Doug Santo

I think this will prove to be a major victory. The democrat media is already doing their best to portray it as a victory for Obama, or a disaster because of European hatred for Trump, or some other cockamamie nonsense.

The big factor is the US and EU combine our huge economies to resist Chinese spoiling attacks aimed at distracting Trump from focusing the power of the US economy on Chinese malfeasance in international markets. This will force China to the bargaining table and probably soon. The other big factor is EU agreement to import US LNG to combat the German pipeline to Russia and decrease European reliance on Russian energy.  This is a US and EU win.

Irwin Stelzer:

“…For Trump, the victory was greater than even he imagined it might be. He has been arguing that tariffs are merely a tactic in the trade war, his way of persuading the trading partners who have been taking unfair advantage of America to come to the bargaining table. Which the E.U. has done, proving that Trump is not a mad protectionist, but, at least for now, a champion of freer, fairer trade that will benefit American workers, farmers, and businesses. In return for agreeing to attempt to resolve all steel and aluminum tariff issues, and related retaliations, here’s what Trump got:

• The parties will work towards zero tariffs and removal of all trade barriers for non-auto industrial goods, the fate of autos to be decided at a later date.
• The E.U. will “almost immediately” increase its purchases of soybeans. Soybean farmers have been hit hard by China’s decision to aim its retaliation for U.S. tariffs squarely at them, in a so-far failed effort to shake their support for Trump in key states with close senate races (North Dakota, Indiana, Missouri). Trump countered by resuscitating a Depression-era statute that allows him to dole out $12 billion to strapped farmers, no congressional approval needed, and now has further proof to offer farmers that he “has their backs.”
• The E.U. will import “massive” amounts of American LNG, a bonanza for U.S. natural gas producers that at the same time diversifies Europe’s energy supplies, diluting the power over Europe’s energy supplies that Nordstream 2, the planned pipeline from Russia to Germany, will put at Putin’s disposal—a “horrible” project Trump told a miffed Merkel.
• The U.S. and the E.U. will work together to reform the World Trade Organization, which Trump has been accused of planning to wreck.
• Most important, the E.U. and the U.S. will combine their forces—some 50 percent of global GDP—to end the theft of intellectual property, forced technology transfers, industrial subsidies to state-owned enterprises, and the use of excess capacity to drive global prices below cost.

The combination of U.S. and E.U. economic firepower is perhaps the most important feature of the agreement. While China’s President, Xi Jinping, his debt-laden economy slowing, is shopping the world for allies in the Asian theater of the trade war, Trump has enlisted Europe in his battle to end the trade practices that China has used and is using to achieve dominance in the industries of the future.

Unfortunately for Trump’s critics, try as they might, they cannot interpret this as anything other than a victory for his belligerent tactics. It is said around Washington that if the president walked across the Potomac River his critics would say the feat proves that Trump can’t swim…”

Original Here

“…Donald Trump is leading a double life. In the west, most foreign policy experts see him as reckless, unpredictable and self-defeating. But though many in Asia dislike him as much as the Europeans do, they see him as a more substantial figure. I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by his skill as a strategist and tactician

Few Chinese think that Mr Trump’s primary concern is to rebalance the bilateral trade deficit. If it were, they say, he would have aligned with the EU, Japan and Canada against China rather than scooping up America’s allies in his tariff dragnet. They think the US president’s goal is nothing less than remaking the global order.

They think Mr Trump feels he is presiding over the relative decline of his great nation. It is not that the current order does not benefit the US. The problem is that it benefits others more in relative terms. To make things worse the US is investing billions of dollars and a fair amount of blood in supporting the very alliances and international institutions that are constraining America and facilitating China’s rise.

In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump’s response is a form of “creative destruction”. He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington.

Once the order is destroyed, the Chinese elite believes, Mr Trump will move to stage two: renegotiating America’s relationship with other powers. Because the US is still the most powerful country in the world, it will be able to negotiate with other countries from a position of strength if it deals with them one at a time rather than through multilateral institutions that empower the weak at the expense of the strong.

My interlocutors say that Mr Trump is the US first president for more than 40 years to bash China on three fronts simultaneously: trade, military and ideology. They describe him as a master tactician, focusing on one issue at a time, and extracting as many concessions as he can. They speak of the skilful way Mr Trump has treated President Xi Jinping. “Look at how he handled North Korea,” one says. “He got Xi Jinping to agree to UN sanctions [half a dozen] times, creating an economic stranglehold on the country. China almost turned North Korea into a sworn enemy of the country.” But they also see him as a strategist, willing to declare a truce in each area when there are no more concessions to be had, and then start again with a new front.

For the Chinese, even Mr Trump’s sycophantic press conference with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, in Helsinki had a strategic purpose. They see it as Henry Kissinger in reverse. In 1972, the US nudged China off the Soviet axis in order to put pressure on its real rival, the Soviet Union. Today Mr Trump is reaching out to Russia in order to isolate China…”

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Joel Kotkin writing in City Journal on the reality of liberal policies and their effects on minority groups in the state (it’s not what you’ve been lead to believe from the democrat media). It’s almost as if all the talk of minority rights and wokeness is just a blind for a fundamentally exploitative system:

“…Progressives praise California as the harbinger of the political future, the home of a new, enlightened, multicultural America. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill has identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new immigration-detention facilities in favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.

Its political leaders and a credulous national media present California as the “woke” state, creating an economically just, post-racial reality. Yet in terms of opportunity, California is evolving into something more like apartheid South Africa or the pre-civil rights South. California simply does not measure up in delivering educational attainment, income growth, homeownership, and social mobility for traditionally disadvantaged minorities. All this bodes ill for a state already three-fifths non-white and trending further in that direction in the years ahead. In the past decade, the state has added 1.8 million Latinos, who will account by 2060 for almost half the state’s population. The black population has plateaued, while the number of white Californians is down some 700,000 over the past decade.

Minorities and immigrants have brought much entrepreneurial energy and a powerful work ethic to California. Yet, to a remarkable extent, their efforts have reaped only meager returns during California’s recent boom. California, suggests gubernatorial candidate and environmental activist Michael Shellenberger, is not “the most progressive state” but “the most racist” one. Chapman University reports that 28 percent of California’s blacks are impoverished, compared with 22 percent nationally. Fully one-third of California Latinos—now the state’s largest ethnic group—live in poverty, compared with 21 percent outside the state. Half of Latino households earn under $50,000 annually, which, in a high-cost state, means that they barely make enough to make ends meet. Over two-thirds of non-citizen Latinos, the group most loudly defended by the state’s progressive leadership, live at or below the poverty line, according to a recent United Way study.

This stagnation reflects the reality of the most recent California “miracle.” Historically, economic growth extended throughout the state, and produced many high-paying blue-collar jobs. In contrast, the post-2010 boom has been inordinately dependent on the high valuations of a handful of tech firms and coastal real estate speculation. Relatively few blacks or Latinos participate at the upper reaches of the tech economy—and a recent study suggests that their percentages in that sector are declining—and generally lack the family resources to compete in the real estate market. Instead, many are stuck with rents they can’t afford.

Even as incomes soared in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco after 2010, wages for African-Americans and Latinos in the Bay Area declined…”

Original Here

Art Laffer:

“…Gross domestic product, or GDP, is the measure of choice when assessing the health of any economy, especially in the United States. GDP, which is measured at annual rates, includes the value of production of all goods and services produced in a country. In the one year since President Trumptook office, the first quarter of 2017 through the first quarter of 2018, real GDP grew at a 2.55 percent annual rate. This is higher than the growth for six of the eight years former President Obama was in office, or even five of the eight years when former President George W. Bush was in office.

Moreover, the economic growth rate in the first year of Trump in office is higher than the average annual growth rate for the entire presidencies of both Obama at 2.05 percent and Bush at 1.71 percent. For the full 65 years from the first quarter of 1953 through the first quarter of 2018, annual real GDP growth in the United States averaged 2.95 percent, which is still substantially higher than the first year under Trump.

The growth rate for the second quarter of 2018 is 4.1 percent. This is a nice sign of American prosperity and is the strongest quarter of economic growth since the third quarter of 2014. Net exports contributed about 1 percent, while the change in private inventories subtracted 1 percent. Lots of changes like this happen on a quarter by quarter basis and should not be taken too seriously…”

Original Here

From the corruption file.

Kimberley A. Strassel:

“…It’s 105 degrees as I stand with Rep. Devin Nunes on his family’s dairy farm. Mr. Nunes has been feeling even more heat in Washington, where as chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence he has labored to unearth the truth about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s activities during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Thanks in large part to his work, we now know that the FBI used informants against Donald Trump’s campaign, that it obtained surveillance warrants based on opposition research conducted for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and that after the election Obama administration officials “unmasked” and monitored the incoming team.

Mr. Nunes’s efforts have provoked extraordinary partisan and institutional fury in Washington—across the aisle, in the FBI and other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, in the media. “On any given day there are dozens of attacks, each one wilder in its claims,” he says. Why does he keep at it? “First of all, because it’s my job. This is a basic congressional investigation, and we follow the facts,” he says. The “bigger picture,” he adds, is that in “a lot of the bad and problematic countries” that Intelligence Committee members investigate, “this is what they do there. There is a political party that controls the intelligence agencies, controls the media, all to ensure that party stays in power. If we get to that here, we no longer have a functioning republic. We can’t let that happen.” . . .

It got worse. This spring Mr. Nunes obtained information showing the FBI had used informants to gather intelligence on the Trump camp. The Justice Department is still playing hide-and-seek with documents. “We still don’t know how many informants were run before July 31, 2016”—the official open of the counterintelligence investigation—“and how much they were paid. That’s the big outstanding question,” he says. Mr. Nunes adds that the department and the FBI haven’t done anything about the unmaskings or taken action against the Flynn leakers—because, in his view, “they are too busy working with Democrats to cover all this up.”

He and his committee colleagues in June sent a letter asking Mr. Trump to declassify at least 20 pages of the FISA application. Mr. Nunes says they are critical: “If people think using the Clinton dirt to get a FISA is bad, what else that’s in that application is even worse.”

Mr. Nunes has harsh words for his adversaries. How, he asks, can his committee’s Democrats, who spent years “worrying about privacy and civil liberties,” be so blasé about unmaskings, surveillance of U.S. citizens, and intelligence leaks? On the FBI: “I’m not the one that used an unverified dossier to get a FISA warrant,” Mr. Nunes says. “I’m not the one who obstructed a congressional investigation. I’m not the one who lied and said Republicans paid for the dossier. I’m just one of a few people in a position to get to the bottom of it.” And on the press: “Today’s media is corrupt. It’s chosen a side. But it’s also making itself irrelevant. The sooner Republicans understand that, the better.”

His big worry is that Republicans are running out of time before the midterm elections, yet there are dozens of witnesses still to interview. “But this was always the DOJ/FBI plan,” he says. “They are slow-rolling, because they are wishing and betting the Republicans lose the House.”…”

Original Here

Mitch McConnell takes heat for what some perceive to be old “party” politics. Some characterize him as part of the swamp. I admit he can be dull, but he is one the most effective politicians I have seen. He out plays the democrats on issue after issue. His sense of humor is very subtle, but pay attention to this short speech and his humor will become evident—at the expense of the screeching, over-the-top democrats.

“…Media Bias: Twitter might soon have the government breathing down its neck for “shadow-banning” conservatives, while Facebook’s market value has plunged more than $130 billion in just two days as the once-dominant social media site’s growth goes flat amid charges of bias. Is this the beginning of the end of the social media boom?…”

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Liz Sheld:

“…At this point in the game if you think this investigation is about Trump-RUSSIA collusion, you must be an idiot. It’s clear that President Trump and those in his orbit are being subjected to a forensic examination of their lives in order to obstruct Trump’s presidency, as punishment to those who have supported him, and to dissuade others from working for him…”

Good economic news:

• Gross domestic product increased 4.1 percent in the second quarter, matching Reuters estimates.
• Strong consumer and business spending as well as a surge in exports ahead of retaliatory tariffs from China helped drive economic growth.
• The last time the economy grew this quickly was in the third quarter of 2014.

Original Here

Dan Bongino:

“What would happen if an illegal immigrant used a plastic straw in California?”

The out-of-whack “priorities” among California lawmakers has opened the mockery floodgates.

I agree with some of this. Interesting piece at any rate.

H. W. Crocker:

“…North and South venerated the Founders. They shared the same language, the same religion, and, in large part, the same general stock. Most of all, they shared what Jeff Sessions was recently rebuked for calling an “Anglo-American heritage” of liberty under law, stretching from the mists of medieval England — even before Magna Carta — to our own Bill of Rights.

Today, however, our divisions are so deep and fundamental that Americans cannot even agree on what marriage is or what a man or a woman is (which is pretty darn fundamental).

The lunatic self-righteousness of the Left (and yes, I’m afraid one must point fingers here), where disagreement is bigotry to be prohibited by law or even condemned and prosecuted as treason, is a consuming, destructive fire that will not be easily quenched, and cannot be reached by cool waters of rational argument…”

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Mollie Hemingway:

“…Whatever you think about Trump’s reaction to the release of the FISA application, the media reaction to the story was disingenuous and even more hyperbolic than the president’s tweets. After a year of continuous and alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign, and used dubious partisan political research to justify their surveillance.

The media reaction to both the redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap applications and President Trump’s tweets was pure gaslighting. They claimed the FISA applications hurt the critics’ case. It wasn’t that they reported the news that critics of the FISA application felt vindicated while defenders of the wiretap applications also felt vindicated. They wrote as partisans in a war with those skeptical of FISA abuse…”

Original Here

Michael Barone:

“…Sometimes a society’s values change sharply with almost no one noticing, much less anticipating the consequences. In 1968, according to a Gallup survey, 70 percent of American adults said that a family of three or more children was “ideal”—about the same number as in Gallup surveys starting in 1938. That number helps explain the postwar baby boom that exploded after Americans were no longer constrained by depression and world war.

Those values and those numbers didn’t last. By 1978, Gallup reported that only 32 percent considered three or more children “ideal.” The numbers have hovered around there ever since, spiking to just 41 percent amid the late 1990s tech boom.

The change in values and behavior took time to register. Just before the 1972 election, Richard Nixon and a Democratic Congress goosed up Social Security benefits. They figured the baby boom generation was just delaying producing a baby boom of its own. They were wrong, and Social Security has needed patching up ever since. . . .

The trend varies among demographic groups. Native-born Hispanics and blacks used to have above-replacement (2.1 births per woman) rates. Now they’re below-replacement, almost as low as native-born whites and Asians, which are down only a bit. Immigrant birth levels remain above replacement levels among blacks, but only barely above among Hispanics and below among whites and Asians.

One possible consequence: Those often gleeful predictions that whites will soon be a minority will not be realized so soon, or maybe ever. Nor is it clear, as sociologist Richard Alba has suggested, that often-intermarrying Hispanics and Asians will see themselves as aggrieved minorities. They might, as Italians and Poles once did, just blend in.

Also, the sharp drop in Hispanic birth rates, combined with the sharp drop in Hispanic (especially Mexican) immigration post-2007, means a lower proportion of immigrants with low skills competing for jobs with low-skilled Americans. Asian immigrants may outnumber Hispanics and arrive with significantly higher skill levels. So do immigrants from African countries like Nigeria and Ghana. Their capacity for expanding the economy rather than competing for low-skilled jobs may point to unexpected growth. And neither group arrives with grievances rooted in slavery and American racial segregation.

Other familiar trends may be reversed. Demographer Lyman Stone, citing various data, argues that “the decline in fertility is mostly due to declining marriage,” as he writes in IFS Studies. The issue lies with black and lower-income white women having difficulty finding suitable spouses. They might have more success if the recent increase in downscale wages continues.

Similarly, fewer young people would get caught in the trap of incurring huge college debt for worthless degrees (or no degrees at all) if, as the Manhattan Institute’s Aaron Renn suggests, higher education enrollments, already declining, start plunging precipitously around 2025. Might young people who bypass college find constructive jobs and marry and raise families as their counterparts did in the postwar years?…”

Original Here

Paratroopers descend over Alaska