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I don’t think this is good. Jim Acosta has definitely earned the scorn of many Americans with his biased, one-sided reporting, but this hostility is not good. Having said that…
CNN Sucks! CNN Sucks! CNN Sucks!
.@Acosta is trying to do a stand-up at #trumptampa and the crowd is booing and chanting “CNN sucks” behind him. pic.twitter.com/XiULajB1Li
— Emily L. Mahoney (@mahoneysthename) July 31, 2018
This senator is a legislator. She has the power to make law, change law, and discontinue law in the United States. She does not appear to know that people who enter the United States illegally have broken federal law. She appears to think federal law is a Trump dictate. The senator’s question to the ICE official, “would you send your child to FRCs,” shows a high level of ignorance and a lack of seriousness on the part of the senator. No person sends their child to an FRC. An FRC is a holding facility for the children of immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally.
In Kentucky, a major pension plan covering state employees had about 16% of what it needs to fulfill earlier promises, according to the Public Plans Database, which tracks state and local pension funds, based on 2017 fiscal year figures. A fund covering Chicago municipal employees had less than 30% of what it needed in that fiscal year, according to the same database. New Jersey’s pension system for state workers is so underfunded it could run out of money in 12 years, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study.
When the math no longer works the result is Central Falls, R.I., a city of 19,359. Today, retired police and firefighters are wrestling with the consequences of agreeing to cut their monthly pension checks by as much as 55% when the town was working to escape insolvency. The fiscal situation of the city, which filed for bankruptcy in 2011, has improved, but the retirees aren’t getting their full pensions back.
“It’s not only a financial thing,” said 73-year-old former Central Falls firefighter Paul Grenon, who retired from the department after a falling wall punctured his lung, broke his back and five ribs, and left him unable to climb ladders. “It really gets you sick mentally and physically to go through something like this. It’s a betrayal, as far as I’m concerned.”…”
“…Speaking to a friendly Trevor Noah, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defense spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about “private equity” firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park. If anything, she was worse this time than she had been during her appearance on Firing Line a few days earlier, on which newly revamped show she demonstrated her obliviousness to the fact that the United States economy exploded during the 1990s, to the manner in which unemployment numbers are calculated, and to even the most obvious facets of the Israel–Palestine question about which she has assured her supporters she is so passionate.
“It’s really weird!”
It is, yes. Especially given that, before her two interviews aired, Ocasio-Cortez had taken to exhibiting that jealous penchant for credentialism that so stains the world’s wannabe socialists, and to boasting about her intellectual prowess. At the beginning of July, she tweeted with self-satisfaction — and a noticeably premature use of the word “other” — that she was “Wondering how many other House Democrats have a degree in Economics like I do?”…”
“…GDP growth is an abstraction. What people actually feel are jobs and “job security”—are they afraid of losing their job in the near future? And here, it could be argued, Republicans have an even better argument. Not only is unemployment down to 4 percent, but most Americans believe the U.S. economy is improving. In fact, the job market is so hot that, for the first time ever recorded, there are more job openings than unemployed workers to take them.
That feeling is buoyed by stories about employers dropping requirements for college degrees. According to at least one analysis, the share of job postings requiring a college degree is falling as employers struggle to find workers to fill open jobs. Some businesses are even hiring job seekers who fail the drug test, making drug treatment part of the employee package. That’s a job market that’s growing, not shrinking.
As President Trump tweeted, “Private business investment has surged from 1.8 percent the year BEFORE I came into office to 9.4 percent this year — that means JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!”…”
God bless Captain Hughes and the brave men and women battling the California fires. May God grant them success in their missions.
“…Arrowhead Interagency Hotshots Captain Brian Hughes was killed when he was struck by a tree while working with his crew to set a back fire. They go into the steepest of the steep, the most rugged of the rugged areas,” said Mike Theune, a spokesman with the parks. The Arrowhead team, one of two hotshot crews within the National Park Service, was working on a two-week rotation when the fatality occurred, he said….”
Snowflakes everywhere!
“…’Trump Anxiety Disorder’ may not be an official diagnosis, but therapists know the symptoms.
“Is he gonna blow us all up?”
So inquired one of Elisabeth LaMotte’s patients recently, fretting out loud about the volatility of U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions during a therapy session at her Washington practice.
It was a rhetorical question — one that predated Trump’s threats of a showdown with Iran this week. But if the question wasn’t meant in earnest, the politically induced anxiety LaMotte is hearing about from her clients certainly is, says the founder of the D.C. Counselling and Psychotherapy Center.
She refers to it as a “collective anxiety” among patients who feel on edge about how potentially dire the president’s decisions could be.
“There is a fear of the world ending,” she said. “It’s very disorienting and constantly unsettling.”…”
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 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…”
“…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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”…”
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?…”