Monthly Archives: October 2018

The Economy Under President Trump

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Breitbart is reporting today that the Labor Department has stated that initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 207,000 for the week ending September 29th.

The article reports on the impact of Hurricane Florence:

Hurricane Florence, which hit North Carolina and South Carolina last month, affected claims, according to the Labor Department. The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending September 22 was in North Carolina. Claims in South Caroline rose by 2,830, the third largest rise behind Kentucky.

The article concludes:

Jobless claims, which are a proxy for layoffs, have been closely watched for signs that trade disputes would be a drag on the labor market. Earlier this year, economists predicted that the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed by the Trump administration would cost 400,000 jobs. That prediction now looks way too pessimistic.

The jobless claims data has no impact on the monthly employment report, which is scheduled for release on Friday. Bloomberg’s survey of economists sees nonfarm payrolls likely increased by 18o,000 in September after rising 201,000 in August. The unemployment rate is expected to fall one-tenth of a percentage point to 3.8 percent, an 18-year low first hit in May.

President Trump may not be the perfect role model for your son, but it is obvious that he is a very savvy businessman who is working for the benefit of all Americans. I hope all Americans will vote next month to elect people who will support his policies. His economic policies are obviously working.

American Sovereignty

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Yesterday The Washington Times reported that the International Court of Justice has ordered the United States to lift some Iran sanctions. The Court wants to make sure that the people of Iran are not harmed by the sanctions. Does the Court want to set up another ‘oil for food’ program like the one in the 1990’s? It’s amazing how much money dishonest people made from that program while the people of Iraq starved. (article here)

First of all, what are the sanctions on Iran about? Iran is probably the largest source of money for terrorism in the world. Iran supplies weapons and military equipment to Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the government of Syria, Palestinian terrorists, etc. It would be nice if Iran had a little less money to spread around. Iran has also partnered with North Korea and Russia in developing nuclear technology. This is not a country that is working toward peace.

There is also the matter of human rights abuses by the Iranian government. Homosexuals are dropped from buildings or worse. Dissidents are jailed and never heard from again. Fashion police roam the streets and beat women for being immodestly dressed. Human rights are not part of the Iranian government.

The sanctions are putting pressure on the regime. As the financial situation of the people worsens, they are rebelling against the totalitarian government. In this rebellion they have the support of America. If the International Court of Justice truly supported human rights and the humanitarian treatment of people, they would support the sanctions as a way to bring freedom to the people of Iran.

The article states:

The ICC’s David Scheffer responded in the Guardian by saying Bolton’s speech “isolates the United States from international criminal justice and severely undermines our leadership in bringing perpetrators of atrocity crimes to justice elsewhere in the world.”

Wahh.

In case the United Nations hadn’t noticed, this is the Donald Trump administration — not the Barack Obama wishy-washy White House. On globalism first, America second, this president doesn’t play that. MAGA, anyone?

The ICC, apparently, isn’t getting the message.

“The United Nations‘ highest court has ordered the United States to lift sanctions on Iran that affect imports of humanitarian goods and products and services linked to the safety of civil aviation,” NBC wrote.

And on that: “Ordered” seems a rather remarkable word. Better would be “begged.”

After all, what is the ICC to America? America may have helped establish this court back in 2002 — but that’s the extent of the relationship. America has not joined as a state party; the ICC does not dictate policy and procedure to the United States.

It’s almost a delicious anticipation to sit and wonder what Bolton will say to this ICC “order.”

Chances are, given his past and this administration’s bold “America First” dealings on the foreign policy front, it’ll be something like, Bite me, ICC.

That would be well stated, for sure.

I like having a President who not only stands up for American sovereignty, but is willing to support the quest for freedom in other countries.

When Did The FBI Become Political?

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This article is based on two articles–one at The Conservative Treehouse and one at The Hill.

The Conservative Treehouse article reports:

The DOJ-NSD and FBI are holding a press conference today at 9:30am.  The topic is unknown, but the timing coincides with a document production subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee for McCabe Memos, the “Woods File” supporting the Carter Page FISA application, and Gang-of-Eight documents on the Russia investigation.

In related news, former FBI chief legal counsel, James Baker, delivered testimony to the Joint House Committee yesterday in the ongoing investigation of corrupt FISA processes and “spy-gate”.   Fox News and The Hill both have reports.

The Hill reports:

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm.

That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the presidential election.

The dossier, though mostly unverified, was then used by the FBI as the main evidence seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in the final days of the campaign.

The revelation was confirmed both in contemporaneous evidence and testimony secured by a joint investigation by Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees, my source tells me.

It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump,” a knowledgeable source told me.

Here you have the smoking gun in the Russian investigation. Unfortunately it is a smoking gun that Robert Mueller has chosen to ignore. That alone should give all of us pause. What in the world is Mueller investigating? (Or what in the world is Mueller avoiding investigating?)

The Hill further reports:

The growing body of evidence that the FBI used mostly politically-motivated, unverified intelligence from an opponent to justify spying on the GOP nominee’s campaign — just weeks before Election Day — has prompted a growing number of Republicans to ask President Trump to declassify the rest of the FBI’s main documents in the Russia collusion case.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), veteran investigator Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and many others have urged the president to act on declassification even as FBI and Justice Department have tried to persuade the president to keep documents secret.

Ryan has said he believes the declassification will uncover potential FBI abuses of the FISA process. Jordan said he believes there is strong evidence the bureau misled the FISA court. Nunes has said the FBI intentionally hid exculpatory evidence from the judges.

And Meadows told The Hill’s new morning television show, Rising, on Wednesday that there is evidence the FBI had sources secretly record members of the Trump campaign.

“There’s a strong suggestion that confidential human sources actually taped members within the Trump campaign,” Meadows told Hill.TV hosts Krystal Ball and Ned Ryun.

I can assure you that if those responsible for the illegal spying on the opposition campaign are not brought to justice, this will happen again in the future. In the Watergate Scandal, people went to jail. In the Russiagate Scandal, people should also go to jail. Oddly enough, it seems as if the people the Special Prosecutor is investigating are not the ones who should go to jail.

Meanwhile In France

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Breitbart is reporting the following today:

Small groups of young people in the French city of Mulhouse clashed with local police over the weekend, allegedly using guerrilla-style tactics against the officers including laying traps and attacking them.

The clashes occurred over the period of several hours and saw the local youths set garbage bins on fire and destroy a car in the neighbourhood of Drouot, newspaper L’Alsace reports. 

The violence began in the area at around 8:30 pm according to local residents who called the police to help calm the situation. When officers arrived on the scene at Rue de la Navigation, they were met with violence as small groups attacked them with weapons including stones and iron bars.

Attacks on police and medical services personnel have become more common in France recently. Some are Islamic-terrorist related, and some are simply random attacks.

The article further reports:

The besieged officers caught in the ambush managed to call for reinforcements from Mulhouse and from neighbouring Colmar and Saint-Louis which lies on the Swiss border. The police also requested additional Gendarmes helicopter air support.

Around 50 “youths” were believed to have participated in the clashes, throwing stones and other objects from the top of roofs in the neighbourhood at the officers. The clashes lasted several hours and police say that the situation did not return to normal until around 3 am. No one was arrested following the conflict.

This is not totally an Islamic problem, but it is partially the result of excessive immigration by Muslims–including Muslim youths who are unable to find jobs. Proverbs 16:27 says, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Groups of young men without jobs and without family responsibilities are not a recipe for stability in any country. We can learn from what is happening in Europe that we need to limit immigration to those who can find work in America and are willing to respect the laws of our country. If not, we will find ourselves with youth rioting in the streets of America in the not-to-distant future.

Putting Money Toward A Good Cause

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The Hill is reporting today that President Trump will donate his quarterly salary to the Small Business Administration to fund a program that provides assistance to veterans who are interested in starting their own companies.

The article reports:

She (Administrator Linda McMahon) said the money will be used for the SBA’s “Emerging Leaders” program, which offers seven months of training to veterans transitioning from military life into the private sector.

Trump has donated each of his quarterly salaries to different areas of the government since taking office. The president donated his salary from the first quarter of 2018 to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Last year, Trump gave his salary to the Transportation Department, the Health and Human Services Department for the opioid epidemic, the National Park Service and the Education Department.

Thank you, President Trump.

Does It Matter That She Lied About This?

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The question of the hour (for the last week) has been whether to believe Professor Ford of Judge Kavanaugh. Both have been successful in their careers. Both have completely different stories to tell. Well, there seems to be a problem with one part of Professor Ford’s testimony. The Democrats may ignore it, but I suspect the Republicans might not.

The Federalist reported yesterday:

In a sworn statement provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a man who claims to be an ex-boyfriend of Christine Blasey Ford says that he personally witnessed Ford coach a friend on how to take a polygraph exam. If true, it would mean Ford provided false testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week when she claimed she had never had any discussions with anyone about how to take a polygraph.

The troubling allegations about Ford’s polygraph history and potentially false testimony were revealed Tuesday in a letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, to attorneys for Ford. Ford and her attorneys have thus far refused to provide all polygraph-related documents and media to the Senate for review.

I need to mention here that polygraph exam results are not admissible in a court of law. I realize that the hearings were not a court of law, but the fact that polygraph exams can be rigged needs to be taken into consideration.

The article continues:

“The full details of Dr. Ford’s polygraph are particularly important because the Senate Judiciary Committee has received a sworn statement from a longtime boyfriend of Dr. Ford’s, stating that he personally witnessed Dr. Ford coaching a friend on polygraph examinations,” Grassley wrote. “When asked under oath in the hearing whether she’d ever given any tips or advice to someone who was planning on taking a polygraph, Dr. Ford replied, ‘Never.’”

“This statement raises specific concerns about the reliability of her polygraph examination results,” he continued. “The Senate therefore needs this information.”

The article includes the sworn statement provided to the committee. Please follow the link above to the article to read the entire statement.

I don’t know if providing the committee with the information relevant to the polygraph exam will clear things up or not, but it is interesting to me that Dr. Ford’s lawyers have refused to provide that information.

Bringing Good Things Out Of A Disaster

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This is the video of the flag at the Frying Pan Tower during Hurricane Florence:

The Frying Pan Tower is a Coast Guard Light Station located 34 miles off the coast of North Carolina that has been turned into a unique adventure bed and breakfast like no other.

The Daily Caller posted an article today about the flag in the video above.

The article reports:

An American flag that flew off the coast of North Carolina survived winds of over 100 mph from Hurricane Florence and was sold for over $10,000.

Richard Neal, owner of the Frying Pan Tower where the flag once flew, said it was meant to be a symbol of the pride and resilience of America.

“What we wanted to do when we put it up there was nothing more than saying this is America,” Neal told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday. “We are proud of it and we go through storms together and we survive. We hang on and we rebuild.”

The flag was auctioned off for $10,900 Sunday and all the proceeds are going to help victims of Hurricane Florence through the Red Cross, ABC11 WTVD reported.

Wow.

Is This Where Our Culture Is?

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Dennis Prager posted an article today in National Review about middle-class values and the attack on those values by the political left.

The article reports:

In August 2017, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax wrote a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer in defense of middle-class values. She and her co-author cited a list of behavioral norms that, as Wax, put it, “was almost universally endorsed between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s.”

They were:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

She later wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The fact that the ‘bourgeois culture’ these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s largely explains today’s social pathologies — and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.”

For her left-wing colleagues at Penn Law School, this list was beyond the pale. About half of her fellow professors of law — 33 of them — condemned her in an open letter. And Wax wrote in the Journal, “My law school dean recently asked me to take a leave of absence next year and to cease teaching a mandatory first-year course.”

If you are over the age of 60, chances are these are the values you grew up with. Many young people rebelled against these values in the 1960’s and beyond, but these were the values they grew up with.

The article continues:

The Pennsylvania chapter of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild condemned her for espousing bourgeois values and questioned “whether it is appropriate for her to continue to teach a required first-year course.”

These are now considered bourgeois values by the political left. Let’s look at the consequences of these values.

In March 2013, the Brookings Institute posted a list of three things teenagers living in poverty themselves should do to avoid poverty in their future.

This is the list:

In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class. Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.

I would add avoiding illegal drugs or excessive alcohol to that list. However, note that the ways to avoid poverty are very much in line with the bourgeois values that the political left is denigrating. These bourgeois values are also the building blocks of a strong society. Again, why is the political left denigrating them?

The article concludes:

There surely are mean conservatives — witness some of the vile comments by anonymous conservative commenters on the Internet. And it is a moral scandal that Ford has received death threats. The difference in left-wing meanness is the meanness of known — not anonymous — people on the left. They don’t hide behind anonymity because they do not feel bound by traditional notions of civility, for which they have contempt.

Now you can understand why the Left hates Mike Pence, a man who has, by all accounts, led a thoroughly honorable life. He — and other Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews — tries to live by a code that is higher than him.

That ethic is what Übermenschen seek to destroy.

They are succeeding.

I hope not. That is not the country I want to leave to my children and grandchildren.

Why The Iran Deal Needed To Be Scrapped

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Reuters is reporting today that France has seized Iranian assets belonging to Iran’s intelligence services in response to a June plot to attack an exiled Iranian opposition group’s rally outside Paris. Make no mistake–the money Iran got in the Iran deal is being used to fund terrorism around the world. If European countries choose to ignore the sanctions America has put on Iran, they do so at their own risk. The Muslim population of Europe can easily be mobilized and paid by Iran to create havoc in Europe.

The article reports:

The hardening of relations between Paris and Tehran could have deep consequences for Iran, coming at a time when Rouhani’s government is looking to European capitals to salvage a 2015 nuclear deal after the United States pulled out.

“An attempted attack in Villepinte was foiled on June 30. An incident of such gravity on our national territory could not go unpunished,” said a joint statement by the foreign, interior and economy ministries.

Asked for reaction, a spokesman at the Iranian Embassy in Paris replied simply: “Hello. Thank you.” There was no immediate response to the French move from Tehran.

The plot targeted a meeting of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) outside the French capital. U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and several former European and Arab ministers attended the rally.

It unraveled after an Iranian diplomat accredited in Austria was arrested in Germany and two other individuals in possession of explosives were detained in Belgium.

The article concludes:

Paris has also suspended nominating a new ambassador to Iran and not responded to Tehran nominations for diplomatic positions in France.

The deterioration of relations with France could have wider implications for Iran.

France has been one of the strongest advocates of salvaging the 2015 nuclear deal, which saw Tehran agree to curbs on its nuclear program in return for a lifting of economic sanctions.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has said it expects renewed sanctions to impact the Iranian economy hard.

The answer to Iran as a terrorist state is regime change. Increasing the economic pressure on the current regime through sanctions could bring that to pass. For further information on the Iranian revolution and the goals of the government that took control in 1979, I recommend reading A Time to Betray by Reza Kahlili. The book tells the story of a man who believed that the revolution would bring freedom to Iran and thus supported it, only to be disillusioned later and work undercover as an American spy. It’s a great read.

Who Were Those Women?

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Most of us have seen the video of Senator Jeff Flake accosted in the elevator before the Senate Judiciary Committee vote to move the Kavanaugh nomination out of committee. Many of us have little doubt that it was staged. If nothing else, it provided cover for the actions of the spineless Senator.

Yesterday John Fund posted an article at the National Review which sheds some light on exactly what happened. Mr. Fund notes that the two women had to get past reporters and security officers in order to block a senators-only elevator in the U.S. Capitol. That should cause some concern about the safety of our legislators. Considering the 3017 attack on Republicans while they were playing softball, I would think the security at the Capitol would be better.

Let’s take a look at who those two women are. The article reports:

Ana Maria Archila and Maggie Gallagher were the two women who confronted Flake inside the elevator to express, as the New York Times put it, “a rising anger among many who feel that, too often, women’s voices are silenced and their pain ignored.”

Perhaps because the women expressed such raw emotion, few media outlets dug into their political activism. Archila is an executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy; she had spent the previous week in Washington engaged in protests against Kavanaugh. Gallagher is a 23-year-old activist with the group. The Center is a left-wing group that is heavily funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Indeed, as of 2014, the Open Society was one of the three largest donors to the group.

…Archila has another role beyond her duties as co–executive director of the Center. She is also a member of the national committee of the Working Families Party (WFP), a New York–based fringe political party that exercises outside influence in the Empire State because of the state’s unique law allowing candidates to run on more than one party line.

…The WFP was founded in 1998 by the leaders of ACORN, the now disbanded and disgraced group of community organizers for whom Barack Obama served as a lawyer, in Chicago in the 1990s.

The article concludes:

I have no doubt that the vast majority of protesters who want to stop Brett Kavanaugh are sincere and are merely exercising their constitutional rights. But imagine if two women had cornered a Democratic senator in an elevator and demanded an investigation of who had leaked to the media Christine Blasey Ford’s letter alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. (Senator Lindsey Graham said today that he planned to investigate the leak.) There would have been sputtering outrage in media circles, and reporters would have breathlessly hunted down any ties between the women and outside groups.

It’s a sign of media bias that the people from the well-funded groups behind the anti-Kavanaugh protests are described merely as “activists” and that their political motives and origins are largely unexplored.

The fact that these fringe-left groups are fighting so hard to stop Judge Kavanaugh convinces me that he needs to be confirmed. He represents a return to Constitutional Law that the political left does not want. He summed up his views when he reminded Congress that it was their job to make laws–not the Supreme Court’s. It is time to get back to the Representative Republic our Founding Fathers designed.

President Trump Has Reached A Trade Deal With Canada And Mexico

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America has not done well in trade deals in the recent past. Our manufacturing sector has suffered for a variety of reasons–high taxes, bad trade agreements, energy costs, etc. The Trump administration has begun to address these issues, sometimes more successfully than others.

This past weekend, Fox Business announced that the United States and Canada confirmed that they had reached a deal on a “new, modernized trade agreement,” which is designed to replace the 1994 NAFTA pact.

The article reports:

In a joint statement the two nations said the new deal would be called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said following a cabinet meeting, “It’s a good day for Canada.”

…The agreements reportedly boost U.S. access to Canada’s dairy market and protect Canada from possible U.S. autos tariffs.

Trump’s administration has said Canada must sign on to the text of the updated NAFTA by a midnight Sunday deadline or face exclusion from the pact. Washington has already reached a bilateral deal with Mexico, the third NAFTA member.

If Canada did not sign a new deal, Trump had threatened to impose steep tariffs on all automotive imports.

…Trump blames NAFTA for the loss of American manufacturing jobs and wants major changes to the pact, which underpins $1.2 trillion in annual trade. Markets fear its demise would cause major economic disruption.

Negotiators from both sides spent two days talking by phone as they tried to settle a range of difficult issues such as access to Canada’s dairy market and U.S. tariffs.

As part of any agreement, Canada looks set to offer increased access to its highly protected dairy market, as it did in separate pacts with the European Union and Pacific nations.

Access to Canada’s dairy market was one of the sticking points of the negotiations. Canada places high tariffs on imported dairy products in order to protect its dairy farmers.

This agreement is another indication of the Trump administration’s desire to protect the interests of America. America is simply looking for a level playing field in trade agreements. This treaty is one more step in that direction.

Misleading Voters In The Hope Of Winning Elections

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Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial on Friday about misleading claims about ObamaCare by Democrats running for office.

The editorial reports:

Democrats want health care to be a major deciding issue in the midterm elections and are spending a fortune running campaign ads. Too bad most of the ads make the false claim that Republicans would take away protections for pre-existing conditions.

From January to July, Democrats spent some $17 million for 56,000 health care ads on behalf of Senate candidates, according to USA Today.

The Wesleyan Media Project reported that 44% of all the ads for congressional Democrats focused on health care. In Senate races, half of the ads were on health care, and another 16% on prescription drug costs.

One of the claims in the ads is that Republicans want to deny insurance to those with pre-existing conditions. This is a scare tactic.

The editorial explains the Republican plan for dealing with those who have pre-existing conditions (The article notes that the individual market comprises just 7% of the total insurance market. And of those, only a much smaller fraction had ever been denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions before ObamaCare.):

One GOP idea was to create subsidized high-risk pools for those whose health needs would truly make them ineligible for coverage. Another was to provide protections for those who maintain continuous coverage. That would prevent people from gaming the system by waiting until they’re sick to buy insurance. (In contrast to ObamaCare, which encourages people to game the system.) Still another was to expand access to group coverage by removing needless government restrictions on “association health plans.”

Whatever anyone thinks of the Republican alternatives, it’s clear that ObamaCare’s approach is failing. Its rules and mandates led to double-digit price increases year after year, which have priced millions of families out of the insurance market altogether. (So much for guaranteed coverage.) Those who can afford ObamaCare coverage have no choice but to enroll in HMO-style plans with extremely high deductibles. (So much for making insurance “affordable.”)

The GOP proposals aren’t perfect, a point we made in this space many times. But ObamaCare as it exists today is a disaster. It promises affordable coverage, but makes it impossible for millions to get it. And it requires massive taxpayer subsidies to bring individual insurance within reach of anyone.

Unfortunately voters who are not well informed may believe the lies being told. Hopefully enough people have been negatively impacted by ObamaCare to see through this ploy.