TRUMP IS PUTTING ON A GREAT CIRCUS, BUT WHAT ABOUT HIS PROMISES?

By Fareed Zakaria
Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017

Let’s say you are a Trump voter, the kind we often hear about — an honest, hard-working American who put up with Donald Trump’s unusual behavior because you wanted a president who would stop playing Washington’s political games, bring a businessman’s obsession with action and results, and focus on the economy. How is that working out for you?

The first few weeks of President Trump’s administration have been an illustration of writer Alfred Montapert’s adage, “Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.” We are witnessing a rocking-horse presidency in which everyone is jerking back and forth furiously, yet there is no forward movement.

Since winning the election, Trump has dominated the news nearly every day. He has picked fights with the media, making a series of bizarre, mostly false claims — about the magnitude of his victory, the size of his inauguration crowd, the weather that day, the numbers of illegally cast ballots, among many others. He has had photo ops with everyone from Kanye West and Jack Ma to Shinzo Abe and Justin Trudeau. Now he is embroiled in a controversy about ties to Russia. But in the midst of it all, what has he actually done? Hardly anything.

On Thursday, Trump said at a news conference, “There has never been a presidency that’s done so much in such a short period of time.” Matthew Yglesias of Vox observes that at this point in his presidency, Barack Obama had signed into law an almost-trillion-dollar stimulus bill to revive the economy, extended health insurance to 4 million children and made it easier to challenge discriminatory labor practices. In their respective first 100 days in office, FiveThirtyEight calculates, Bill Clinton had passed 24 laws; John Kennedy, 26; Harry Truman, 55; and FDR, 76.

Despite having a Republican House and Senate, Trump does not seem likely to crack 10 in his first 100 days. Yglesias notes that the Trump White House has not even begun serious discussions with Congress on major legislation. According to The Post, of the 549 positions that require Senate confirmation, the president has yet to nominate 515 of them.

Trump has issued a series of executive orders with great fanfare (though fewer than Obama at this point). But they are mostly hot air — lofty proclamations that direct some agency to “review” a law, “report” back to him, “consider” some action or reaffirm some long-standing practice. His one order that did something, the temporary travel ban, was so poorly conceived and phrased that it got stuck in the court system and will have to be rewritten or abandoned. For a recent piece in Politico Magazine, Zachary Karabell carefully analyzed all the executive orders and presidential proclamations and concluded, “So far, Trump has behaved exactly like he has throughout his previous career: He has generated intense attention and sold himself as a man of action while doing little other than promote an image of himself as someone who gets things done.”

Historian Douglas Brinkley recently observed that Trump is a creature of reality television, for which the two cardinal rules are: Always keep the cameras focused on you, and always stay interesting. The president has certainly fulfilled those mandates. But what about the ones he promised his voters? What about the plans to reindustrialize the Midwest, bring back jobs, and revive the coal and steel industries? What, for that matter, of his explicit commitments that “on Day One” he would begin “removing criminal illegal immigrants” and would “label China a currency manipulator,” “push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress” and “get rid of gun-free zones in schools, and . . . military bases”? All were promised. Almost nothing has been done.

There are two aspects to the Trump presidency. There is the freak show — the tweets, the wild claims, the fake facts, the fights with anyone who refuses to bow down to him (the media, judges), the ceaseless self-promotion. But then there is Trump the savvy businessman, who named intelligent heavyweights such as Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis to key positions, and who has at times articulated a serious reform agenda. For many people, the bargain of the Trump presidency was that they would put up with the freak show in order to get tax reform, infrastructure projects and deregulation. That may still happen, but for now at least, reality TV is in overdrive, and not much is happening in the realm of serious policy.

That voter in Ohio or Michigan might well wonder how picking fights with the media will bring jobs back to his region or how assaulting the judiciary will help create retraining programs for laid-off workers. But maybe Donald Trump, who freely admits to getting most of his information from television, has a television view of the presidency. The point is to be seen doing things. The Romans said that the way to keep people happy was to give them “bread and circus.” So far, all we have gotten is the circus.

(c) 2017, Washington Post Writers Group

The Lunacy of a Boarder Adjustment Tax

It is just inscrutable that the Republicans in the U.S. Congress could conger up such a lunatic tax.  Why can't anybody in Washington, D.C. think?  Click on the following link for details.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/08/gop-stalwart-steve-forbes-blasts-republicans-on-border-adjustments-1-trillion-cost-to-consumers.html

Climate Gate: 1 & 2

Check out these three articles on politically-correct climate data:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/6/noaa-agrees-review-claim-data-manipulation-climate/

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/5/climate-change-whistleblower-alleges-noaa-manipula/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html#ixzz4XwLUFctN

Change Would Be Healthy at U.S. Climate Agencies

By

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
2017 February 4

It will be hard to notice when President Trump does something worthy of hysteria if everything he does is greeted with hysteria. Take claims that he’s laying siege to the alleged chastity of climate scientists. This is one subject where it might be wise not to rely on the reflexive media narrative. 

The year 2016 was the warmest ever recorded—so claimed two U.S. agencies, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Except it wasn’t, according to the agencies’ own measures of statistical uncertainty.

Such fudge is of fairly recent vintage. Leaving any discussion of the uncertainty interval out of press releases only became the norm in the second year of the Obama administration. Back when he was presenting the 2008 numbers, NASA’s James Hansen, no slouch in raising climate alarms, nevertheless made a point of being quoted saying such annual rankings can be “misleading because the difference in temperature between one year and another is often less than the uncertainty in the global average.”

Statisticians wouldn’t go through the trouble of assigning an uncertainty value unless it meant something. Two measurements separated by less than the margin of error are the same. And yet NASA’s Goddard Institute, now under Mr. Hansen’s successor Gavin Schmidt, put out a release declaring 2014 the “warmest year in the modern record” when it was statistically indistinguishable from 2005 and 2010.

Nowadays Goddard seems to mention confidence interval only when it’s convenient. So 2015, an El Niño year, was the warmest yet “with 94 percent certainty.” No confidence interval was cited one year later in proclaiming 2016 the new warmest year “since modern recordkeeping began.” In fact, the difference versus 2015 was a mere one-quarter of the margin of error.

Commerce’s NOAA makes a fetish of ignoring confidence interval in its ranking of the 12 warmest years. Yet when statistical discipline is observed, 2015 and 2016, the two El Niño years, are tied for warmest. And the years 1998, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2014 are all tied for second warmest.

In other words, whatever the cause of warming in the 1980s and 1990s, no certain trend is observable since then.

Shall we posit a theory about all this? U.S. government agencies stopped mentioning uncertainty ranges because they wanted to engender a steady succession of headlines pronouncing the latest year unambiguously the hottest when it wasn’t necessarily so.

This doesn’t mean you should stop being concerned about a potential human impact on climate. But when government scientists deliberately seek to mislead, it’s a warning to raise your guard.

For instance, NOAA states its annual temperature estimate as an “anomaly” in relation to the 20th-century average. Do you really believe government scientists can reconstruct a global average temperature for years in the first half of the 20th century with sufficient accuracy to allow comparisons of 1/100ths of a degree?

You start to notice other things. The numbers keep changing. Years 2005 and 2010 were exactly tied in 2010, but now 2010 is slightly warmer, just enough to impart an upward slope to any graph that ignores statistical uncertainty.

Government scientists are undoubtedly ready with justifications for each of the countless retroactive adjustments they impose on the data, but are you quite sure they can be trusted?

Climate science is not a hoax. The U.S. government spends impressive sums to take the increasingly rigorous readings from which a global average temperature is distilled. But other countries like the U.K. and Japan also do sophisticated monitoring and end up with findings roughly similar to the findings of U.S. agencies, yet they don’t feel the need to lie about it. For instance, the U.K. Met Office headlined its 2016 report “one of the warmest two years on record.” A reader only had to progress to the third paragraph to discover that the difference over 2015 was one-tenth the margin of error.

President Trump is a complete novice, but presumably at some point he will climb the learning curve, gain control over his administration, and start making cagier decisions about which fights are worth having. Our guess is that fighting with his administration’s climate scientists won’t seem like much of a priority. And yet, given all the money U.S. taxpayers spend on climate science, a mental freshening wouldn’t be the worst thing. Goddard’s Mr. Schmidt, keeper of a snarling blog that makes frequent use of the slur “denier,” got his start at the New York City-based NASA science lab more than 20 years ago.

On the slight chance Mr. Trump does make such a move, keep something else in mind: Undifferentiated hysteria will apparently be the media reaction to every Trump action equally whether those actions are entirely justified or entirely indefensible.

What Evil and Destruction Hath Barack Obama Rought?

The Stillborn Legacy of Barack Obama

by

Charles Krauthammer

National Review

2016 October 6

His signature domestic legislation and his foreign policy of preening disengagement are both coming apart at the seams. 

Only amid the most bizarre, tawdriest, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, a.k.a. Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.

Obamacare

On Monday, Bill Clinton called it “the craziest thing in the world.” And he was talking about only one crazy aspect of it — the impact on the consumer. Clinton pointed out that small business and hardworking employees (“out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week”) are “getting whacked . . . their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.”

This, as the program’s entire economic foundation is crumbling. More than half its nonprofit “co-ops” have gone bankrupt. Major health insurers such as Aetna and UnitedHealthcare, having lost millions of dollars, are withdrawing from the exchanges. In one-third of the U.S., exchanges will have only one insurance provider. Premiums and deductibles are exploding. Even the New York Times blares, “Ailing Obama Health Care Act May Have to Change to Survive.”

Young people, refusing to pay disproportionately to subsidize older and sicker patients, are not signing up. As the risk pool becomes increasingly unbalanced, the death spiral accelerates. And the only way to save the system is with massive infusions of tax money. 

What to do? The Democrats will eventually push to junk Obamacare for a full-fledged, government-run, single-payer system. Republicans will seek to junk it for a more market-based pre-Obamacare-like alternative. Either way, the singular domestic achievement of this presidency dies.

The Obama Doctrine 

The president’s vision was to move away from a world where stability and “the success of liberty” (JFK, inaugural address) were anchored by American power and move toward a world ruled by universal norms, mutual obligation, international law, and multilateral institutions. No more cowboy adventures, no more unilateralism, no more Guantanamo. We would ascend to the higher moral plane of diplomacy. Clean hands, clear conscience, “smart power.”

This blessed vision has just died a terrible death in Aleppo. Its unraveling was predicted and predictable, though it took fully two terms to unfold. This policy of pristine — and preening — disengagement from the grubby imperatives of realpolitik yielded Crimea, the South China Sea, the rise of the Islamic State, the return of Iran. And now the horror and the shame of Aleppo.

After endless concessions to Russian demands meant to protect and preserve the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad, we finally capitulated last month to a deal in which we essentially joined Russia in that objective. But such is Vladimir Putin’s contempt for our president that he wouldn’t stop there.

He blatantly violated his own cease-fire with an air campaign of such spectacular savagery — targeting hospitals, water-pumping stations, and a humanitarian aid convoy — that even Barack Obama and John Kerry could no longer deny that Putin is seeking not compromise but conquest. And he is prepared to kill everyone in rebel-held Aleppo to achieve it. Obama, left with no options — and astonishingly, having prepared none — looks on.

At the outset of the war, we could have bombed Assad’s airfields and destroyed his aircraft, eliminating the regime’s major strategic advantage — control of the air.

Five years later, we can’t. Russia is there. Putin has just installed S-300 antiaircraft missiles near Tartus. Yet, none of the rebels have any air assets. This is a warning and deterrent to the only power that could do something — the United States.

Obama did nothing before.  He will surely do nothing now.  For Americans, the shame is palpable.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea may be an abstraction, but that stunned injured little boy in Aleppo is not.

“What is Aleppo?” famously asked Gary Johnson. Answer: the burial ground of the Obama fantasy of benign disengagement. 

What’s left of the Obama legacy?  Even Democrats are running away from Obamacare.  And who will defend his foreign policy of lofty speech and cynical abdication? 

In 2014, Obama said, “Make no mistake: [My] policies are on the ballot.” Democrats were crushed in that midterm election.

This time around, Obama says, “My legacy’s on the ballot.” If the 2016 campaign hadn’t turned into a referendum on character — a battle fully personalized and ad hominem — the collapse of the Obama legacy would indeed be right now on the ballot. And his party would be 20 points behind. 

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2016 The Washington Post Writers Group.

CAN THIS COUNTRY WITHSTAND 4 (or 8) MORE YEARS OF THE OBAMA CORRUPTION, DECEIT, AND CAPITULATION?

Only In America!

No. 10 — Only in America ... Could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000.00 per plate Obama campaign fund-raising event.

No. 9 — Only in America ... Could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black  while only 14% of the population is black, 40+% of all federal entitlements goes to black Americans: 3 times the rate that go to whites, and 5 times the rate that go to Hispanics!

No. 8 — Only in America ... Could they have had the two people most responsible for our  tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and  Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.

No. 7 — Only in America ... Can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.

No. 6 — Only in America ... Would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just 'magically' become American citizens. (probably should be number one)

No. 5 — Only in America ... Could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be called EXTREMISTS.
   
No. 4 — Only in America ... Could you need to present a driver's license to cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.

No. 3 — Only in America ... Could people demand  the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. Oil company (Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).

No. 2 — Only in America ... Could you collect more tax dollars from the people than any  nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it  has per year - for total spending of $7 Million PER  MINUTE, and  complain that it doesn't have nearly enough money.

No. 1 — Only in America .... Could the rich people—who pay 86% of all income taxes—be  accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who don't pay any income taxes at all.

IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY OR WHAT!

Bill Clinton’s airport run-in with Loretta Lynch was no accident

And We Now Live In A Banana Republic

By Edward Klein

New York Post

2016 October 3

In his new book, Guilty As Sin (Regnery), out Tuesday (2016 October 4), Edward Klein claims officials in the Obama administration decided before the first witness was interviewed that Hillary Clinton would not face prosecution over the handling of classified email.  An excerpt:

Bill Clinton’s private jet was cleared for takeoff and was taxiing toward the active runway at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport when a Secret Service agent informed him that Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plane was coming in for a landing.

“Don’t take off!” Bill barked.

As his plane skidded to a halt and then headed back to its parking space, Bill grabbed a phone and called an old friend — one of his most trusted legal advisers.

It was June 27, 2016 — one year into the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“Bill said, ‘I want to bushwhack Loretta,’ ” the adviser recalled. “ ‘I’m going to board her plane. What do you think?’ And I said, ‘There’s no downside for you, but she’s going to take a pounding if she’s crazy enough to let you on her plane.’

“He knew it would be a huge embarrassment to Loretta when people found out that she had talked to the husband of a woman — the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party — who was under criminal investigation by the FBI,” the adviser continued. “But he didn’t give a damn. He wanted to intimidate Loretta and discredit [FBI Director James] Comey’s investigation of Hillary’s emails, which was giving Hillary’s campaign agita.”

Bill hung up the phone and turned to a Secret Service agent.

“As soon as her plane lands,” he said, “get the attorney general on the phone and say the president would like to have a word with her.”

Once inside Lynch’s plane, Bill turned on the Clinton charm. He gave Lynch’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze and shook hands with her husband, Stephen Hargove.

“Bill said he could tell that Loretta knew from the get-go that she’d made a huge mistake,” his adviser said. “She was literally trembling, shaking with nervousness. Her husband tried to comfort her; he kept patting her hand and rubbing her back.

“Bill made small talk about golf and grandchildren and [former Attorney General] Janet Reno, and he kept at it for nearly a half-hour. It didn’t make any difference what they talked about; all he wanted to do was send a message to everyone at Justice and the FBI that Hillary had the full weight of the Clinton machine, the Democratic Party, and the White House behind her.

“It was clearly tortuous for Loretta. Bill told me later that he noticed there were beads of sweat on her upper lip.”

One week later, Barack Obama invited Hillary to fly with him to North Carolina for a campaign rally. He wouldn’t have let her use two of the greatest symbols of presidential power — Air Force One and the podium with the Seal of the President of the United States — if he thought there was even the slightest chance she was going to be indicted. But Attorney General Lynch had privately assured him that she wouldn’t let that happen, and that the fix was in.

Many members of the mainstream media thought that FBI Director Comey was hell-bent on indicting Hillary. They called him the Eliot Ness of his time — squeaky clean and untouchable.

But that was a complete misreading of Comey.

He was affable, had a good sense of humor, and might come across as a straight arrow, but he didn’t get to be director of the FBI by falling off the turnip truck. It took huge ambition and an instinct for political survival.

Comey knew that if he recommended an indictment of Hillary — something that was fiercely opposed by the president, the attorney general, the Democrats in Congress, and the mainstream media — he’d ignite a firestorm and go down in history as the man who traumatized the country’s political system. What’s more, if after all of that, Hillary was found not guilty by a jury, it would blacken Comey’s reputation for all time to come.

The day after Obama and Hillary flew to North Carolina, Comey held a televised press conference in the FBI auditorium. Dressed in a blue shirt and gold tie, which matched the colors of the FBI flag standing behind his lectern, Comey methodically laid out a bill of indictment against Hillary Clinton.

He said that Hillary and her top aides at the State Department — Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Jake Sullivan — had been “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

On and on he went, for a full 10 minutes, making an iron-clad case that Hillary was guilty of gross negligence in her handling of classified material, and that she had violated a federal statute that did not require evidence of intent to prove her guilty.

Attorney General Lynch sat in her office, along with her top aides, watching Comey deliver his blistering rebuke of Hillary Clinton.

Lynch had promised President Obama and Valerie Jarrett that Hillary would not be indicted. But here was the director of the FBI on national TV laying out what appeared to be an unassailable case for prosecuting her.

How could this have happened?  What had gone wrong? Would she be forced to resign?

All these thoughts went through Lynch’s mind, as she later recalled to a friend, as she listened to Comey drone on.

She was livid.

Finally, she couldn’t stand to watch him anymore. She covered her eyes with her hands and let out a string of curses aimed at Jim Comey. And then, three-quarters of the way through his news conference, Comey dropped a bombshell.

Hillary, he said, shouldn’t be prosecuted for her handling of classified information — even though it wasn’t his job to make prosecutorial decisions. That was up to the prosecutors in the Justice Department. There was no evidence, he said, that Hillary had intentionally transmitted or willfully mishandled secret documents in order to harm the United States.

“Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

Hillary was clearly guilty as sin, and the right thing would have been for Comey not only to say so — which he did — but to make her pay for her sins.

But he didn’t.