say is disproportionately used to silence them.

For some slices of the right, their leaders’ willingness to confront Silicon Valley has become a litmus test.

“The GOP’s voters are being systematically censored off of the primary channels of public communication by left-wing tech giants,” wrote Nehlen, “and Ryan — indeed, the entire GOP Congress — has sat utterly mute for years and allowed it to happen.”

SOURCE

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Trump reverses another Obama policy

President Donald Trump derailed a $13 billion dollar project to build an Amtrak tunnel between New Jersey and New York’s Penn Station Friday, Crain’s New York Business reports.

Trump is scrapping a proposal by former-President Barack Obama for the federal government to cover half the cost of the new line. New Jersey and New York would cover the other half of the cost under the Obama-era proposal.

Department of Transportation Deputy Administrator K. Jane Williams notified State officials in response to an updated proposal to fund the states’ half of the price tag through federal loans. The states’ proposal referenced the Obama administration’s plan for the federal government to underwrite the project as an “agreement.”

“Your letter also references a non-existent ’50/50′ agreement between USDOT, New York, and New Jersey. There is no such agreement,” Williams’ letter said, according to Crain’s New York Business. “We consider it unhelpful to reference a non-existent ‘agreement’ rather than directly address the responsibility for funding a local project where nine out of 10 passengers are local transit riders.”

The proposed line would shuttle tens of thousands of commuters daily in one of the United States’ most important economic areas.

SOURCE

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

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

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Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Post’ Fails To Land the Real Scoop On the Fate of Free Vietnam

"Democracy dies in darkness" is the new motto of the Washington Post. It adopted the slogan amid the campaign of the liberal press to topple President Trump.

Steven Spielberg’s new movie about the Washington Post is a reminder — however unintended — of something else. Sometimes democracy dies in the full glare of the press.

That’s what happened in Vietnam. And the film, "The Post," takes on a special irony today, as a press full of righteous indignation seeks to overturn an American election.

Mr. Spielberg’s epic is about events that took place in 1971. That’s when the Washington Post published the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers.

The history had been assembled on orders of President Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara. A security analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, who’d turned against the war, leaked the documents to the New York Times.

Among the things the papers showed is that America’s leaders sometimes lied. About, say, the events in the Tonkin Gulf that led Congress to authorize the Vietnam War. Or about whether we could win.

The Times started publishing the papers in June 1971 but was stopped by a federal judge. Mr. Ellsberg then gave boxes of the papers to the Washington Post. All eyes then fell on the paper’s owner, Katharine Graham.

Played by Meryl Streep, the doughty doyenne is torn between two factions. On one side are her bankers, who are trying to raise capital for the paper; on the other, her famed editor, Ben Bradlee, played by Tom Hanks.

"What are you going to do, Mrs. Graham?" Bradlee asks her.

The real drama, though, was the war. Bradlee is up on his high horse. "The way they lied — those days have to be over," the editor tells Graham.

Fair enough. It’s not my intention to fault either of them.

Yet this movie deals with only some of the lies about Vietnam. Inexcusable as they were, the lies told by the Americans were relatively small beer.

It was our Communist enemies who told the big lie — that the war was a struggle for liberation by Vietnam’s noble comrades, who took on the Americans with pitchforks. What hooey.

The truth is that the war was a conquest of free South Vietnam by a well-armed, Soviet-backed regime in the north. At the end, the enemy emerged from the jungles with tanks and surface-to-air missiles.

The Pentagon Papers disclosed that our own leaders, in effect, refused to heed evidence that we would lose the war — and sent our troops anyway. "The Post" seems to buy into this theory. Yet it wasn’t sending troops that turned out to be the error. Rather, it was assuming we couldn’t win.

On the ground in Vietnam, our GIs did just that. In the most famous battle, Tet in 1968, our soldiers trounced the Communists. The cause of free Vietnam was betrayed in the United States Congress, which had been turned by the anti-war movement.

That danger had worried the Washington Post’s greatest editor, J. Russell Wiggins. He was the editor who built it into a national publication. He, however, was a liberal hawk.

And staunch. Once, on a visit to Moscow, Wiggins was shown by a representative of the North Vietnamese a sheaf of newspaper clippings about the peace movement in the United States.

That was how the Communists planned to win the war, the thug told Wiggins. A colleague, Stephen Rosenfeld, later described how "Russ’ face reddened and he set his jaw."

When The Washington Post fell away from the war, Wiggins quit, ahead of his retirement, and became LBJ’s ambassador to the United Nations. He is, sadly, unmentioned in the movie.

The Supreme Court allowed the Times and Washington Post to proceed. Nixon launched his hunt for leakers. The movie ends with the discovery of the Watergate burglary that eventually cost Nixon the presidency.

It fell to President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger to try — heroically, in my view — to keep Congress from abandoning Vietnam. Early in 1975, though, Congress cut off supplies of ammo and materiel to our ally.

The Communist conquest quickly followed.

Let President Trump — and his critics — remember: When Congress cut off Vietnam, it wasn’t about saving our GIs. They’d long since been withdrawn.

No, the decision by Congress was to retreat in the face of Soviet Communism. It was about abandoning the hope of free Vietnam itself.

Vietnam’s democracy died in broad daylight.

SOURCE

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US stocks mount milestone-shattering run in the year of Trump
   
Business is booming

Wall Street has taken stock investors on a mostly smooth, record-shattering ride in 2017. The major stock indexes are closing in on double-digit gains for the year, led by Apple, Facebook, and other technology stocks.

"This would go in the category of stellar year, with very little volatility in the market and pullbacks that were essentially minor," said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial.

Several factors kept the market on an upward grind for most of the year and repeatedly drove stock indexes to all-time highs. The global economy rebounded, while the US economy and job market continued to strengthen, which helped drive strong corporate earnings growth.

Investors also drew encouragement from the push in Washington, D.C., to slash corporate taxes, roll back regulations and enact other pro-business policies. Congress passed the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul bill, which reduces corporate taxes from 35 percent to 21 percent, last week.

The S&P 500 index is on track to finish the year with a gain of about 22.5 percent, counting dividends. That means if you invested $1,000 in an S&P 500 index fund at the beginning of the year, you’d wind up with about $1,225 at the end of the year.

Other major market indexes also were on course to deliver solid gains. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 25.1 percent, while the Nasdaq composite is headed for a 28.2 percent gain. The tech-heavy index blew past the 6,000-point mark for the first time in April.

Small-company stocks, which trounced the rest of the market in 2016, got a boost this year as investors bet that the companies would be big beneficiaries of a corporate tax cut bill. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks is on course for a 13.1 percent gain.

For the most part, markets overseas also fared better this year than in 2016.

In Europe, Britain’s market closed the year with a gain of 7.6 percent. Indexes in Germany and France finished 2017 with gains of 12.5 percent and 9.3 percent, respectively. Japan’s Nikkei and Hong Kong’s benchmark index notched gains of 19.1 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

The gains in overseas markets reflect how economies in Japan, Europe, China, and many developing nations began growing in tandem with the United States for the first time in a decade. The United States delivered GDP growth of 3.1 percent in the second quarter and a 3.3 percent gain in the third, its fastest rate in three years.

"We hadn’t seen that kind of growth all together in a long time," said Paul Christopher, head of global market strategy for Wells Fargo Investment Institute. "We had a pretty strong third quarter and we’re going to have a pretty strong fourth quarter, too."

The market also rode out many negative headlines in 2017.

North Korea tested a ballistic missile for the first time in July. Then, reportedly, a hydrogen bomb in August. Major hurricanes slammed into Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. And congressional Republicans’ failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act fueled worries on Wall Street that the Trump administration’s plans for a sweeping corporate tax cut and other pro-business policies would be delayed or derailed entirely.

Still, investors seemed determined to keep the market moving higher. On days when the market pulled back, stocks typically rebounded the next day.

"You had geopolitical risk with regard to North Korea and the saber-rattling on both sides caught the market’s attention, but it became a buying opportunity," Krosby said.

The last time the S&P 500 had a correction, or a decline of 10 percent or more, was in February 2016. In 2017, the biggest single-day drop was less than 2 percent.

And the VIX, a measure of how much volatility investors expect in stocks, is on track to end near historic lows. Traders repeatedly bought back in on bad news in 2017 because they, and corporations, have a lot of cash and don’t see better places to get a return as long as the economy and company earnings continue to improve, Christopher said.

"People have just been waiting for pullbacks to buy the dips," he said. "There’s still a lot of cash on the balance sheets of businesses and households."

And now eight years into the bull market, many analysts expect stocks to keep climbing next year.

"We expect the bull market to continue in 2018, but at a more moderate pace," said Terry Sandven, chief equity strategist at US Bank Wealth Management.

SOURCE

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Some Leftists reject the "Russia" obsession

Excerpt from Justin Raimondo below:

The small but intrepid band of left-wing commentators who remain sane in the midst of the Trump Derangement Syndrome epidemic have written (and tweeted) about the new left-wing Russophobia and their severe disappointment that it appears to be taking over the Democratic party base. Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, Doug Henwood, Aaron Mate (of The Real News), Robert Parry of Consortium News have all reported, refuted, and regretted this ominous development, while managing to give the impression that this something new and unique.

The “Trump is a Russian agent” crowd has not one iota of credible evidence that the elected President of the United States “colluded” with the Russians to somehow hypnotize American voters into casting their votes for him: none, nada, zero, zilch.

That doesn’t matter to the Washington Post, the New York Times, or Louise Mensch, three of the most prominent disseminators of the collusion conspiracy theory: they simply report it as fact. Nary a day goes by when the latest iteration of this continuing hoax doesn’t morph into a new variation. Paul Manafort is spilling the beans. Mike Flynn is singing like a bird. Yes, they write like that, in trite, tired phrases worn down by overuse: their imaginative powers are confined to emitting evidence-free conclusions, like that time the Post reported the Russians had hacked into Vermont’s power grid (false – they never even called the power company), or when Mensch swears half the White House staff is about to be perp-walked. All is always about to be revealed – just keep reading the Post, checking the Times, and following Mensch’s tweets!

From a seemingly successful political scam the new Russophobia is fast turning into a growing industry, with several rival conspiracy theorists and “expose the Russians” outfits peddling their wares. The politics of this is reflected in the reunion of the “centrist” liberals with the neoconservatives, like David Frum, Bill Kristol, and Max Boot, all of whom are fanatic NeverTrumpers and have joined the anti-Trump “Popular Front” advocated by liberal warhorse Michael Tomasky.

SOURCE

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

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

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The Year Reheated

David Thompson

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with searing insights from the world of academia. Specifically, London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where black student activists denounced objectivity as an “alienating” concept, and issued numerous demands, allegedly to challenge stereotypes of student laziness and inadequacy. It turns out that the way to avoid any appearance of such things is to complain about the “stress and anxiety” of being corrected, or disagreed with, especially by people who are insufficiently brown and deferential.

Elsewhere, the psychological reverberations of Donald Trump’s election victory continued to be felt, as when a charmingly progressive lady sensed a fellow plane passenger’s failure to vote as she did and promptly threatened to vomit on him.

Other pious lefties signalled their moral superiority by planning to sabotage transport infrastructure, stranding and distressing countless random people, and thereby reminding us that “social justice” posturing is often difficult to distinguish from petty malice or outright sociopathy.

Meanwhile, Laurie Penny preferred to advocate “spite” as a guiding progressive principal, as if this were a new and novel development.

February provided further illustrations of this fashionable malice, as when educators at the University of Cincinnati bemoaned the fact that their attempts to inculcate unrealism, dishonesty and pretentious racial guilt were still being met with pockets of resistance. Objecting to slander and brow-beating by bigoted mediocrities is, we learned, merely “white fragility” and therefore, somehow, damning proof of racism.

Racial fixations were also in play at the Writing Centre at the University of Washington, Tacoma, the stated goal of which is to “help writers succeed in a racist society,” a goal to be achieved by denouncing grammar as “an unjust language structure,” and the correction of punctuation as “an oppressive practice.” Because those ungrammatical job applications, the ones enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine.

We also learned of the steep price to be paid for small acts of courtesy – namely, holding open a door for a Guardian contributor with weight issues and a gift for hysterical screaming.

Accessorising was an unexpected topic of discussion in March, when the crushingly put-upon students at Pitzer College, Claremont, California, informed the world that “winged eyeliner and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance,” and should therefore be the exclusive ornamentation of the slightly brown and radical.

Elsewhere, at Middlebury College, Dr Charles Murray attempted to give a lecture on, among other things, the dangers of tribalism and social fragmentation, only to be met with tribal hysteria and an actual riot, complete with slanderous chants, hospitalised staff and students wearing ski masks.

In April, the immense, frustrated love machine Caleb Luna wondered why his Grindr profile attracts so little interest. Carefully sidestepping the possibility of weight loss, Mr Luna decided that the rest of us must “interrogate” our “phobias,” which is to say our preferences, and consequently start lusting after “alternative bodies.” Specifically, bodies like Mr Luna’s.

Avoiding the obvious was also a theme in the world of performance art, where Shannon Cochrane and Márcio Carvalho unwittingly entertained us with their deep thoughts, shifting paradigms and heads wrapped in meat.

Another highlight of the month came via Everyday Feminism’s Emily Zak, who wanted us to know that the allure of fresh air is, like everything else, terribly oppressive, due to the “painfully heteronormative” nature of wildland firefighting, and a shortage of adverts featuring gay people kayaking in a suitably gay-affirming manner.

Artistic innovations were at the forefront of May, when performance artist Sarah Hill shook our tiny mental worlds with a “temporal historical rupture” that is “cathartically dialogical,” and achieved by falling over repeatedly while dressed as Wonder Woman.

No less impressive were the attempts to “transform” middle-school children by making maths lessons “intersectional,” thereby furthering the cause of “social justice.” A process that entailed reducing the time available for humdrum things like trigonometry and using it instead to teach children to “subvert power,” while scorning maths itself as a “dehumanising tool.”

June brought us a “guerrilla performance” by “artist, healer and dancer” Shizu Homma, who “interrogates the human condition” with her creative tremendousness.

The month also brought us not one, but two illustrations of what happens when leftwing student psychodrama is allowed to run its course. And not entirely unrelated, we also pondered news that expired pet owners are sometimes eaten by their own dogs, cats and hamsters.

In July, we once again witnessed the educational benefits of “an academic background in gender studies,” and self-declared activist and single mother Jody Allard impressed us with her exemplary feminist parenting, and a determination to humiliate her own teenage sons, publicly and in print, for the sins of being white and male, and therefore, obviously, potential rapists.

Google software developer James Damore rose to notoriety in August by politely questioning the gospel of identity politics, promptly getting fired for it, and triggering a truly boggling display of near-total media dishonesty.

Elsewhere, at the University of Florida, identity politics devotees complained about the “violence” of not being taken seriously, while demanding the construction of two entirely separate buildings to house the university’s black and Latino student groups, because sharing a building, or at least an entrance lobby, would “erase and marginalise their black and brown bodies.”

August also provided several vivid insights into the psychology of “social justice,” as when a mob of severely educated student Mao-lings demanded “empathy” while laughing at accounts of random beatings and then assaulting people themselves, in the name of tolerance.

In the pages of The Atlantic, educator Alice Ristroph watched a total eclipse and somehow saw nothing but racism; while fellow educator Dr A.W. Strouse, whose works include Literary Theories of the Foreskin and deep ruminations on the preputial connotations of aluminium cans, signalled his radicalism by advising students to say “fuck you” to potential employers during job interviews.

Our sexual horizons were broadened in September when we learned of the phenomenon of “ecosexuality” and the orgasmic delights of rock rubbing, tree licking and frottage al fresco.

Meanwhile, academia’s Clown Quarter continued to bewilder. Dr Michael Isaacson, an adjunct professor specialising in “anti-capitalist economic theories” at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, repeatedly tweeted his enthusiasm for the murder of random police officers, and of future officers, including his own students.

And Harvard-educated sociology professor Crystal Fleming championed the looting of trainers while the law-abiding were distracted by an oncoming hurricane.

October brought us more unhinged educators, among them, University of Pennsylvania teaching assistant Stephanie McKellopp, whose areas of expertise include “self-marriage” and “racial blame,” and who signalled her wokeness by announcing her classroom policy of ignoring white male students.

We were also told, by Charles Davis, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, that any hint of consequences for acts of thuggery on campus is “racist” and “unfair,” as it creates “an unsafe and threatening environment” for students who like to indulge in coercive and threatening behaviour.

At the University of California, Irvine, the identity-politics contingent displayed its mental brilliance again in November, and also at Ballou High School, Washington, DC, where, thanks to “social justice,” students who are barely literate and rarely seen in class all somehow graduated and were promptly waved through the gates of a college or university.

And at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, the sadistic, fever-dream world of leftist educators was caught on tape quite shockingly, when teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd found herself being accused of “targeted violence” and of being “threatening,” for remaining politically neutral and politely presenting both sides of an argument.

As the year drew to a close, we witnessed the mental disarray wrought by competitive virtue signalling, wherein racial wokeness veered towards Gorillas in the Mist territory. And we learned that standards of diligence and proficiency are racist and oppressive, according to Purdue University’s Dr Donna Riley, who congratulates herself for her own “alternative ways of thinking,” and who scorns expectations of rigour and competence as “exclusionary,” mere tools of “privilege,” and therefore unfair to women and minorities, for whom rigour and competence are presumably impossible.

So. Quite a year.

SOURCE

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Expensive bureaucracy

The U.S. government pays employees a total of about $1 million per minute, according to a watchdog group’s report on the sprawling federal bureaucracy.

Looking at 78 large agencies, the nonprofit organization OpenTheBooks.com found that the average salary of a federal employee exceeds $100,000 and that roughly 1 in 5 of those on the government payroll has a six-figure salary.

Almost 30,000 rank-and-file government employees make over $190,823, more than any governor of the 50 states.

“Our oversight report shows the size, scope, and power of the administrative state,” Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books’ CEO and founder, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “Two million federal bureaucrats have salaries, extraordinary perquisites, and lifetime pension benefits. This compensation package has never been seen in the private sector.”

The median wage for all American workers was $44,148 a year for a 40-hour work week in the final quarter of 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Andrzejewski said the Open the Books report, released Tuesday and including an interactive map of the 2 million federal bureaucrats by ZIP code, is meant to educate taxpayers on where their dollars are going.

So what about those perks?

When federal employees reach the third anniversary of their employment, he said, “they get eight and a half weeks’ paid time off,” including “10 holidays, 13 sick days, and 20 vacation days.” [Correction: The word “plus” has been replaced with “including” to convey his meaning accurately.]

“We estimate those perks alone cost the American taxpayer $22.6 billion a year,” Andrzejewski said.

With the government paying the disclosed workforce $1 million per minute, according to the report, every eight-hour workday costs taxpayers more than $500 million.

A total of 406,960 employees make a six-figure income, amounting to roughly 1 in 5 employees. From 2010 through 2016, the number of federal employees making more than $200,000 increased by 165 percent.

SOURCE

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Trump's tax returns

During a recent press conference, a reporter with MSNBC hollered from the press corps,"Where is President Trump hiding his tax returns?"

Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, astutely responded, "We've found a very secure place and I'm certain they won't be found."

"And just where is that?", said the reporter, sarcastically.

Mrs. Sanders grinned sardonically and said, "They are underneath Obama's college records, his passport application, his immigration status as a student, his funding sources to pay for college, his college records, and his Selective Service registration.

"Next question?"

The above appears to be a myth but it makes a good point nonetheless.  Obama's university records are "sealed" and the original of his birth certificate has never been produced, only printed "copies"

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

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

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Donald Trump's Sechel — Yes, Sechel!
   
“It’s the economy, stupid,” as we used to say back in the good old days — the good old days being the 1990s, when the president of the United States could have molested women in the White House during business hours with impunity. In fact, if memory serves, that president, William J. Clinton, saw his popularity soar after accusations of his molestations were made public, or at least after some of them were made public. If all of them were made public, according to wisdom of the time, he might have been elected president for life. Those were the days when then-Senators Edward Kennedy and Christopher Dodd ranged freely on Capitol Hill and, back in New York City, young Anthony Weiner was getting amorous thoughts and restless stirrings in his lower parts about the life led by the likes of Kennedy.

Yet even in those heady times, “it” was “the economy stupid,” a phrase made famous by the poet James Carville. The vibrant economy saved President Bill Clinton, and I assume it will save President Donald Trump from his shocking tweets and other inexcusable acts that are so hurtful to the bien pensants of Washington, DC, and New York. At present, the stock market is setting record after record. That is truly significant to the lives of an increasing number of people who have money in the market or look to the market for direction. According to a CNBC All-America Economic Survey, for the first time in at least 11 years more than half those surveyed thought the prospects for the economy either good or excellent.

Unemployment is down; the Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that 1.9 million jobs have been added to the economy since President Trump’s inauguration. The growth in gross domestic product has been vibrant — over 3 percent in the last two quarters — and now the New York Fed is talking about 4 percent for this last quarter. If Carville’s observation is correct — and in the 1990s it was held to be sacred by tout le monde — Trump and the Republicans do not have much to worry about in the off-year elections of 2018, to say nothing of the presidential election two years later.

Yet there is more. The Islamic State group, or ISIL, as it has been called, was held to be formidable back in President Barack Obama’s day but has been decimated. At one time it was spreading its tentacles throughout Syria and Iraq, and one got the impression from the Obama administration that it was invincible. Doubtless there were people in his national security apparatus who considered giving ISIL a seat at the United Nations, or possibly one on the UN Security Council.

Now the so-called Islamic caliphate is in terminal decline, and that is thanks to President Trump and his national security team. By the way, Trump’s whole Middle Eastern policy is looking better all the time. Upon second glance, his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was greeted with relative calm throughout the region, where things have quieted down from a couple of weeks ago. Obviously, the Arabs have graver concerns today, for instance Iran and missiles launched from Yemen.

Actually, on a whole range of issues, the president is looking not like a billionaire real estate developer, or even a television celebrity, but like a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School. There are his many superb court appointments. There is his successful deregulation program that is encouraging growth. He took the United States out of the Paris climate accord. He is shoring up our borders and attending to our out-of-control immigration laws, and now he has his tax reform. It cuts corporate and individual taxes and repeals the Obamacare individual mandates once thought immutable. The blooming economy will bloom some more, and my guess is that it will not contribute to the national debt as President Obama’s slow growth did.

How has Donald Trump been such a wizard without conferring with Official Washington or any of the usual sages? I have researched the matter. He is not a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He never attended class at the Kennedy School, and if he visited a Washington think tank, it was The Heritage Foundation. Where has he gotten his ideas, and how did he learn to implement them with all the Washington wisenheimers against him? Well, here is a tip from one of Trump’s earliest supporters: He got his ideas from the American experience. He is a patriot. As for how he implemented them, he did it the same way he amassed a fortune. He used his sechel — the Yiddish word for a combination of intelligence, street smarts and wisdom. Some call it statecraft.

SOURCE

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Democrats Aim to Make Tax Cuts Unpopular

Their Leftmedia propaganda machine is happy to oblige, pushing the BIG Lie on Americans. 

It was a sight conservatives have waited decades to see. This week on the White House lawn, President Donald Trump was flanked by House Republicans in a ceremony marking a historic legislative achievement: the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The act is being heralded in many circles as the most conservative, pro-growth policy to emerge from Congress since President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform.

One might think the name of the act alone would clearly resonate with the American people. (Then again, when you have legislative catastrophes named the “Affordable Care Act,” folks can be forgive for some cynicism.) What could be better than keeping more of our hard-earned money and giving businesses the ability to invest in our nation’s economy, hire more workers and raise wages?

Apparently, not everyone is on board. In fact, most people don’t believe it.

How did this happen? How could the House Republican leadership and even the president allow such a momentous occasion to be summarily dismissed by the very people who will benefit?

Republicans have historically lost the public relations battle to Democrats and their mainstream media accessories, and while yesterday’s ceremony is a step in the right direction, one senses that average, hard-working Americans still want a common-sense explanation for how this tax bill will put more money in their pockets. This should have been done in the weeks leading up to the vote, but once again Republicans failed to control the debate.

Investor’s Business Daily reports that the tax plan is “widely unpopular” or “wildly unpopular” or “horribly unpopular,” depending on which news outlet one reads. The polling analysts at FiveThirtyEight say the tax plan is “historically unpopular,” noting that it gets an average of just 33% support in nine surveys taken in December, with 52% saying they oppose it.“ Yes, that’s the same FiveThirtyEight that had Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump late into the evening on election night. Nonetheless, someone is shaping the public’s perception about this bill, and it’s not Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Most of the surveys asked very broad questions about whether Americans support the plan or whether they think they’ll receive any benefits. It’s no wonder that many respondents are suspicious about the legislation. After all, Democrats demonized the act as soon as they got a whiff of it. While Republicans in the House and Senate were squabbling over the details, Democrats had effectively characterized the plan as another scheme to take from the poor and give to the rich. It’s a BIG Lie, but an effective one.

National Review’s Jibran Khan states, "The predictable result is that a false claim — Republicans are raising taxes on all but the very rich, full stop — has spread like wildfire across Twitter, and has been given added momentum by think tanks, verified accounts, and trending hashtags. This effort has certainly paid off. According to a recent New York Times poll, only a third of Americans believe that they will see their taxes go down in 2018. It should come as no surprise, then, that the bill’s extreme unpopularity is in line with historic tax rises, rather than tax cuts: The majority of people think it’s a hike.”

But it’s hard to run from the facts, and even The Washington Post had to admit that “8 in 10 Americans will pay lower taxes next year, according to the nonpartisan [insert hysterical laughter at that characterization] Tax Policy Center’s analysis of the final bill. Only 5 percent of people will pay more next year. Mostly, those are folks who earn six figures and own expensive houses in places with high local taxes, such as New York and California.” Yet the Post led the Leftmedia assault on the bill, and none of those outlets are backing down in their effort to mislead the American people.

Alexandra DeSanctis writes in National Review, “A couple of weeks ago, the NYT editorial board co-opted the Twitter account of its opinion page and spent an entire afternoon issuing tweets, urging readers to call their senators to protest the tax-reform bill. They even went so far as to include the office numbers for each senator, so readers could more easily petition their representatives. It was outright political lobbying, from an editorial board that has routinely denounced Citizens United and decried the supposed involvement of ‘dark money’ in U.S. politics.”

Clearly, Democrats and their media propaganda machine will go to any lengths to stop the Trump/Republican agenda.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that the legislation “will be an anchor to the ankles of every Republican running in 2018.” Really? If Democrats truly believed that the tax plan will backfire on Republicans, then why did they fight so hard to stop it? Sounds more like Democrats are fearful that Americans will forget all of the rhetoric when they see more money in their 2018 paychecks.

Even so, Republicans aren’t helping matters. They need to do more than sit around and wait for the truth to take hold.

The fact that a significant number of Americans think that one of the largest tax cuts in American history is actually a tax hike should put Republicans at all levels on notice that they need to do a better job of communicating their ideas. This is the only way to overcome the coordinated assault on a measure that will fatten nearly everyone’s wallet.

But this is the problem. Democrats have always circled the wagons and come up with catch phrases and slogans to drive their points home. They never shy away from making their case, even when their case is baseless. Many Americans still believe that Democrats are the party of the working class, and Republicans are fat cats. That’s because the Left has been in lockstep on message for decades.

It’s time for Republicans to defend their ideas without apology. For the first time since Reagan, we have a president willing to embrace a bold, conservative agenda — if only members of his own party would join him.

President Trump has never been afraid of winning, but it’s taken Republican leaders in Congress a full year to catch on.

SOURCE

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New Trump EO Targets corruptocrats

President Trump quietly signed an Executive Order on December 21st targeting lobbyists and Clinton Foundation-linked individuals involved in human rights abuses and corruption.

This EO allows for the freezing of any U.S. housed assets belonging to foreign people or entities considered “serious human rights abusers”.

Furthermore, anyone in the United States who aids or participates in said corruption or human rights abuses by foreign parties is subject to frozen assets – along with any U.S. corporation who employs foreigners deemed to have engaged in corruption on behalf of the company, reports Zero Hedge.

The Order could have serious implications for D.C. lobbyists who provide “goods and services” (e.g. lobbying services) to despots, corrupt foreign politicians or foreign organizations engaging in the crimes described in the EO. “Virtually every lobbyist in DC has got to be in a cold sweat over the scope of this EO,” said an attorney consulted in the matter who wishes to remain anonymous.

Many of the individuals listed are friends of the Obamas and Clintons and donors to the Clinton Foundation.

SOURCE

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

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

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No, Melania’s Christmas Selfie Was Not ‘Offensive,’ and She Did Not Deserve the Attacks on her

Being good-looking has its perils -- particularly with envious people



Melania Trump did a lot this Christmas. But perhaps nothing captured people’s attention on social media more than a cheeky tweet she made using a Snapchat filter with golden flying reindeer and wishing everyone a #MerryChristmas.

It got 80,000 likes as of this writing and was retweeted 14,000 times. People seemed to enjoy the fun of it.

But then those on the Left made it their duty to smear Melania as a horrible First Lady for posting the innocent image.

They mocked and bullied her until the cows came home, attempting to use the innocent gesture as proof that Melania was a horrible First Lady and role model for our nation’s youth.

"Disgraceful for a First Lady, Christmas or not. You look like a model on a photo shoot for the front page of Hustler. I'm sure the elderly and poor will appreciate this photo given how you and hubby don't care about them, only your millionaire friends at Mar-a-Largo"

From Ib Times:

“Seriously Melania??? That photo is excessively TACKY!!! Zero class in this,” a critic shared, calling out the First Lady over the Christmas selfie that was shared on the official Flotus twitter and Instagram account.

“Incredibly tacky and an insult to the position of First Lady. #embarrassing #trumpban,” a second user tweeted, as someone else chimed in, “Are you the FLOTUS or a Kardashian? Good Lord.”

More:

A critic sarcastically added, “wow! Extremely First Lady-ish! How I miss Michelle Obama!” Speaking of sarcasm, some social media users didn’t even hesitate to use harsh words to criticise the First Lady’s latest selfie.

“Why do I immediately think that this is a cover of a “Playboy” magazines?” One follower of the Flotus shared in the comments section, to which another responded, “Because it looks exactly like the cover of a Playboy Magazine. Just a guess.”

But the last laugh may be on the critics. A recent Gallup poll put Melania’s favorability rating at 54 percent so it’s not hard to see that she gets a lot of attention.

Melania and her husband, President Donald Trump are celebrating the holiday at Mar-a-Lago.

They went to a Christmas Eve service at The Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, the church where they had been married in 2005. They were greeted with open arms and received a standing ovation.

SOURCE

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised for opening Uranium One probe

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement praising Attorney General Jeff Sessions for reopening the Uranium One matter:

“Various reports that the Attorney General has ordered a review of the facts surrounding the sale of Uranium One to Russian interests demonstrates that not only will internal determinations about legality of the sale be examined, but potential conflicts of interests of those involved. Also, whether information was deliberately withheld from the Committee on Foreign Investment by the Justice Department. And if Hillary Clinton had any culpability in the process of the sale.

Given that many of the same Department of Justice officials now overseeing major investigations at the department were a major part of the Rosatom subsidiary Tenex (the Russian atomic energy agency) corruption case, it is important to determine what, if any, Russian ties and conflicts they might have had.

“The Uranium One case has achieved notoriety in recent months as an FBI whistleblower has come forward with serious allegations of malfeasance in the handling of the case as persons affiliated with the deal gave approximately $145 million to the Clinton Foundation, while former President Bill Clinton received $500,000 for a speech to a Russian investment firm involved in the sale.

“Attorney General Sessions is right to look into these matters to ensure that the public interest and law were followed throughout the process in light of very credible whistleblower allegations.” 

SOURCE

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The New York Times Left Socialism’s Role Out of Its Report on Venezuela’s Devastation

Kudos to The New York Times—yes, The New York Times—for running an excellent, detailed story on the mass starvation and economic catastrophe taking place in Venezuela.

As the Times notes, Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves in the world, yet is going through a starvation crisis exacerbated and hidden by its own government.

Common items like baby formula are almost unattainable for the average person and the crisis is deepening.

Alas, missing from the Times analysis is nearly any discussion of the reality that Venezuela is a socialist country once praised by America’s liberal elite.

In fact, only a single mention of the ruling socialist party near the end of the piece can be found.

Venezuela was once praised by left-wing pundits—including in the Times’ opinion section—for being a model of glowing success.

In fact, scoffing at claims of Venezuela’s alleged mismanagement under then-President Hugo Chávez, one New York Times contributor wrote in 2012:

Since the Chávez government got control over the national oil industry, poverty has been cut by half, and extreme poverty by 70 percent. College enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.

Less than half a decade later, the collapse has come. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who once published an op-ed in The New York Times, has made himself a dictator as the country faces runaway inflation reminiscent of Zimbabwe.

Venezuela’s inflation spiked to 4,115 percent at the end of 2017, according to a CNN Money report, leading more than one economist to conclude that the country’s economy is in a “death spiral.”

So how did Venezuela get here?

The answer is that socialism, as always, ends with running out of other people’s money.

James M. Roberts, the research fellow in economic freedom and growth at The Heritage Foundation, wrote about how dysfunctional policies such as nationalizing industries and redistribution schemes have destroyed a once thriving country.

The private economy has been almost completely wrecked, and is now unable to meet even the most basic demands of the population.

But it isn’t just socialist policies that have led to this catastrophe. Venezuela is one of the most corrupt countries in the world and has very little economic freedom.

Roberts wrote: “Venezuela’s score in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index makes it the most corrupt country in the Western Hemisphere, and helped drag the country to the bottom of The Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom, too.”

As Heritage’s Latin American policy analyst, Ana Quintana, noted in The Hill, Venezuela’s leaders have managed to secure for themselves absolute power and wealth through repressive government actions and turning their country into a criminal enterprise.

Their leaders are “directly involved in corruption, the drug trade, human rights violations, and support for terrorist groups,” Quintana wrote.

For instance, the current Venezuelan vice president, Tareck El Aissami, was designated by the U.S. Treasury as drug kingpin with connections to Islamist terrorist organizations. He’s been hit with heavy sanctions by the Trump administration, but is a good example of the kinds of problems that pervade Venezuela’s government.

He’s only one of many.

Despite egalitarian socialist rhetoric, Venezuela’s ruling class has managed to both enrich itself and protect that wealth at the expense of the public.

With outright corruption rampant, promises of material care by a benevolent state can seem appealing as an alternative to “capitalism” when capitalism is simply defined as cronies in government working with cronies in big business for their own benefit.

Alas, like in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” the new overlords end up being just like the old ones, or worse.

The rule of law and a free economy have generally combined to form the secret sauce of a flourishing economy.

Lacking both, Venezuela has somehow squandered a gold mine—or oil reserves to be more literal—in its downward descent into bankruptcy, tyranny, and mass starvation. Being oil rich has only masked the deep dysfunction under the surface of the Venezuelan regime.

Perhaps this should be a sobering wake-up call to millennials who in worryingly large numbers say they’d rather live under socialism or communism rather than capitalism.

Socialism’s failures in the last century should be enough to disabuse Americans of any notion that this broken political philosophy, which runs counter to human nature, is in any way the answer to our problems.

But if history fails to be a guide, then the modern demonstration of yet another socialist country immolating itself, starving its people, and destroying any measure of real democracy should be evidence enough.

SOURCE

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Trump slams FBI, Obamacare in post-Christmas tweets

PALM BEACH, Fla. — After a quiet Christmas Day, President Trump was back at work Tuesday — on Twitter.

Trump began his day criticizing the FBI and claiming the now-famous dossier containing allegations about his connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin is a ‘‘pile of garbage.’’ Trump, who is vacationing at his private estate in Mar-a-Lago, appeared to be watching and quoting from the morning cable news show ‘‘Fox and Friends’’ while tweeting.

‘‘WOW, @foxandfrlends ‘Dossier is bogus. Clinton Campaign, DNC funded Dossier. FBI CANNOT (after all of this time) VERIFY CLAIMS IN DOSSIER OF RUSSIA/TRUMP COLLUSION. FBI TAINTED.’ And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!,’’ Trump tweeted.

The Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee helped fund the dossier, which was first published by BuzzFeed. Officials have said some of the information has been corroborated, but other parts — including the most salacious claims about Trump — remain unverified.

SOURCE

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

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

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Trump coins show that Trump widens the range of the possible



The news about the Trump presentation coins was a good laugh. They are twice as thick as ones by previous Presidents and instead of being nickel-silver are -- OF COURSE -- in gold, presumably gold-plated.  Trump has always liked gold.  It is his trademark color.

And the media went wild about how crass and vulgar it all is.  The man has no taste, no restaint!

And the lack of restraint is the key.  Nothing conventional or accepted restrains him.  He does what he thinks is a good thing, regardless of any convention.  He is extraordinarily independent. He has clearly had a life in which he didn't need to seek approval from others.  He gained all the acceptance he needed just by being himself.

And American society in general and the Presidency in particular had become  heavily tied up in conventional expectations about what you could and could not do.  And, unfortunately, many of those constraints have come from the Left and have been genuinely oppressive.

But Trump has burst the barriers wide open. The Leftist constraints are going at a great rate and other ways of doing things are now possible.  His coins are a graphic symbol of that. Who can doubt, for instance, that future Presidents will tweet?  They will undoubtedly do it more cautiously but they will do it.  It will even be expected now as evidence of frankness and openness.

So expect more and more shrieks from the media as Trump steadily normalizes more and more of what was once forbidden or at least heavily decried -- JR

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Excellent Christmas day news

The US should completely withdraw from this corrupt and biased body

The U.S. will cut its 2018 contribution to the United Nations by $285 million—nearly 25 percent -- an announcement that comes days after more than 120 nations criticized the United States for its decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Ambassador Nikki Haley made the announcement Sunday, but specifically blamed the world body for its budgetary excesses without making a specific reference to last week's vote on President Donald Trump's controversial Jerusalem decision.

“The inefficiency and overspending of the United Nations are well known. We will no longer let the generosity of the American people be taken advantage of or remain unchecked,” Haley said in a statement announcing the cut to the U.N.'s overall $5.4-billion budget. “This historic reduction in spending—in addition to many other moves toward a more efficient and accountable U.N.—is a big step in the right direction.”

Haley said there might be further budget cuts in the future. President Trump's proposed 2018 spending budget would end funding for U.N. climate change programs and would cut funding to the United Nations Children’s Fund, also known as UNICEF, by 16 percent.

Trump has long discussed cutting U.S. contributions to the U.N., and Haley hinted that the current administration could be motivated by a lack of support for its efforts around the world, specifically after the Jerusalem vote on Thursday.

"The United States is by far the single largest contributor to the U.N. and its agencies," Haley at the time. "We do this because it represents who we are. It is our American way. But we'll be honest with you. When we make generous contributions to the U.N., we also have a legitimate expectation that our goodwill is recognized and respected." 

SOURCE

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Nikki Haley, the Trump administration's breakout star

by Jeff Jacoby

AMONG THE LOW POINTS of the Obama administration's final weeks was its refusal to veto a blatantly anti-Israel resolution in the UN Security Council.

When Nikki Haley attended her first Security Council session a few weeks later as the new ambassador under President Trump, she promptly reversed course. "I am here to emphasize," she told reporters, "that the United States is determined to stand up to the UN's anti-Israel bias."

Haley lived up to that promise on Tuesday, when she vetoed a resolution demanding that the Trump administration rescind its decision recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. She followed up her veto with formal remarks calling the resolution "an embarrassment" to the UN and scolding those who "presume to tell America where to put our embassy." On Twitter the next day, Haley laid down a marker ahead of Thursday's vote on the topic in the UN General Assembly.

"When we make a decision . . . abt where to locate OUR embassy, we don't expect those we've helped to target us," she tweeted. "On Thurs there'll be a vote criticizing our choice. The US will be taking names."

Reckless and counterproductive? Hardly. Haley's performance at the UN has been a joy to behold. The former South Carolina governor, who came to the job with no foreign policy experience, has turned out to be a natural — behind the scenes no less than in the spotlight.

This fall, Haley succeeded in winning unanimous Security Council approval for economic sanctions on North Korea in response to its continuing nuclear belligerence. Displaying a knack for political deal-making, she initially proposed a package of sanctions so severe that Russia and China would doubtless have vetoed them had they been put to a vote. Then she set out to negotiate a compromise — dropping demands for a total oil embargo, for example, but digging in on other restrictions. "That made it possible for both China and Russia to join the consensus," reported The Nation, a journal far from friendly to the Trump administration. "Haley got a unanimous 15-0 'yes' vote against North Korea, an outcome that sent a message of unity" to Pyongyang.

Last week she did it again, winning unanimous Security Council approval for a new layer of sanctions on North Korea.

Nearly a year into the job, America's ambassador to the UN comes across as refreshing, unabashed, principled, and savvy. She is one of the most popular officials in a historically unpopular administration. "The breakout star of Trump's Cabinet," CNN calls her.

This would be impressive under any circumstance. It's especially so in the Trump presidency, which has been very rough on the reputations and careers of numerous high-level officials. It's even more remarkable given Haley's own history with Trump. She publicly opposed his presidential bid, urged Republicans not to "follow the siren call of the angriest voices," and endorsed Marco Rubio in the South Carolina primary. After Trump won that primary, he lashed out on Twitter: "The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!" (Her unruffled response: "Bless your heart.")

Trump holds grudges, yet he made Haley a key diplomatic face of his administration. Trump hates to share the spotlight, but he has done nothing to impede Haley's celebrity. And while the president has publicly rebuked or undercut other Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, he hasn't done so to Haley — not even when she has expressed views and taken stands that are quite different from his.

Which she has. Haley has loudly denounced Russia's continuing aggression in Ukraine, vowing that sanctions would never be lifted until Crimea is restored to Ukrainian control. Despite Trump's open embrace of Vladimir Putin, Haley warns bluntly: "We cannot trust Russia. We should never trust Russia."

Haley vigorously castigates dictatorships for their human rights abuses, something that neither Trump nor Tillerson considers a priority. "For me," Haley stresses, "human rights are at the heart of the mission of the United Nations."

On most issues, of course, Haley supports the president, as all ambassadors do. "I don't go rogue on the President," she has said. But she has figured out how to distance herself from Trump even when defending him. During the furor over banning travelers from several Muslim nations, Haley publicly justified it as a security measure. But she immediately and more memorably added that it would be "un-American" to "ever ban anyone based on their religion."

Haley plainly outshines Tillerson, a hapless if well-meaning secretary of state who has managed to wow neither the president nor the public. Tillerson brought an admirable international business resume to the job, but he lacks the political skills that Haley acquired during her meteoric rise from total unknown — she was the bookkeeper for her mother's clothing business — to governor of South Carolina. Haley has quickly acquired the foreign-policy fluency in which she was totally deficient a year ago. It is quite plausible that Trump will ask her at some point to replace Tillerson at the State Department.

Critics treated Haley's warning that the US would be "taking names" on the UN's Jerusalem resolution as an appalling diplomatic gaffe. It wasn't. The best UN ambassadors have always known that the job entails more than behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing: It calls for the vigorous defense of moral truth as well. Like Adlai Stevenson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, Haley has shown that she can be effective in the UN while bluntly decrying the lies and prejudices that sully it. Her first year on the job has been brilliant. Whatever Trump may have gotten wrong, his choice of Nikki Haley was a masterstroke.

SOURCE

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Congress repeals individual mandate, first step of ending Obamacare

This will kill off Obamacare.  Insurance firms will now be able to balance their books only by hiking their already high premiums and deductibles.  That will make health insurance unaffordable for just about everyone.  Even the RINOs won't be able to defend Obamacare after that

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning praised efforts by Congress and the Trump administration to repeal the individual mandate under the health care law:

“Thanks to President Trump and Congress, the tyranny of the individual mandate is coming to an end, which penalized individuals if they chose to opt out of purchasing health insurance. As a result more than 6 million Americans were being penalized more than $3 billion a year.

Now, starting in 2019, every American will once again have what they are entitled to by right, a choice to participate in the insurance market. No more guaranteed customers. Now companies will have to compete on price to attract individuals to their plans. This is the first step to repealing the health care law. Ending the individual mandate takes away the cornerstone of Obamacare, and is another promise kept by President Trump and Congress. Although it is disappointing that the repeal will not occur for another year, this is a giant step in the right direction for the American people.”

SOURCE

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

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

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No posts today, maybe tomorrow

If you are looking for something congenial to read, you might find my list of short articles interesting. They cover a wide subject range.  The subject index is here

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR  to all those who come by here

In case anybody is wondering, my surgery went off without a hitch and I am already as right as rain again. For any curious minds,  I have put up a detailed account on my Personal Blog

I want to mention something that seems to have passed almost unnoticed in this Christmas season.  It occurred in the speech President Trump gave to coincide with the lighting of the White House Christmas tree.  He at one stage invoked "Our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ". 

In that utterance he expressed the core doctrine of evangelical Christians.  That was unprecedented as far as I can remember.  Even Reagan, an undoubted man of God, was not so emphatically Christian.  Many Americans DON'T think Jesus is their Lord and saviour so it was a bold thing for a politician to say.  It would have been a dagger aimed at the heart of Leftist anti-Christians and a warm glow in the hearts of committed Christians. 

Trump got most of the evangelical vote last time so he will probably get all of it next time but it was clearly not a good electoral calculation.  He stood to lose non-Christian voters while picking up only a few more Christians.  So why did he do it?  The speech was undoubtedly written for him by an evangelical pastor but he ad-libs readily so could easily have toned that bit down if he had wanted to.

The obvious reason is that he believed what he said.  Trump is amazing the way he speaks his mind.  He is clearly no career politician.

But I think there is a second reason. Christians have copped so  much abuse and condemnation in recent years that they deserved some support -- and Trump gave them that.  He validated their beliefs and principles.  It told them that the days of travail are easing.  And if it stabbed at the anti-Christian left, it was about time they got some heat back.  It was justice for the meek.

And the media were amazingly silent about it.  They criticized a few minor details but ignored the Christian invocation as far as I could see.  Maybe they were wary of antagonizing Christians

And how splendid that Trump finally got most of his tax reforms through. It was like herding cats but it was done. The reforms hit a lot of targets but one that I think has not been mentioned as much as it should is the drastic cut to the company tax.  The tax went from high down to middling by international standards. Tax cuts in general stimulate economic expansion but this one is particularly stimulatory.  Where the old tax was a big disincentive to overseas investment, the new tax should unleash a flood of overseas investment into the USA -- meaning lots of new jobs and government revenue. It might even enable paying off some of the Federal debt -- JR.

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God First Means America First

Yaacov Ben Moshe

As much as I have always tried to confine my reasoning, observation and writing to secular and factual areas, I often wind up with this (mostly unexpressed) thought: “Only God can help us now.”

I have known that if I were to write it or even just say it out loud, it would sound like despair and resignation- but it is not. It is really just my belief that if our fellow Americans, inheritors of the great Judeo-Christian culture, whether Jews, Christians or secularists could find a reconnection to The Divine many of our worst problems would just evaporate. I am not talking about a specific religion or even, necessarily, a belief in “God” as such. All that is required is an appreciation of the divinity behind the miracle of creation. It is only with faith in the creator as a force for good and order, that we can hope to dispel the moral relativism and post-modern sectionalism that are daily degrading our culture. In the guise of justice and equality they are dissolving our commonality of interest and sapping our energy as a civilization.

This is still an upstart of a nation- the fastest growing, richest and most diverse country on the planet. There is more opportunity here for anybody than anywhere else in the world. In this age of globalist ennui, faltering faith, Islamic conquest, rejection of tradition and conceited intellect, we are still as Lincoln said,”  …the last best hope of earth”. All we really need, in my opinion is a general reconnection to the source of all life and goodness. For inspiration I look, as I often do to the founding documents of our country and the framers who were inspired to create them.

When the founders of the US sought to create a new kind of nation, one more immune to corruption and abuse than any other in history, they did a profoundly revolutionary thing. They sought a higher authority to overrule the “rights of kings”- an even higher authority than the doctrine of any particular church. They assessed human nature as flawed and prone to corruption. So they also sought to avoid the rule of "a man" or a secular "theory of man” (socialism, fraternalism etc…). The result was a nation governed by three independent branches of government, empowered to counter-balance (read: stymie) the natural human drive to amass power and wealth. The higher authority that superseded royal prerogative, they called “natural law” not so much derived from God as it was from their understanding that every man may have his own “personal relationship” with The Creator. It is fortunate that Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Washington were themselves men of complicated and subtle faith who were of such generous spirit that they could credit any other person of good faith with equal right to their way of worship.

Jefferson called upon "natural law”  in the Declaration of Independence not only to sever the “right" of the British King to rule the American colonies, but to found the first nation in history that would set as its charter, every individual’s “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The founders called on the highest possible authority to construct our nation for a very important reason. They and their forebears were here on this wild continent because they had already disagreed with, fled and finally, revolted against kings and churches in “The Old World”. They knew that without God, we are just so much meat- animated by dangerous proclivities, taking up space and making trouble. Yet they were also acutely aware that with any specific and organized God there would be unavoidable and ultimately fatal conflict over the exact description of that God and its laws. Only in the sometimes infinitesimal space between the personal God and doctrine is there a hope of finding a common ground for unity and mutual respect. The already disparate collection of religious mavericks, lumberjacks, northern farmers, slave-holding planters, self-sufficient pioneers and merchant traders needed to find that common cause to be worth fighting for for the new nation to survive. Otherwise they would be unable to resist conquest or co-option by the powers of  The Old World. Without a higher binding principal they would have been left with only fear, envy and anger and their evil results. The founders provided a meaningful and successful framework by acknowledging the blessing that God’s love for the individual and his liberty could bring forth. They created a nation that mirrored that blessing or as Abraham Lincoln put it at Gettysburg: “…conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…,”.

Lincoln was our president at the moment of the nation’s greatest peril and need. He staked everything on what he knew was right. He did so with the certain knowledge that God would bless his actions. Here is a bit more of the lines that I quoted a few words of above. It is from his address to congress about his forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation:

“We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

The blessing of whatever divinity you acknowledge must be used to help us blend that plain, peaceful, generous, and just way into our common existence here in America. If we can recreate that unity of spirit, we will continue to be safe, happy and secure at home and maybe even inspire some of our old allies and even, competitors to a better way. But we owe it to ourselves to do it in America First.

Epilogue:

Here is my best shot at a sales pitch for a revival of faith: Take God personally! Religious fundamentalists, agnostics and atheists are at a far higher risk of being a “glass is half empty” person. Having a belief in a loving Creator/God gives you a much better chance to be a “glass is half full kind of person”. Having a personal relationship with that loving and transcendent God is the portal to becoming a “cup runneth over” being.

SOURCE

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The Reason the Left Gives Communism a Pass

Walter E. Williams

Before the question, how about a few statistics? The 20th century was mankind’s most brutal century. Roughly 16 million people lost their lives during World War I; about 60 million died during World War II. Wars during the 20th century cost an estimated 71 million to 116 million lives.

The number of war dead pales in comparison with the number of people who lost their lives at the hands of their own governments. The late professor Rudolph J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii documented this tragedy in his book “Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900.” Some of the statistics found in the book have been updated.

The People’s Republic of China tops the list, with 76 million lives lost at the hands of the government from 1949 to 1987. The Soviet Union follows, with 62 million lives lost from 1917 to 1987. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German government killed 21 million people between 1933 and 1945. Then there are lesser murdering regimes, such as Nationalist China, Japan, Turkey, Vietnam, and Mexico.

According to Rummel’s research, the 20th century saw 262 million people’s lives lost at the hands of their own governments.

Hitler’s atrocities are widely recognized, publicized, and condemned. World War II’s conquering nations’ condemnation included denazification and bringing Holocaust perpetrators to trial and punishing them through lengthy sentences and execution. Similar measures were taken to punish Japan’s murderers.

But what about the greatest murderers in mankind’s history—the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong? Some leftists saw these communists as heroes.

W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian in 1953, said, “Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. … The highest proof of his greatness [was that] he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.” Walter Duranty called Stalin “the greatest living statesman” and “a quiet, unobtrusive man.”

There was even leftist admiration for Hitler and fellow fascist Benito Mussolini.

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, George Bernard Shaw described him as “a very remarkable man, a very able man.” President Franklin Roosevelt called the fascist Mussolini “admirable,” and said he was “deeply impressed by what he [had] accomplished.”

In 1972, John Kenneth Galbraith visited Communist China and praised Mao and the Chinese economic system. Michel Oksenberg, President Jimmy Carter’s China expert, complained, “America [is] doomed to decay until radical, even revolutionary, change fundamentally alters the institutions and values.” He urged us to “borrow ideas and solutions” from China.

Harvard University professor John K. Fairbank believed that America could learn much from the Cultural Revolution, saying, “Americans may find in China’s collective life today an ingredient of personal moral concern for one’s neighbor that has a lesson for us all.” By the way, an estimated 2 million people died during China’s Cultural Revolution.

More recent praise for murdering tyrants came from Anita Dunn, President Barack Obama’s acting communications director in 2009, who said, “Two of my favorite political philosophers [are] Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa.”

Recall the campus demonstrations of the 1960s, in which campus radicals, often accompanied by their professors, marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving Mao’s “Little Red Book.” That may explain some of the campus mess today. Some of those campus radicals are now tenured professors and administrators at today’s universities and colleges and K-12 schoolteachers and principals indoctrinating our youth.

Now the question: Why are leftists soft on communism? The reason leftists give communists, the world’s most horrible murderers, a pass is that they sympathize with the chief goal of communism: restricting personal liberty.

In the U.S., the call is for government control over our lives through regulations and taxation. Unfortunately, it matters little whether the Democrats or Republicans have the political power. The march toward greater government control is unabated. It just happens at a quicker pace with Democrats in charge.

SOURCE

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

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

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