Trump’s China tariffs could actually work

President Trump has officially picked a fight with China, announcing Thursday that the United States is imposing up to $60 billion in new tariffs on Chinese goods, along with additional restrictions on China’s ability to invest in US companies.

How China will respond is unclear. The Chinese government has sent mixed signals about its readiness to negotiate but also its willingness to retaliate, including against vulnerable sectors of US agriculture. Just the threat of a trade war was enough to rattle global markets and push the Dow Jones Industrial Average down over 700 points.

At its root, this is a fight about intellectual property: how US companies try to safeguard their innovations, and how China tries to get around those safeguards via reverse engineering, coercion, or even theft.

Pirated software is perhaps the most familiar example, so common across China that one trade group has estimated that as of 2015, 70 percent of software installed on Chinese personal computers was unlicensed.

But that’s only the beginning. Sometimes, the only way for US businesses to gain access to the Chinese market is by partnering with a local firm and handing over precious intellectual property — which could be anything from new manufacturing techniques to software algorithms. Refuse, and businesses can be subject to provisions of Chinese law that actually force dominant companies to license their treasured tech to competitors.

If that doesn’t work, China also engages in various forms of industrial espionage: hacking into US companies to gather sensitive information, or luring away employees who might pass along well-guarded details. Affected businesses span the economic gamut, from wind turbine programmers to semiconductor manufacturers to the makers of genetically modified seeds.

The full extent of these practices is hard to quantify, as is the cost to US businesses and consumers. There’s no central repository of incidents, and many of the companies affected might not even know they were infiltrated or exploited.

During Thursday’s announcement, Trump put the figure at “hundreds of billion of dollars,” though his administration later released a fact sheet estimating the annual cost from improper IP transfer at approximately $50 billion per year, or something closer to 0.25 percent of gross domestic product.

Yet whatever the exact number, the politics are potent — centered around a narrative of innovative US companies having their hard work stolen away by a foreign economic rival. It’s a neat fit with Trump’s longtime contention that the global trading system is rigged against America.

The question is: Can Trump’s plan for new tariffs and other pressures make a real difference?

As with all tariffs, there will be costs, including for consumers, who probably will have to pay more for some electronics gear. Those costs will only grow if China responds in kind, whether taxing select agricultural imports, placing further restrictions on new US businesses, or cutting cooperation with firms already on the ground in Shanghai or Beijing. Worries of this damaging tit-for-tat helped fuel Thursday’s stock sell-off.

But an escalating trade war isn’t inevitable. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said he thought we would “end up negotiating these things rather than fighting over them.”

Just as important, China has also signaled a willingness to talk, suggesting that Trump’s gambit could work, creating some real, effective pressure that ultimately forces China to rethink its approach to US intellectual property rights.

Trump’s negotiating position was probably strengthened by his decision last week to reject a proposed takeover of the US telecom firm Qualcomm, for fear that it would give China too much control over wireless technology. If he could attract allies in Europe and around the world — many of whom share concerns about China’s lack of respect for intellectual property — that also would help, including by building broader support for another action Trump unveiled Thursday, a challenge against China at the World Trade Organization.

But here’s where Trump’s mercurial side becomes a liability. In recent weeks, he has angered key trading partners with the announcement of wide-reaching steel and aluminum tariffs — not to mention making himself look unprepared for sacrifice by saying trade wars are easy to win.

There may well be a deal out there on protecting US intellectual property, which this package of tariffs and other restrictions can help forge. All that’s required is for Trump to prove himself the deal-maker he has long claimed to be.

SOURCE 

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Authoritarianism for Me but Not for Thee

It's funny how projection works. These hysterical Democrats calling for President Trump's impeachment because of his dastardly "authoritarian tendencies" are the ones with authoritarian tendencies.

I'll bet you didn't know that the president commits an impeachable offense if his political opponents harbor an irrational fear that he has authoritarian tendencies — whether or not he has acted outside the scope of his constitutional authority, flouted the rule of law or done anything else that could be remotely construed as a high crime or misdemeanor. I didn't, either.

But doesn't it bother you just a little bit that the very people who are calling for Trump's removal because they don't like him or his policies want to put their own authoritarians in power, where they can actually flout the rule of law?

My chief complaint is not their hypocrisy, though it abounds among these sanctimonious progressives. It is that they are eager to twist the law to suit their political agenda while masquerading as sacred guardians of the Constitution.

Someone should ask these mob-thinking witch-hunters how they can contemplate impeachment without a colorable claim that Trump has committed an impeachable offense. Other than their incapacity for self-reflection, why are they demanding an official proceeding to remove the president based on what he stands for and things he says?

Granted, impeachment is largely a political matter, but riotous partisans shouldn't be allowed to just make things up and ignore the plain language of the Constitution and the historical background informing its provisions. Sure, liberal activists who can find an emanation and penumbra behind every constitutional rock can distort any constitutional provision beyond recognition. But would anyone but a rabid authoritarian pretend that the Framers intended "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" to include any lawful conduct or tweet that could be exploited in bad faith to overturn the democratic will of the voters?

The less likely it appears that Trump did anything improper with Russia the more desperate these Democratic authoritarians become. There is an inverse relationship between the amount of actual evidence against Trump and the intensity of the Democrats' impeachment rhetoric. Old adages endure for a reason, and the Democrats are quite familiar with this one: "If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell."

Everywhere we look, Democrats are pounding the table and yelling like hell. On MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes," Sen. Bernie Sanders said Trump has "a strong authoritarian personality" and shows a "disrespect for democracy" in the U.S. His proof: Trump admires foreign dictators, and he disrespects democracy in terms of voter suppression, gerrymandering and his attacks on the media.

Well, I hate to tell you, Bernie, but one of the telltale signs of leftists these days is their adoration for dictators such as the Castros. I also regret to inform you that Barack Obama declared war on Fox News and conservative talk radio without a syllable of protest from you or your comrades. And gerrymandering? Really? Nevertheless, it's amusing for socialists to complain about authoritarianism when their lives are dedicated to consolidating governmental power to exercise authoritarian control over their subject citizens. But at least Sanders is not demanding impeachment — yet.

Liberal MSNBC host Brian Williams slammed Republicans for lacking the courage to discuss impeaching Trump. Unsurprisingly, the authoritarian-prone Williams didn't cite any impeachable offenses.

Campus Reform reports that Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe is teaching a class that explores what impeachment and removal by other means might resemble in the Trump era. He has a new book coming out on the subject, and he was already calling for impeachment last May in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

In that essay, Tribe cited no impeachable misconduct on Trump's part. He just groused about the "emoluments clause" — give me a break — and that "ample reasons existed" to worry about Trump even before he fired FBI Director James Comey. Tribe argued that the nation couldn't afford to wait to begin impeachment proceedings. "To wait for the results of the multiple investigations underway is to risk tying our nation's fate to the whims of an authoritarian leader."

Soon after, Tribe said on MSNBC: "Letting him just sit out the time ... is too dangerous for the country. We have to start an impeachment investigation in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee now while the FBI continues to do its work."

Does that sound a bit authoritarian to you? Just begin the formal process to remove a sitting, duly elected president against whom there is no evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor. No big deal, right?

Not one member of the reckless cabal wildly calling for Trump's impeachment — which includes leftists and parts of the never-Trump right — can cite an actual abuse of authority by Trump, much less a high crime or misdemeanor. President Obama violated the Constitution and the rule of law for sport, and liberals didn't care.

For the left, this isn't about the Constitution, the rule of law or authoritarianism; it's about getting rid of Trump at any cost to the Constitution and the rule of law — and by any authoritarian means necessary.

SOURCE 

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John Brennan’s Thwarted Coup

As his plot to destroy Trump backfires, his squeals grow louder.

It was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who coined the phrase the “dustbin of history.” To his political opponents, he sputtered, “You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!”

It is no coincidence that John Brennan, who supported the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party in the 1970s (he has acknowledged that he thought his vote for its presidential candidate Gus Hall threatened his prospects at the CIA; unfortunately, it didn’t), would borrow from Trotsky’s rhetoric in his fulminations against Donald Trump. His tweet last week, shortly after the firing of Andrew McCabe, reeked of Trotskyite revolutionary schlock: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”

[Compare  what Lenin said in describing his fellow revolutionaries (Kautsky and others).  He spoke of "the full depth of their stupidity, pedantry, baseness and betrayal of working-class interests". Old Communist Brennan even uses language reminscent of Lenin.  Leftists are expert at abuse, if nothing else]

America will triumph over a president it elected? That’s the raw language of coup, and of course it is not the first time Brennan has indulged it. In 2017, he was calling for members of the executive branch to defy the chief executive. They should “refuse to carry out” his lawful directives if they don’t agree with them, he said.

Trump has said that the Russians are “laughing their asses off” over the turmoil caused by Obamagate. No doubt many of the laughs come at the sight of Brennan, a supporter of Soviet stooges like Gus Hall, conducting a de facto coup from the top of the CIA and then continuing it after his ouster. Who needs Gus Hall when John Brennan is around? This time the Russians don’t even have to pay for the anti-American activity.

Another hardcore leftist, Samantha Power, who spent the weeks after Trump’s victory rifling through intelligence picked up on his staff, found Brennan’s revolutionary tweet very inspiring. “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan,” she wrote. Sounded pretty dark and grave. But not to worry, she tweeted later. She just meant that the former CIA director was going to smite Trump with the power of his “eloquent voice.”

Out of power, these aging radicals can’t help themselves. They had their shot to stop Trump, they failed, and now they are furious. The adolescent coup talk grows more feverish with each passing day. We have a former CIA director calling for the overthrow of a duly elected president, a former attorney general (Eric Holder) calling for a “knife fight,” a Senate minority leader speaking ominously about what the intelligence community might do to Trump (“they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer has said), and assorted former FBI and CIA officials cheering for a coup, such as CNN’s Phil Mudd who says, “You’ve been around for 13 months. We’ve been around since 1908. I know how this game is going to be played. We’re going to win.”

In all this unhinged chatter, the partisan origins of Obamagate become clearer. The same anti-Trump hatred on display in their tweets and punditry drove the political espionage. James Kallstrom, the former FBI Assistant Director, notes that the “animus and malice” contained in Brennan’s tweet is “prima facie exposure of how he felt about Trump before the election.”

All the key figures in the decision to open up a probe on Trump wanted him to lose — from Brennan to Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump machinations included, according to the latest batch of texts with his mistress, plotting to manipulate a buddy on the FISA court. In one text, he wonders if he can finagle a meeting with his friend by inviting him to a “cocktail party.” The impropriety aforethought on display in that tweet is staggering, but of course the media has paid no attention to it, preoccupied as it is with Andrew McCabe’s retirement income.

McCabe, by the way, has removed all doubts about his capacity for partisan lying with his post-firing statement, which rests entirely upon it. With all of its anti-Trump special pleading, the statement reads like it was cobbled together by Rachel Maddow. Like so many other ruling-class frauds, McCabe seeks absolution for his perjury and leaking through liberal politics. I stand with the liberal powerful against Trump, you can’t touch me — that’s the upshot of his defense. Comey has taken the same tack. The title of his forthcoming book should be: How the Law Doesn’t Apply to the Self-Appointed Ruling Class.

What an amazing collection of entitled creeps, who long ago convinced themselves that the “rule of law” is identical to what they see as their sacred right to exercise power in any way they see fit. All the blather about Trump’s violation of the law is simply a projection of their own lawlessness. So far the coup has been thwarted. They had hoped to stop him in the campaign through political espionage. But that didn’t work. Then they tried to upend him through spying during the transition, holding out hope until the very last moment, as evidenced by Susan Rice penning her sham exculpatory note only after Trump’s swearing-in. Now they join Brennan in seeking to bury Trump in Mueller’s dustbin.

Trotsky would have understood the shorthand of all the tweets, polemics, and posturing perfectly. Nothing in this show trial bears any relationship to reality or justice. It is simply an expression of power politics, which doesn’t always end well for its exponents. As even an old Gus Hall supporter like John Brennan must know, and perhaps his fulminating panic indicates a dawning awareness of it, those who talk the loudest about their enemies heading for the ash heap of history often end up in it.

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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John Bolton to replace General H.R. McMaster as President Trump's national security advisor

Great!  I was wondering what had happened to Bolton.  Bolton is as uncompromising as Trump, whereas McMaster was too conventional. It was McMaster who got Trump back into Afghanistan

President Donald Trump is replacing national security adviser H.R. McMaster with John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Trump tweets that McMaster has done "an outstanding job & will always remain my friend." He says Bolton will take over April 9.

Trump has repeatedly clashed with McMaster, a respected three-star general, and talk that McMaster would soon leave the administration had picked up in recent weeks.

His departure follows Trump's dramatic ouster of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week.

It also comes after someone at the White House leaked that Trump was urged in briefing documents not to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin about his recent re-election win. Trump did it anyway.

McMaster was brought in after Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was dismissed.

SOURCE

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The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica 'Scandal' Is a Nothingburger

What the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal lacks in relevance it sure makes up for in melodramatic rhetoric. Take Bloomberg, for instance, which reported, “The revelations of the apparent skulduggery that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election keep sending shock waves across the political landscape.” Well, it’s partially true. Everyone is talking about it. The story has consumed most of the mainstream media.

The theory goes something like this: Facebook obtained information on users who took a personality quiz with their online friends. Another outlet, the advertising firm Cambridge Analytica, harvested that information, brainwashed a bunch of rubes and then yada, yada, yada … Russia! Former Cambridge Analytica contractor Christopher Wylie told CNN that while at the company, he helped build a “psychological warfare weapon” to “exploit mental vulnerabilities that our algorithms showed that (Facebook users) had.” So, in other words, he worked in the advertising business.

Those who have covered politics for more than a single Trump cycle should know better than to use this kind of unnerving rhetoric for what amounts to nothing more than average microtargeting, which has been used by hundreds, if not thousands, of firms. Yet now, when it serves to bolster convoluted theories about an election having been overthrown, terms like “psychographics” and “breach” are being thrown around to make it sound like someone hacked into voter rolls after boring into the deepest recesses of our collective soul.

Here’s a thought: If you’re uncomfortable with data mining and your information being shared, don’t take surveys. Because, guess what, you don’t have to be on Facebook. You don’t have to use Twitter. You don’t have a constitutional right to play FarmVille without answering a survey. You don’t get free stuff. The very existence of social media and tech companies is predicated on mining data so that they, or third parties, can sell you things. That has always been the deal.

Cambridge Analytica is a shady company owned by the British firm SCL Group — and, reportedly, in part by the right-wing-funding Mercer family — which claimed it could build models that identify persuadable voters by using six key personality types. Now it looks like Cambridge Analytica kept data it shouldn’t have. Yet the effectiveness of Cambridge Analytica’s targeting was as questionable as its business practices. As others have pointed out, most Republicans used the firm to open to door to the Mercers’ checkbook.

By constantly using the word “breach,” reporters are trying to insinuate that someone stole voter data that typically was off-limits. Cambridge Analytica was allowed to pull that profile data. Facebook only changed its policy in early 2015. But before the general election, the Trump campaign dropped Cambridge Analytica for the Republican National Committee data, reportedly never using any of the “psychographic” information. According to CBS News, in September 2016, it had “tested the RNC data, and it proved to be vastly more accurate.”

Even if the campaign hadn’t, however, its efforts would have been akin to those being heralded as revolutionary when serving the interests of Democrats. In fact, Facebook allowed the Obama campaign to harvest data in the same way that is now generating headlines and handwringing. Do you remember any outrage and trepidation over the privacy and manipulation of your thoughts in 2012? The only consistent position the Left seems to take these days is that the mechanisms it uses to keep power automatically transform into something nefarious and undemocratic when the opposition uses them. If anything, there should be concerned about the ideological double standards of yet another tech giant.

Most of all, so what if voters were being “targeted”? Part of living in a free society means being bombarded by messages we don’t like. The entire Facebook-Russiabots scare is predicated on the notion that people don’t have free will. It’s only once we start micromanaging the information Americans consume that we begin undermining choices. Of course, people shouldn’t get their news from Facebook. And a reliable Fourth Estate that reports without bias to help Americans navigate through this messy contemporary digital life would be helpful. But the Cambridge Analytica story is just another example of how it fails.

SOURCE

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The Cambridge Analytica scandal: an elitist delusion

Comment from Britain

There are two remarkable things about the fallout from the Observer exposé of the Cambridge Analytica Files. First, $37 billion was wiped from the value of Facebook in one day and its share price is continuing to fall – not because it did anything wrong, but because its lax data-protection policies allowed a third party apparently to misuse its users’ data without consent. Secondly, and more importantly, is how the story is strengthening the misconception that a dark dystopian data company has been the manipulating force behind election results around the world, particularly the greatest political disruptions for years: the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.

What are the media and political elite smoking these days? They actually appear to believe that Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s Eton-educated chief executive, who has been suspended, is a Bond-type villain behind the scenes, whose data company has the power to change the world. They also appear to believe the self-serving claims made by the pink-haired data science geek and whistleblower at the heart of the exposé, Christopher Wylie, that he became ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool’, which brought Trump to power. This is deeply delusional.

The only real truth behind this exposé is the fact that Cambridge Analytica used 50million profiles that had been harvested from Facebook, without its users’ consent, to target US voters with political advertisements. This certainly does have important privacy concerns which a lot of policymakers are getting very exercised about. We know how this is going to end, however: with increased calls for regulation and clampdowns which will threaten free speech and the further evolution of the internet.

But, it is not how the data was acquired which is leading the calls to regulate social media. The real reason the liberal media and politicians have gone into meltdown over this case is because of their prejudiced and misguided belief that Cambridge Analytica successfully used this data to bring about political outcomes which disgust them.

The data used by Cambridge Analytica was collected by Aleksander Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University. Yes, the fact that he passed this data to Cambridge Analytica without obtaining the consent of millions of Facebook users is an issue – the issue over which Facebook is now facing a growing barrage of criticism and a share-price slump. But Kogan’s entire research objective is itself problematic. His data-mining research programme aims to determine personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook ‘likes’. His data are used to prepare ‘psychographic profiling’ after correlating them with more traditional data sets like magazine subscriptions or airline travel, shopping histories, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and so on. The purported outcome is the capture of every single aspect of voters’ information environments. This is what Cambridge Analytica is alleged to have done, enabling it to craft individual messages to targeted voters, either to persuade them to vote Trump or plant misinformation about opposition candidates.

The problem is that there is no evidence that any of this actually works. It is highly unlikely that an algorithm that examines a few dozen ‘likes’ can glean anything other than a very superficial indication of a user’s preferences, politically or otherwise. According to one report, for example, when users liked ‘curly fries’ and Sephora cosmetics, this was said to give clues to intelligence. Liking Hello Kitty is supposed to indicate one’s political views, while ‘being confused after waking up from naps’ was linked to sexuality. In short, garbage. These are correlations, not cause-and-effect relationships, and thus they are highly dubious ‘insights’. Spending large amounts of money on this kind of research can only be a stupid rich man’s game. The only ‘evidence’ we have that this works are the self-serving claims made by the snake oil salesmen of the data world and the liberal elite’s fantastical belief that this was the reason they lost the Brexit referendum and Hillary Clinton lost the White House.

There is an enormous degree of hypocrisy in this discussion, too. In a piece for the Spectator, Freddy Gray correctly points out that Barack Obama’s 2012 election campaign pioneered the use of Facebook’s APIs (application programming interfaces) and data to target voters to the same end. This was legitimate, apparently. Obama was heralded as being hip and in the vanguard of electioneering in the digital age. Apply the same to Donald Trump and we get conspiracy theories and hysteria.

But Gray makes another point which is salient. Namely, that the shutting down of these APIs by Facebook in 2014 had little to do with Facebook addressing legitimate privacy concerns. Facebook acted because it realised that any outside company could use these APIs to replicate the ‘social graph’ that Facebook sells to advertisers. In other words, Facebook and companies like Cambridge Analytica have built businesses around an apparent increased data capability to provide ‘psychographic profiling’ and the contemptible fantasy that ordinary people can be psychologically manipulated to buy, act and vote in a certain way.

We are not talking about a conspiracy to run the world. Rather what we are witnessing is the emergence of an ecosystem of con artists of the 21st-century dataverse. Despite their political differences, everyone who is peddling this garbage is united around the odious assumption that ordinary people, either as consumers or an electorate, are stupid, irrational and incapable of independent thought. That they are children who can be swayed, cajoled or seduced by honed messages or advertising. The fact that Trump’s election team employed Cambridge Analytica shows that they, too, share this view of the very people they were hoping to win to their cause. They treated electoral participation as a behavioural experiment, a stimulus-response model that could deliver Trump to power. Both sides are in denial about the realities of 21st-century politics – as if the American electorate needed Cambridge Analytica to manipulate them into rejecting the political elite in Washington, who regard them as deplorable.

The worst thing about this sorry story is that the more the media and liberal elite get their knickers in a twist over data manipulation, conspiracies and fake news, the more they reinforce the notion that this approach to politics is legitimate and actually works. The sordid irony is that the political elite and liberal intelligentsia have been hoisted with their own petard, so to speak. For years the absence of any real political vision about the purpose of government has forced the elite into technocratic managerialism based upon policies designed to nudge and manipulate the public for its own good. Elite politics can be summed up as an attempt to ‘save’ citizens from the negative consequences of their own behaviour. The liberal elite has been at the forefront of transforming the sphere of public agency, moral judgment and autonomy into a laboratory for manipulation through various forms of ‘nudge’ projects.

What the Cambridge Analytica Files exposé has revealed more than anything else is how all sides of the debate are more united than they would like to let on. Like squabbling children, one side is throwing their toys out of the pram because the other side won. ‘It’s not fair’, cries the Observer as it refuses to face the reality that it was not data manipulation that won Brexit or elected Trump, but the very contempt that they and their ilk hold for ordinary people. It’s time to grow up and start addressing the real concerns and problems we the people face. It’s time to put these childish pranksters on the naughty step.

SOURCE

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Expert Canadian finds the ‘smoking gun’ in Florida bridge collapse

A mysterious Canadian engineering YouTuber appears to have found the “smoking gun” of the Florida International University bridge collapse, which killed six people last week.

According to the YouTuber, identified only as AvE, a single snapped tension cable spotted at the site paints a picture of crews negligently trying to jury-rig an unstable bridge while still allowing midday traffic to pass underneath.

“They knew there was a problem and they were trying to remediate it while the fucking traffic is still going … incredible, just an incredible … I can’t even,” said AvE in the 16-minute video.

By analyzing building plans and construction photos from the site, AvE concluded that the bridge would have been fine as initially designed, but that it was brought down by shortcuts taken on the construction site.

The main span of the bridge was prefabricated and then swung into position in a single day. This unique design was intended to reduce traffic delays on the six-lane road it would be spanning.

Once in place, the plan was to install the bridge’s final supports while traffic was once again allowed to flow underneath the still-unfinished span.

But photos and video from the swing-out reveals that the heavy-lift vehicles used to move the span were positioned differently than indicated in the bridge’s original plans, which would have placed stress on weaker areas of the bridge. This, in turn, could have upset the latticework of cables holding the bridge together.

More HERE

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

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

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Are Liberals High On Dopamine?

An interesting hypothesis below.  The motive behind political correctness has always seemed clear to me:  It is just another form of Leftist destruction, destroying customary speech.  But it is proposed below that PC has another motive:  Creating a sense of belonging in the PC individual. By being correct you ally yourself with the predominant view and against foolish and uncaring old-fashioned people.  You place yourself among an approving community of the good and the wise.

There may be something in that but if the motive is to be part of a comforting group, wouldn't that wish be better served by identifying with the unreformed majority?  Politically correct speech is the province of a small minority, albeit a minority that the intellectual elite approve of

I have no doubt that being PC evokes warm feelings of righteousness but does that arise from feeling part of a group or from something else?  I think it arises from the usual Leftist egotistical motive of wanting to appear wiser and kinder than "the herd".

Leftism is fundamentally egotistical.  You have to be quite an egotist to think that you know how to change the world for the better but it is REALLY egotistical to think that you and your party are entitled push your vision through by force or coercion.  You have to think very highly of yourself to believe all that


I am reading an excellent analysis of PC behavior by Loretta Graziano Breuning, PhD, entitled How I Escaped Political Correctness And You Can Too. She says that biology drives PC behavior:

I looked for answers that fit reality as I’d lived it. My search led to amazing research on the social behavior of animals. This showed me that political correctness is biological. The brain chemicals that make us feel good are inherited from earlier mammals. They reward us for behaviors that promote survival in the state of nature. Political correctness stimulates your reward chemicals in primal ways.

I’m not saying we’re hard-wired. On the contrary, our neurons are not connected at birth. We connect them from life experience, and these connections make us who we are. Early experience wires you to expect rewards and pain in ways that happened before. Political correctness wires you to expect rewards and pain in specific ways. It’s hard to re-wire yourself after the neuroplasticity of youth, which is why people cling to political correctness even when they see its flaws.

I finally ripped off the PC goggles and looked at the world without them. You can say I haven’t escaped political correctness because it’s still there. But I have stopped filtering reality through the lens built by the gatekeepers of political correctness. I have learned to focus on the pleasure of my own choices instead of on solidarity with suffering. You can rip off the PC goggles and enjoy your own choices too. You’ll be glad you did!

So when people act in politically correct ways, as mammals, their brains are stimulated with "happy chemicals" such as oxytocin or dopamine: "mamamals seek safety in numbers because the brain rewards it with oxytocin" ... "The joy of dopamine is released when you approach a reward"..."Political correctness promises new rewards, and shames you for seeking rewards in other ways."

If this is the case, why are some of us not programmed to "get high" off political correctness?" In fact, when I hear people being PC, I feel mistrustful of them for being driven by PCness rather than the truth. Maybe the rest of us who are not PC simply get high from different values: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

SOURCE



Clinton/Facebook Document Exposed… Media Narrative Destroyed,/b>

Another attack on the Trump presidency is turning into an embarrassment for Democrats.

Since The New York Times report on Saturday that a company with ties to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had mined the personal information of millions of Facebook users, the media and Capitol Hill have been filled with more accusations about undercover help Trump got before the 2016 vote.

But internal Hillary Clinton campaign emails being published by WikiLeaks show the real scandal is just starting to come out – and the real villains are Democrats and the Hillary campaign, again.

Since the reports about the Trump-linked Cambridge Analytica first appeared, reports have already surfaced that Facebook allowed the Barack Obama re-election campaign wide access to user data back in 2012.

But emails released by WikiLeaks show just how closely Facebook was working with the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.

An email exchange between Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, makes it clear the two were political soulmates, dedicated to a Hillary Clinton victory.

“Wishing you a happy new year,” Podesta wrote on Jan. 2, 2016. “2015 was challenging, but we ended in a good place thanks to your help and support. Look forward to working with you to help elect the first woman president of the United States.”

SOURCE

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Nullification: Calif. Town Takes Massive Stand Against State’s Sanctuary Law

Tensions between the state of California and the federal government over “sanctuary laws” are already tense — but now even cities are joining the fray, and starting to reject liberal immigration policies at the local level.

A law recently signed by Democrat Governor Jerry Brown gives cover to illegal immigrants who are arrested in California, by prohibiting police from telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement when a criminal who is facing deportation is released from detention.

In other words, Democrats in California want to purposely block law enforcement from communicating and enforcing the law… and the city of Los Alamitos just sent a strong message back to the governor.

“(The) California city voted on Monday to exempt itself from the state’s sanctuary law, which limits cooperation between local authorities and federal immigration enforcement,” reported Fox News.

“Following more than two hours of heated testimony from residents on both sides of the debate, the Los Alamitos City Council voted 4-1 to opt out of the California Values Act,” continued the report.

The local ordinance passed by Los Alamitos declares that the liberal sanctuary policy “may be in direct conflict with federal laws and the Constitution.”

Incredibly, it looks like at least one group still takes the Constitution seriously, and is standing up for the oath that elected officials and law enforcement officers take to the founding principles of America.

The council announced that it “finds that it is impossible to honor our oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States” without opting out of the liberal sanctuary law.

SOURCE

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Give Freedom a Chance

 One of the typical responses to criticism of a government policy, program, or other undertaking is the demand for an answer to the question, “What is your alternative?” Often this challenge demands a blueprint or other detailed plan for the alternative to the governmental status quo. Absent such a fully articulated plan, one’s criticism is often dismissed as mere carping by someone who has no idea about how to replace the present government undertaking.

My own alternative is simply freedom. Get the government completely out of whatever it is now doing so badly, whether it be educating youth, protecting the public from crime, or keeping the economy in flourishing operation. Of course, the critic is likely to dismiss this answer on the grounds that it constitutes nothing but a shibboleth, a magic word that is taken to solve all the problems even though it lacks any definite plan or arrangement for a solution.

This response, however, only reveals that the critic does not understand how a free society operates or what may reasonably be demanded of its supporters. The essence of freedom is the unrestricted ability to make changes without the government’s permission and without spelling out how all the various elements of the change will operate or be brought about.

For example, when Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and a few other entrepreneurs were introducing and developing the technology and business arrangements of the personal computer industry, they themselves did not know how this industry would be developed over the years and all the ramifications it would produce throughout the economy and society. If asked, they could not have spelled out everything that would flow from their initial impetus, who would do what next, and how all of these free actions would play out in the larger context. No one could have said, and those who ventured a guess were often, as seen later, ridiculously off base in their forecasts. That’s how a free economy and society develop, in spontaneous steps taken by decentralized decision makers.

So when a critic demands, “What is your alternative?” and you answer, Freedom, do not feel dismayed if you cannot provide a detailed blueprint. No one can. Nor should anyone be expected or required to carry out this impossible task. Freedom cannot be reduced to a static diagram of specific inputs, transformations, and outputs. It is an ongoing process. It is the sum total of what people do when no overriding authority holds them back. No one should feel embarrassed or inadequate when someone demands, “What is your alternative?” and one cannot respond in great detail.

Freedom is an endless venture into the unknown, the working out of problems as they present themselves, by millions of individuals, firms, and other organizations who know best the facts of specific times and places and who have the tacit knowledge—the “feel” and intuition—for what might work and what will not. The conduct of countless experiments constitutes the dynamics of the free society. It has no blueprint, and even if it had one today, that plan would have been altered by the end of tomorrow.

The proper response to the demand, “What is your alternative?” is simply, “Give freedom a chance.”

SOURCE

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Trump is right: The special counsel should never have been appointed

BY ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ

President Trump is right in saying that a special counsel should never have been appointed to investigate the so-called Russian connection. There was no evidence of any crime committed by the Trump administration. But there was plenty of evidence that Russian operatives had tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, and perhaps other elections, in the hope of destabilizing democracy. Yet, appointing a special counsel to look for crimes, behind the closed doors of a grand jury, was precisely the wrong way to address this ongoing challenge to our democracy.

The right way would have been (and still is) to appoint a nonpartisan investigative commission, such as the one appointed following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to conduct a broad and open investigation of the Russian involvement in our elections. This is what other democracies, such as Great Britain and Israel, do in response to systemic problems. The virtue of such a commission is precisely the nonpartisan credibility of its objective experts, who have no political stake in the outcome.

Such a commission could have informed the American public of what Russia did and how to prevent it from doing it again. It would not seek partisan benefit from its findings, the way congressional committees invariably do. Nor would it be searching for crimes in an effort to criminalize political sins, the way special counsels do to justify their existence and budget. Its only job would be to gather information and make recommendations.
The vice of a special counsel is that he is supposed to find crimes, and if he comes up empty-handed, after spending lots of taxpayer money, then he is deemed a failure. If he can’t charge the designated target — in this case, the president — he must at least charge some of those close to the target, even if it is for crimes unrelated to the special counsel’s core mandate. By indicting these low-hanging fruits, he shows that he is trying. Maybe those lesser defendants will flip and sing against higher-ups, but the problem is that the pressure to sing may cause certain defendants to “compose,” meaning make up or enhance evidence in order to get a better deal for themselves.

In this case, the appointment of a special counsel has done more harm than good. It has politicized our justice system beyond repair. The FBI deputy director has been fired for leaking and lying. His testimony appears to be in conflict with that of the former FBI director as to whether the leaks were authorized. Messages by high-ranking FBI agents suggest strong bias against Trump. A tweet by the former CIA director reveals equally strong negative views of the president. Perhaps these revelations prove nothing more than that law enforcement and national security officials are human and hold political views like everyone else.

But these views are not supposed to influence their decisions. In our age of hyperpartisanship, the public has understandably lost confidence in the ability and willingness of our leaders to separate their political views from their law enforcement decisions. This is not all attributable to the appointment of the special counsel, but the criminalization of political differences on both sides of the aisle has certainly contributed to the atmosphere of distrust in our justice system.

The public has lost faith in the leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI. They don’t trust congressional investigative committees. They don’t know whom to believe when they hear conflicting accounts. There are leaks galore followed by denials of leaks. It’s a total mess. And what do we have to show for it? Just a handful of low-level indictments based largely on alleged crimes that are either unrelated or only marginally related to Russia’s attempt to influence our presidential election in 2016.

It’s not too late to try to repair some of the damage done. Let Congress now appoint a nonpartisan commission to conduct a transparent investigation of Russia’s efforts to influence our elections. Let the special counsel suspend his investigation until the nonpartisan commission issues its report. If the report identifies crimes and criminals, there will be time enough to indict and prosecute. Right now, we need the nonpartisan truth, because we aren’t getting it from the special counsel.

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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Thank goodness for Statesman Trump

Antagonizing Russia is incredibly stupid.  The last thing the world needs is a war -- cold or hot -- with the largest country on earth.  But the idiot British bureaucrat, PM Theresa May, and the Washingtom establishment, are doing their best to foment war. But Mr Trump did not follow suit, choosing instead to have a cordial conversation with Vladimir Vladimirovich. The world is in safe hands with Mr Trump


A SECRET memo has been handed to US President Donald Trump about what not to say to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Mr Trump’s national security advisers reportedly warned the president in briefing materials: “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” ahead of a phone call with the Russian leader about his re-election, according to officials familiar with the call.

But Mr Trump ignored the advice. “I had a call with President Putin and congratulated him on his electoral victory,” the US leader said. “The call had to do also with the fact that we will probably get together in the not-too-distant future.”

Mr Trump also chose not to heed talking points from aides who instructed him to condemn Mr Putin about the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy with a powerful nerve agent in the United Kingdom, a case that both the British and US governments have blamed on Moscow.

Russia is under pressure from London and its allies to explain how its former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned on British soil. Moscow has denied being involved.

Although the nerve attack has topped global headlines for weeks, it did not come up during the leaders’ conversation, according to both the Kremlin and White House. Mr Trump later described the phone conversation with Mr Putin as “a very good call”.

SOURCE 

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'They were on our side': Obama campaign director reveals Facebook ALLOWED them to mine American users' profiles in 2012 because they were supportive of the Democrats

I think this is a storm in a teacup. Targeted advertising is the way of the future.  You want your messages to go to those who might be interested in them.  The shotgun approach which is still normal ends up with people being exposed to advertising messages that only annoy them.  Targeted advertising reduces the annoyance of unwanted messages and ensures that your messages are delivered in a useful way.  But targeted advertising requires information on who is interested in what.  And getting that information is what they are talking about below

Facebook allowed the Obama campaign to access the personal data of users during the 2012 campaign because they supported the Democratic candidate according to a high ranking staffer.

Carol Davidsen, who worked as the media director at Obama for America and has spoken about this in the past, explained on Twitter that she and her team were able to ingest massive amounts of information from the social network after getting permission from Facebook users to access their list of friends.

'Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing,' wrote Davidsen.

She wrote that, not only did Facebook not try to stop them, but the company said they'd made a special exception for them.

'They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,' she tweeted.

Davidsen was then careful to note: 'I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side.' 

Davidsen posted this in the wake of the uproar over Cambridge Analytica, and their mining of information for the Trump campaign.

The revelations, if true, mean that Obama's campaign used similar tactics to those of Cambridge Analytica, which worked on President Donald Trump's election campaign, and reportedly harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users.

Members of Congress called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify about Facebook's actions on Monday in the wake of the revelation.

Meanwhile, British privacy regulators are seeking a warrant to search the offices of the U.K.-based Cambridge Analytica as both US and European lawmakers demand an explanation of how the consulting firm gained access to the data. 

The news also saw Facebook shares closed down nearly 7.0 percent on Monday, wiping nearly $40 billion off its market value as investors worried that new legislation could damage the company's advertising business.

Facebook said on Monday it had hired forensic auditors from the firm Stroz Friedberg to investigate and determine whether Cambridge Analytical still had the data.

'Auditors from Stroz Friedberg were on site at Cambridge Analytic's London office this evening,' the company said in a statement late Monday. 'At the request of the UK Information Commissioner´s Office, which has announced it is pursuing a warrant to conduct its own on-site investigation, the Strop Friedberg auditors stood down.' 

Yet the Obama campaign may have harvested information from millions during the 2012 run.

Of course, the biggest difference is that those signing up to the Obama campaign did so knowingly. While with Cambridge Analytic, users were told they were contributing to an academic research project. That information was then passed to the Trump campaign.

But that doesn't mean the friends of the Obama supporters consented to have their details used in their data mining.

The New York Times Magazine reported how the campaign had a list of a million people who had signed into the campaign website through Facebook.

To do so, they were prompted to agree to grant the campaign permission to access their Facebook friends list, photos and other personal information. 

Another prompt, which most people also agreed to, asked for them to grant access to their news feed.

Through these prompts, the campaign had access to millions of people, and their interests, and friends - who they could note down as potential donors, unregistered voters and persuadable votes - to target in specific campaigns.

One staffer said that once a supporter signed up through Facebook, it would take them mere seconds to go through their friends' lists, match them with votes lists, and then they would go through photos - trying to weed out old girlfriends and college friends who could share their political beliefs.

The campaign reportedly mined data from 15 million Facebook users, which triggered alarms at the social media giant, but the company always decided that the campaign had not violated its privacy and data rules.

SOURCE 

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Jaw dropping revelation: Benghazi Hero Reveals What Comey and McCabe’s FBI Did to Him

When it was announced Friday evening that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had been fired on the recommendation of both the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, there were plenty of “hot takes” from politicians and media figures on both the right and left.

However, according to BizPac Review, the hottest take of all in regard to McCabe’s termination may have come from one of the heroes who emerged from the deadly 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, Kris “Tanto” Paronto.

Paronto, a former U.S. Army Ranger who was a security contractor in Benghazi at the time of the attack and helped fend off repeated waves of assaults by terrorists at the U.S. consulate and nearby CIA annex, took to Twitter to make his feelings known in regard to McCabe, as well as former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan.

He began with a tweet which eviscerated McCabe’s rebuttal claiming he had been “singled out” in an effort to “slander” him and the FBI in general by President Donald Trump and his administration.

Paronto tweeted, “Slander the FBI and Law Enforcement?! You’ve got to be s—-ing me Andy. You, James and your @BarackObama appointed syndicate brought nothing but lies, politics, corruption & disgrace to a once great FBI. @Comey #AndrewMcCabe #LockThemUp.”

But it was the tweet he sent immediately following that which really garnered attention, as he appeared to indicate that partisan members of the FBI attempted to slap him and the other team members from Benghazi with excessive use of force charges, presumably in relation to their use of deadly force to defend the consulate and CIA annex from repeated attacks.

“By the way, as you’re on your way out I want to thank you, James and your @HillaryClinton supporting hacks at the @FBI for trying to pin excessive force use on myself and my team after coming home from Benghazi. You all are the worst scum of human. @Comey #SorryNotSorry,” the Benghazi hero tweeted.

That astonishing assertion — that he and other Benghazi heroes were targeted for legal reprisal by partisan hacks at the FBI — cannot be independently verified at this time. But it will be interesting to see if any further information in regard to this claim is shared by Paronto or one of his teammates, or perhaps even the upcoming DOJ-OIG report which has been looking into allegations of FBI misconduct.

But Paronto wasn’t quite done yet, as he then set his sights on Comey. He posted a tweet in response to the veiled threat issued to Trump by the former director that Comey’s own version of events would be heard by the American people “very soon” — as in, as soon as his lucrative and profitable book tour kicks off.

“Still beating your ‘honorable’ drum James?? Yea, because your words hold so much truth after lying continually & protecting the criminal @HillaryClinton. Say what you want, I won’t believe a word of it. You have zero integrity which you earned. @Comey #believeyourownBS,” Paronto tweeted.

Nor did he let the more open and unhinged threat against Trump from Brennan slide either, as he tweeted a short time later, “Showing your true partisan colors that you took into the @CIA, a govt organization that should be politically neutral. Being nominated by @BarackObama though it should come as no surprise. You put #politicsbeforepatriots.”

This man knows a thing or two more than the average government bureaucrat about such things as honor, patriotism and service to country, and he isn’t the least bit afraid to let the partisan hacks who have infested the bureaucratic deep state know exactly how he feels about their duplicitous actions.

Hopefully more information will emerge in the near future to validate and support his claim of being targeted by those same slimy hacks in the aftermath of the Benghazi terror attack, now that a nonpartisan and less vindictive rule of law is being restored.

SOURCE 

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Israel Demands That Left-wing Groups Disclose Funding Sources, Activists’ Personal Details

Organizations that facilitate meetings between Israelis and Palestinians must now provide extensive information in order for the Palestinians to be granted entry permits to Israel

The Israeli army has started asking left-wing groups that arrange meetings between Israelis and Palestinians for large quantities of information about their activities, funding sources and media efforts.

SOURCE 

In America Leftists have managed to force various conservative organizations to make their donor lists public. They use that information to harass donors -- with the  Brendan Eich case being a well known example -- and thus discourage others from donating. But the Left  are not liking having the same thing done to them in Israel

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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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States Win Another Big Case Against Obamacare

Hans von Spakovsky

In a decision that has gotten almost no media attention, six states led by Texas have won another round against the Obama administration implementation of Obamacare.

Judge Reed O’Connor, a federal judge in Texas, threw out the Obama administration’s imposition of a federal fee or tax on states as a condition of continuing to receive Medicaid funds. O’Conner ruled March 5 that the fee violates the non-delegation doctrine of the Constitution and the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.

The 2010 Obamacare law imposed a “health insurance providers fee” on medical insurers to help pay for the subsidies provided by the federal government to individuals purchasing health insurance. However, the law specifically exempted states from having to pay this fee.

Texas and the other states who filed this lawsuit against the federal government in 2015 provide a majority of Medicaid services for their residents by contracting with, and paying a monthly fee to, managed care organizations, which then provide health care to eligible Medicaid beneficiaries.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a component of the Department of Health and Human Services, must approve all such state contracts for health care services. In 2014, the agency promulgated a regulation that requires that states pay managed care organizations an “actuarially sound rate.”

However, the regulation delegates the decision of what is an “actuarially sound rate” to a private organization, the Actuarial Standards Board, which sets practice standards for private actuaries.

Ignoring the statutory exemption from paying the fee that was provided to the states in the Obamacare law, the Actuarial Standards Board enacted a rule stating that the “actuarially sound rate” paid by the states to their Medicaid-managed care organizations must include their portion of the health insurance providers fee.

The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services refused to approve any state contract that did not comply with this requirement.

We are talking substantial sums of money here. According to the judge in this case, Texas alone appropriated $244 million to pay this fee in fiscal years 2016 and 2017. Other states in the lawsuit “likewise provide Medicaid to millions of their citizens at the cost of a considerable portion of their annual budgets.”

O’Connor found that over “the next decade, the federal government will collect between $13 and $14.9 billion” from all 50 states paying the fee. According to the IRS, Congress placed a moratorium on the fee for 2017 and 2019, but not for 2018. So the fee remains on the books.

While the court found that the health insurance providers fee, which O’Connor labeled a “tax,” is constitutional, the regulation issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that delegated “to a private entity the authority to decide who must pay this tax” violates the non-delegation doctrine.

O’Connor goes through a very interesting and illustrative history of the non-delegation doctrine, which “remains a cornerstone in the constitutional architecture of free government” to the frustration of “modern liberals.”

In essence, the non-delegation doctrine “stems from the very first clause of the Constitution, which reads: ‘All legislative Powers … shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.’” Thus, Congress cannot delegate or transfer to others its “essential legislative function.”

This “structural feature of the Constitution … exists to protect democratic deliberation, executive accountability, and individual liberty.” The framers “enshrined” this doctrine in “our charter because the framers, drawing from the deep wells of their Western heritage, recognized it as an axiom of just government.”

The most difficult determination of whether the non-delegation doctrine has been violated is when courts are reviewing the actions of federal agencies under their authorizing statutes. In those cases, “courts must distinguish between unlawful delegation of legislative power and lawful delegation of policy judgement,” according to O’Connor. It “is inherently difficult to draw this distinction and identify an unlawful legislative delegation by Congress to an executive agency.”

However, this case does not present such a dilemma concluded O’Connor because here, the power to determine whether a tax should be imposed was delegated to a private party. In such cases, “there is not even a fig leaf of constitutional delegation.”

While legislative delegations to executive agencies “threaten liberty by undermining democratic accountability … legislative delegations to private entities are even more dangerous” because they “create a double layer of unaccountability.”

The legislative power of Congress has been passed “to an unelected agency, and then by the agency to an unelected private entity.” And that “private entity is not subject to term limits, appropriations, impeachment, or removal, and neither holds a commission nor takes an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

In addition to this constitutional violation, O’Connor found that the imposition of this tax violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the promulgation of rules and regulations by federal agencies.

According to O’Connor, the tax went beyond the statutory authority of the Obamacare law: “there is no genuine dispute of material fact that [the regulation] is ‘in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations, or short of statutory right.’”

This ruling wipes out the ability of the federal government to collect billions of dollars from the states that it has been using to subsidize Obamacare. And this is not the end of the story.

A new lawsuit has just been filed—in the same federal court where O’Connor presides—by 20 states alleging that Obamacare is no longer constitutional because the tax cut bill signed into law by President Donald Trump on Dec. 22, 2017, eliminated the tax penalty imposed on individuals who don’t comply with the individual mandate.

Because the Supreme Court only upheld Obamacare as constitutional based on the taxing authority of Congress, the states argue that its constitutional underpinning is gone.

Piece by piece, year by year, Obamacare is slowly being taken apart by both litigation and legislation like the 2017 tax cut bill that eliminated the tax penalty on the individual mandate.

But members of Congress would do well to return to their abandoned effort to repeal Obamacare in its entirety in order to provide Americans with a replacement that supports their needs.

SOURCE

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Mike Pompeo might be the only guy Trump trusts

The busiest guy in Washington, DC, right now is Mike Pompeo. Shuttling from the halls of Congress to CIA headquarters in Langley and, soon enough, back across the Potomac to Foggy Bottom, the former congressman from Kansas and current secretary of state-designate is rapidly becoming the Henry Kissinger of the Trump administration — the man for all jobs, in all seasons.

Pompeo’s long-bruited selection to replace Rex Tillerson is an inspired choice. He’s a rising star with an impeccable résumé (graduated first in his class at West Point, degree from Harvard Law, military vet), a no-nonsense manner and a capacity to get things done. Even better, he’s fully in synch with President Trump’s foreign-policy goals and outlook, which sees China, not Russia, as America’s principal global competitor, views the Iran nuclear deal as subject to immediate renegotiation or cancellation and is ready to go nose-to-nose with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

At State, Pompeo, who in just 14 months has helped refocus the CIA from its partisan activism under former chief John Brennan and back toward dispassionate information gathering, will pick up where Tillerson left off, continuing to streamline and downsize the bloated diplomatic ranks and bring the notoriously independent department, heavily populated with anti-Trump personnel, back under some semblance of White House control. Historically, State has always been far to the left of any given administration, even liberal ones — it sees its job as representing the world to America, instead of vice versa — and it’s long past time it was reined in.

Most important, Pompeo shares Trump’s politically incorrect vision for America’s place in the world — assertive, confident and indifferent to international opinion when it doesn’t suit America’s best interests. Like his boss, Pompeo would rather be respected, and even feared, than loved. In a world where America is surrounded by enemies, the days of “soft power” are over. Blunt talk from America’s top diplomat is going to be the norm, not the exception.

And so the Trump housecleaning continues. The recent personnel changes predictably have some squawking about “chaos” in the White House, but in this case one man’s chaos is another’s reorganization. Trump entered office with no experience in politics and no DC Rolodex — who can be surprised that it’s taken him a year to finally find his footing?

Further, White House staff shuffles — economic adviser Gary Cohn is out, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was cashiered on Friday, two days short of retirement, and there are once again widespread reports that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster will soon be forced to step down — are nothing new. Ronald Reagan’s second term was highlighted by the job switch between Treasury Secretary Don Regan and Chief of Staff James Baker, and even Barack Obama’s administration saw turnovers in the chief of staff, communications director, press secretary and national security adviser, among other posts. They too were accused of “chaos” by their political opponents at the time.

Trump may be acting more quickly than his predecessors, but given the exigencies, why wait? The president has already announced his intent to run again in 2020, so the faster the better.

With Pompeo’s elevation to indispensable-man status, look for the Trump White House to become even more direct in pursuit of its international and domestic goals. For one thing, the elevation of Gina Haspel, Pompeo’s deputy at CIA, would ensure that the agency remains on course. Within the intelligence community, Haspel is regarded as a consummate professional, and the only surprise is that after keeping a very low profile for her entire career, she’s willing to enter the public arena. You can bet that her support for rendition and enhanced interrogation techniques will become a major issue in her Senate confirmation hearings. Look for her to finally put the argument to rest with a spirited defense of America’s fight against Islamic terrorism.

Confirmation hearings for Pompeo are scheduled for next month, and they could be rocky. Already, gadfly Sen. Rand Paul has said he’ll vote against Pompeo, which means the nominee will need at least some Democratic support to win his vote in the Senate. And coming on the heels of a string of election losses in Alabama, Virginia and last week in Pennsylvania, the administration has been forced on the defensive as it heads into the midterms later this year.

Still, Trump and Pompeo are unlikely to be swayed by transient public opinion or the carping of the Democrats and the dwindling ranks of the “never Trumpers” on the right. The job of the secretary of state — like that of all Cabinet appointees — is to serve the president honestly and forthrightly and let the voters decide how they like it at the next election. By that standard, Mike Pompeo is just the man for the job.

SOURCE

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The absurd Haaretz

Haaretz is well-known as Israel's version of the NYT but sometimes they get so absurd as to be amusing.  The opening salvo of one of their recent stories is below.  It accuses Trump of being a DANGER to Israel:

Netanyahu Puts Israel’s Fate in Hands of U.S President Dubbed ‘Serious Threat to National Security’

Trump’s dismissal of Tillerson and McCabe marked by vindictive cruelty that borders on sadism

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the security cabinet last week that he believes U.S. President Donald Trump intends to abandon the Iran nuclear deal in May. His tone, presumably, was approving.

SOURCE

One wonders what you have to do for Haaretz to see you as a friend of Israel.  You can't be a conservative, obviously.  They are all "Nazis"

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Prominent Scot defends Russian broadcaster

Alex Salmond’s defence of Russia Today will have delighted the Kremlin regardless of whether he has editorial independence on his chat show, an expert on the country has said.

Robert Orttung, a professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, said that Moscow was getting “bang for their buck” out of RT’s relationship with Mr Salmond.

He defended the channel on his weekly chat show but the former MP was facing renewed calls to cut ties with the channel. Mr Salmond said that he had never been told what to say on his show, and claimed RT was not a propaganda station. He also compared it to the BBC, ITV and Sky, saying all had breached the Ofcom code on occasion.

SOURCE

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Israel destroys new Hamas tunnel in Gaza

The Israeli military said Sunday it destroyed a tunnel built by the Hamas militant group.

Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, a military spokesman, said the tunnel was intended to connect to an old one that Israel partly destroyed in the southern Gaza Strip during the 2014 war. He said it appeared to be the first case of Hamas trying to ‘‘recycle’’ part of its devastated network.

Conricus said Israel has been following Hamas’s progress for some time and that the targeted tunnels will now be impossible to rebuild. Conricus called it a ‘‘futile effort’’ by the Islamic militants and a waste of resources that could be used to aid Gaza residents.

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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McCabe Cracks, Throws Comey Under Bus, Accuses of Perjury

Disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired Friday night, two days prior to his official retirement with full benefits, by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on recommendations from both the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General.

And it looks like he might not want to go down alone.

McCabe was fired for allegedly lying to federal investigators and for making alleged unauthorized disclosures to the media about sensitive investigations. Basically, he is alleged to have “lacked candor” with investigators about making anonymous leaks to a Wall Street Journal reporter about the status of the Clinton Foundation investigation in 2016.

In what could only be described as an already prepared statement, McCabe released a letter shortly after his termination that attempted to give his side of the story and asserted that he had been “singled out” by a vindictive President Donald Trump for removal, a laughable claim given the recommendations of the Obama-era-initiated inspector general’s investigation led by the Obama-appointed IG and career bureaucrats at the FBI’s OPR.

But there was something else in McCabe’s statement that caught the eye of law professor Jonathan Turley, who described in The Hill how McCabe appeared to have contradicted his former boss, former FBI Director James Comey, and essentially accused him of committing perjury.

In dispute of the allegations of unauthorized leaks to the media, McCabe wrote, “I chose to share with a reporter through my public affairs officer and a legal counselor. As deputy director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that. It was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter.”

Turley pointed out that since Comey was the director at that time, McCabe’s claim that his leaks were authorized — or at least done with the knowledge of — his boss would run completely counter to testimony delivered under oath by Comey in May 2017 during a congressional hearing.

In that hearing, Comey was asked directly by Sen. Chuck Grassley if he himself had “ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation” or if he had “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation,” to which Comey had replied without hesitation “Never” and “No.”

Thus, we now know that either Comey or McCabe has lied about the leaks to The Wall Street Journal reporter. If Comey told Congress the truth that he never authorized any leaks to the media, then McCabe just lied and threw Comey under the bus to save his own skin.

Likewise, if McCabe is telling the truth that he had permission to leak information to the reporter, then that means Comey lied under oath to Congress when he denied ever authorizing such leaks.

If it turns out that McCabe just lied, it represents little more than cornered rats biting each other as they attempt to flee a sinking ship, as he was already fired for lying and faces potential prosecution for such. What is one more charge in that case?

But if Comey is the one who lied, he stands to suffer more than McCabe from the exposure, as he is about to launch a lucrative book tour to promote his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership.”

Oh, the irony.

Furthermore, Comey is already facing scrutiny over how he handled the Clinton investigation as well as memos he allegedly wrote about his interactions with Trump and kept after he was fired, some of which were leaked to a friend in the media and which may contain classified information.

On top of that, Turley noted that if it were McCabe who lied and he somehow avoids prosecution for the crime, then he just inadvertently opened the door for President Donald Trump to issue a full pardon for former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who was forced by special counsel Robert Mueller to plead guilty to lying to investigators, a crime it appears McCabe just committed.

One of these two individuals — Comey or McCabe — was lying about leaks to the media, as they both can’t be telling contradictory truth about the same incident in question.

We will know for sure which is the case when the OIG report is released to the public and the full extent of alleged partisan misconduct of FBI leadership is revealed.

SOURCE 

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MSM Won’t Push SC Mass Killing Story Because It’s So Destructive to Their Narrative

Whenever there is a shooting in which three or more people are murdered, the mainstream media devotes ample coverage to the horrific crime in order to perpetuate the liberal agenda and push a narrative that guns are evil and must be strictly regulated, if not totally confiscated.

However, when an equally heinous mass murder occurs with a weapon other than a firearm, the media stays stunningly silent, largely because wall-to-wall coverage of the incident does nothing to further the gun control narrative, and may even work against it by revealing how a gun in the hands of a victim could have changed the terrible outcome.

Such is the case with a recent mass murder in South Carolina, in which WCSC reported that 22-year-old Lovequawn Scott has been charged with four counts of murder for the deaths of four family members in their home.

Astonishingly, police caught him attempting to flee the scene covered in blood when they arrived to check out a report from another concerned family member of a suspicious death.

The victims, who according to the county coroner all died of blunt force trauma, were identified as 72-year-old Joseph Manigault, 69-year-old Rose Manigault, 42-year-old Kenya Manigault and 15-year-old Faith Manigault.

The weapon believed to be used to slaughter them was not an “assault rifle” or shotgun or even a handgun, but a pair of dumbbells, which the suspect allegedly used to beat the four members of his family to death.

Nor is this the first time that the quadruple murder suspect has been in trouble with the law, as WMBF reported that Scott, who had been enrolled at Coastal Carolina University, was arrested by campus police in 2017 and charged with trespassing, possession of marijuana, unlawful possession of a handgun and carrying a weapon on school property.

But Scott’s rap sheet didn’t begin there, either. WPDE reported in Nov. 2016 that Scott had been arrested on a golf course and charged with a litany of crimes after an altercation with police.

In that incident, the burgeoning career criminal was charged with possession of Schedule IV drugs — Xanax pills, MDMA powder and marijuana — other drug offenses, four counts of receiving stolen goods, resisting arrest with a deadly weapon, breaking into a vehicle and the unlawful sale, delivery or possession of a handgun by a prohibited person.

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When confronted by police in that incident, he attempted to flee the scene, then attempted to pull a loaded handgun on the arresting officer in the scuffle. He was later found to be in possession of stolen goods believed to have come from at least eight separate breaking and entering of vehicles.

With regard to the murders, Bearing Arms took note of the lack of national coverage of this tragic and brutal crime.

Writer Tom Knighton pointed out that the media was most likely avoiding this story because it decisively runs counter to their standard anti-gun narrative.

Indeed, a semi-automatic rifle, shotgun or handgun in the possession of any of the four victims — whether the elderly grandparents, the suspect’s aunt or his young niece — could have saved some or all of the victims from their horrific fate at the hands of the much stronger career criminal who bludgeoned them all to death at his leisure.

Moreover, it proves that mass murder occurs whether or not the murder possesses or has access to a firearm.

Had the perpetrator of this atrocity used a gun in the murders, the media likely would have been all over it — though they probably would just as quickly have dropped it once the suspect’s lengthy rap sheet entered the conversation.

However, since he didn’t use a gun and doesn’t fit the profile of an angry National Rifle Association member, they have avoided it at all costs.

SOURCE 

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Even Under Right to Work, This Union Bullies Workers Into Submission

MADISON, Wis.—The United Auto Workers Local 833 chapter is worse than an unwanted house guest: It can’t take a hint, and it won’t take no for an answer.

In a burst of big labor thuggery, Local 833 has treated employees who decline union membership to a steady stream of harassment punctuated by not-so-subtle threats.

The union has done so despite Wisconsin’s status as a right-to-work state, where employees are free to choose—free of harassment and intimidation—whether they want to join a union.

Josh Herr, a Kohler Co. employee, says he has been repeatedly pressured by union leadership since he began his job in the plumbing fixture manufacturer’s pottery plant nearly eight months ago.

Herr on multiple occasions told Local 833’s steward and its president that he didn’t see any value in unions, that he didn’t want to automatically turn over a portion of his hard-earned paycheck to a group he doesn’t agree with.

The union chiefs didn’t care for Herr’s answers. He was told that if he didn’t join, the union couldn’t protect him from harassment.

The message wasn’t lost on Herr: Join or the union wouldn’t protect him from the union.

Tim Tayloe, Local 833’s president, called him at work and threatened him while he was doing his job, Herr claims.

“He said, ‘We really don’t like when people don’t join the union,’” Herr said. “He told me there were two other people in the pottery building who didn’t join the union and that nothing good happened to them.”

“He said, ‘I don’t want anything bad happening because you’re not joining,’” Herr added.

Herr found a sign on the back of the plant punch clock praising 19 Kohler workers who had started paying union dues. Each name was accompanied by a gold star.

In asterisks, the sign advised that “[s]ome scabs have decided to start paying dues again, they have a gold star after their names.”

At the bottom, written in red: “Pottery member that refuses to join the Union.” Joshua Herr, machine cast operator, the union sign boldly stated, is “Not a Union Brother.”

Tayloe accused Herr of lying, or at least “blowing this out of proportion.” He claims he didn’t authorize the sign, and neither did his union.

“Whatever he’s up to, I hope he’s having fun. None of that happened,” the local president told Maclver News.

And regarding his little talk with Herr, Tayloe said in a statement that he is “constantly walking the floor of the plant to have discussions with people from the hourly workforce.”

“These discussions include the benefits of union membership and union representation. As part of these discussions, the benefits of being a union member are discussed quite frequently,” he added.

Yes, yes, the benefits. Like the benefit of your money or your life? The benefit of not being harassed and intimidated by a union that insists on representing you? Those kinds of benefits?

Herr’s problems with the union underscore the fact that the fight for worker freedom isn’t over simply because a state enacts a right-to-work law, as Wisconsin did in 2015.

Bullies are bullies, no matter what the laws or rules say. Unions are replete with bullies who target dissenters, anyone who declines the “benefits” of membership. They do so under the premise that workers who chose not to pay union dues are getting a free ride on the “benefits” bus. It’s a protection racket that employees like Herr aren’t buying.

Kohler Co. has directed union management to the first page of its labor management agreement, which makes clear the stunts the union chiefs have been pulling are prohibited.

The bullying has stopped, for now.

Herr, at 24, has thick skin. He can handle the union games. He says he went public with his experiences because he knows there are other Kohler employees who have simply given in to the union because they didn’t want to deal with the aggravation, the harassment.

This time, Herr wants to make sure the union bosses finally get the message.

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.

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