BOTH RECENT SHOOTERS WERE LEFTISTS

Betts:

With their usual kneejerk reactions, the media were quick to blame the largely mythical white supremacists, people who don't even exist as any sort of identifiable group, as being the shooters.  But as usual, both shooters were in fact Leftists.  And a little digging soon revealed that truth.  But you had to get in quickly as Leftists rapidly changed the original sources to conceal the truth. Leftists lie as easily as they breathe

Connor Betts, the Dayton, Ohio mass shooter, was a self-described “leftist,” who wrote that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”

Betts’ Twitter profile read, “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” One tweet on his page read, “Off to Midnight Mass. At least the songs are good. #athiestsonchristmas.” The page handle? I am the spookster. On one selfie, he included the hashtags, “#selfie4satan #HailSatan @SatanTweeting.” On the date of Republican Sen. John McCain’s death, he wrote, “F*ck John McCain.” He also liked tweets referencing the El Paso mass shooting in the hours before Dayton. The Twitter page contains multiple selfies of Betts.

On Nov. 2, 2018, he wrote: “Vote blue for gods sake.”

Twitter has now suspended the Twitter page, removing it. It was up for several hours after the mass shooting.

SOURCE.  Breitbart has more

Crusius:

MyLife is an American information brokerage founded in 2002 as Reunion.com. MyLife gathers personal information through public records and other sources to automatically generate a “MyLife Public Page” for each person, described by MyLife as a “complete Wikipedia-like biography on every American.”

At 2:50 PM leftists changed his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Screenshot of the original:



President Trump allowed himself to be bullied by the media into condemning white supremcists but he shouldn't have bothered. He should have attributed the shootings to the seething anger that underlies Leftism. History has shown us that murder does not trouble Leftists at all -- as we see from the mass murders they carry out when they get untrammeled power -- in Russia, China etc

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

How Justin Trudeau lost his rock star shine

Justin Trudeau did little wrong in his supporters eyes during his first three years as Canada’s prime minister. In the fourth, his popularity has dropped so far his party may lose its majority in October elections.

A secretly taped call is one reason why. Just before Christmas, Canadian Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould turned on her iPhone voice recorder for a call with the country’s top bureaucrat, Michael Wernick. Mr. Trudeau and senior officials had already pressed her and her chief aide 20 times in calls, messages and in person to let a major Canadian firm avoid a criminal trial on bribery and fraud charges. She had resisted.

On the phone, Mr. Wernick said the company, SNC-Lavalin Group Inc., was considering selling itself or moving abroad, and Mr. Trudeau believed it should be given the chance to negotiate an out-of-court settlement.

Mr. Wernick, unaware of the recording, said: “I think he is going to find a way to get it done.” Ms. Wilson-Raybould didn’t relent: “This is going to look like nothing but political interference by the prime minister, by you, by everybody else that has been involved in this.”

That’s exactly how it looked to many Canadian voters when the recording surfaced after parliamentary hearings in February and March exposed details of the Trudeau government’s moves to advocate for the engineering-and-construction firm. Testimony in the hearings captivated the public and turned Ms. Wilson-Raybould into one of the most recognizable Canadian politicians outside Mr. Trudeau.

Now, several polls show Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals trailing the rival Conservative Party or in a statistical tie, after beginning 2019 with a comfortable lead. Nearly two-thirds of Canadians disapprove of the job he is doing, according to polls released in mid-July by Ipsos Public Affairs and Angus Reid Institute. They cite the SNC-Lavalin matter as a primary reason.

The Canadian leader, who had a rock-star following among progressives for championing clean governance -- and a promise to let women and ministers have more governing say -- had sided with a scandal-plagued company and overruled his attorney general, eventually moving her to a lower-profile position.

Based on current data, some pollsters say, the best Mr. Trudeau can expect from the election is a minority government needing another party’s support to govern. “If the election becomes a referendum on Justin Trudeau,” says Nik Nanos, head of Ottawa-based Nanos Research, “the Liberals may lose.”

A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s Office referred to Mr. Trudeau’s remarks in a March press conference that he regretted the erosion of trust between his office and Ms. Wilson-Raybould and has “learned a lot about how we can do better.” SNC-Lavalin, which has commented on some specifics of the case in past months, declined to answer queries last month.

Mr. Trudeau, his senior advisers and other government representatives have publicly said their discussions with Ms. Wilson-Raybould were to ensure she considered all legal options, with livelihoods of 9,000 SNC-Lavalin employees in Canada at stake.

“It is our job as parliamentarians to defend the interests of the communities we were elected to represent,” Mr. Trudeau said in the March press conference. “I stressed the importance of protecting Canadian jobs and reiterated that this issue was one of significant national importance.”

Ms. Wilson-Raybould says she remains puzzled by the pressure Mr. Trudeau’s office placed on her. “I know that there was a huge lobbying effort by that company,” she says. “But the motivations for the prime minister or all of those people that engaged with me in the way that they did? You’d have to ask them.”

Mr. Wernick declined to comment. In the parliamentary hearings, he said his phone call and other communications with Ms. Wilson-Raybould “were entirely appropriate, lawful, legal.”

SNC-Lavalin is based in Montreal, a portion of which Mr. Trudeau represents in the legislature. Aides in his office met 23 times with its representatives during a roughly three-year period between the Liberal government’s election in late 2015 and late 2018, lobbying records show.

That was nearly five times as many meetings SNC-Lavalin secured over the prior three years with aides to Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Compared with the Liberals, the company got little traction from the Harper administration, say people familiar with the firm and former members of the Harper government.

Members of Mr. Trudeau’s administration had personal ties with the company, a reminder of the tight circles that can make up the top levels of business and politics in Canada. SNC-Lavalin Chairman Kevin Lynch was Mr. Wernick’s boss between 2006 and 2009, when Mr. Lynch was Canada’s chief bureaucrat and Mr. Wernick was a top public servant. SNC-Lavalin said Mr. Lynch declined to be interviewed.

Fraud allegations: With about 10 billion Canadian dollars ($7.5 billion) in 2018 sales, SNC-Lavalin employs 50,000 world-wide. It is working on a nuclear-power plant in Britain, Nevada freeways and Riyadh’s subway.

In February 2015, Canadian police charged that SNC-Lavalin bribed Libyan officials and defrauded Libyan organizations between 2001 and 2011. SNC-Lavalin denied wrongdoing and said the acts in question were carried out by two employees without the company’s knowledge. A former SNC-Lavalin vice president pleaded guilty in Swiss court in 2014 to corruption-related charges linked to his activity in Libya.

Mr. Trudeau’s dust-up was over whether the company should face trial on the Libya charges. A criminal conviction could trigger a ban on SNC-Lavalin’s bidding on government contracts at home and abroad.

About a week after Mr. Trudeau was sworn in as prime minister, in November 2015, SNC-Lavalin’s CEO, Mr. Bruce, argued at a Montreal luncheon for a system letting companies reach out-of-court settlements without guilty pleas. Such mechanisms in the U.S. and U.K. let prosecutors suspend criminal charges in exchange for financial penalties, pledges to strengthen compliance and other measures.

Over the following years, the company lobbied Mr. Trudeau’s office, cabinet ministers and their aides, senior bureaucrats and opposition lawmakers, lobbying records show.

‘Politically interfering?’ About two weeks after prosecutors told SNC-Lavalin the trial would proceed, Ms. Wilson-Raybould met with Messrs. Trudeau and Wernick, according to parliamentary hearings. The meeting’s agenda was aboriginal policy, but the conversation swiftly turned to SNC-Lavalin.

Mr. Trudeau asked whether a solution could be found, given the jobs at stake, Ms. Wilson-Raybould testified, saying Mr. Wernick warned SNC-Lavalin would likely move its headquarters to London if an out-of-court settlement wasn’t an option.

An SNC-Lavalin spokesman in March said the company provided documents to prosecutors indicating a headquarters move was a worst-case scenario.

Mr. Trudeau reminded Ms. Wilson-Raybould he was an elected official from SNC-Lavalin’s home base, she testified, saying she responded: “Are you politically interfering with my role, my decision?” Mr. Trudeau backed off, she said. He has publicly confirmed the thrust of her account.

Through the fall, officials in Mr. Trudeau’s office pressed Ms. Wilson-Raybould and her chief aide to change course, according to Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s testimony. On Dec. 19, she and Mr. Wernick spoke in the recorded call. She told him she realized her refusal would have consequences.

“I knew that this situation was coming to a head,” says Ms. Wilson-Raybould, explaining her recording. “This was an extraordinary situation that required me to ensure that I protected myself.”

Three weeks later, while Ms. Wilson-Raybould was vacationing in Bali, Mr. Trudeau told her she would be demoted to heading veteran’s affairs, she said in testimony.

On Feb. 7, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported allegations Ms. Wilson-Raybould had faced pressure to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case before her demotion, sparking a media flurry and criticism from opposition lawmakers. Mr. Trudeau initially said the allegations were false. Ms. Wilson-Raybould quit her post heading veterans affairs five days later.

At the urging of the opposition parties, members of Canada’s parliamentary justice committee agreed Feb. 13 to hear testimony from certain witnesses about the allegations. Those hearings officially ended March 19 after the Liberal majority on the committee voted to cease calling witnesses and hear additional testimony, arguing Canadians possessed the information required. Ms. Wilson-Raybould submitted the recording as additional evidence.

In April, Mr. Trudeau expelled Ms. Wilson-Raybould from his party’s caucus, saying trust had been broken by the recorded phone call. Mr. Wernick in March announced his retirement from the civil service, citing fallout from the uproar.

A judge ruled on May 29 the case against SNC-Lavalin could head to trial. On June 11, the company said Mr. Bruce would retire immediately. In a LinkedIn note, he said his family had moved “and I was keen to join them.”

Ms. Wilson-Raybould is running for re-election, as an independent lawmaker.

SOURCE 

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

Finally, a reasonable Democrat

Tulsi Gabbard is almost a female Donald Trump --which means that the Democrats won't nominate her -- luckily for Donald Trump

The liberal establishment is so scared of Tulsi Gabbard that they’ve convinced themselves she’s an unwitting stooge of Russia, being pushed by Putin’s evil online robots to destroy America from within.

It’s ceaseless. ‘Russia’s propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard’, declares NBC News. What all this nonsense reveals is that Russophobic conspiracy theories play a really important role for dazed Hillary-era centrists. They are now the main means through which these people try to make sense of a political world that no longer conforms to their tastes or their ideology. So just as they used the Russian-bots rubbish to explain why Trump beat Hillary, now they use it to explain why a candidate who, horror of horrors, is opposed to US military intervention overseas is proving popular with viewers and voters. Given that Gabbard’s worldview runs so counter to theirs – on war, on free speech, even on identity politics – the only way they can explain her presence in politics is as a result of foreign, fascistic meddling. That tells us far more about their own political arrogance than it does about Gabbard’s Russian fanbase.

In a sense, they’re right to be scared of Gabbard. She feels like a genuinely fresh force in Democratic politics. A former soldier who served in Iraq, and now the Democratic member of the House of Representatives for the 2nd congressional district of Hawaii, she represents a challenge both to the old militaristic US establishment and to the newer, more woke wing of the establishment.

She is best known for her principled opposition to American militarism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. ‘We were all lied to’, she said of the Iraq War in the Detroit debate. She described the spun stories about Saddam Hussein’s WMD and connections with al-Qaeda as a ‘betrayal of the American people’. Even more stingingly, she argues that far from defeating al-Qaeda in the post-9/11 period, the US has ended up backing al-Qaeda-derived forces, especially through its support for so-called ‘rebels’ in Syria who, as Gabbard rightly says, are in fact dangerous Islamist groups.

She gets a huge amount of flak for her anti-war stance. Establishment figures denounce her as an ‘Assad apologist’. She met with Bashar al-Assad during a fact-finding mission to Syria in 2017, and ever since she’s been called a friend of dictators by pro-militarist elements in the US. Kamala Harris, reeling from Gabbard’s attack on her authoritarian record as attorney general of California during this week’s debate, raised the Assad thing when the debate was over. And yet, as Gabbard has explained numerous times, she met Assad only because she wants to gather as much information as possible, from as many sources as possible, on how destructive the West’s ‘regime-change wars’ can be. Establishment stiffs simply fear the prospect of a president who would refuse to wage war overseas. ‘Tulsi Gabbard’s Syria record shows why she can’t be president’, sniffs the Washington Post.

If Gabbard horrifies the old warmongering elites, she worries, at least, the new woke elites. It is notable that unlike other young female political representatives, most notably the so-called ‘squad’, Gabbard is rarely cheered for her background. She was the first-ever Hindu and Samoan America to enter Congress. She’s the first Hindu to run for president. But you’ll be waiting a long time for the kind of people who never stop going on about the fact Ilhan Omar was one of the first two Muslim women to be elected to Congress to congratulate Gabbard on her identity achievements.

Not that Gabbard would want praise on that basis. Indeed, she’s a critic of both identity politics and political correctness, which is precisely why the woke are so iffy about her. She lists political correctness alongside overreaching government and Big Tech as one of the great threats to freedom of speech in 21st-century America. And she says of identity politics that it is ‘being used to kind of tear people apart’ when we should be ‘remembering and recognising what unites us’.

Her commitment to challenging PC and its strangling of open debate extends to criticising then president Barack Obama for his refusal to use the phrase ‘radical Islamic terrorism’. We should never cower from using the word Islamic in relation to Islamic terrorism because ‘it is important that you identify your enemy, you know who they are, you call them by their name, and you understand the ideology that’s driving them’, she said. Such moral clarity is rare in a time when politicians lamely insist that Islamist terrorism ‘has nothing to do with Islam’, as if such clipped, self-censoring utterances are ever going to solve anything.

Gabbard also dislikes Big Tech’s enforcement of PC speech codes online. Social-media giants have become a ‘threat to our freedom of speech’, she says. Their drowning-out, or outright banning, of both radical right and radical left voices is a threat to open debate, she says, and even ‘controversial’ and ‘distasteful’ views should enjoy freedom of expression.

Her anti-authoritarianism was on full display in her showdown with Kamala Harris this week. She dragged Harris for her record as Californian attorney general from 2011 to 2017. During that time, thousands of people were incarcerated for marijuana possession (and yet Harris effectively admitted that she herself has smoked dope), numerous people were kept in prison for unnecessarily long periods of time, and Harris withheld evidence that would have freed someone from death row. Gabbard’s confrontation with Harris won her many new fans and also helped to puncture the shallow identitarian cheering of Harris that has been happening on Twitter and elsewhere for the past few weeks.

Gabbard is a candidate worth supporting. She wants the US to reject identitarian division and ‘reclaim patriotism’, she wants an end to American wars, she likes freedom of speech, and she’s not afraid to call Islamist terrorism by its name.

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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

The problem with Jordan Peterson

Andrea Seaman says he’s not nearly as pro-freedom and pro-reason as he thinks he is. But her criticisms are amazingly poorly informed.  Libel has never been protected free speech so when Peterson sues for libel, that tells you NOTHING about his attitude to free speech.

And his tracing of morality to evolution is a perfectly respectable idea in moral philosophy, indeed the increasingly dominant one.

And the fact that he has certain religious and spiritual ideas is again common among people with  scientific interests. That religion is incompatible with science is an old canard that religious people routinely reject.

So Andrea is using some very cheap shots indeed


Jordan Peterson, formerly an obscure professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has become famous throughout the West. His popularity began with his opposition to oppressive legislation in Canada, which he argues can force people to use certain gender pronouns, and it peaked with the now famous Channel 4 News interview and the release of his book 12 Rules for Life. Peterson presents himself as a defender of science and reason against so-called social-justice warriors and the postmodern left, people who refuse to accept biological realities and the principle of free speech.

His rhetoric is certainly very powerful. His refusal to bow down before a torrent of criticism, from those attempting unjustly to paint him as a right-wing extremist, is inspiring. Combine this with his passionate entreaties towards men to ‘grow the hell up’, take on responsibility for their own lives, and stand straight with their shoulders back, and you can sense why he receives massive support from many young white men who feel besieged by a left that routinely labels them racist, homophobic and pillars of ‘the patriarchy’. This is Peterson’s positive side. Who can disagree with telling men – steeped in our modern culture of snowflakery, low ambitions and self-pity – to man up?

But there are two major problems with Peterson. First, his commitment to free speech is not nearly as strong as he thinks it is. Although he fiercely opposes hate-speech legislation and campus censorship, he has also launched a $1.5million defamation suit against Wilfrid Laurier University because some of its staff compared him to Hitler. Lindsay Shepherd, then a graduate student and teaching assistant at the university, recorded the comments, which were made in a private meeting, and then released them online. Peterson says his lawsuit is intended to ‘convince careless university professors and administrators… to be much more circumspect in their actions and their words’. So watch what you say, professors and administrators of Canada, or Peterson will set the law upon you!

He has since filed a second defamation suit for $1.75million against Wilfrid Laurier University. He argues that the university’s statement about his first lawsuit was libellous: the university claims that his original suit was unjustified because the publicity achieved by the exposés of the unfounded allegations against Peterson boosted his reputation. It also points out that his motivation in pursuing the suit is authoritarian, as demonstrated by his warning that professors and administrators should be more ‘circumspect’ in their words, and that, if anything, Peterson should be suing Shepherd, given she is the one who released the recording.

Peterson also allegedly threatened to sue Kate Manne, an associate professor at Cornell University in the US, the online news platform Vox and Cornell University, all for an interview Manne gave to Vox. In it, she described Peterson’s ideas as misogynistic, among other unflattering epithets. Given Peterson earns millions through his YouTube channel and his book deals, it seems unlikely he is pursuing these cases for the money. Maybe he, who likes to lament the thin-skinned nature of our society, just can’t handle criticism?

The second problem with Peterson is the weakness of his commitment to science and reason. He may continuously talk of ‘the scientific literature’ and the realities of our biological condition, but his understanding of (if not commitment to) science is fundamentally flawed.

Take his discussion of rats. He can’t stop referring to something apparently discovered by the neuroscientist and psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp – that in rats’ brains there is a ‘play circuit’. So, if one little rat play-wrestles with a bigger rat, relays Peterson, then the little rat will stop playing with the big one if the latter does not allow the former to win a certain number of times. This, he claims, is evidence of how ethics emerges out of nature. Ethics, he proposes, is something natural in our brains, as in those of rats. Morality, he suggests, is a product of our neural activity, which tells us how to act.

Peterson here is blurring the line between science and morality. It may well be that the small rat stops playing if the big rat beats it every time. But that is simply how it is, not how it should be. The former is the domain of science, the latter is the domain of ethics. To see ethics in the mechanical workings of nature and unfree beasts is as unscientific as discovering the hand of God in His supposed creation. Morality is simply not an object of scientific investigation. Its existence and properties cannot be proven or disproven by empirical methods.

In this, Peterson reveals that he is mired in scientism, rather than science – and a particularly strange form of scientism at that. He mixes investigation of the material world with investigation of the non-material world, to the detriment of both. He has suggested that ancient depictions of entwined snakes foreshadowed the discovery of the DNA double helix. Here spiritual experiences apparently offer insight into the real nature of fundamental parts of our biological being, and vice versa. It’s almost Deepak Chopra.

For a man so fixated on being academically rigorous, fact-based and reasoned, Peterson talks a lot about spirits, gods, dreams and mysticism. He has suggested that psychedelics can bring on ‘transcendent’ and ‘metaphysical’ experiences. This type of superstition was the very thing the Age of Reason tried to extinguish. Peterson fatally combines science with mysticism. Often when he talks about science he becomes mystical, and then tries to back it up with deep evolutionary or scientific ‘truths’.

It is invigorating to see Peterson fill up stadiums with many people of my generation, capturing their positive spirit of rebellion against PC orthodoxy. But we should be sceptical next time he presents himself as a warrior for free speech, or cites ‘the scientific literature’, or some primeval spirit or other. He’s not nearly as pro-freedom and pro-reason as he thinks he is.

SOURCE 

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

Nationalism, Rightly Understood, Is a Necessary Ingredient of Political Success
   
Nationalism has a bad name. For many Americans, mention of the word summons up visions of Hitler and Nazism. Some condemn nationalism as thoughtless bragging that your nation is better than others, which should be discouraged just as second graders are told not to brag, lest they hurt classmates’ feelings.

Historical and international perspective is supplied by one of the conveners of the well-attended National Conservatism conference in Washington last month, Israeli think tank head Yoram Hazony, in his 2018 book, “The Virtue of Nationalism.” Hazony argues that nationalism first emerged in the northwest corner of Europe, in Tudor England and in the Dutch republic rebelling against the overlordship of the king of Spain. These were small maritime nations, growing rich through international trade even while threatened by massive monarchies. In the years of religious wars, they were the most religiously diverse and tolerant polities in Christendom.

Hazony contrasts nationalist states with what he calls imperialist polities, which include international organizations such as the United Nations and political entities such as the Holy Roman Empire, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which was not just trying to govern Germany but to conquer “untermensch” peoples. As an Israeli, he is very much aware that his successful nationalist state is under constant attack from such imperialist bodies.

Nationalist states, he argues, can provide peaceful havens for those of differing cultural views and economic interests who share a common citizenship. They will, he argues, protect their individual liberties and (here some readers will disagree) abjure external conquests. “The best political order that is known to us,” he writes, “is an order of independent national states.”

This is congruent with the words of two of President Trump’s thoughtful speeches, delivered in Warsaw, Poland, in July 2017 and in Normandy on D-Day this year. In them he pays generous tribute to other nations’ nationalism and how they have advanced human liberty. It is also congruent with the rhetoric of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he tries to give effect to British voters’ decision to leave what, in Hazony’s terminology, is an increasingly imperialistic European Union.

Hazony seems to me on solid ground in arguing that nationalism, rightly understood, can be a force for good. Trump’s words on D-Day, and those of presidents before him on earlier anniversaries, should remind us that the Allies who cooperated in that enterprise were all led by nationalists — America’s Franklin Roosevelt; Britain’s Winston Churchill; France’s Charles de Gaulle; and the leaders of Canada, Poland, Norway and Australia.

One might add that an ally left unmentioned, the Soviet Union dictator Josef Stalin, temporarily portrayed himself as a nationalist rather than a communist to rally his people to fight on the Eastern Front even as democratic nationalists worked together to open the front on the West.

The nationalist sensibility is an important part of domestic partisan politics. In an article I wrote for The Public Interest in 1993, I argued that the political parties and political leaders of Western democracies partake, in varying proportions, in four different dispositions — religious, socialist, liberal and nationalist.

Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Religious parties come to grief when people abandon religion (like the Christian Democrats in largely secular Western Europe), and they struggle to amass majorities in religiously diverse nations like the United States.

Socialist parties’ weakness is that socialism just doesn’t work. When that became apparent in Britain, Margaret Thatcher controversially rolled back postwar Labour Party policies in the 1980s. More quietly, Scandinavian nations rolled back their welfare states in the 1990s. Now venerable social democratic parties have all but disappeared in Germany, France and Italy.

Liberal parties — liberal in the 19th-century sense: secular and free market — have sometimes governed effectively but proved incapable of defending themselves against destruction. Britain’s Liberals, dominant in 1916, were ground to bits between the Conservatives and Labour in 1924. The dominant secular party in Italy was swept from power by Mussolini’s brownshirts in 1922, and the one in France by Hitler’s troops in 1940.

Only parties with a strong nationalist strain have proved to be lasting — including, over most of their histories, America’s Democratic and Republican parties. Today we’re told that Donald Trump’s Republicans are dangerously and self-destructively nationalist. Headline speakers at Hazony’s conference — tech mogul Peter Thiel, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, national security adviser John Bolton, Sen. Josh Hawley — seemed to disagree. And many observers are wondering whether Democratic presidential candidates’ enthusiasm for open borders is a politically hazardous trashing of a sensible nationalism long essential for political success.

SOURCE 

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

Don't worry, the South is still booming

The North loses residents and economic activity to the low-tax South

Anyone who understands real estate knows it’s all about three things: location, location, location. In recent decades, many of the hottest locations in the country have been in Dixie. Much of this growth has come at the expense of the Northern states. In the last several decades, the North has lost more than 5 million residents and hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity to the low-tax and business-friendly Southern states.

Miami, Dallas, Charlotte and Nashville are the happening cities, replacing struggling places like Chicago, Hartford, New York, Baltimore and Providence.  We would urge people to go to our friend Travis Brown’s wonderful book “How Money Walks,” which shows the places Americans are moving to and from.

But now we are told by liberal think tanks and the media that the South’s ascent has stalled out. The Wall Street Journal recently announced in a front page headline: “The South Is Falling Behind.” After several decades of speedy development, things have supposedly changed. Over the last decade, the WSJ says, the southeast “recorded the country’s slowest growth in output and wages … and the highest unemployment rate.” The implication is that low tax rates don’t work anymore as a magnet.

Not so fast. These kinds of stories don’t take into account that the South isn’t monolithic. Some Southern states have low tax rates and others don’t. The four states with the best economic climate — Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — are all high-flyers, thank you. Three of these four, have no personal income tax and the 4th, North Carolina, has cut its income tax sharply.

These big four in the South have attracted 3.04 million net new residents from other states over just the past decade. That’s a 4.6 percent rise in population due to net migration from other states. Does that sound like a decline?

Contrast that performance with the four states of the apocalypse — Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. This group is in the worst fiscal condition in the nation, they are losing residents every day and they have among the highest taxes and the most anti-business policies.

These states lost 2.8 million people (6 percent of the population) over the past decade to other states and if you go to Texas or Florida you will meet lots of rich and middle class residents who came from one of these four states. Naples, Florida, for example, is now nicknamed Chicago South, because so many former windy city families now live there more than six months of the year. 

The big four in the South saw a 10.5 percent gains in jobs from 2007-17. The four northern states gained a meager 2.5 percent. For every job in these high tax state, the low tax states attracted four.

Over the last decade home values in the high-flying Southern states were up an average or 10 percent. In the loser states of the North home values fell. The loss of jobs and population and is now being reflected in declining home values in these Northern states. Nowhere is this collapse in home prices more evident than in Connecticut, where a cascade of tax increases have led to an exodus of millionaires. So much for the benefits of progressivism.

All these rumors of a southern slump are highly misleading. Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas are following a winning economic formula of low tax rates; right to work laws; business-friendly regulatory climate; and low costs. Anyone who thinks the boom in Dixie has ended needs to travel to places like Raleigh and Tampa and Houston and Chattanooga and see what’s happening with their own two eyes.

SOURCE 

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

TX. Austin's Mad Homeless Camping Policy

On June 20 the Austin City Council repealed ordinances prohibiting homeless camping around town. They had to move on or the police could cite them. Police oppose this policy and went into a low-level revolt. The people oppose this policy and have also gone into a low-level revolt.

The policy went into effect in a political blink on July 1. That very day, tent cities began popping up all over town. Those tent cities grew. A Twitter hashtag — #austinhomeless — grew up to chronicle the issues the city's residents now face.

Since my last article on this subject, a theory to explain the policy change has swept across Austin and a petition to stop the policy has appeared. I'll get to the theory later.

The petition is the work of Travis County Republican Party chairman Matt Mackowiak. Austin and Travis County are both deep blue. But this issue has some questioning their allegiance to a Democratic Party that is running the city over a cliff.

"I created the petition 15 days ago and we now have more than 20,000 signatures," Mackowiak told me. "The goal was to create an easy way for people to express their opposition to the Homeless Camping ordinance. We haven’t spent one cent on advertising. This thing has gone viral."

It has, and it's still accepting signatures.

"The Mayor and the City Council have needlessly threatened public safety, public health, tourism, and our economy," Mackowiak adds.

The hot Austin summer has seen tents and associated Baltimore-style filth sweep across town — and a grand unified theory to explain the indefensible is sweeping across town too.

The Austin City Council could amend or rescind the policy at its August meeting. Or, it could leave it in place. It's a safe bet the mayor will seek more money, paid for by taxpayers, which will make Austin that much more unaffordable. Cutting taxes and reducing spending to lighten the burden on taxpayers will not be on the agenda.

Mo money. Mo money. Mo money. Agenda items one, two and three.

"Our hope is they will end this disastrous policy on August 8. If they don’t, we will ratchet up the pressure considerably," Mackowiak says. We'll see.

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

The Asian Century Is Over

Beset by conflicts, stagnating economies, and political troubles, the region no longer looks set to rule the world -- says Michael Auslin.  It is a most iconoclastic article and  clearly makes some important points.

I am inclined to take a middle road on the matter.  Auslin is clearly right that cultural rigidities could hold China back and the failure of Japan to make much progress in the 21st century is a clear warning sign that Asian economies are far from miracle economies once they pass a certain point.  They approach an economic asymptote

The arrival of President Xi in China could well strangle China.  He represents the end of the Dengist era and a return to traditional Chinese authoritarian government.  He is getting close to becoming Emperor Xi.  My Sinophilic friends despair of him.  He is a definite roadblock to China's progress towards becoming a modern developed nation. And, sadly for China, there seems to be an iron law that an authoritarian nation will never be a rich one.  Even the DDR only ever approached midddle-income status, with its GDP per capita being only half the West German figure

ON THE OTHER HAND:  If Maoism ended, might not the same be true of Xi-ism?  How fragile is Xi's position?  He strives mightily to strengthen it but who knows how well he will last?  Could it be that the experience of prosperity and the taste of freedom might make enough forces in China bold enough to overthrow him in favour of a return to Dengism?

Though even Dengism had its limits.  Large State-owned businesses continued and were never very efficient.  And the party never looked even close to relinquishing control.  It could be that even Dengism cannot break the asymptote; it perhaps cannot support the final stages of modernization.

My take on China has been influenced by a positive "law" that is at least as strong as the negative law that authoritarian nations do not prosper economically.  I am referring to the stark correlation between national wealth and national average IQ.  And China has a VERY high national average IQ.  We always thought that once China threw off the dead weight of socialism it would prosper.  And exactly that happened up until recently. But is a high national IQ sufficient to rein in authoritarian rule?  The auguries are not good -- UNLESS China undergoes a significant FALL in living standards.  That would undoubtedly be energizing  -- JR.


The air forces of four of Asia’s leading powers nearly came to blows in the skies over the Sea of Japan, or East Sea, last week. As Russia and China conducted their first joint aerial patrol, South Korean fighters fired more than 300 warning shots at a Russian command and control aircraft that crossed into South Korea’s air defense identification zone. Meanwhile, Japanese fighters scrambled in case Japanese territory came under fire.

The unprecedented encounter was just one more reminder of the risks that threaten peace in the Indo-Pacific—and that the “Asian Century,” once heralded by writers such as Kishore Mahbubani and Martin Jacques, is ending far faster than anyone could have predicted. From a dramatically slowing Chinese economy to showdowns over democracy in Hong Kong and a new cold war between Japan and South Korea, the dynamism that was supposed to propel the region into a glorious future seems to be falling apart.

Asia’s geopolitical turbulence has been long in the making. In fact, the region’s weaknesses were for decades ignored by those certain that China would dominate the world, that the region would begin to manifest a shared sense of “Asian values,” that the United States’ influence was on the wane, and that the global future would be determined more in Beijing and New Delhi than in Washington. But underneath the region’s glittering new cities, the foundations of its rise were already beginning to crack.

Enter an earthquake. U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing, including 25 percent tariffs on nearly half of China’s exports to the United States, accelerated China’s economic decline. The country’s growth rate last quarter was the slowest in nearly three decades, since its economy took off in the early 1990s. Even if the 6.2 percent growth figure can be trusted, it reveals not only the effect of Trump’s trade actions but the general weakness of an economy in which meaningful reform has stalled and inefficiencies are as prevalent as ever.

Chinese exports to America have collapsed. Its exports to the rest of the world have shrunk, too. Meanwhile, dozens of major companies, from Google to Dell, are reducing or eliminating their production in China, exacerbating the slowdown and reshaping global supply chains. Worse for China’s economic future, perhaps, is a recent report that the country’s total debt, from corporations, households, and the government, now tops 300 percent of GDP—and much of it is caught up in opaque and complicated transactions that could become a ticking time bomb.

It isn’t only China that faces economic travails.It isn’t only China that faces economic travails. In developed nations, such as South Korea and Japan, sluggishness continues despite years of reform, while India’s once red-hot growth has halved in recent years, raising questions about how much further it can develop a middle class. Such fears are prevalent throughout Southeast Asia, as well.
Economics are just part of the problem. China’s ongoing attempts to squeeze Hong Kong and Taiwan’s democracies reveal just how tenuous political stability in the region really is. In Hong Kong, seven weeks of anti-China, pro-democracy protests are coming dangerously close to forcing Beijing to decide whether or not to intervene. If it deploys troops to restore order, it could lead to the bloodiest clashes since Tiananmen Square 30 years ago.

Even democracies in Asia are sailing in dangerous waters. Japan and South Korea are perilously close to a complete rupture in relations, thanks to Seoul’s continued pressing of World War II claims through its courts. Tokyo has responded by cutting the supply of chemicals critical for Korea’s electronics industry. In late 2018, Japan claimed that a South Korean naval vessel turned its fire-control radar on a Japanese patrol aircraft, nearly precipitating a military crisis. Meanwhile, Vietnam is facing off against China over oil exploration in the South China Sea, with maritime vessels shadowing and intimidating each other.

Conflicts in the region are also threatening security around the world. Despite three rounds of presidential summits, North Korea remains a nuclear-capable state that is also engaged in online offensives around the world. The global battle over civil liberties is also tilting toward greater state control, in part through China’s perfection of high-tech surveillance systems that it is keen to export, even to Western democracies. Many believe that Huawei, among other Chinese companies, is a security risk for any nation adopting its technology. And the FBI has warned that China is the greatest espionage threat to the United States, on campuses, in Washington, and in major corporations.

U.S. policymakers bet that China’s economic modernization and peaceful rise would lead to an era of global prosperity and cooperation. That was wrong.

U.S. policymakers bet that China’s economic modernization and peaceful rise would lead to an era of global prosperity and cooperation, linking advanced economies in Asia with consumers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. That was wrong. Similarly, years of attempts to bring U.S. allies Japan and South Korea closer together have foundered. It is time for a reconsideration of Asia’s future.

SOURCE 

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

Sorry If You’re Offended, but Socialism Leads to Misery and Destitution



On the same day that Venezuela’s “democratically” elected socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, whose once-wealthy nation now has citizens foraging for food, announced he was lopping five zeros off the country’s currency to create a “stable financial and monetary system,” Meghan McCain of “The View” was the target of internet-wide condemnation for having stated some obvious truths about collectivism.

During the same week we learned that the democratic socialist president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, is accused of massacring hundreds of protesters whose economic futures have been decimated by his economic policies, Soledad O’Brien and writers at outlets ranging from GQ, to BuzzFeed, to the Daily Beast were telling McCain to cool her jets.

In truth, McCain was being far too calm. After all, socialism is the leading man-made cause of death and misery in human existence. Whether implemented by a mob or a single strongman, collectivism is a poverty generator, an attack on human dignity, and a destroyer of individual rights.

It’s true that not all socialism ends in the tyranny of Leninism or Stalinism or Maoism or Castroism or Ba’athism or Chavezism or the Khmer Rouge—only most of it does. And no, New York primary winner Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t intend to set up gulags in Alaska. Most so-called democratic socialists—the qualifier affixed to denote that they live in a democratic system and have no choice but to ask for votes—aren’t consciously or explicitly endorsing violence or tyranny.

But when they adopt the term “socialism” and the ideas associated with it, they deserve to be treated with the kind of contempt and derision that all those adopting authoritarian philosophies deserve.

But look: Norway!

Socialism is perhaps the only ideology that Americans are asked to judge solely based on its piddling “successes.” Don’t you dare mention Albania or Algeria or Angola or Burma or Congo or Cuba or Ethiopia or Laos or Somalia or Vietnam or Yemen or, well, any other of the dozens of other inconvenient places socialism has been tried. Not when there are a handful of Scandinavian countries operating generous welfare state programs propped up by underlying vibrant capitalism and natural resources.

Of course, socialism exists on a spectrum, and even if we accept that the Nordic social program experiments are the most benign iteration of collectivism, they are certainly not the only version. Pretending otherwise would be like saying, “The police state of Singapore is more successful than Denmark. Let’s give it a spin.”

It turns out, though, that the “Denmark is awesome!” talking point is only the second-most preposterous one used by socialists. It goes something like this: If you’re a fan of “roads, schools, libraries, and such,” although you may not even be aware of it, you are also a supporter of socialism.

This might come as a surprise to some, but every penny of the $21,206 spent in Ocasio-Cortez’s district each year on each student, rich or poor, is provided with the profits derived from capitalism. There is no welfare system, no library that subsists on your good intentions. Having the state take over the entire health care system could rightly be called a socialistic endeavor, but pooling local tax dollars to put books in a building is called local government.

It should also be noted that today’s socialists get their yucks by pretending collectivist policies only lead to innocuous outcomes like local libraries. But for many years they were also praising the dictators of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the nation’s most successful socialist, isn’t merely impressed with the goings-on in Denmark. Not very long ago, he lauded Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela as an embodiment of the “American dream,” even more so than the United States.

Socialists like to blame every inequity, the actions of every greedy criminal, every downturn, and every social ill on the injustice of capitalism. But none of them admit that capitalism has been the most effective way to eliminate poverty in history.

Today, in former socialist states like India, there have been big reductions in poverty thanks to increased capitalism. In China, where communism sadly still deprives more than a billion people of their basic rights, hundreds of millions benefit from a system that is slowly shedding socialism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the extreme poverty rate in the world has been cut in half. And it didn’t happen because Southeast Asians were raising the minimum wage.

In the United States, only 5 percent of people are even aware that poverty has fallen in the world, according to the Gapminder Foundation, which is almost certainly in part due to the left’s obsession with “inequality” and normalization of “socialism.”

Nearly half of American millennials would rather live in a socialist society than in a capitalist one, according to a YouGov poll. That said, only 71 percent of those asked were able to properly identify either. We can now see the manifestation of this ignorance in our elections and “The View” co-host Joy Behar.

But if all you really champion are some higher taxes and more generous social welfare, stop associating yourself with a philosophy that usually brings destitution and death. Call it something else. If not, McCain has every right to associate you with the ideology you embrace.

SOURCE 

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

Sanders: Medicare for All Will Require Higher Taxes on the Middle Class

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) sided with former Vice President Joe Biden, arguing that Medicare for all would require increased taxes on the middle class during an appearance on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday.

Host Jake Tapper showed Sanders a clip of Biden commenting on Sen. Kamala Harris's (D., Calif.) claim that she would not raise taxes on the middle class to fund Medicare for all.

"Well I find the people who say they're for Medicare for all, but they're not going to tax the middle class because you don't need to do that, come on. Is this a fantasy world here?" Biden asked.

"Do you agree with Vice President Biden that Senator Harris is in a fantasy world?" Tapper asked Sanders.

Sanders pointed out that in a Medicare for all system people would not pay premiums or deductibles, but argued "that in a progressive way people will have to pay taxes."

"The wealthy will obviously pay the lion's share of those taxes but at the end of the day, the vast majority of the American people will pay substantially less for the health care than they now receive because we're going to do away with hundreds of billion dollars of administrative waste. We're going to do away with the incredible profiteering of the insurance companies and the drug companies. So people will be paying in some cases more in taxes but overall because they're not gonna pay premiums, deductible or co-payments, they'll be paying less for their health care," Sanders continued.

"So is Vice President Biden correct that anybody who says Medicare for all is going to happen, but we're not gonna raise taxing on anybody or on the middle class is in a fantasy world?" Tapper pressed.

"Well obviously health care is not free. We pay for it through premiums and out-of-pocket expenses and in Canada it is paid through taxes. We'll have to do that," Sanders said.

Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) estimated his Medicare for all proposal would cost up to $40 trillion over 10 years. Sanders has also said he would raise taxes, including for the middle class, to pay for Medicare for all, and that "there will be pain" in a transition to a single-payer system.

Former Vice President Joe Biden's healthcare plan, released on Monday, does not go as far as Medicare for All. His proposal includes a public option to buy into a Medicare-like plan and wouldn't eliminate private health insurance.

The Kaiser Family Foundation found that Americans' view of the single-payer plan "can shift significantly after hearing information." 56 percent of those surveyed support "Medicare for All," while 42 percent oppose it.

58 percent oppose the plan, however, if told it would eliminate private health insurance plans, and 60 percent oppose it if it requires higher taxes.

SOURCE 

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

Trump's Economic Policies Raise Wages for 99% of workers

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released annual revisions to its personal-income report on Tuesday, and the data should encourage everyone: Americans’ wages have been increasing at a healthy rate since President Donald Trump took office. The Wall Street Journal reports, “The revisions show that employee compensation rose 4.5% in 2017 and 5% in 2018 — some $4.4 billion and $87.1 billion more than previously reported. The trend has continued into 2019, with compensation increasing $378 billion or 3.4% in the first six months alone. Wages and salaries were revised upward to 5.3% from 3.6% in May year over year. And in June wages and salaries grew at an annual rate of 5.5%, which is a rocking 4.1% after adjusting for inflation.”

Counter to the Leftmedia’s erroneous narrative that credits Barack Obama and not Trump for America’s current economic growth, the Journal notes, “Employee compensation has increased by $150 billion more in the first six months of 2019 than all of 2016. Compensation increased 42% more during the first two years of the Trump Presidency than in 2015 and 2016. This refutes the claim by liberals that the economy has merely continued on the same trajectory since 2017 as it was before.”

The fact of the matter is that today “Americans are earning more and relying less on government.” So, how does this reality comport with the leading Democrat presidential candidates’ socialist message of ever more government-provided “free” stuff — stuff that can only be “given” by taking more of the wages of hard-working Americans? For all the overwhelmingly negative press Trump receives, at the very least his policies are proving effective in putting/leaving more money in the pockets of hard-working Americans, giving them more freedom to spend and invest as they see fit. Once again, it’s capitalism, not socialism, that is lifting everyone’s boats.

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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

CA Governor signs law barring Trump's name from the primary ballot without releasing his tax returns

As usual, the Left have no foresight.  There are more states run by Republicans than Democrats so what is to stop red states enacting similar laws to ban Democrat front-runners from ballots in their states?  A banning contest might HELP the GOP
   
California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Tuesday that would bar President Donald Trump’s name from appearing on the state’s 2020 primary ballot unless he discloses his tax returns. Newsom “justified” the bill, arguing, “These are extraordinary times and states have a legal and moral duty to do everything in their power to ensure leaders seeking the highest offices meet minimal standards, and to restore public confidence.” So, the party that loudly opposes any form of voter ID laws out of faux concern for potential voter suppression has now put forth a draconian piece of voter-suppression legislation. Even former Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown wouldn’t dare go this far, as he vetoed a similar measure over concerns that it was unconstitutional.

However, in this era of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Democrat concern for constitutionality is no longer even feigned. But they would have done well to listen to Brown, who argued, “It sets a ‘slippery slope’ precedent. Today we require tax returns, but what would be next? Five years of health records? A certified birth certificate? High school report cards? And will these requirements vary depending on which political party is in power? A qualified candidate’s ability to appear on the ballot is fundamental to our democratic system. For that reason, I hesitate to start down a road that well might lead to an ever escalating set of differing state requirements for presidential candidates.”

Brown’s argument is a cogent one. What stops Texas, Georgia, or Florida from coming up with their own laws clearly aimed at suppressing the ability of a Democrat presidential candidate from getting his or her name on the ballot?

Obviously, this move is meant to once again highlight the long-running Democrat complaint that Trump has not released his long-form tax returns. That’s an action most modern presidential candidates have willingly taken, but one the Constitution does not require.

Clearly, however, this law is ripe for legal action.  The bill also violates the 1st Amendment right of association since California can’t tell political parties which candidates their members can or cannot vote for in a primary election.” It would seem the one-party oligarchs in California disagree.

Another 10 states are considering similar legislation.

SOURCE 

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

Obama’s legacy undermined from within

Sam Clench

Years after he left office, Barack Obama’s legacy is under serious threat from the unlikeliest of sources. This time it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

For six hours this week, across two separate debates, the candidates fighting for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination slugged it out on stage.

Because I’m a nerd and apparently a bit of a masochist, I watched the whole tedious exercise. One thing stood out.

While the Democrats spent plenty of time bashing Donald Trump and his “dark psychic energy” — that’s a real quote, I promise — he was not their only target.

Many of them also took aim at his predecessor Barack Obama.

It is hard to understate just how stunning that sentence is.

Think back to January of 2017 when Mr Obama left office as one of the most popular presidents in American history. The idea of any mainstream Democrat criticising his record was pretty much unthinkable. Now it is commonplace.

As Democratic voters decide who will confront Mr Trump next year and, they hope, become Mr Obama’s successor, they are wrestling with just how much of his legacy to preserve — and how much to reject.

Two major policy areas are at the heart of the argument. The first is healthcare.

Mr Trump won the presidency promising to repeal Mr Obama’s signature achievement, Obamacare, which expanded health insurance coverage to millions more Americans. The President ultimately failed to follow through. He couldn’t find enough votes in Congress.

But having stubbornly defended the healthcare law from his efforts, some of the top tier Democratic candidates now want to scrap it and start again.

Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris all support replacing Obamacare with some form of “Medicare for all”.

That could mean something along the lines of Australia's system, where everyone is covered by Medicare but private insurance is still available. Or it could be more radical. Ms Warren and Mr Sanders both want to ban private health insurance entirely.

Obamacare barely passed after an extremely ugly legislative fight a decade ago. It was seen, by his own party at least, as a historic achievement. Now many in that same party believe it did not go nearly far enough.

The only major candidate vociferously defending it is Joe Biden — and he has no real choice in the matter, having served as Mr Obama’s vice president. He can hardly disown the policies he helped craft.

A number of candidates are also being fiercely critical of Mr Obama’s record on immigration, particularly his administration’s mass deportation of three million undocumented migrants.

Many of them support decriminalising the act of crossing the border as a means to remove the legal justification for locking migrants — including children — in detention centres.

On stage this week, Mr Biden came under fire from Mr Obama’s former housing secretary Julian Castro, a leading advocate of that approach. Mr Biden was pressured to explain whether he had argued against the mass deportation policy from his position of influence in the White House. He refused.

“I found that the secretary, we sat together in many meetings, I never heard him talk about any of this when he was the secretary,” Mr Biden said in frustration.

“It looks like one of us has learned from the lessons of the past and one of us hasn’t,” Mr Castro shot back, getting large cheers from the crowd. “What we need are some politicians who actually have some guts on this issue.”

The clear implication was that Mr Biden, and by extension Mr Obama as well, did not show the necessary fortitude when they were in power.

Mr Biden continued to defend his former boss, bristling at suggestions Mr Obama had been almost as harsh on undocumented migrants as Mr Trump. “To compare him to Donald Trump, I think, is absolutely bizarre,” he said.

Democrats are still reluctant to slam Mr Obama explicitly and directly by name. But there is no denying much of the current political debate is being framed around a rejection of his policies.

The party has moved conspicuously to the left since 2016, making positions that used to be untenable a core part of several candidates’ platforms. But going too far in that direction could prove disastrous if it costs the eventual nominee swing voters in the general election.

The fact is, Mr Obama was aggressively centrist compared with most members of the current Democratic field, and he is still wildly popular — particularly among Democratic voters, with whom he has an average approval rating of more than 85 per cent.

Rejecting his successful, election-winning political philosophy in favour of something markedly more progressive would be a tremendous gamble.

“It was weird for me to watch about 40 minutes of primarily attacks on the Obama administration’s policies,” said MSNBC’s Joy Reid after the debate on Wednesday night. “It was an odd strategy to me. It’s almost as if the debate forgot who was president.”

Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, who now hosts a morning news program, echoed her. “These candidates are attacking Barack Obama’s policy positions more than Donald Trump. That is politically stupid and crazy,” he said. “Hit Trump. Not Obama. It’s not that hard, folks.”

Mr Biden remains the odd one out. His entire campaign is premised on the calculation that Americans are nostalgic for the Obama years. If anything, he risks clinging too tightly to the former president.

That problem was summed up pretty well earlier this year on National Best Friends Day when Mr Biden posted this cringe-worthy tweet. "Happy #BestFriendsDay to my friend, @BarackObama."

Even after being roundly mocked for overegging it, Mr Biden has continued to invoke his relationship with Mr Obama, often using his former boss as a shield against criticism.

It’s a strategy that doesn’t work quite so well when his opponents are perfectly willing to criticise Mr Obama’s record. On immigration, for instance, Mr Biden simply can’t escape his share of the blame. “You can’t have it both ways. You invoke President Obama more than anyone else in this campaign. You can’t do it when it’s convenient and then duck it when it’s not,” one rival, Cory Booker, said on Wednesday night.

But Mr Booker and the other Democrats are arguably trying to have it both ways as well.

On the one hand, they will inevitably want voters to associate them with Mr Obama. You can guarantee the former president will appear often on the campaign trail next year, regardless of who claims the nomination.

On the other, they are distancing themselves from huge parts of his record, including his one signature achievement.  Ultimately, Mr Obama’s own party might undermine his legacy more thoroughly than Donald Trump ever could.

SOURCE 

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

The Trump economy remains strong as 2020 fast approaches

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at an inflation adjusted 2.1 percent in the second quarter of 2019, upping the ante for the remaining quarters in order to get to 3 percent growth for the year, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The U.S. economy has not grown above 4 percent since 2000, and not above 3 percent since 2005.

2018 got close, growing at 2.93 percent, the best year since 2005, according to the most recent data. That was better than 2015, which came in at 2.91 percent.

The first quarter the economy grew at 3.1 percent, but with the slowing in the second quarter, now, the economy must catch up in order to get back on track for 3 percent for the year.

Suffice to say, that’s probably not going to happen. Most likely, the economy winds up in mid-2’s somewhere for the year. Which is not great but not terrible, either.

The Trump economy is still markedly improved from the preceding years. Unemployment remains at a 50-year low of 3.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Almost 4.9 million more Americans say they have jobs since Trump took office in Jan. 2017.

Wage growth from 2017 forward is the best seen since the financial crisis, most recently at 2.8 percent growth in the first quarter of 2019. Those are good numbers.

For 16-to-64-year-old working age adults, the economy is definitely improving. While the population of working age adults has increased by about 1 million between 2016 and 2018, the civilian labor force grew by 2.1 million. In 2019, labor participation is still increasing for that group, too, so we’re still on the right track.

SOURCE 

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

Trump increases pressure on China for trade deal with new 10 percent tariff on the other $300 billion of goods while Chinese economy reels

China has proven itself to be an unreliable trade partner in its negotiations, says President Donald Trump, and now he is levying another 10 percent tariff on $300 billion of Chinese goods that were untaxed.

This comes atop the 25 percent tariff on another $250 billion of goods that was hiked in May, which is expected to raise more than $50 billion in revenue this year to the U.S. Treasury.

Trump cited failure by Chinese President Xi Jinping to follow through on commitments he has made, stating on Twitter, “Our representatives have just returned from China where they had constructive talks having to do with a future Trade Deal. We thought we had a deal with China three months ago, but sadly, China decided to re-negotiate the deal prior to signing. More recently, China agreed to… buy agricultural product from the U.S. in large quantities, but did not do so. Additionally, my friend President Xi said that he would stop the sale of Fentanyl to the United States — this never happened, and many Americans continue to die!”

The President still held out hope that a deal could be reached, with the tariffs being a bit of additional incentive, writing, “Trade talks are continuing, and… during the talks the U.S. will start, on September 1st, putting a small additional Tariff of 10% on the remaining 300 Billion Dollars of goods and products coming from China into our Country. This does not include the 250 Billion Dollars already Tariffed at 25%… We look forward to continuing our positive dialogue with China on a comprehensive Trade Deal, and feel that the future between our two countries will be a very bright one!”

The breakdown of trade talks in May led directly to Trump putting the 25 percent tariff on $200 billion of goods — it had been at 10 percent — in addition to the 25 percent that had been levied on another $50 billion of goods.

The trade deal was said to have been in its final stages, but at the eleventh hour, Beijing changed the terms of the deal and promptly walked back prior concessions. According to a May 8 Reuters report, “In each of the seven chapters of the draft trade deal, China had deleted its commitments to change laws to resolve core complaints that caused the United States to launch a trade war: Theft of U.S. intellectual property and trade secrets; forced technology transfers; competition policy; access to financial services; and currency manipulation.”

Adding to the mix, the trade in goods deficit with China hit a record high in 2018 at $419.1 billion according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And that was with some of the tariffs in place.

Ostensibly, the only reason China had come to the table in the first place was President Trump’s threat of further tariffs and an attempt string along negotiators in the hopes of avoiding them. It appears to have been designed to test Trump, betting that perhaps he would not follow through on the tariffs.

Which, it’s hard to blame China for miscalculating. It’s used to just getting its way with the U.S. without consequence or blowback. Since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, U.S. manufacturing market share has dropped from 13.4 percent to 7.5 percent in 2017, according to World Bank data. China has risen from 5.3 percent to 16.6 percent in 2017, although their percent of global manufacturing market share has peaked in 2015 at 18.8 percent. During that time, the U.S. economy has not grown above 4 percent since 2000, and not above 3 percent since 2005 on an annual basis.

What they didn’t plan on was Trump. Now, there’s tariffs on $550 billion of goods. Either way, the decision to end the deal may have been so it could wait Trump out with 2020 right around the corner.  If Trump loses his bid for reelection, their problem is solved.

For Trump’s part, he seems to be betting China has more to lose in a trade war than the U.S. According to data by the U.S. Trade Representative. China’s $539.5 billion of goods exports to the U.S. comprised almost 4.1 percent of its $13.28 trillion Gross Domestic Product in 2018 and about 22.5 percent of its $2.4 trillion of goods exports. In contrast, American goods exports to China were $120.3 billion, comprising 0.58 percent of the 2018 annual GDP of $20.5 trillion, and comparatively 7.2 percent of its $1.66 trillion of goods exports.

And Trump may be right.

On June 17, “The Coming Collapse of China” author Gordon Chang on Fox Business reported to host Neil Cavuto, “China right now has an economy which is crumbling, could have been contracting last month. We saw that with bellwether car sales down 16.4 percent, the eleventh straight month of decline, the worst monthly decline eves. And imports were down 8.5 percent year on year, a real indication of declining domestic demand.”

Chang added, “This is an economy that is in severe trouble. They need the U.S. market desperately.”

So, maybe the tariffs are working. In this confrontation, Trump does not need a deal as much as China does, for he can inflict damage merely by encouraging manufacturers to move their business elsewhere, whether back to the U.S. or somewhere else. In “The Art of Deal,” Trump wrote, “Use your leverage.” That’s exactly what he’s doing — and it’s about time.

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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

Robert Mueller’s Feet of Clay

If your knowledge of the Robert Mueller fiasco in the United States is informed by any news service then you are ignorant of the facts. Therefore, let me give you the unvarnished facts as I see them.

First fact: Donald Trump is the most innocent politician in the world. How do I know this, you might ask? Nineteen, Hillary-loving, radical Democrat activists with law degrees, posing as impartial lawyers, investigated the heck out of him for two years on an unlimited budget and with the power to coerce witnesses, to threaten their families, to financially ruin them and to jail them. And yet they came up with squat. There is no other politician in the world who would have survived this kind of inquisition. None. Hence my conclusion that Trump is cleaner than Mother Teresa.

Second fact: Mueller had nothing to do with his own probe. He was titular. He came in each day to have coffee and engage in sheltered-workshop activities. Andrew Weissmann led the probe. He was the de facto Special Counsel. He hired all of the conflicted activists to assist him. He oversaw the writing of the report and the public statement that Mueller made after the report came out; sensibly instructing the doddery Mueller to take no questions about the report of which he had only passing acquaintance.

Third fact: Mueller escaped Weissmann’s supervision to attend Congress where he proceeded not only to reveal his ignorance of the report but of information about the events which precipitated the probe, which he was supposed to have led. For example, he knew nothing of Fusion GPS, the firm commissioned by Clinton’s lawyers to recruit Christopher Steele (the ex-British spy) to find, or as it turned out make up, Russian dirt on Trump.  I doubt you could find a backwoodsman out of telecommunication range with less knowledge.

Fourth fact: The Weissmann report set a French Revolutionary standard of jurisprudence by explicitly finding no prosecutorial evidence of obstruction of justice by the President but of finding insufficient evidence to exonerate him. To wit: the presumption of innocent defenestrated in the space of a few words in a dodgy and tendentious report. Look, take my word for it, I have never murdered anyone but I doubt you could find a court that would completely exonerate me from having ever murdered someone, somewhere, at some time. I’ll just have to live with it.

Fifth fact: It is curious on its face to suggest that someone trying to impede a process designed to bring false charges against him (in this case conspiracy to collude with a foreign power) is obstructing justice. But, be that as it may, Trump’s only ‘crime’ was to sound off in understandable frustration. A thought crime, as Orwell’s Winston Smith might put it. He did nothing of practicality to impede the Weissmann probe. He allowed White House staff to give testimony. He supplied all of the millions of pages of documents requested. He allowed the probe to run its course.

Sixth fact: The Democrats can’t let it go, however baseless is the case against Trump (and, vindictively, his family) because they have nothing else to run on. Theoretically they could run on policies on health care, climate change, inequality and immigration. But, in all of these areas, their agenda has been hijacked by callow far-left fruitcakes; prominently, though not only, by ‘the squad’: Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Thus, you get the complete takeover of health insurance by government and the provision of this insurance at taxpayers’ expense to illegal immigrants; you get the Green New Deal, confiscatory taxation, reparations for descendants of slaves, and open borders. And you see all of the twenty-plus Democratic candidates for president putting up their hands in unison for most or all this agenda; which, without doubt, has President Kennedy turning in his grave and would have only been a wet dream for even President Obama.

Seventh fact: The relentless attack on Trump the man has been become all the more vehement as his polices have produced enormous economic success. And, to rub it in, particular beneficiaries of this success are blacks and Hispanics, whom the Dems like to think are welded on to them. The Dems are caught in a pincer. Fighting against successful policies with looney-tune policies. Distraction is their only option.

Eighth fact: Western civilisation is disintegrating. As just a few disparate examples: witness police in the US being shirt-fronted and doused with water and doing nothing about it because they know that no one has their back among the great and good; witness the erosion of free speech in the UK; witness the overturning of the sanctity of millennia-old traditional marriage in the blink of an eye; witness the inculcation of gender confusion among school children; witness the erosion of the presumption of innocence when it comes to sexual assault allegations; witness Christian and Jewish clerics playing footsie with disciples of a noxious creed; witness economically-damaging and, more critically, culturally-undermining immigration policies. And, finally, in this abridged list, witness identity politics retribalizing nations. However, be sort of comforted, despite all of this woe, things have not yet gone so far downhill that a majority of Americans will vote for suicidal polices or be swayed by patently inane manoeuvrings to impeach Trump.

Ninth and best fact: Trump will win again.

SOURCE 

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

When murders increase, so does support for capital punishment

Jeff Jacoby

WHEN ATTORNEY GENERAL William Barr announced last week that the federal government would resume executing Death Row inmates after a hiatus of more than 16 years, opponents were swift to object.

Within hours of Barr's announcement, Representative Ayanna Pressley introduced a bill to abolish capital punishment for federal crimes. The American Civil Liberties Union said it would challenge the new policy in court. And more than a dozen Democratic presidential candidates condemned the Trump administration and the death penalty. Among them was former Vice President Joe Biden, a longtime supporter of executing murderers who had switched his position just two days earlier.

The Justice Department has scheduled five men to be executed in December and January. Alfred Bourgeois, Dustin Honken, Daniel Lee, Lezmond Mitchell, and Wesley Purkey were all convicted of unspeakably cruel and depraved murders. Their victims ranged in age from 2 to 80, and most were tortured and terrorized before they were killed. There is no question about the guilt of these killers, nor any claim that they have been denied scrupulous due process of law.

Those who deplore Barr's decision make no attempt to argue that these men deserve to live. Instead, they denounced capital punishment itself, and accuse the administration of changing its policy out of "raw political calculus" (Slate) and as "one more stunt to distract Americans" (The Atlantic).

Of course politics were involved in Barr's move. But in carrying out the executions, the federal government will also be doing justice and upholding the rule of law. It wasn't the Trump Administration that convicted and sentenced these killers. It was independent judges and jurors who saw the evidence, observed the witnesses, heard the lawyers, and then concluded — unanimously — not only that the defendants were guilty of capital murder, but that death was the proper punishment.

If anyone is being political, it is Democrats like Biden, who favored the death penalty when it had widespread public support, and didn't turn against it until it became unpopular among Democrats. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, Biden championed a crime bill that created 60 new death penalty offenses. "We do everything but hang people for jaywalking in this bill," he proudly declared at the time. That measure passed by sweeping majorities in the Democratic-controlled House and Senate, and was signed into law by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

What has changed since the Clinton era? Why has there been such a marked decline in the share of Americans who say that they support the death penalty for murderers? Death-penalty abolitionists credit themselves with making better, stronger, or more effective arguments. Here's a more likely explanation: Public opinion shifted because of murder rates, not policy debates.

In the 1990s, when Americans approved the death penalty by sky-high percentages, Americans were also being killed with sky-high frequency. There were fewer than 10,000 homicides annually in the United States in the early 1960s, but three decades later there were more than 24,000. The nation's murder rate soared over the same period from 5 per 100,000 to 9.5 per 100,000.

It was against that background that support for capital punishment, which had been falling since the 1950s, began to climb. In 1966, Gallup found that only 42 percent of the public favored executing murderers: an all-time low. In 1994, the year Clinton signed that crime bill, pro-death-penalty sentiment had risen to 80 percent: an all-time high.

And just as Americans embraced the death penalty when killings were on the rise, they backed away from it as killings decreased.

After hitting 9.5 in 1994, the murder rate began a downward plunge that criminologists are still trying to understand. It sank all the way to 4.4 in 2014 — and as it did, so did public approval of the death penalty. According to the Pew Research Center, the fraction of Americans supporting capital punishment dropped to 49 percent in 2016, the lowest level in four decades.

And since then? In 2014, the pendulum shifted again. Murders and the murder rate began moving back up. Sure enough, support for the death penalty did too. It rose to 54 percent in 2018.

To be sure, correlation doesn't prove causation. But six decades of correlation are hard to discount: The willingness of the public to put murderers to death rises and falls with the threat murderers pose. If homicides are back on an upward trend, more and more Americans will want killers put to death — and more and more politicians will decide they do, too.

SOURCE 

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

A Sign of Hope for Affordable Health Care

The forthcoming rule will allow employees to pay for their health care needs using funds deposited by their employer.

A final rule on health reimbursement arrangements set to take effect in August could expand opportunities for American workers and their families to attain affordable health care, increase access to health care for employees of small businesses, and create new competitive market forces that will increase coverage charges for all.

The rule, which would loosen many of the restrictions that have limited the scope and utility of health reimbursement arrangements, represents a large step in shifting the rigid defined-benefits insurance structure toward a defined-contributions structure that allows patients to direct their health care spending.

“We want more decision-making and power in the hands of the consumer and worker over how to finance their health care,” said Brian Blase of the National Economic Council in summarizing the goal of the rule change.

A health reimbursement arrangement is an employer-based, tax-advantaged account that allows employees to pay for their health care needs using funds deposited by their employer. Employees can then use the funds to pay for health care expenses as agreed upon with the employer in the terms of the arrangement.

Funds deposited by the employer will not be taxed, and funds used by employees will not be taxed as income. Furthermore, funds in the account may roll over year to year depending on the terms set by the employer.

This rule change will create two new health reimbursement arrangements—the individual coverage HRA and the excepted benefits HRA—and allow funds in a health reimbursement arrangement to be applied to purchasing health insurance plans.

Small employers who cannot afford a traditional group plan, or employees dissatisfied with their employer’s group health plan, instead can be offered a health reimbursement arrangement to purchase a plan from the individual market.

Health reimbursement arrangements, which don’t have the administrative expenses of normal health insurance plans, can be much less costly than traditional employer-based group health insurance, an important consideration for small businesses.

Blase said a quarter of small businesses in 2010 stopped offering health insurance, and he expects changes in this rule will reverse that trend. In fact, he expects that in five years, 800,000 businesses will take advantage of these new plans, and 90% will be small businesses, covering 90 million workers and their dependents.

The administration expects that with hundreds of thousands of new consumers shopping for individual plans, the individual market will expand and grow robust competition in favor of the consumer.

Excepted benefits HRAs, capped at $1,800 annually, can be used for benefits that are exempted from the Affordable Care Act and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act provisions and, importantly, can be used to purchase limited-duration health insurance plans.

Because they are exempted from minimum essential coverage requirements, these plans can be offered at low prices with high deductibles but broad networks.

Excepted benefits arrangements must be offered along with traditional group plans. An employee who turns down an employer’s traditional group plan would be able to use tax-advantaged funds in an excepted benefits plan to purchase a short-term limited-duration plan.

Blase noted 27% of employees of small businesses choose to turn down their employer’s group health plan because it was a bad fit for their individual needs.

With an excepted benefits plan, employers still will be able to contribute to employee health even if they turn down the employer’s group health plan, giving both employee and employer increased flexibility in their health care choices.

In August 2018, the administration finalized changes to rules governing short-term limited-duration plans to make them less cumbersome to use, lengthening their maximum duration to one year, renewable up to three years. The previous administration had limited these plans to no longer than three months.

Individual Coverage HRAs, in contrast to excepted benefits plans, have no limits on tax-advantaged contributions. They can be used to cover out-of-pocket expenses or services not otherwise covered by an existing health insurance plan. The new rule should make them much more practical and easy to use.

The Affordable Care Act added certain provisions to the Public Health Service Act that were nearly impossible for health reimbursement arrangement to comply with, including a ban on annual and lifetime limits on spending, and the requirement to cover a large selection of preventative health services without cost sharing.

These plans also were not previously integrated with individual market plans, so they would be ineligible even if used to purchase a fully compliant health plan on the individual market.

As long as health reimbursement arrangement funds are used to purchase a compliant plan on the individual market, it will satisfy the requirements of the Public Health Service Act under the new rule.

According to Blase, compliant plans “can be grandfathered coverage … on Obamacare exchange coverage, or off Obamacare exchange coverage.”

He said the administration expected “the vast majority of people” would “use the individual coverage HRA to purchase an Obamacare plan off the exchange.”

Blase said the rules could do for health coverage what 401(k) and 403(b) did for retirement planning. This rule change greatly expands the potential uses of these accounts and makes it much more affordable for small businesses to offer their employees health care coverage.

If Blase’s expectations pan out, Americans will be directing a large part of their own health care spending, shifting the market power away from the insurance companies to patients, where it belongs.

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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