Doug Santo

Censorship of conservative speech is the next battle. Trump will crush the liberal CEO’s who run the social media companies, and who will scurry for cover when the president focuses national attention on them.

U.S., China Plot Road Map to Resolve Trade Dispute by November

“…Chinese and U.S. negotiators are mapping out talks to try to end their trade standoff ahead of planned meetings between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at multilateral summits in November, said officials in both nations.

The planning represents an effort on both sides to keep a deepening trade dispute—which already has involved tariffs on billions of dollars of goods and could target hundreds of billions of dollars more—from torpedoing the U.S.-China relationship and shaking global markets.

Scheduled midlevel talks in Washington next week, which both sides announced on Thursday, will pave the way for November…”

Robert Kuttner, editor of the lefty journal The American Prospect, wrote yesterday to his email list:

“…Trump as China Diplomat: Suppose His Shock Diplomacy Works? Trump started a tariff war with Beijing. China vowed to retaliate in kind. But Beijing was more vulnerable because China has more to lose—it exports far more than it imports and China indeed violates trade norms of fair pricing and fair access.

A number of commentators, me included, faulted Trump for the incoherence of his moves. But Trump’s blunderbuss approach seems to be harming the Chinese economy and catching the leadership off guard. Whether by luck or design, Trump picked a moment when China’s economy was precarious, due to its heavy reliance on debt, the instability of many of its money-losing enterprises, and its inflated stock market.

Now Chinese President Xi Jinping, who seemed to have consolidated power, is facing criticism for bungling the trade conflict to China’s detriment. With the value of China’s currency falling, some observers are even comparing China to Turkey.

You almost have to feel a little sorry for Xi. The Chinese leadership is skilled at scoping out America’s trade policy, cutting separate deals with multinational corporations, buying influence, and besting Washington at trade negotiation. But how do you play chess when the other guy is playing a schoolyard game that he makes up as he goes along?

Bottom line: China was more vulnerable all along than America’s Wall Street-dominated trade elite was willing to believe, or act on. We might have had a trade policy that looked out for the interests of U.S. manufacturing and American workers—something that Trump’s approach does not deliver—and that did not risk starting a wider conflagration with Beijing, as Trump’s approach does.

But the last several American presidents were too compromised and too wedded to a preposterous, corporate conception of “free trade.” And so America rolled over.

We do need a resetting of the U.S.-China relationship, but a mortally wounded Chinese economy is in nobody’s interest. Yet Trump’s apparent success, flawed as it is, offers one more illustration of how the corruption of ruling U.S. elites created a vacuum that opened the door to Trumpism…”

When hard lefties begrudgingly admit your policy is working and offer tepid support, you know its working.

 

“…For academic feminists, male and female biology is either interchangeable or immutable, depending on what complaint they need to lodge…”

“…A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.

For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.

It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. . . .

Such discoveries should be the death knell for social constructivism. Along with many others like them, they buttress the possibility that uneven sex ratios in various fields are in part the result of males and females’ different average dispositions toward competition, risk, and abstract rather than people-centered work (an observation that got computer engineer James Damore fired from Google).

And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously…”

https://www.city-journal.org/html/gender-construct-16117.html

“You gotta feel for the Pope, tripping over all those abused kids as he lunges for a mic to talk about U.S. border policy.”

“…Salvanto’s polling currently indicates that few House seats will change hands in November — and that the GOP could very well hold its majority in the House. “In this era, a district’s voting patterns from the past tend to stay that way,” Salvanto said. “Not as many partisans today are willing to cross party lines.” Of the nation’s 435 House districts, fully 85 percent will almost certainly stick with its current party affiliation come November, Salvanto projects…”

https://nypost.com/2018/08/18/cbs-news-pollster-reveals-why-blue-wave-is-unlikely/

John Hinderaker:

“…The case that Bob Mueller has brought against Paul Manafort has nothing to do with Donald Trump or the 2016 election. It is irrelevant to any significant political issue. But Democrats worry that Mueller’s prosecution of Manafort for years-ago tax evasion may fail, thereby making a laughingstock of the special counsel investigation in which they have invested so much. What happens when Democrats are afraid they may lose a political battle? Things get nasty.

Politico reports on the latest, shocking developments in the Manafort trial:

Paul Manafort’s trial will stretch into a fourth week, as jurors headed home Friday without reaching a verdict for the second straight day and the judge overseeing the case alluded to “threats” the jury may be receiving.

“I had no idea this case would incite this emotion,” U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III said in an open court hearing, responding to a motion from seven news organizations, including POLITICO, seeking access to sealed materials related to the trial that would have publicly identified the jurors.

Ellis denied the motion, telling the courtroom that jurors were “scared” and “afraid.” As a result, Ellis said, he didn’t “feel right” releasing the names of the 12-person jury.

Good for Judge Ellis. Why do you suppose seven news organizations–all liberal, presumably–wanted to know who the jurors are and where they live? They are worried that the jury, having heard the evidence, may not render the “right” verdict, i.e., the one that helps the Democratic Party.

So they want to know who the jurors are so they can apply pressure on them through mob action, newspaper denunciations, online harassment and so on. This is how today’s Democratic Party operates. If the jury fails to render the Democrats’ preferred verdict, what do you suppose Maxine Waters will suggest Democrats should do to the jurors if they venture out in public?

UPDATE: Via a commenter, these are the Democratic Party news outlets who want to know the names and addresses of the jurors who have not yet fallen into line for the Democratic Party: CNN, NBC, the New York Times, Politico, the Associated Press, Buzzfeed and the Washington Post. That tells you every single thing you might have wanted to know about what is going on here…”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/08/democrats-frighten-manafort-jurors.php

If you don’t peruse conservative websites and alternate media you would not be aware of the censorship from social media websites attacking conservative ideas and commentary. The censorship is real. It is a disgrace. It is ongoing. It is becoming extreme.

Normally I would not consider government intervention in a situation like this, but in this case social media websites have become similar to the airwaves. They should be free of censorship and open to almost all ideas and commentary. There are few exceptions to this rule. The antidote to ugly and hateful speech is more speech, not censorship. The left does not accept this because they know they cannot win the argument and are not willing to try.

From the Super Galactic Nitwit file

Michael Walsh:

“…Even in a faith founded upon the notion that there is no such thing as an unforgivable sin, should the penitent be sincere, what has been occurring in the church over the past 70 years or so would surely test the mercy of Christ himself.

No need to go over the nauseating details. The Church—and clearly not just in Pennsylvania—has descended into a nest of predatory perverts, largely but not exclusively homosexual, but child-molesters all. Even worse, its upper administrative reaches, the bishops, have conducted a cover-up under the guise of “compassion” and “protecting the Church,” denying, obfuscating, and lying about the extent of the problem—even as some of them were charter members of the racket. Their sanctimony is even more sickening than the sins they concealed, if such a thing is possible.

Sexual peccadilloes have always been part of every human institution, including the Catholic Church. The priapic cleric has been a staple of creative pornography since Rabelais and de Sade, and the list of sins attributable to the popes alone would make a harlot blush. Such tales of dissipation and license fueled the animosity against the Church, especially in France, and the French Revolution’s violent destruction of the ancient regime was as much directed against the Church as it was against the monarchy. To this day, laïcité is one of the French Republic’s guiding principles, and it’s no accident that into the Gallic spiritual void left by ostracized Christianity has rushed recrudescent Islam. Satan, like Nature, abhors a vacuum…”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/15/the-shame-of-the-church/

“…Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and the state’s Bond Commission denied $600 million to Citibank and Bank of America over the gun control stance adopted by both companies. Citibank and Bank of America were both to be part of a road financing plan in the state, but were omitted from the financial plan after arbitrarily placing new gun controls on banking customers. Louisiana Executive Division press secretary Ruth Wisher told Breitbart News that Landry and State Treasurer John Schroder have been working on the state’s response to corporate gun control ‘for some time.’ Omitting them from the $600 million is part of that response…”

https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/08/16/louisiana-attorney-general-denies-600-million-to-citibank-bank-of-america-over-gun-control/

Kimberley A. Strassel;

“…The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department have continued to insist they did nothing wrong in their Trump-Russia investigation. This week should finally bring an end to that claim, given the clear evidence of malfeasance via the use of Bruce Ohr.

Mr. Ohr was until last year associate deputy attorney general. He began feeding information to the FBI from dossier author Christopher Steele in late 2016—after the FBI had terminated Mr. Steele as a confidential informant for violating the bureau’s rules. He also collected dirt from Glenn Simpson, cofounder of Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm that worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and employed Mr. Steele. Altogether, the FBI pumped Mr. Ohr for information at least a dozen times, debriefs that remain in classified 302 forms.

All the while, Mr. Ohr failed to disclose on financial forms that his wife, Nellie, worked alongside Mr. Steele in 2016, getting paid by Mr. Simpson for anti-Trump research. The Justice Department has now turned over Ohr documents to Congress that show how deeply tied up he was with the Clinton crew—with dozens of emails, calls, meetings and notes that describe his interactions and what he collected.

Mr. Ohr’s conduct is itself deeply troubling. He was acting as a witness (via FBI interviews) in a case being overseen by a Justice Department in which he held a very senior position. He appears to have concealed this role from at least some superiors, since Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified that he’d been unaware of Mr. Ohr’s intermediary status.

Lawyers meanwhile note that it is a crime for a federal official to participate in any government matter in which he has a financial interest. Fusion’s bank records presumably show Nellie Ohr, and by extension her husband, benefiting from the Trump opposition research that Mr. Ohr continued to pass to the FBI. The Justice Department declined to comment.

But for all Mr. Ohr’s misdeeds, the worse misconduct is by the FBI and Justice Department. It’s bad enough that the bureau relied on a dossier crafted by a man in the employ of the rival presidential campaign. Bad enough that it never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of that dossier’s provenance. And bad enough that the FBI didn’t fire Mr. Steele as a confidential human source in September 2016 when it should have been obvious he was leaking FBI details to the press to harm Donald Trump’s electoral chances. It terminated him only when it was absolutely forced to, after Mr. Steele gave an on-the-record interview on Oct. 31, 2016.

But now we discover the FBI continued to go to this discredited informant in its investigation after the firing—by funneling his information via a Justice Department cutout. The FBI has an entire manual governing the use of confidential sources, with elaborate rules on validations, standards and documentation. Mr. Steele failed these standards. The FBI then evaded its own program to get at his info anyway.

And it did so even though we have evidence that lead FBI investigators may have suspected Mr. Ohr was a problem…”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-was-bruce-ohr-doing-1534462447

Great piece by Don Surber

“…Omarosa. The show trial for Paul Manafort. These are the things CNN chipmunks chattered about endlessly the last few days. But CNN has no news judgment because it is run by a moron with a Harvard degree and a Napoleon Complex.

To find the news, I read the South China Morning Post, which is worried spitless that the Red Chinese economy will tank like its stock market has.

(Its stocks overall have declined in value by 40% in the last three years. Our stocks are up 33% since we elected Trump. In the eight years from Obama’s election to Trump’s, the Dow rose by 33%.)

The newspaper is running a series of columns by panicked investors and experts.

Aidan Yao is senior emerging Asia economist at AXA Investment Managers.

Yao wrote, “China needs to put its house in order as the trade war goes from bad to worse.”

He pointed out, “In contrast with the progress seen in United States-European Union negotiations, there are no signs of trade talks resuming between the US and China since the breakdown of negotiations in June.”

There are 375 billion reasons this is bad for Red China. That is the number of dollars its profit was from exports to the United States last year.

Xu Yimiao is an independent China-based researcher.

Xu wrote, “China should cut its losses in the trade war by conceding defeat to Donald Trump.”

He spared not Chairman Xi’s regime.

“Beijing’s strategy of a tit-for-tat retaliation over tariffs has clearly failed. In fact, this strategy escalated the conflict. The direct retaliation after the US announced the first batch of 25 per cent tariffs on US$50 billion in Chinese goods (with the increase from US$34 billion just finalised and coming into effect on August 23) brought few benefits for China. If anything, it gave the US an excuse to plan for a new batch of tariffs covering US$200 billion in Chinese goods. To be fair, it is possible that the US would have escalated the conflict even if China had not retaliated, but whatever the case may be, China’s strategy did not work,” Xu wrote.

Here’s the problem, we buy roughly $500 billion of their stuff. They buy only $125 billion or so of our stuff. We have four times as much to tariff as they do.

Xu ended his piece, “To get out of this predicament, Beijing probably needs to deal with Trump directly, figure out what he needs to declare a win and create conditions for that. Of course, allowing Trump to declare victory might be tough and even embarrassing for Beijing, but sometimes it is the best choice to stop losses in one trade and hope to profit at another time.”

Reporters Wendy Wu and Kristin Huang wrote, “Did China think Donald Trump was bluffing on trade? How Beijing got it wrong.”

This happens when your intelligence consists of spying on Dianne Feinstein and watching CNN.

Fraser Howie is co-author of “Red Capitalism, The Fragile Financial Foundations of China’s Extraordinary Rise.”

Howie wrote, “China has no idea how to play Trump, and it is doing what it always does when it smells trouble.”

Thanks, Red China.

Predictability plays right into President Trump’s hands.

“Beijing may be shocked by how things have played out for the moment, but they haven’t lost control of levers of power in the economy, nor are they going to stand by as pressure mounts. A coordinated monetary and fiscal policy can indeed avert short-term impacts, but China hasn’t even cleaned up the post-financial crisis stimulus and is now embarking on another as the outlook becomes ever more complicated,” Howie wrote.

“Yet again, China is facing a very delicate balancing act. In November, America will see midterm elections which could change the dynamic again, but the possibility of a second term for Trump should not be discounted. China will continue to be in Trump’s crosshairs. Pumping more money into an already bloated economy may have worked in the past, but the Chinese may find out that indeed this time really is different.”

It is brutal. The money men are not pleased with Chairman Xi. That may explain, in part, this last story from Bloomberg News.

“Asian stocks pared losses and Treasury yields ticked higher after China said its vice commerce minister will visit the U.S. for trade talks in late August. The dollar slipped along with the yen,” Bloomberg reported.

He will bring the white flag. How do you say “no mas” in Mandarin?

Oh, the press will play this as a big win for Red China. When was the last time the press got President Trump right?…”

https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2018/08/trump-has-red-china-reeling.html?spref=tw

This is outstanding. If you think the nonsense the media covers and presents about the Trump Administration is true, watch this. This is how government should work. This type of high level policy meeting should be made public on a regular basis. I applaud the president and his capable secretaries for their good and hard work.