The Wall and the Shutdown

Right now the federal government is "shut down" with no end in sight over President Trump's demand for a border wall. Trump's position is easy to understand. The wall was his biggest campaign promise and trump has probably learned from George H. W. Bush's "read my lips" promise which was a big factor in his single-term as president. As it is, Trump has backed off a lot from his original promise of a wall going from ocean to ocean. The current one will be much smaller but will still target areas with the most border crossings.

Trump's desire for a border wall is reasonable. It may not stop border crossings but it will slow them a lot. $5 billion sounds like a lot of money but the wall will pay for itself in reduced border enforcement costs (like the $1.3 billion the Democrats proposed) and reduced demand for federal aid for illegal immigrants. It will also help wages since the flood of unskilled workers depresses wages in general.

So why are Democrats so opposed to the wall? I can think of a few reasons, none of them complimentary to the Democrats.

The first is simple opposition to Trump. Many people reflexively take the opposing side from anything that Trump proposes, even if it means reversing themselves. So they are willing to see the government shut down rather than see Trump fulfill a campaign promise.

Opposition also comes from people who believe in open borders. They want to welcome anyone who wants to come to the US. While laudable, they will eventually run into the adage that you can have open borders or a welfare state but not both.

The Democratic Congressional leadership has to answer to both of these groups but I think there's more to their opposition than just this. After all, their counter-proposal is for money for border enforcement. This should be treated as a trap. Border enforcement without a wall means more children separated from their parents and more children dying in custody. That stokes opposition to Trump and helps motivate people to vote Democrat.

In the long-term, though, the Democratic party is counting on a continuing moderate influx of Hispanics. They are counting on this group to give them a permanent majority through demographics. The Democratic leadership may be willing to moderate the influx through heightened enforcement but they want to be able to revert. That's why they can't allow a wall. They are expecting that two years from now President Beto will agree to slashing enforcement funds again. But you can't defund a wall. It keeps on stopping immigrants, even if the current president welcomes them.

Hollywood and McCarthyism

Hollywood loves to make movies about the days of the McCarthy hearings and the Blacklist when writers couldn't get work (actually they could but they had to use pseudonyms or fronts). These movies always side with the poor people accused of being communists, usually portraying them as hapless victims who only joined the Communist Party to impress a girl or some such. The almost never show the truth which is that the Communist Party of Hollywood was dedicated to the overthrow of the US government and was directly controlled by the Kremlin. All of this came out in the early 90s after the fall of the USSR during a brief period when their records were public.

The point of all of these movies is to make us root for the dissident and boo the officious accuser who is willing to ruin the lives of hard-working, talented people over a difference in philosophy. Hollywood is for the underdog.

Except is isn't.

Look at what happened to Kevin Hart. He was chosen to host the 2019 Oscars. Within three days he was out after people dug up some homophobic tweets he made a decade or more ago. Never mind that he recanted and apologized for them years ago. He was judged unsuitable to host the Oscars.

Hollywood has taken the place of McCarthy and no one is there to stand up for their victims.

Note, the one exception to the movies about the Hollywood communists was the Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar. That movie correctly showed a group of writers who were dedicated communists although it was an over-the-top portrayal that included kidnapping an actor and sending the ransom to the USSR. After The Majestic, I can forgive the Coens' exaggerations.

How Socialism Fails - a Case Study

Whenever Venezuela is brought up as an example of failed socialist policies, American socialists immediately claim that the country is not really socialist and that it's problems are due to corruption and the plummet in oil prices rather than socialism. Regardless of other issues, their policies on food prices are pure socialism and should be examined as such.The following is a highly simplified account of actual policies Venezuela practiced and their results. Given Venezuela's hyper-inflation, their real prices are meaningless so I made up some round numbers to illustrate the point.

The government decided that food prices were too high so they went to the grocers and told them, "You are charging $10 for beef. We want you to cut that in half." So the grocers went to the farmers and told them, "We were paying you $7 for beef but now we can only afford to pay you $3". It cost the farmers more than $3 to produce the beef so they either went out of business or started selling beef to unofficial markets. Soon a black market for beef was established but black market beef cost $12.

The government asked the grocers why their shelves were empty and they replied, "There's no beef available. The farmers won't sell it below cost so they've gone out of business." So the government went to some select grocers (meaning friends of officials) and gave them money to buy beef from other countries. Depending on the grocer there were four ways the money was used:

1) The grocer pocketed the money and used some of it to bribe officials to look the other way.

2) The grocer bought foreign beef and sold it to the black market.

3) The grocer bought foreign beef and sold it at $5. The first person through the door was someone from the black market who bought all of it.

4) The grocer bought foreign beef but kept it in a back room and only sold to close friends and family.

The result for all of these is that the shelves remained bare and the only way for the average person to buy beef was on the black market.

This is the inevitable result of well-meaning government officials who try to help people by ignoring markets and setting prices too low. Shelves remain bare and a black market develops. The Soviet Union was notorious for bread lines and for its black market.

Venezuela got a lot worse after this. Because of their hyper-inflation and limited foreign currency reserves, the government couldn't keep subsidizing buying food from other countries so even the black market was affected.

This works the other way, too. The State of New York has very high taxes on cigarettes so there's a thriving black market from people who buy cartons of cigarettes in other states with lower taxes then sell individual cigarettes in New York.

The bottom line is that markets develop around what people will pay for goods and what sellers are willing to sell them for. If the government sets prices too low then the goods vanish from the shelves and move into a black market. If the government sets the price too high then markets will develop to get around the official prices.

And that's why socialism fails.

Why the Socialists Scare Me

Socialism is on the rise. A large percentage of the Democratic Party wants socialism. A Socialist made a strong showing in the presidential race in 2016 and a much-younger one managed to defeat the 4th-most powerful Democrat in the House. I find all of this terrifying.

Socialism means that the government either owns or controls "the means of production" which means most employers. It's a totalitarian philosophy where the government intrudes into every facet of your life.

"But wait", you say, "Scandinavian socialism" and "Democratic socialism!".

Ha!

Free college and centralized health care does not make a country socialist. That's just the bait. Scandinavian countries are basically capitalist and the socialists are insisting that capitalism is the cause of all of society's ills and needs to be eradicated. The Antifa movement calls itself "anti-fascist" but they are also anti-capitalist. What's more, the Scandinavian countries manage because they are small, homogeneous and xenophobic. They are the opposite of the racially (but not ideologically) diverse population the American socialists want.

As for the democratic part, socialists have a long history of being for democracy right up until they are in power. Then they change the rules to see that they never have to win an election again. They're already talking about how they'll do this. They lost two out of five presidential elections in the Electoral College so they want to abolish that. They've also noticed that the Senate gives as much power to small states as to large ones so they want to change that. They also noticed that members of the House of Representatives from small states represent fewer people than members from large states so they want to change that.

They want increased voting rights. If you're a convicted felon they want you to vote. They are even allowing non-citizens to vote in some municipal elections. They are also big on making it as easy as possible to vote (and as easy as possible to cheat).

They keep trying to change the rules for nominees to the Supreme Court. Since that hasn't worked, they are now floating ideas such as term limits or outright court packing.

They don't believe in individual freedoms, either, at least not the traditional ones. Freedom of speech has been under attack for years under the guise of "hate speech" where hate speech is anything they don't want to hear. If you only believe in protecting speech that you agree with then you support political censorship. And they really love that. For years, progressive speakers can say anything they want on campus but conservatives, even moderate ones, are protested as hate speech and have to provide expensive security. Recently that's gone a step further. Corporations are examined to see if the officers have the correct views and any deviation from the party line can result in the company being made unwelcome. This is an amazing guilt-by-association where the private opinions of one executive or board member taints an entire company.

Colleges have long been mono-cultures but now the tech giants are also embracing a far-left corporate culture and dissent is punished. During the 2016 election, someone wrote a pro-Trump message on the physical wall in the Facebook office and this was treated as vandalism. Only pro-Hillary messages were allowed. Google, Facebook and Twitter all have the reputation of being far quicker to punish conservatives than progressives.

And this is only getting worse. There have been a few recent incidents where Republicans have been equated with Nazis or Nazi-enablers. These didn't spring out of no-where, hundreds of miles apart. It's what the left is telling itself. After years of calling President Trump every name they can think of, they've gone on to do the same to the entire Republican Party.

Once you've outlawed hate speech and declared all conservatives to be white supremacists then you've shut down debate completely - which is the goal. I'm a conservative who believes in free speech and capitalism. If these socialists ever take power then I'll have to stay quiet or face the gulag.

And that's why they terrify me.

Obama admits that Identity Politics are Racist

At a recent event at Rice University, former President Obama said this:

"In those environments, you then start getting a different kind of politics … that's based on, 'that person's not like me and it must be their fault,' and you start getting a politics based on a nationalism that's not pride in country but hatred for somebody on the other side of the border. And you start getting the kind of politics that does not allow for compromise, because it's based on passions and emotions," Obama said.

"It's identity politics," Baker said.

"Which is why, by the way, when I hear people say they don't like identity politics, I think it's important to remember that identity politics doesn't just apply when it's black people or gay people or women," Obama said. "The folks who really originated identity politics were the folks who said Three-Fifths Clause and all that stuff. That was identity politics … Jim Crow was identity politics. That's where it started."

When you read a more complete transcript, he meant to be saying that President Trump is an evil nationalist who hates foreigners but he got sidetracked by Baker's interjection of identity politics and said a few true things that I don't think he meant to say. But he's right, identity politics and intersectionality are just as racist as Jim Crow. They judge people by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and possibly a few other traits rather than who they are. They try to dismiss it by redefining racism so that only white people can be racist but that puts us right back to defining people solely by their race.

I'm old enough to have actually heard Doctor Martin Luther King on TV and believe in his goal of a society where people are judged for who they are instead of the color of their skin. The Left has rejected that vision and embraced a new one that is as bad as what King was protesting against.

I hope that President Obama isn't forced to retract his statement.

Why Trump Will Be Reelected

I'm writing this on the eve of the 2018 election. At this point the predicted Blue Wave looks more like a Blue Ripple and may even turn into a Red Ripple (which sounds tastier). The election is being billed as a referendum on President Trump. Regardless of how it turns out, Trump has a near-lock on reelection in 2020. There are several reasons why I'm making this prediction:

The President's party typically does poorly in the first mid-term election. Under Obama, the Democrats suffered a major Red Wave in 2010. So did the Democrats under Clinton. Both presidents went on to be reelected. Trump's popularity hit a historic low point last year but it's recovered and is above Obama's at this point in Obama's presidency. So, midterm results seldom have much to do with a President's reelection.

Another problem is that the Democrats have far too many candidates. The first tier of candidates, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have all run and lost before. The are also ancient. Biden and Sanders make Trump look young and Clinton, who is a few months younger than Trump, can't match his energy.

Of the she second tier, only Elizabeth Warren is nationally known. The rest, like Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, are known to political junkies but not to the general public. That makes it hard for them to raise enough funds to break through into the top tier. There are a couple of billionaires in the third tier who can get around this by self-funding but they're even less known.

Despite all these candidates, the actual policy differences between them is minimal. Bernie Sanders was able to challenge Hillary Clinton from the left but the party as a whole has moved so far to the left that there are few actual policy differences. That makes it even harder for candidates to break into the top tier.

All of that gives Trump and advantage but what really cinches it for him is the white hot anger the Democratic base feels for him. In order to win the general election, a candidate will need to appeal to more than just the Democratic base. But the base hates Trump so much that they will not support anyone who doesn't share their hatred of Trump's policies.

Immigration is a big factor here. Democrats laughed at Trump and his wall but illegal immigration is a major economic issue to working-class Americans. It's a major reason Trump won and a clear majority of the population supports enforcing immigration laws. Prior to Trump, enforcing boarder security wasn't a controversial policy. But that's changed. The more Trump enforces immigration the more the Democrats call for open borders. That's a losing issue for them but calls to abolish ICE are so common that the Democratic candidate will find it impossible to disown them.

A lot of pundits have described Trump as a populist but that means that anyone opposing him is going to have to take a lot of positions that are unpopular with the general electorate, just to get the nomination.

Little has been written about the internal problems within the Democratic party but they are real. The Democratic elite is richer, whiter and much further to the left than the majority of the party. That's how Trump was able to win states like Pennsylvania and it gives him a chance at making further inroads into the Democrats.

There's still a possibility that Trump will lose reelection. A major recession will kill his chances of reelection. That's somewhat outside his control. There's also the possibility that a scandal will finally stick but that gets less likely every day.

Barring one of these external events, the Democrats don't have a chance of unseating Trump.

Why the Democrats Can't Be Allowed In Power Again

The Democrats have gotten scary over the last decade or so. They are rejecting the basis of America in general. If they come to power (meaning the Presidency and both houses of Congress) our basic institutions are at stake. If this seems overwrought, just look at the the things they want to eliminate:

The Electoral College. In two of the last five Presidential elections, a Republican won the Election even though the Democrat had more votes (note, in neither of these cases did the Democrat actually have more than 50% of the vote). Their response is to propose abolishing the Electoral College.

The Senate. After the Kavanaugh confirmation, several prominent Democrats pointed out that the Senators voting for confirmation represented smaller states than the ones against confirmation. They also began referring to the Senate and the Electoral College as racist remnants of slavery.

Free Speech. This the oldest point on the list. For years the left has tried to argue that the 1st Amendment doesn't protect hate speech. Unfortunately the best definition of hate speech is any speech they hate. In other words, they are in favor of outright censorship of their opposition. This has been going on in colleges for years - progressive speakers are welcomed with open arms but conservatives are protested and often required to pay for expensive security.

Guns. The left's antipathy for the 2nd Amendment is even older and more deeply ingrained than for the 1st Amendment. The subject or their ire varies from decade to decade. Currently they are after AR-15s. In other decades they were after handguns. Facts and figures don't phase them. They are operating from the viewpoint of, "I don't want a gun so no one else should be allowed to own one."

Due Process. Due process is part of the 5th and 14th Amendments. For certain crimes, the left has given up on due process, at least on college campuses. A "dear college" letter circulated to colleges by the Obama administration called for new, harsh policies for accusations of sexual assault. The standard of guilt was reduced to 50.001% likely, the accused was often denied right to a lawyer and, in many cases, wasn't even told what the accusations were until his hearing. While college is not the court system, being expelled for sexual assault still carries a life-time stigma and can ruin someone's life. Many on the left want to see this precedence carried into the courtroom. Their justification is that "women lie about rape so seldom that they should always be believed." The figures they are citing put false rape accusations in the 1%-3% range but these figures are for cases that were investigates and actually went to trial. Even if that number was correct, it turns on its ear the liberal adage "I'd rather see 100 guilty go free than a single innocent convicted". This reversal shows the sea change in the shift on the left from being liberals to being progressives.

Honest elections. The Democrats are convinced that their key to total control is getting more people to show up at the polls. Accordingly they keep making it easier and easier. They refuse to purge voter rolls of people who are dead or have moved. They register every warm-body they can find with little regard for their legal status. They insist that any sort of ID requirement is voter suppression. In some cities they allow non-citizens to vote on some issues which makes it even easier for some to slip through the cracks and vote in the general election.

Limits to immigration. Abolish ICE is a current battle cry among Democrats and Democratic Socialists. They aren't real clear what they would do in its place. It's implied that they would allow open borders. To quote Milton Freedman, " It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state." Welfare states are only possible when the majority of citizens are productive workers. Add in the antipathy to acculturation and you have the recipe for a failed state.

Capitalism. This is a growing movement on the left. They want to eliminate capitalism with "social democracy" or something similar. They are always vague about exactly what they want. Somehow it involves workers running the companies and deciding what will be produced. Their rhetoric is still rooted in the notion that everyone works in a 19th-century factory and that the factory owner have unlimited wealth. They also ignore the fact that every country that has tried real socialism (not just free college and health care) devolves into a dictatorship pretty fast.

So, that's what we have to look forward to if the current crop of Democrats get in power. This is an example of winning an election then using their power to be sure they never have to run again. If they manage to accumulate enough power they will ruin the country.

So we can't let these idiots in power again. 

Blaming the President

There's a tendency for the party out of power to hold the President personally responsible for tragedies. This often veers into conspiracy theory. One example for President Obama is Benghazi where many Republicans are convinced that Obama called off a rescue mission, leaving four Americans to die. Various Congressional committees have investigated this and none has found any proof.

But that's nothing compared to the left's need to blame Republican presidents. This was most recently on display after the tragic shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue which left 11 dead. The shooter previously announced that he was against President Trump and had voted against him. Regardless, Democrats and the news media lost no time in blaming Trump for the shooting. Trump, according to them, has raised the acceptable level of violence through loose talk to the point that shooting Jews is acceptable. He also used coded references. By complaining about George Soros, the billionaire who has donated millions to oppose Trump, is sending a dog whistle about Jews. never mind that Soros is a non-practicing Jew and Trump's daughter and son-in-law are practicing Orthodox Jews, Trump must be sending signals about killing Jews. This is a case of projection - they hate Trump so much that they can't admit that something bad can happen without Trump being the instigator.

This happened earlier. A news report listed Trump as the collaborator during a hurricane.

This is not unique to Trump, though. The left did it to President Bush.

After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, I watched the contributors for the Daily KOS comb through the state budget. They were positive that the levee failed because funds had been cut to pay for Bush's foreign wars. The levees actually failed because the cement parts weren't sufficiently robust. There was even a theory that Bush ordered the levees to be dynamited in order to floor the poor, black sections.

But that pales next to the 9/11 Truthers. To them, it is inconceivable that something as big as 9/11 could happen without the government's cooperation. They invented a conspiracy where the government secretly planted explosives in the Twin Towers and blew them up. Never mind how impossible it would be to secrete enough explosives to do that, they invented an imaginary form of thermite that could do it.

These are all irrational responses fed by hate for the purpose of justifying their hate. But they are not unique to Trump.

Political Violence

Two incidents in the last week have the left up in arms against President Trump. The first was a series of bombs sent to prominent Democrats. There were at least 14 of these. None actually exploded and all were sent to people who have mail rooms that open their packages for them so these were almost certainly meant to intimidate rather than harm. Far more serious was a gunman who attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh in one of the worst attacks against Jews in US history.

The left blamed President Trump for both incidents. While it's true that the bomber appears to be a Trump supporter, he also appears to be a nut case.

The gunman is both anti-Semitic and anti-Trump. Considering that Trump is our naiton's most pro-Israel president and his son-in-law and daughter are Jewish, as are the President's grand-children, there's just no way that Trump could have influenced someone who is violently anti-Jew. Regardless, the left has been blaming Trump regardless, accusing him of using anti-Semitic code-words and in raising the level of violence in general.

Here's the thing, most of the violence is from the left. Just this month someone sent ricin-laced letters to members of the Trump administration including the President. These did not actually have ricin, only ground castor beans which is enough to set off ricin alarms. So this was nearly identical to the fake bombs - both were designed to alarm people rather than actually hurt anyone. But the ricin letters barely got any publicity while the bombs were a top story for days.

But the ricin letters where just the latest in a long line of violence against Republicans. That includes a Bernie Saunders supporter trying to assassinate the Republican members of Congress and going back to more Bernie supporters physically disrupting Trump rallies in 2016. Someone attacked a Republican candidate with a knife. A different Republican candidate, a woman, had her arm twisted. Republican headquarters have been burned or had their windows smashed. I could go on but you get the idea. There are a disproportionate number of attacks against Republicans than Democrats. But the left doesn't even see this.

When condemning political violence, it's important to condemn all political violence. Otherwise you are saying that you support it as long as it's against people you disapprove of.

That's what's been happening. The left condemns the KKK and the Proud Boys but cheers on Antifa. They complain about Trump's violent rhetoric while ignoring actual violence against Republicans.

This shouldn't be a surprise. This is just an extension of the left's definition of hate speech. For years they've been claiming that hate speech is not free speech and should not be protected but their definition of hate speech usually comes down to any speech they hate. Now they've extended that to violence. If it's against Republicans then it's justified because the Republicans must have brought it on themselves (this was an excuse after the Republican softball team was attacked). In the few cases where Democrats are attacked then it is immediately blamed on President Trump.

There are a couple of special cases that should be mentioned. First, if the violent offender is Muslim then the conversation immediately turns to gun control.

The second special case is the left's growing antisemitism. I mentioned this to a far-left friend on Facebook a few months ago and was called a troll. But antisemitism is growing world-wide and it's mainly from the left. There is a direct relationship between colleges with active BDS movements and antisemitic incidents. Bernie Sanders had to assure people that he was ethnically Jewish but not a practicing Jew. A member of Washington DC's city council insisted that Jews control the weather. Louis Farrakhan maintains relations with many Democrats regardless of how anti-Jewish his rhetoric is. Linda Sarsour, co-organizer of one of the anti-Trump women's marches has similarly made anti-Jewish statements. England's far-left Labor leader, Jeremy Corbin, has alienated Jews in his party. And, of course, the gunman who shot the Jews in Pittsburgh hated Trump as well as Jews. But the American left refuses to see this. They like to think of themselves as loving diversity but they also have a growing hatred for Israel which spills over into a general dislike for Jews in general and practicing Jews in particular.

Elizabeth Warren Enters the 2020 Race and Looses It in a Single Day

The initial headline sounded good: Senator Elizabeth Warren had a DNA test done and it proved that she does have some Indian ancestors. For years she's been haunted by the fact that in her early career she was listed as Native American despite looking whiter than white.

The problem was in the details. Yes, a researcher found some evidence of Indian ancestry but it was much further back than she'd been claiming. Rather than her mother being related to two modern tribes, the DNA analysis showed that the apparent Indian ancestor was six to ten generations back, far too distant to affect her mother's status. Further, there is very little DNA mapping from North American tribes so the analyst used Mexican and Peruvian DNA as a proxy. So all we really know is that, like most European/Americans, Warren had a distant ancestor who was from somewhere in the Americas. That's a long way from proving the Cherokee ancestry she'd originally claimed.

So the initial story was favorable but the follow-ups will continue to haunt her. She took a vague, unsubstantiated claim (every family has those) and proved it wrong while claiming it proved her right. In doing so, she brought the whole false claim back into the news cycle. What had been old news became news again.

And she did it three weeks before an election where the Democrats can't afford any further distractions angering Democratic campaign professionals across the country. It also gave President Trump a chance to dig her on her Indian claim yet again. By the end of the day she was sending out angry tweets, sounding more like Hillary Clinton than the high-minded icon she pretends to be.

This proves that A) Warren is running for president, B) she's already reacting to Trump rather than forcing him to react to her, C) her timing and judgement are really poor.

Six years ago she was widely followed. Her line about corporations not accomplishing things on their own was so powerful that Barack Obama appropriated it with his "you didn't build this" line in the 2012 campaign. Two years ago Bernie Sanders was seen as the consolation candidate after Warren decided not to run. But those days are past. She's no longer widely quoted. She's forced to do stunts like her "saving capitalism act" (an example of really bad economic policy) and releasing a genetic study that shows she's no more Native American than most whites.

Warren still has a decent shot at the nomination but there's no way she can defeat President Trump.

Why I Don't Believe Dr. Christine Ford

In evaluating the conflicting testimony between Dr. Ford and Judge Brett Kananaugh, people have been trying to read how earnest each was and how "believable" each seemed. This is the wrong approach. Rather than trying to judge how well they presented their case, we need to look at externals.

Years ago I was on a Duck tour of Plymouth, Ma. My daughter asked me if something the guide said was true. My answer was that the things I knew about were incorrect so I didn't trust the parts that I knew nothing about.

This is how I approach Dr. Ford's statements.

She claims that, while a teenager, Kavanaugh placed his hand over her mouth making her think that he'd kill her by accident and causing trauma that lasts through today. She said that the event is burned into her hippocampus.

The events she describes happened so long ago that it is impossible to prove or disprove with anything approaching certainty. But we can look at more recent events.

According to Dr. Ford, she has crippling claustrophobia caused by the attack. When she and her husband remodeled her house she insisted on having a second front door as an escape route from her living room. Her husband didn't understand the reasoning and loss of curb appeal. This lead to couple's counseling which is when she first revealed that she had been attacked.

But, records show that the house was remodeled in 2008 and she went to counseling in 2012 so the one did not directly lead to the other. Further, the extra door appears to have been installed so that the Fords could (and still do) rent out a spare room. And pictures of the Ford residence from Google Street View show that the extra door is not particularly visible so there is no affect on its curb appeal.

In other words, Dr. Ford wasn't being truthful.

Another supposed symptom of Dr. Ford's claustrophobia is her inability to fly. Her lawyer gave this as the reason that she could not appear before the Senate on September 24 - because she had to drive across the country.

But it turns out that she flies regularly. So that one is an outright lie.

She also told the Washington Post that she opposed President Trump because Kavanaugh was on the President's list of possible Supreme Court nominees and she did not want to live in a country where Kavanaugh was on the highest court. But that can't be true. Trump didn't add Kavanaugh to his list until a year after his inauguration.

These lies are significant, too. Part of Dr. Ford's story is that she's had life-long psychological problems because of Kavanaugh but the examples she gives are false. Does she even have any real lasting effects from the incident? If so then why did she feel the need to make some up? The obvious answer is that she wanted to make the incident more serious than it was. If she'd simply said that, while they were both teens and drunk, Kavanaugh had felt her up and put his hand over her mouth but it had no lasting effect on her then Kavanaugh would already be confirmed. So she embellished her story.

And that's where it really unravels. Once we establish that she embellished the facts we have to wonder how much of her testimony is true? Is she really convinced that it was Kavanaugh?

We also have to remember that this is a woman who twice traveled to DC to march in anti-Trump protests. So we have to wonder if she's really relating a traumatic experience from her teens or if she's using this as a chance to #resist?

The worst falsehood anyone has caught Kavanaugh in was that he was legally allowed to drink while in college. (Yes, some people have come forward and said that Kananaugh lied about his drinking but none of them have actually contradicted his sworn statements.) None of the various accusations about Kavanaugh have complimented each other. And Ford's is the most credible one.

So, measuring the statements that we can check by the two parties, I believe Kavanaugh is the one telling the truth.

Stall, Stall, Stall

After a week or more of demanding an FBI investigation into the accusations against Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the Democrats finally have one. naturally they are not satisfied. Why? Because they are to turn in the results in a week. Fired FBI Director James Comey wrote an editorial in the New York Times complaining that it needs to be an open-ended investigation.

Contrast this with what was being said just a few days ago. Democrats were insisting that the FBI conduct an investigation prior to Dr. Ford testifying. Back then they insisted that such an investigation would only take a couple of days. Here's an example from CBS News:

Townsend said the FBI probe into the claims would take "a couple of days."

"This is not weeks or months," she said.

Townsend pointed to Anita Hill's testimony in 1991 for the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, where Hill alleged Thomas had engage in sexual misconduct.

Why would an investigation take a couple of days before the hearing but need more than three times that long now?

Because it's not about finding the truth, it's about stalling. They tossed out the "couple of days" figure to try to delay reopening the hearing. If the Republicans had gone along with that then the Democrats have insisted on stretching out the investigation. The goal was to delay the hearing as long as possible.

Now that they got the hearing and the investigation they are trying to delay the confirmation vote. The investigation is just a tool to delay the vote.

That's how the confirmation process has been going all along. Senators who announced that they were opposed to Kavanaugh insisted that they needed every possible document from his time in the Bush administration. This was a combination of stalling tactic and hope that something disqualifying would miraculously appear.

Once the FBI finishes its investigation then something else will come up and the Democrats will demand more delays. The short-term goal is to push the confirmation past the election. Then, the Democrats will argue that a lame-duck Senate shouldn't be able to hold a confirmation vote. Their real hope is to take the Senate then refuse to confirm any Trump nominees.

As a long-term strategy, this is terrible. It invites retribution and court-packing since nominees will only be confirmed when the White House and Senate are controlled by the same party.

The Democrats need to realize that's where this is going and ask themselves if that's the future they really want.

Then kick themselves for answered yes and answer the question again.

The Poisonous Lie about Rape Culture

One of the accusations hurled at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is that he was part of a gang rape where a girl would be drugged then the boys lined up to rape her. Judge Kavanaugh described this as being something out of he Twilight Zone - something that never happened in his life.

This accusation should be preposterous. The idea that gang rapes go on regularly is absurd, or it should be. There is absolutely no evidence that such things happen. But feminists insist that colleges are part of a "rape culture" where such things do happen and are covered up.

Rolling Stone got itself in trouble a few years ago after running a story claiming that freshmen had to rape someone as part of a fraternity initiation. The author of the piece originally wanted to write about the rape culture in ivy league schools but was unable to find any cases. She settled for Virginia Tech, which was still prestigious enough for her purposes. But she and her editors failed to check the story. It was too good to be true and turned out to be false.

Other similar stories about gang rapes on campus have also turned out to be lies.

The truth is that such crimes are very rare and very repulsive. When they do happen, rather than turning a blind eye and covering it up, most men want justice for the victim.

Even rape itself has always been taboo. Yes, it happens and has always happened. So does murder. And for centuries the penalty for both was death.

In the last few decades feminists have redefined rape from a repulsive crime to a tool for perpetuating the patriarchy. I order to do this, they've had to redefine the meaning of rape. Women can withdraw their consent after the fact, sometimes days or weeks after the action.

And they conflate unwanted attention with physical actions in order to inflate the statistics.

All of this is meant to browbeat men in general or any man who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Brett Kavanaugh is that man right now. Feminists fear that his elevation to the Supreme Court will mean a reversal of Roe v. Wade. So they are pulling out the rape card and accusing Judge Kavanaugh of sex crimes. And we are supposed to believe these accusations regardless of the lack of evidence. Simply by being a white man from a well-off family, Kananaugh is automatically part of the group they've been slandering as rapists so his guilt is predetermined.

The Kavanaugh Accusations

Currently the nation has erupted into a debate over the guilt or innocence of Judge Kavanaugh. The judge has been accused of groping a 15-year-old when he was 17 and having exposed himself to a fellow student when he was in college. Despite there being no witnesses, the left has already decided that this makes Kavanaugh unfit for the Supreme Court. (Note - one woman claimed that "everyone in the school knew about the first accusation" but later admitted that she had no idea if the incident she was remembering involved Kavanaugh or his accuser.)

While I'm sure that people across the country are in an actual fury over the accusations, I also think that it is a manufactured fury modeled on the confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas. Kavanaugh had already passed the judiciary committee and was on his way to confirmation. The worst anyone could pin on him was  doctored response that implied that he didn't understand the difference between birth control and abortion. Then Senator Feinstein let it out that she'd been sitting on an anonymous letter accusing Kavanaugh of some sort of sexual assault decades ago.

Let's be honest, the reaction of the left was "Hot damn, we've got him now!"

They've already shown that they don't really care about assaults against women by politicians. They said so about Bill Clinton. Look at the collective yawn about the allegations against Keith Ellison. These are much more credible - there are police and medical reports and they happened recently. But no one cares. There are also allegations about Cory Booker who, ironically, is one of the senators interrogating Judge Kavanaugh.

If they really thought these claims were credible then Senator Feinstein would have released them well before the hearings. Instead she held the letter as a last-ditch effort to stop Kavanaugh.

The point of all of this is not to determine if Judge Kavanaugh is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. It is to keep the court from having a conservative majority. If Kavanaugh's name is withdrawn then something will be found to disqualify his successor. The idea is to stall the confirmations in the hope of a Democrat majority in the Senate. If the Democrats do get a majority then we can expect that they will refuse to confirm any candidates that President Trump names. This will be ironic after all of the complaints over the Republicans refusing to confirm President Obama's lame duck appointment. But they'll do it because this has always been about power.

Decades ago the Democrats decided that it was easier to go around the legislatures and the messy business of amending the Constitution and take their case to the courts. Roe V. Wade is the most prominent of these cases but there have been a slew of them. And the #Resistance has mainly been fought out in the courts with judges preempting executive orders. Eventually these will filter their way to the Supreme Court and the Democrats want to be sure that the cases are ruled in their favor, or result in a tie which will allow the lower-court rulings to stand.

Because the courts have become so important to the left, confirmations have gone from fairly routine to a circus. They are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their alternative to democracy. If it means elevating a story (with no evidence) of an unwanted groping into an attempted rape, they are only too glad to do this. After all, it's only a conservative's life they are ruining. He should be ashamed to even exist (which is what a protestor recently yelled at Senator Cruze while driving him out of a restaurant).

The Kavanaugh Accusations

What to make of the accusations that Brett Kavanaugh sexually attacked a 15-year-old when we was 17?

There are two obvious possibilities - that it happened just as his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, describer or that she's outright lying. But these events happened nearly 40 years ago. There are several ways that Ford could be telling the truth as she sees it but not accurately describing what happened.

Here's the thing - memory isn't fixed. It's malleable and can play trick on you. What's more, Ford claims that she didn't tell anyone about the incident for decades. Memory is not a video file that can be reversed and replayed at will. It's a bunch of incidents with links to and from them. If you don't think about an event for a long time then it can be difficult to accurately reconstruct it. It's also possible to create false memories. One notorious example came from the 20th century's most notorious witch trial (and I'm not speaking figuratively). Members of a preschool were arrested on charges that they took their charges into underground chambers where they performed satanic ceremonies. This was impossible since the preschool was build on a slab with no basements. It turned out that people questioning the children had planted false memories in the kids by asking specific questions. Keeping that in mind, here are ways that Ford's memory could have played tricks on her:

It didn't happen as described. Was Ford actually forced into the bedroom or did she embroider the story to excuse being alone with two drunken guys (while possibly drunk herself)? She cold have been telling herself that it wasn't her fault that she was alone with them until she believed it.

It wasn't Kavenaugh. Did Ford know the two people who were in the bedroom with her? Or did she later decide it was these two? And if it was later, how much later was it?

It happened to someone else. Ford has very distinct memories of the incident but everything surrounding it is vague. Possibly she heard someone else describe the event and internalized it until she believes that it happened to her then fixed on Kavanaugh and his friend Judge as the perpetrators. This is the very definition of a false memory.

Because of the way this allegation was made, there was no time for a proper investigation. What we do know is that there is no supporting evidence. None at all. Of the three names we have, two deny that anything happened. In cases like this, investigators look for a pattern of behavior. Men who abuse women don't limit themselves to a single victim. Look at Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lower. Or Bill Clinton or Donald Trump. They all left a long trail or women willing to come forward and accuse them. So far, Ford stands alone in accusing Kavanaugh. But, at the same time, multiple women have supported him. His wife and two previous girl friends plus 200 other women have all vouched for his character.

Given how unsupported the accusations are, they should never have been made public. It's likely that they were only released to blacken Kavanaugh's name and force delays in the confirmation vote. The ultimate goal to to put off any confirmation vote until after a new, Democrat-controlled Senate is confirmed. After that, no one that President Trump nominates will be confirmed. Period.

What's more, we can expect similar accusations for all future Republican nominees to the Supreme Court.

A dirty trick like this should not be allowed to succeed.

A deplorable anniversary

September 11th is the sad anniversary of the 9/11/01 terrorist attack that killed thousands and led to a pair of seemingly-endless wars.

But, on the bright side, it's also the second anniversary of one of the worst weekends of the Clinton campaign. First, on September 9th, her description of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" became public. It wasn't the first time she'd used it. She'd been using it as an applause line in private events. But this time she said it in public and it was widely reported.

Either she got so comfortable using the line or she assumed that the press would continue to cover for her. Or she simply forgot where she was. Her health wasn't the best that weekend.

Things got worse when she collapsed at a 9/11 tribute and was seen being dragged to a car like a sack of flower in a jumpsuit. She left her campaign to twist in the wind, first saying that she's overheated (on a not-particularly hot day) then that she was dehydrated (is it really the best move to say that your candidate won't drink water, suggesting that she only imbibes alcoholic beverages?) before settling on pneumonia a the cause. She topped this of with an accusation of sexism - she tried to "power through" the pneumonia because women aren't allowed to get sick.

Clinton continued to lead in the polls but this one-two combination motivated Trump voters to vote against her while reinforcing her reputation as a liar.

With All Due Respect Mr. Obama

Recently former President Obama gave a speech that broke with tradition and criticized President Trump while glorifying his own administration. Here's a few thoughts I have about what he said:

Obama: "How hard is it to say Nazis are bad?"

At least as hard as it is to say "Killing cops is bad." During your presidency, My Obama, two cops were shot and killed from ambush in New Orleans. At the same time BLM protests were calling for "More dead cops". Did you call for the protestors to moderate their rhetoric? No. Did you meet with the families of the slain police or send a representative to their funeral to signify that you were against killing police? No. But you did meet with BLM leaders just days after the shooting.

Obama: " When you hear about this economic miracle that's been going on… when the job numbers come out … suddenly Republicans are saying, 'It's a miracle,'" he said. "I have to kind of remind them, actually those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015 and 2016."

Not really. Here's the official numbers. During 2015 unemployment started at 5.7 and dropped to 5.0. During 2016 unemployment had a high of 5.0 and a low of 4.7. It was 4.8 in January, the month that you left office. It dropped to 4.7 in February, 2017, Trump's first full month in office, 4.6 the month after that and has not been above 4.4 since August of 2017. The unemployment rate has been below 4.0 four of the last five months. It is currently near the lowest in 18 years. Unemployment among minorities is the lowest ever.

Granted the economy bottomed out from the crash of 2008 and recovered under Obama and the current trend is a continuation of the Obama recovery. But it is untrue to claim that years when unemployment fluctuate between 4.8 and 5.7 are the same as years in which it is 3.8-4.7.

What the Kavanaugh Hearings Are Really About

The opening days of the Senate hearings for Judge Kavanaugh have been full of theatrics, both from spectators and Senators. We've had women dressed as Handmaids, a guy wearing a full-body condom, Senators who announced weeks ago that they will vote against Kavanaugh insisting that they don't have enough time to evaluate all of the paperwork. There have been accusations that a Mexican Jew was flashing a white power sign and that Kavanaugh refused to shake the hand of the parent of a Parkland victim and instead called security.

All of this is an attempt to Bork the judge. The term goes back to the nomination of Judge Robert Bork for the Supreme Court. That was a successful attempt at derailing a nomination by painting a judge as being outside norms. In both cases it was insisted that ratification would mean the end of legal abortion and a return to the days of back-ally abortions.

The claim that the two nominees would be a threat to abortion is, at best, dubious. Bork represented the winning side in Roe vs Wade. The theory was that he secretly hated winning his more important case and, through the sheer weight of his intellect, would convince the rest of the court to vote against abortion. The assumption that Kavanaugh will vote to overturn abortion isn't quite as dubious but there's no weight to it, either. There's no reason to think that a single justice will suddenly make the court reverse Roe Vs Wade and it's just speculation that Kavanaugh would support such a reversal.

Clearly abortion is just being used to motivate people. It's not a real issue.

But Roe vs Wade figures into this. It, along with the decision allowing same-sex marriage, are two important examples of how the left has used the courts to bypass Congress. That's what this is really about - trying to preserve a court that swings liberal.

Most of the #Resistance to President Trump has centered on court challenges. These are, at best, a holding action unless they can count on a liberal, activist Supreme Court. They will also become less effective and Trump appoints more judges.

When Harry Reid triggered the Nuclear Option a few years ago, it was with the expectation of a permanent Democratic majority. The hope was to pack the courts. And the expectation of President Clinton appointing two or more liberal justices.

So things blew up in the Democrats' faces. Instead of assuring a liberal court, they are watching a president they hate shift the courts to the right.

They have very few options. One is to try to stall Kavanough's nomination or derail it in the hope that a blue wave will give them the Senate next year. Then they can either try to keep the court at 8 members for the remainder of Trump's (first) term or hope that Trump gives up on Kavanough and nominates a blank-slate justice who turns out to be more liberal than expected. The chances of any of this coming to pass are poor. Current projections show the Republicans will keep the Senate and it's way too early to assume that Trump will not be reelected.

The biggest problem for the Democrats is that they are playing the short-game. Triggering the Nuclear Option gave them a short-game advantage but it's now working against them.

Previously, a well-qualified judge could count on an easy confirmation. Republicans have continued that tradition but after the current theatrics, I expect Republicans to start retaliating in kind the next time a Democrat is in the White House. That's a long-game reaction to the Democrats' short-game strategy. In fact, just days after Senator McCain's funeral and the call for decorum, we have hearings full of theatrics. One short-game strategy trounced all over a different one.

About Hillary's Emails

Two pieces of news has surfaced in the last few days regarding Hillary Clinton's emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. The first to come out is that FBI Director Comey told a brazen lie back in October, 2016 when he said that the FBI had checked all of Clinton's emails that were found on the laptop of her aid's husband, Anthony Weiner. Hillary and her assistant had forwarded over 100,000 emails to Weiner to print. This turned up in September, 2016, while the FBI was investigating Weiner for child pornography charges. The field agents in New York wanted to act on the child porn charges but Comey and Peter Strzok sat on the investigation. Apparently, under threats from the New York office that they'd go public and fearing political damage to Clinton when it got out that there were additional emails, Comey made the sham investigation and declared Clinton blameless. In fact, only a handful of the emails were actually checked and confidential information was found on them but the point of the investigation was to clear Clinton.

The bigger news was buried in the July Inspector General's report and recently reported on by the Daily Caller - all of the emails being sent or received by Clinton's private server were being forwarded to a business connected with the Chinese government.

Think about what a scandal that is. Every email sent or received by the Secretary of State under the first four years of Obama's administration were forwarded to a hostile government. This is huge.

It's also a near-secret.

President Trump tweeted about it and the news dutifully reported it as Trump offering no proof.

Just a few days ago they were reporting that Trump had advance notice of the meeting between his son and a Russian who claimed to have dirt on Clinton. As it turned out, they had no proof but they ran with it anyway. But the Inspector General's report that says the emails were forwarded isn't considered proof.

Side note: Back in 2016, Trump made a joke, asking if any foreign powers had hacked Clinton's server and had a copy of the 33,000 emails "About yoga and wedding plans" that she had deleted, that they should release them. It was not a call for a foreign government to hack Clinton's server (which was already off-line and in FBI custody). It was a reminder that she had used a poorly-protected server for confidential emails and it was very possible that a foreign power had copies. This turns out to be true.

Side note #2: President Obama was using an alias to communicate with Clinton on her private server so the Chinese have copies of some of his emails, too.

Why Alexandria Needs to Debate a Capitalist

A few weeks ago Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio Cortez claimed that Republicans were afraid to debate her. In response, columnist and talk show host Ben Shapiro challenged her to a debate and offered to give $10,000 to either her campaign or the charity of her choice. She refused and accused him of catcalling and giving her unwanted attention.

I can understand why Alexandria doesn't want to debate Shapiro. She has no experience in trying to defend her ideas against a skeptical audience. Her education and political experiences have all been within a bubble with no one questioning her facts or beliefs.

But Shapiro's challenge was not catcalling nor was it unwanted attention. After her unexpected primary win, top Democrats pronounced her the future of the party. She accepted that role and went on a nation-wide tour, endorsing and campaigning for fellow travelers. And, as I said before, she had stated that Republicans were afraid to debate her. So she's jumping up and down asking people to pay attention to her then saying "I didn't mean you!"

But Alexandria owes us a debate, if not against Shapiro then against some other well-informed opponent. She's not just any candidate for Congress, she's proposing major changes to our nation, changes that would affect everyone here. She needs to lay out exactly what she is proposing and how it will be paid for. What does she actually mean by socialism? Recently she's suggested that national parks and employee-owned businesses are socialist (hint, neither is). She also talks about Scandinavian socialism (again, they aren't).

If we are to become the socialist paradise she talks about then she needs to show us that she actually knows what she's talking about. Does she really understand what socialism is, how to pay for it, how to implement it and how to keep it from becoming a dictatorship? Or is she full of unchallenged ideals? The only way for us to know is if she debates someone.

That's not catcalling or unwanted attention. That's how you convince people to follow you.

Character and the Presidency

Jonah Goldberg and David Horowitz recently got into a spat over President Bush's character. It began with a tweet from Goldberg: " Re-asking a question I've been posing for three years: Please come up with a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear. "

Horowitz gave a quick answer which Goldberg rejected then went into detail here.

He also point out that there are two varieties of never-Trumpers. My take on this is that there are the ones who hate Trump so much that they reverse long-held positions just to oppose Trump (Jenifer Rubins and moving the embassy to Jerusalem) and the ones who admit that they share values with Trump but still hate his style. The first group is totally irrational. The second group might be reasoned with.

First, I'd like to hit Goldberg with a counter-question: Please come up with a definition of good character that Hillary could clear but Trump can't. Seriously, in terms of honesty and truthfulness, Hillary sets a very low bar. It's been said that she will never tell a simple truth when she can tell a complicated lie instead. And the allegations of campaign finance violations are nothing to things the Clintons have gotten away with. Fifteen of their friends and associates were convicted in the Whitewater investigation. Further, multiple reports say that Hillary is rude to the Secret Service and other staffers while Trump is warm and friendly.

So anyone saying that he'd prefer Hillary to Trump is really saying that he prefers to be on the outside complaining about the ones in power rather than having to defend policies that he is supposed to support. Or that he needs to learn to say, "I hate Trump's style but I agree with what he's doing."

But how important is character in a president anyway? Yes, Trump cheated on his wives. So did Clinton, JFK, FDR, Jefferson, and possibly others. It's hard to think of any way that Bill Clinton was a better person than Donald Trump. It wasn't widely reported but Clinton was known for his purple-face rages. His press secretary, George Stephanopoulos, said that Clinton yelled at him for up to 45 minutes at the start of every day!

Going back further, name a test for good character that Nixon and LBJ could pass that Trump could not. Both were effective presidents and both used dirty tricks.

Ronald Reagan, the gold standard for Republican presidents, was the first president to be divorced. He was also cold and distant to his children.

Then there's the flip side. Jimmy Carter is considered a very nice man and a failure as a president. George H. W. Bush was known as a gentleman and was a one-term president. Few of the never-Trumpers cared for George W. Bush, either but he is now being held up as an example of sterling character.

Barack Obama projected the aura of a demigod but beneath that he had a mean side. He was a bad winner and a worse loser (if he won in a basketball he teased the loser the rest of the day and if he lost then he pouted). He loved straw man arguments and allowed his staff to attribute political differences to racism. Plus there was the weaponizing of the Justice Department and the IRS plus innumerable other scandals that were under-reported.

Anyway, the argument that Trump is lacking in character is pretty specious.

The Resistance is Dead (at least in Ohio)

In early August Republican Troy Balderson struggled to beat Democrat Danny O'Connor in a House special election. The votes are still being counted but it's considered mathematically impossible to O'Connor to win. This is a seat that has been Republican since 1982 and that President Trump carried by a wide margin. Because it was such a tight race, many are pointing to it as an early indication of a blue wave. No one seems to be aware of the campaigns themselves. As someone who actually lives (and voted) in this district I have a few insights that others have missed.

The big one is that O'Connor wasn't running as a Democrat. He was running as a moderate. In his first ad he said that both parties needed new leadership. Later, when the race turned mean, he moved on to promising to save Social Security and accusing his opponent of wanting to cut business taxes too much at the cost of Social Security. Nothing was said about open borders, $15/hour minimum wage, single-payer health care or impeaching President Trump. Certainly nothing was said about socialism, democratic or otherwise. O'Connor started the race with a big lead which took a major hit when he admitted that, yes, he would support Nancy Pelosi if she was the Democratic candidate for speaker.

While it's true that O'Connor was running in a district that's half rural, he was not an outlier. Sherrod Brown is usually considered one of the furthest left members of the Senate but he, too, is running ads about bi-partisan cooperation. So is Joyce Beatty who is in a much more urban district.

Here we are in an election in which anger toward Trump is supposed to produce a blue wave and the President is a no-show. Possibly in Cleveland someone is promising to be part of the Resistance but no one in Columbus is. Instead the Democrats are sounding like Bill Clinton moderates rather than the neo-socialists elsewhere.

The Anti-ICE Story

It sounds horrible - a pregnant woman was on her way to have her baby when ICE agents seized her husband for deportation. It only sounds a bit better that she was having a scheduled C-section and not in labor.

But the narrative really changes when you hear that the husband is wanted for murder in Mexico. Should an accused murderer be exempt from arrest because his wife is having her 5th child? Is the wife liable for arrest for shielding a fugitive for years?

There's no excuse for rushing the story to press before giving ICE a chance to explain the reason for the arrest. It was done as part of the Resistance, in order to stoke opinion against a policy they disagree with.

Ironically, the full story reinforces one of President Trumps charges that upsets the left the most - that Mexican murderers are coming across the border.

So a story was rushed out before all the facts are known in order to agitate against the President. Further the events and the release of the story overlapped the date when 350+ newspapers ran indignant editorials about the President's use of the term "fake news". What an irony.

Elizabeth Warren and Capitalism

Elizabeth Warren, who is absolutely not running for President, has proposed saving capitalism from itself. Her proposal is that once a corporation reaches an arbitrary revenue figure, it will be required to obtain a government license in order to stay in business. It will also be required to have an arbitrary number of board members from the employees, spend an arbitrary amount on reinvestment and a super majority of the board will have to agree before the corporation can engage in politics. This last part is a way to neuter the Citizen's United decision which allows corporations to engage in politics. The rest of her proposal shows just how little Warren understands about economics. Vox has a long piece explaining why the proposal is a good thing which proves that they are equally clueless about economics.

The reasoning for this proposal is an essay by Milton Friedman saying that corporations owe it to their shareholders to maximize profits. To people on the left, this means wringing every possible penny of profits, no matter how many lives are ruined in the balance. In practice, this seldom happens. Yes, plants are closed and production is moves overseas but this usually has more to do with keeping the company in business than maximizing profits. Similarly, most corporations have charitable foundations. Warren and Vox seem unaware of this.

The bigger problem is that the whole thing is based on revenue instead of profits. The left often assumes that all corporations have huge profits which are then paid out to the undeserving (meaning the share-holders who literally own the company). In reality, profits are usually a tiny percentage. Take Walmart as an example. It's at the top of Forbes's list of largest corporations. Their revenue was around $500 billion dollars. But... they only made $10 billion in profits. That's 2%. They have 3 billion shares of stock so they only pay a few dollars per share. They also only have 2.3 million employees so, even if you confiscate all of their earnings and give them to the employees, it's only going to come to $5,000/each.

But that will never happen. If the government started confiscating all profits of a corporation once it hit $1 billion in revenue then the shareholders would demand that it never hit that amount. There would be corporate inversions (buying a smaller company overseas then moving the headquarters there), splitting off subsidiaries, and whatever else it takes to avoid that. This is what we'll see if Warren's proposal becomes law, also. Corporations will find ways to avoid it.

And that overlooks the biggest problem with only looking at revenue - not all corporations make money. When I was researching this I looked at a list of corporations' income from 2017. One corporation jumped out at me - Toys R Us. They had $4 billion in revenue last year. This year they went bankrupt. That's because their expenses were greater than their revenue. Red Lobster was also on the list and they've been flirting with bankruptcy for years.

Of course, Warren knows that she can't nationalize all large businesses at this point. Her proposal is aspirational: something that will happen if she becomes President (not that she's running) and has a strong Democratic Congress. And heaven help us if that happens.

It's Anti-Trump Editorial Day

Since I'm writing this after midnight, anti-Trump editorial day was actually yesterday. 300 plus newspapers ran editorials complaining about President Trump's constant refrain of fake new and his calling them the enemy of the people. Considering normal editorial content directed at the president, no one would have noticed if they hadn't told us ahead of time.

Let's talk a bit about fake news, though. Omarose Onee Manigault Newman who is usually known by her first name has a new book out. In it she claims that someone has a tape of Trump using a racial epithet on a hot mic back on the set of The Apprentice. Omorose does not claim to have a copy of the tape and when the book was written she says that she has not heard it (she claims to have heard it since then). No one in the press has heard this tape and no one else has come forward to verify the existence of the tapes. People who are alleged to have the tapes deny their existence. Do they even exist? That's highly questionable since someone already went through hot mic tapes from The Apprentice and released the Bill Bush (grab them by the...) tape.

Omarose has dominated the news cycle for the last week but I have yet to see an article that uses words such as "unverified" or "uncorroborated" or "alleged tapes". Without those modifiers, the public is given the impression that these tapes do indeed exist.

Here's a hypothetical question: if a bitter ex-staffer made damaging allegations about any previous president, would anyone have covered it without hearing the tape? Of course not.

Fake news? They certainly abandoned normal journalistic standards. 

In 2017, President Trump complained that he had been informed that his campaign had been tapped. Editorialists all over the country insisted that there was no evidence that this happened. Never mind that the President in privy to information that the news media is not or that, as it turned out, there was FISA warrant for monitoring at least one campaign staffer which could count.

So when Trump makes a claim, the news media treats it with skepticism but when an ex-staffer makes unverified claims, she is given major coverage.

And this is being done to hurt the President and his agenda. I doubt that most newsrooms even see the double standard they use. Does that make them an enemy of the people? It certainly puts them at odds with the people who voted for Trump and his agenda.

Today's editorials will change nothing. Trump already believes the press hates him so a coordinated attack on him just provides additional proof. As I said at the beginning, if they hadn't told me that this was a special event I'd have assumed it was one of the 4-3 anti-Trump editorials the local paper runs every week. So one more Trump editorial isn't going to affect my opinion. So what's the point?

Confronting the Progressive's Past

We keep hearing about needing a conversation on America's racist past. This usually comes from Progressives. That's what the Democrats call themselves now. They abandoned being liberals early in the 2000s and adopted a return to the Progressive movement of the first half of the 20th century. Hillary Clinton, among others, explicitly called for a return to the Progressive ideals. So, here's some things you should know about the Progressives:

They were racist

Slavery and the end of the Civil War brought major upheavals. It took a couple of generations but things were finally settling down. Then President Wilson, the godfather of Progressivism, decided that the races were getting too cozy. So, he segregated federal workers which set in motion a general segregation.

They didn't like elected officials

The Progressive movement wanted to get politics out of government. Their great idea was to have politicians as figureheads and leave the real governing to dispassionate civil servants. This is where our current administrative state came from. A lot of cities eliminated the mayor except as a figurehead and turned the bulk of city management over to a city manager. This happened on state and federal levels, also, with Congress passing enabling legislation and bureaucrats writing the rules that actually implemented the laws.

They were racist

They loved science, or science-sounding things. They particularly loved Darwin. Our whole concept of race was built on top of Darwin (I'm sure he'd be horrified). They put whites at the top and blacks at the bottom which provided the intellectual underpinnings for racism. It's not racism if it's scientific, right? At least that's what they said.

They admired the fascists

FDR, the other ultra-Progressive president after Wilson, was a huge fan of Mussolini. The two corresponded and saw each other in a competition. Mussolini saw Roosevelt as a fellow fascist who was constrained by the Constitution from doing what was needed.

Did I mention they were racist?

In the 19th century colonialism was considered the "white man's burden". Whites, having a more advanced civilization, were duty-bound to civilize the savages. This faith-based bigotry was replaced with Social Darwinism. Just as individuals and species competed for the strongest, so did civilizations with the strongest almost having a duty to conquer lesser civilizations.

The fascists admired them.

Darwinism and Social Darwinism formed the intellectual underpinnings for Hitler's conquest of Europe. His Aryan master race needed to crush or exterminate the lesser races.

They were really racist

Linked in with all this was the eugenics movement. This was going to improve the species through birth control and sterilization. Planned Parenthood was founded to promote this. And Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, got a fan letter from Hitler.

They were SO racist

I keep seeing memes that minimum wage was meant to make sure that everyone made enough to live on, regardless of what he did. That's not true. The minimum wage was really meant to be sure that jobs went to whites. Minorities were usually paid less. The thinking was that, if you had to pay the same for whites as for minorities then you'd go ahead and hire whites.

They were violently racist

The KKK started in the deep south and was dying out until a revival beginning at Stone Mountain. This coincided with the movie Birth of a Nation which glorified the Klan. Wilson publicly approved of both. Suddenly the Klan went from the deep south to being nationwide. States that had never been slave states such as Indiana were suddenly hotbeds of Klan activity. But the Klan was always tightly linked with the Democratic Party.

They didn't confine their racism to blacks

That hotbed of Progressivism, Oregon, actively discouraged Asians and blacks from living in it. That's why Portland is one of America's whitest cities. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the populous was afraid of enemy spies. FDR responded to this by rounding up German citizens living in the US and anyone of Japanese ancestry. Note the disparity here - he didn't worry about people whose parents had come from Germany but if your grandparents had come from Japan then you were sent to a relocation center. Note - don't ever compare this to what Hitler did. American Japanese lost their homes and businesses but were fairly well treated. Victims of the Holocaust were brutally killed and the ones who weren't were starved.

Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican-turned-Progressive was racist, too

In a speech on race relations after his election victory he engaged in Social Darwinism. He speculated that blacks could be raised up by teaching them white ways but worried that they would debase whites by teaching them black way. He's revered as the father of the national parks but, it is usually overlooked that he was taking Indian land to make those parks. He was specifically inspired in making the national parks by a man named Madison Grant. Grant, in turn, wrote the book on racism (literally, it was called The Passing of the Great Race) which combined all of the things above and more. 

Remember all of this the next time someone talks about the great Progressive traditions

Alex Jones and the Internet

A long list of Internet giants suddenly banned Alex Jones and his InfoWars site. I'll state up front that the few times I've run across Alex Jones's conspiracy theories, they've left me feeling, in the words of Captain Jack Sparrow, sullied and unusual. Regardless there are several reasons why this was a mistake.

First is the obvious one - there are much worse sites out there that have not been banned. The reasons for the ban are too vague to be useful. For example, Louis Farakan's anti-Semitic diatribes are still out there.

This leads into the second reason - the tech giants are simply not equipped to decide what should and should not be allowed. They are staffed with far-left ideologues and only given vague guidelines instead of hard rules. It comes across more as censorship than enforcement of values.

Suppressing Jones has solidified support for him from the Right (including this post) because, given the vague reasons given, the see themselves or sites they support as being next. There have been calls for government control of the Internet giants because if this. My libertarian instincts say that this would be bad so let's not see actions that push the issue.

Finally, the effort could very well backfire. When you suppress a conspiracy theorist, he claims that you are trying to hide the truth. It gives him credibility that he should not have. Jones claims that 4.5 million people have signed up for his email newsletter since the ban. Multitudes of people who couldn't care less about Alex Jones are now wondering what he did to get banned. Some of them will believe his ravings. That's the very opposite of what the Internet giants wanted.

So, how can so many people who are so smart do something so dumb?

Feeding the Narative

Racism is epidemic in the US today. I know that because I'm constantly told so by the national news.

Unfortunately, that doesn't actually make it so.

In July there were stories about the police being called because of black kids trying to make some money. The stories were framed to give the impression that the only reason the authorities were called was because the kids were black.

Last weekend I saw two separate stories about authorities shutting down some girls. One was selling lemonade and the other was selling home-made cookies. Both stories were carried by conservative newsletter under the heading of over-reaching government. Both were very similar to the incidents of black children being shut down but neither case made the national news.

If a black child's lemonade stand is shut down then it makes the news because it's assumed that racism must be involved. Obviously there's no racism if it's a white kid so it's not a story. This in turn feeds the narrative that we are a racist nation, even if no actual racism is involved.

Why does this happen? I don't think that reporters are actually trying to manufacture racism where there isn't any. But they are trying to manufacture ratings and stories about racism get people to watch so they have a financial incentive to push them. There is also confirmation bias. They know that there is racism in the country so they are predisposed to see it.

This goes way beyond a child's lemonade stand but that makes a good starting point.

Now, how often do police kill whites? If you watch the new then you'd say that it never happens. Cops only shoot black men. The actual figures get complicated. Half of the people killed by police are white and 1/4 are black but blacks  disproportionately commit a disproportionate number of cromes (usually victomizing blacks) and the number of black men killed by police is lower than the proportion who commit crimes. My point is that twice as many whites are killed as blacks but a white man shot by the police is never covered while many shootings of black men receive nationwide coverage. Again, this distorts our opinions and feeds the narrative that America is hopelessly racist.

Racism and Reverse Racism

A woman of Asian ancestry named Sarah Jeong was just appointed to the editorial board of the New York Times. Sarah has a history of tweets that are anti-white, anti-male and otherwise offensive. He defenders insist that she can't be a racist because only whites are in an institutional position of power so only whites can be racists. There's also some blather about whites not actually having an identity the way blacks and other groups do. If this was so then she wouldn't have been tweeting about white.

Back to the first point - that only whites are in a position of power so only whites can be racists. This is an incredibly racist statement. It lumps all white together and all non-whites together. There is no room for the individual in that blanket statement. If you aren't white then you are oppressed and powerless.

But Sarah isn't powerless. She's on the editorial board of the most powerful newspaper in the country. It's silly to excuse her because of her powerlessness. She has more power than 99% of whites will ever have.

If you insist on lumping people together by race (and that is racist by the old standards) then you might notice that some groups are doing better than whites in America today - Jews and Asians to name two. And, surprise, Sarah is among those doing well. She's on the editorial board of the New York Times. For someone who's oppressed, she's doing well.

All of this mental gymnastics is silly. Racism is bad, period. It's not excusable to say that it's ok to be racist against whites because our ancestors were racist first. That just leads to a never-ending cycle of hate.

Tribalism and Civil Wars

Let's talk about nationalism and patriotism. These are dirty words to the left these days. They lead to wars and "othering" and numerous other offenses. So nationalism is to be shunned. Patriotism is nothing but taking credit for the accomplishments of people who are long dead.

Fine, so we're all cosmopolitans now.

Except we aren't. We're tribal. We always have been. It's baked into our DNA. Many species of animals form groups of some kind - packs, herds, colonies, schools, flocks. This is true for birds, fish, insects and mammals. It goes back hundreds of millions of years to the dinosaurs. All primates form packs.

What sets humans apart from all of these others is our ability to form super-packs. Somewhere in the mists of history we started recognizing people beyond our immediate tribe as part of a larger tribe. This was usually a combination of language and geography. This allowed us to form villages then towns, cities, city states, states and eventually nations.

War is really tribal conflicts on a massive scale.

So if we get rid of national identity then we will have no more wars, right? Wrong.

We still need to be part of a tribe. It's such a powerful urge that we don't even think about it. You can see that happening on the left. They've abandoned America. That's why President Obama was at pains to say that American exceptionalism was no different from German exceptionalism or other nations. He's internalized the idea that nations are bad. That's also why the left is busy tearing down monument and renaming buildings and streets (and possibly cities) and refusing to honor the national anthem. They want to do away with the concept of America in the name of international cosmopolitanism.

But there's a catch. That tribal instinct is still there so they've replaced America with a new tribe - the urban cosmopolitans.

The more you think about it the more obvious this is. They cluster together with other members of their tribe. They insulate themselves from non-tribe members. That's where the bubble comes from and why they are more likely to unfriend a conservative than a conservative is to unfriend them. They are creating ever-stricter tests to see who is and who isn't a member of their tribe. Even tribe member are one shibboleth away from expulsion.

That also explains their extreme reaction to the election of Donald Trump. He may be a New Yorker, but he's not a member of the tribe and they can't stand seeing a non-member in charge. The same is true for his appointees which is why there are calls for life-time punishment for anyone who works for President Trump. They are proclaiming themselves members of a different tribe.

In fact, this is the only reasonable explanation I have for why the left is so unhinged at the idea of President Trump. They often use terms like "nationalist" to prove that he's a crypto-nazi and they went absolutely bananas when he suggested a military parade similar to the one he saw in France. You can't celebrate America! And you can't close the borders.

This impulse has been around for a long time but, until fairly recently, it had a natural counter-force. During the various wars the US fought, tribal bonds tightened. This was especially true during World War II when the Japanese attach on Pearl Harbor made Americans fear foreign invasion. It was also true during the Cold War when America had a rival tribe of equal stature. But, with the exception of a spurt of patriotism following 9/11, those days are long gone. There is no external threat to force us together so we are breaking apart.

So far the right hasn't hasn't responded in kind. We still think of ourselves as Americans and the left as fellow Americans who are acting strangely. We resent being treated as yokels but we still don't feel the need to form a new tribe to replace America.

This is how civil wars start. Two groups within a country decide that tribal membership is more important than national identity. And that's the logical conclusion to the left's attempted destruction of the American ideal. Eventually the outgroup will feel a group identity similar to the ingroup's and fighting will begin in earnest.

Can this be stopped? Maybe but it will take more than a different president to fix things. Certainly none of the Democrats positioning them selves to run will try to join the two tribes. Right now they are competing to see who is the furthest to the left. Their plan is to take control then subjugate the outgroup. But the country is too evenly split for that to work. None of Trump's competitors in the 2016 race was likely to bridge the divide, either.

The rise of a real external threat would go a long way to uniting Americans again but that has its own dangers in the nuclear age. We aren't likely to see a WWIII with a large portion of the populous mobilized like happened in WWII. Modern wars are fought by a small group who in turn are part of their own tribe. This will be important if an actual civil war breaks out. Most of the troops and police come from the conservative outgroup and are unlikely to fight for the elite ingroup.

The best solution would be for the left to realize the need for America and patriotism. Possibly some of the leaders of the left will look at the stress fractures across Europe and take heed.

Trump and the Press

How soon they forget...

Quote from  A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times:

I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous. I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.

I repeatedly stressed that this is particularly true abroad, where the president's rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists. I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country's greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press.

It was just over two years ago that newspaper all over the world proclaimed that, yes, they had told us that previous Republicans were dangerous but they were fibbing. Donald Trump really is dangerous and all of the rules of journalism are off. No more pretense of being unbiased. Since then they have run poorly sourced (meaning one off-the-record source who was wrong), run opinion pieces disguised as news, and, in general, have been relentlessly partisan. Unlike previous presidents, President Obama pays attention to the news and reacts to it. He also hits back. The press spared no effort trying to prevent his victory and since then has attempted to hobble his administration. So why are they surprised that he responds in kind?

When Kids Lead

Recently the Left has been embracing kids as their leaders. Actually it's young adults but they are showing their inexperience and naivete. First there was the Parkland "survivors" led by David Hogg. I'm calling them "survivors" because many of them were never actually close to the shooter. They are survivors the same way that I'm a survivor of a drowning because I was on the same beach at the same time (true story). Anyway, their proximity to violence is supposed to give them special insights. The truth is that they sound ignorant and inane, resorting to magic thinking that with just a few more gun laws no one will ever go on a school killing spree again.

More recently the Democratic Party has been fawning over Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, proclaiming her the new face of the party. While she is young and pretty, at least compared to Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton and she is earnest, she is also vapid and uninformed. She has degrees in economics and international relations. Either she slept through class or she should demand her tuition back. Over the weekend she went on record as having no idea how the economy actually works (she seems to think that evolution and not capitalism is responsible for the rise of the West). While railing against Israel, she had to admit that she didn't actually know much about Israel and Palestine.

This is what happens when you live in a bubble. Her professors probably spouted off social justice propaganda to her for years and neither she nor any of her classmates actually asked any probing questions. They just accepted what they were told.

So the new face of the Democratic Party is an intellectual embarrassment. And she's not even a Democrat. She's a Social Democrat and the head of the Social Democrat Party now says that communism is good.

This is the problem with turning things over to inexperienced newcomers. Ocasio-Cortez has never been been outside her bubble. Up to this point she's gotten by by parroting lines from other people. She never engaged in introspection.

And for the record, I don't have a degree in international relations but I can explain what's going on in Palestine much better than she could. And I can explain both sides of the argument. That's because I'm older and more experienced and I don't live in a bubble.