Libertarian Leanings

Pelosi For Speaker

I watched Nancy Pelosi's press conference yesterday. She paid lip service to bipartisanship and working with Republicans, all the while speaking of Republicans in the most insulting of terms. She accused Republicans of 'assault' on health care, and called the tax bill a 'Republican scam.' She used the terms 'Republican assault' and 'Republican scam' more than once while claiming her intent to be be bipartisan. I had to force myself to keep watching the deceitful old hag.

I have no doubt that Democrats in congress plan to obstruct and investigate. It's not going to go over very well with Americans, most of whom have no interest in Mueller's Russia probe. Meanwhile Trump claims to be serious when he says Pelosi deserves to be Speaker. He wants her there.

I'm not one for 4D chess, but I do think Trump knows what he wants to do, and has realistic plans and strategies for getting it done. I can't imagine Pelosi getting the better of him. Trump really did accomplish a lot in his first two years.

My faith sometimes weakens, and I grow fearful that Trump might revert to typical Republican presidential form -- bipartisan for the sake of being bipartisan and preserving a legacy. But then Trump unceremoniously dumped Attorney General Jeff Sessions. I expect he will soon declassify FISA applications. To hell with all the talk of obstruction of justice.  Trump doesn't need to get along with the Democrats, congress, or anybody else for the sake of a legacy. Trump sees his legacy is about getting substantive things done.

And he wants Pelosi in the Speaker chair.  Maybe he thinks he can work with her, or maybe he thinks she will make a wonderful foil, a villain.  Whatever the case, Trump wants Pelosi in the Speaker chair.

We Are No Longer One People

In his essay, Our Revolution’s Logic, Angelo Codevilla says that revolution is coming.  He can't say what will happen, or when — only why.

This is our revolution: Because a majority of Americans now no longer share basic sympathies and trust, because they no longer regard each other as worthy of equal consideration, the public and private practices that once had made our Republic are now beyond reasonable hope of restoration. Strife can only mount until some new equilibrium among us arises.

Our Logic

The logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior. With Newtonian necessity, each such exercise causes a corresponding and opposite reaction. The logic’s force comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands. If that were the case, acquiescing to or compromising with them could cut it short. Rather, it comes from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth, to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the inferior’s humiliation. It is an inherently endless pursuit.

10 Red Flags

According to Adam Mill, a Kansas City attorney who specializes in labor and employment law, "It’s not nice or politically correct to say, but people do sometimes lie to get money, revenge, power, attention, or political advantage. False allegations of assault have been documented."  Mr. Mill lists his 10 red flags that tell him when an assault accusation might not be true. Here are the first three:

1. The accuser uses the press instead of the process.

Every company has a slightly different process for harassment and assault complaints. Often it begins with a neutral investigator being assigned to interview the accuser first, then potential corroborating witnesses. When an accuser is eager to share with the media but reluctant to meet with an investigator, it’s a flag.

2. The accuser times releasing the accusation for an advantage.

For example, when the accuser holds the allegation until an adverse performance rating of the accuser is imminent, or serious misconduct by the accuser is suddenly discovered, or the accused is a rival for a promotion or a raise, or the accused’s success will block an accuser’s political objective. It’s a flag when the accusation is held like a trump card until an opportunity arises to leverage the accusation.

3. The accuser attacks the process instead of participating.

The few times I’ve been attacked for “harassing” the victim, it has always followed an otherwise innocuous question about the accusation, such as: Where, when, how, why, what happened? I don’t argue with accusers, I just ask them to explain the allegation. If I’m attacked for otherwise neutral questions, it’s a red flag.

Sound familiar?  Here is the rest of it. It's worth reading.

Character Assassins

Today's Real Clear Politics page features an article from the Wall Street Journal by James Freeman, Is Trump Creating New Republicans?  (The WSJ version is here.)  The gist of it is that Republican candidates are polling well among Latinos in districts that Hillary dominated during the 2016 election, which does not bode well for Democrats in the upcoming midterms.  Are formerly true-blue Democrats drifting to red?  From Mr. Freeman's column:

Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report writes today that Democrats are confident about their support among suburban women, but enthusiasm among female Democratic voters “isn’t being replicated among another group of voters that theoretically should be as motivated — or more — to vote for Democrats: Latino voters.”

Ms. Walter explains:

Latino voter drop-off in midterm elections is nothing new, but the thinking was that President Trump’s rhetoric and policies around immigration, especially the issue of separating children from their parents at the border, would be a catalyst for higher Latino engagement in 2018. At this point, however, recent polling by New York Times Upshot/Siena College and Monmouth University, suggests that’s not the case.

In California’s 39th district — a racially diverse district that Hillary Clinton carried 52 to 43 percent — a Monmouth poll out this week found Republican Young Kim leading Democrat Gil Cisneros 46-42 percent.

Meanwhile on the right coast of the country, it seems that voters are also stubbornly refusing to play the roles they’ve been assigned in the conventional media narrative. Ms. Walter elaborates:

Republicans in Latino majority districts in South Florida are holding up better than their underlying infrastructure suggests they would. In a district Hillary Clinton carried with almost 57 percent, Republican Carlos Curbelo (FL-26) has a narrow lead over his Democratic opponent in the NY Times Upshot/Siena poll. And, in the 27th district, where moderate GOPer Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is retiring, private polls show former Clinton administration HHS Director Donna Shalala struggling to open a lead in a district Clinton carried by more than 58 percent.

Latinos are not following the playbook.  This is not what Democrats had in mind.  Democrat thinking is "that President Trump’s rhetoric and policies around immigration, especially the issue of separating children from their parents at the border, would be a catalyst for higher Latino engagement in 2018."  However, support for Republican candidates seems to imply that if immigration is a hot-button issue for Latinos, it does not necessarily favor Democrats.  Other things may take precedence.

Nearly everyone who wants to work now has a job.

US job growth boomed in August — the 95th straight month of gains — while wage growth hit a nine-year high, the monthly jobs report revealed on Friday.

Fueled by tax and regulation cuts, the economy added 201,000 jobs over the past month, keeping the unemployment rate steady at 3.9 percent, near an 18-year low, according to the federal Labor Department’s report.

Average hourly wages also rose by 10 cents, or 2.9 percent, to $27.16 — the biggest yearly rise since 2009.

The hiring spree builds on what’s already the longest-ever economic expansion in US history, experts say.

“This picture underscores that the US economy is solid, the US economy is gaining strength,” said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial.

Black and Hispanic unemployment rates reached record lows in response to Trump's tax and regulatory policies, and they have stayed low since then.  (My emphasis below)

The black unemployment rate fell in August to the second-lowest on record as the labor market continues to show signs of tightening.

In August, the black unemployment rate fell to 6.3%, continuing the rapid descent from the 16.8% peak shortly after the recession, and the lowest ever after the 5.9% rate in May.

The continued economic expansion, now showing up in rising wages, has helped all racial groups, data show. Donald Trump has frequently pointed out the black unemployment rate reached a record low during his presidency.

That said, the black unemployment rate is still higher than the 4.7% Hispanic unemployment rate — also the second-lowest on record — and the 3.4% unemployment rate for whites and the 3% jobless rate for Asian-Americans.

With all of this good economic news, why would immigration policy be expected to drive up Latino turnout?  In the perception-is-reality world of the Democrats, Hispanics have been elevated in the political sense, from an ethnic group to a distinct race.  Voila! Connect that new distinction to immigration policy, and Democrats have license to call Republicans racists.  Republicans want strict enforcing immigration laws because they don't like Latinos, Latinos not being not white enough to suit them.  That's the story from Democrats, anyway.  It's a strategy that relieves Democrats. so they think, of having to discuss issues — such as the very real implications of open borders and the virtually unlimited immigration that they favor through our southern borders.  Instead, Democrats can talk about insidious racism, the supposed disdain among Republicans for people who are not white, and the imagined nefarious motives of Republicans.  No need to offer explanations as to why Republican policies might be harmful, or how they might fail.

And on the flip side, Democrats don't have to explain what's good about their own proposals.  All their constituents have to know is that Republicans are bigots, their intentions are evil and therefore their policies must be evil, as well.  Republicans must be defeated.  The past success of this strategy has made Democrats complacent.  They've grown accustomed to proposing and implementing policies of their own that benefit hardly anybody except Democrat officeholders, to the great expense of the rest of America.

And now the Democrats have a serious problem.  Democrats' strategy relies upon their being able to instill a sense of oppression and outrage among their constituent groups and to focus it on a supposed racist enemy who is the cause of their problems — Republicans, naturally.  But sometimes it's not easy to feel oppressed.  What happens when hope arrives in the form of a job, instead?  What happens when a sense of well-being settles in as people begin to feel financially more secure?  What happens when realization sets in:  When the job market is so bad that your livelihood and career path are government assistance, there is no upward mobility.   

What happens when Republican policies are in place and the insufferable Trump is out there bragging about them.  Suckers in the progressive media fall for it.  They savage the boorish and unpresidential Trump, and by doing that they accidentally draw attention to his policy successes, and a contrast with reality appears.  The progressive media rail on about Trump the incompetent, Trump the insane, Trump the dangerous, Trump with the too short attention span, he must be defeated.  In the meantime it becomes inescapably clear to a growing number of Americans, of all races and creeds, that they are living a little bit better because of Trump.  

Democrats have painted themselves into a corner, having promised their various flocks that privations they endured were imposed upon them by the unjust policies of racist Republicans and the greedy One Percent.  America's wealth, they said, was not being shared in a fair enough way.  The rich were taking too much of our diminishing resources.  Obama told us that manufacturing  jobs were never coming back, and that 2% growth in GDP was the new norm, the best that we could expect.  And then Trump came along and said, "Here, hold my Coke.  Watch this."  Bingo!  Consumer confidence has hit highs last seen 18 years ago.  On Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average has set record highs 100 times since Trump's election, and there are more job openings than people looking for work.

Unable and unwilling to admit they could be so wrong, Democrats invariably revert to character assassination.  It's worked for decades, and now it's their only remaining strategy for getting themselves elected.  They do what they know how.  From their painted-in corner Democrats spew their vitriol, but with diminishing effect.

The Clintons — Rainmakers

It has been said that the closer you are to Bill and Hillary, the greater your risk of becoming a suicide victim.  I always got a chuckle out of that, but I can't say I ever put much stock in it.  Still, I'm in a state of continual astonishment at Hillary Clinton's ability to escape any repercussion for things that would land other people in a world of trouble.  In part that stems from Bill's and Hillary's cardinal rule to never admit to anything.  Deny, deny, deny.  The phrase "plausible deniability" was born in the Clinton White House.  But that's only part of the story.

A more important part of the story is the incredible loyalty that the Clintons have enjoyed.  Over the years people have gone to what seem to be extraordinary lengths to shield the Clintons from unflattering publicity or accountability for "mistakes."  Have you ever seen the docudrama, The Path to 9/11?  ABC produced the two-part series, airing it on the evenings of September 10th and 11th in 2006.  Unfortunately the series included scenes which cast the Clinton administration in a bad light, questioning its commitment and competence in its efforts to track down Osama bin Laden.  Mysteriously, the film was never broadcast again, and it has never been available for purchase on DVD unless you can find a copy on eBay.  How did the Clintons manage to suppress this so effectively?

And then there is the case of Sandy Berger, who was also a player in the "Path to 9/11" story.  Sandy Berger was President Bill Clinton's national security adviser during the Clinton administration's chase for bin Laden.  In 2004 when the 9/11 Commission conducted its investigation into events leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center, Sandy Berger was an important witness.  In preparation for his testimony, Berger went into the National Archives and got himself caught stuffing classified documents into his pants and his socks, documents that he removed from the Archives, hid under a construction trailer nearby, and then destroyed.  He was given a plea deal in which he avoided jail time but paid a fine of $50,000.  Later, he voluntarily gave up his license to practice law rather than answer questions at a disbarment proceeding.

But the case that I think is most instructive is that of Jamie Gorelick.  Ms. Gorelick held the position of Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration, reporting to Attorney General Janet Reno.  She left the Clinton administration in 1997, and that lapse of four years between then and the 2001 attack may explain why she was able to gain a seat on the 9/11 Commission.  As a 9/11 Commissioner Gorelick was in position to cross examine her former boss, Janet Reno who was a witness to events leading up to 9/11.  How strange that there was no perceived conflict of interest in that situation, but then loyalties to the Clintons so often resulted in strange outcomes.

One strange outcome occurred as 9/11 Commissioners grilled various Bush administration officials on their administration's inability to "connect the dots," anticipate, and then thwart the 9/11 attack.  Gorelick's inclusion on the Commission buttressed the impression that the Commission's purpose was, above all else, to shield the Clinton administration by focusing all blame on the Bush administration.  A stunning surprise came when Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft read from a memo that he declassified for just that occasion.  The memo instructed the Clinton administration Department of Justice to go further than the law required in keeping intelligence and law enforcement strictly separated.  No sharing of information was allowed.  The author of the 1995 memo was none other than Jamie Gorelick.  

There's an arrogance in the Clintons and their loyalists.  Even in the face of this blatant conflict of interest Gorelick refused to step down from the Commission, and she refused to be a witness before it. 

More recently, and more blatantly, we've seen this is the case of Hillary's Home Brew Email Server.  A highlight in the lead up to her presidential campaign was Hillary's ever changing story on the private illegal email server that she kept in her bathroom in Chappaqua.  At first her story was, no classified information was ever sent or received via her private server.  After a while when that was shown to be false the story changed.  No messages marked classified were ever sent or received via her private server.

But then, along comes FBI Director Jim Comey to exonerate Hillary.  In order to satisfy what was sure to be the dissatisfaction of a wide swath of Americans, Comey stepped forward to craft an explanation.  It was an unprecedented move.  When charges are not brought, authorities are not permitted to air the accusations or the evidence.  But here was Jim Comey, quoting chapter and verse from the statutes to show exactly how the law was violated, but then proclaiming that no prosecutor would ever bring such a case.  What a perfect place for Hillary to be.  Half the country knew she had been lying and she was guilty, but there was nothing anybody could or would do about it.  She was untouchable.

How do the Clintons get people to do things like this for them.  A answer may be found by looking at the four years that went by right after Jamie Gorelick left the Clinton administration.  After working in the Clinton Department of Justice from 1994 to 1997, Ms. Gorelick moved on.  To Fannie Mae.  Here is a brief excerpt from Wkipedia on the subject of her tenure there.

Even though she had no previous training nor experience in finance, Gorelick was appointed Vice Chairman of Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) from 1997 to 2003. She served alongside former Clinton Administration official Franklin Raines.^[9] During that period, Fannie Mae developed a $10 billion accounting scandal.^[10]

On March 25, 2002, Business Week interviewed Gorelick about the health of Fannie Mae. Gorelick is quoted as saying, "We believe we are managed safely. We are very pleased that Moody's gave us an A-minus in the area of bank financial strength – without a reference to the government in any way. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions."^[11] One year later, government regulators accused Fannie Mae of improper accounting "to the tune of $9 billion" in unrecorded losses.^[12]

In an additional scandal concerning falsified financial transactions that helped the company meet earnings targets for 1998, a "manipulation" that triggered multimillion-dollar bonuses for top executives,^[13] Gorelick received $779,625.

A 2006 report of an investigation by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight into Fannie Mae's accounting practices and corporate governance revealed that from 1998 to 2002 Gorelick received a total of $26.5 million in income from Fannie Mae.^[14]

In return for her loyalty at DOJ President Clinton rewarded Gorelick with a $26.5 million position at Fannie Mae.  Sure, you could argue that Gorelick got the FAnnie Mae gig on her own merits and with no help from President Bill, but is that even slightly likely.  I don't think so.  According to this website a Senior Deputy Attorney General in Washington, DC today makes a base salary of $170,235.  I could scrape by on that, but imagine you're somebody important, somebody in the news, somebody who makes decisions that affect the entire country and everybody in it.  You're probably thinking you're real career is after you leave government.  Just like Jamie Gorelick.  Imagine yourself going from near $200K per year to $26.5 million.  You deserve it.  But who's going to pay it?

People who have business before the U.S. government will pay it.  There are foundations, think tanks, investment banking houses, law firms, corporations of all type, and even foreign countries that are just about guaranteed to pay it.  That is part of the make up of Clinton Foundation contributors.  In 2016 there were 515 other foundations that contributed at least $5,000 to the Clinton Foundation, and some that contributed between $25 million and $50 million.  The Clinton Foundation is at the center of a network of organizations that do big favors for each other.  They are movers and shakers.  And if you take care of Hillary she might just hook you up somewhere.

Maybe Lisa Page had that in mind when she advised Peter Strzok in a text message in February, 2016: "One more thing: she might be our next president. The last thing you need is going in there loaded for bear. You think she's going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi?"

In all likelihood Hillary Clinton will remain above the law, even as an astounding number of federal officials have been fired, demoted, reassigned, and are under investigation for their meddling in the 2016 presidential elections on Hillary's behalf.

A trail of evidence appearing in major news outlets suggests a campaign to undermine President Trump from within the government through illegal leaks of classified information, and then thwart congressional investigators probing the disclosures.

On Monday the Justice Department released a handful of texts and other documents that included two former officials known for their anti-Trump bias – Peter Strzok and Lisa Page of the FBI – discussing the DOJ’s “media leak strategy.” Strzok now says, through his lawyer, that that strategy was aimed at preventing leaks. Nevertheless, days later he and Page approvingly mention forthcoming news articles critical of Trump associates.

“The leaks that have been coming out of the FBI and DOJ since 2016 are unconscionable,” said retired FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano. “There’s a difference between whistleblowing and leaking for self-serving or partisan purposes.”

Had Hillary been elected we would never have heard of Peter Strzok or Lisa Page.  None of their text messages or their media leak strategy would ever have been made public.  But Hillary didn't win.  Instead we wait for Trump to declassify the Carter Page FISA warrant applications which were cover for partisan spying on the Trump campaign and undermining the Trump presidency.  I expect declassification approximately one month from today, so that a full airing of the biggest political scandal in American history will premier on the Sunday talk shows two or three weeks before the midterms elections, the outcome of which may well determine if justice will find any of the players in what has been an attempted coup, or if justice is gone forever from America.

Congressmen Introduce Bill to End Taxation of Gold and Silver

Press release from Jp Cortez, Policy Director, Sound Money Defense League:

Washington, DC (September 7, 2018) – The battle to end taxation of constitutional money has reached the federal level as U.S. Representative Alex Mooney (R-WV) today introduced sound money legislation to remove all federal income taxation from gold and silver coins and bullion.

The Monetary Metals Tax Neutrality Act – backed by the Sound Money Defense League, Money Metals Exchange, and free-market activists – would clarify that the sale or exchange of precious metals bullion and coins are not to be included in capital gains, losses, or any other type of federal income calculation.

“My view, which is backed up by language in the U.S. Constitution, is that gold and silver coins are money and…are legal tender,” Mooney said in a House Financial Services Committee hearing this week. “If they’re indeed U.S. money, it seems there should be no taxes on them at all. So, why are we taxing these coins as collectibles?”

Acting unilaterally, the Internal Revenue Service has placed gold and silver in the same “collectibles” category as artwork, Beanie Babies, and baseball cards, a classification that subjects the monetary metals to a discriminatorily high long-term capital gains tax rate of 28%.

Sound money activists have long pointed out it is inappropriate to apply any federal income tax, regardless of the rate, against the only kind of money named in the U.S. Constitution. And the IRS has never defended how its position squares up with current law.

Furthermore, the U.S. Mint continuously mints coins of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium and gives each of these coins a legal tender value denominated in U.S. dollars. This formal status as U.S. money further underscores the inappropriate nature of IRS income tax treatment.

A tax neutral measure, the Monetary Metals Tax Neutrality Act states that “no gain or loss shall be recognized on the sale or exchange of (1) gold, silver, platinum, or palladium coins minted and issued by the Secretary at any time or (2), refined gold or silver bullion, coins, bars, rounds, or ingots which are valued primarily based on their metal content and not their form.”

Under current IRS policy, a taxpayer who sells his precious metals may end up with a capital “gain” in terms of Federal Reserve Notes and must pay federal income taxes on this “gain.”

But the capital “gain” is not necessarily a real gain. It is often a nominal gain that simply results from the inflation created by the Federal Reserve and the attendant decline in the Federal Reserve Note dollar’s purchasing power.

Under Rep. Mooney’s bill (which has already been cosponsored by two others), precious metals gains and losses would not be included in any calculations of a taxpayer’s federal taxable income.

“Inflation is a regressive tax that especially harms wage earners, savers, and retirees on a fixed income,” said Jp Cortez, policy director at the Sound Money Defense League. “We are encouraged that an increasing number of citizens, state legislators, and members of congress are taking action to address the evils of the Federal Reserve System.”

“The IRS does not let taxpayers deduct the staggering capital losses they suffer when holding Federal Reserve Notes over time,” said Stefan Gleason, president of a Money Metals Exchange, a precious metals dealer recently named “Best in the USA” by a global industry ratings group.

“So it’s grossly unfair for the IRS to assess a capital gains tax when citizens hold gold and silver to protect them from the Fed’s policy of currency devaluation.”

Rep. French Hill (R-AR) and Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) joined today as original cosponsors. The text of the bill can be found here.

The Sound Money Defense League is a public policy group working nationally to bring back gold and silver as America’s constitutional money.  

A Simpleton Accuses

Let me start by saying that Michael Gerson is not a simpleton.  He can pinch-hit, though, until a real simpleton comes along.  Writing in the Washington Post Gerson takes a wild swing at President Trump and misses.  "We are a superpower run by a simpleton!"  Calling someone else a simpleton rarely works out well, and it doesn't seem to work well for Gerson either.  He writes:

Here is the increasingly evident reality of the Trump era: We are a superpower run by a simpleton. From a foreign policy perspective, this is far worse than being run by a skilled liar. It is an invitation to manipulation and contempt.

Pointing to the polls is the main response of Trump and his supporters. Whatever the president is doing, most Republicans want more of it.  As one apologist argues, “His [Trump's] personality is a feature, not a bug. Many Americans are comfortable with that.” Put another way, a motivated group of Americans — which largely controls the GOP nomination process — enjoys Trump’s reality-television version of presidential politics. And you can’t argue with the ratings.

I can and do. What we are finding from books, from insider leaks and from investigative journalism is that the rational actors who are closest to the president are frightened by his chaotic leadership style. They describe a total lack of intellectual curiosity, mental discipline and impulse control. Should the views of these establishment insiders really carry more weight than those of Uncle Clem in Scranton, Pa.? Why yes, in this case, they should. We should listen to the voices of American populism in determining public needs and in setting policy agendas — but not in determining political reality.

We should pay attention to the economic trends that have marginalized whole sections of the country.

We should pay attention to economic trends, says Gerson.  What an unfortunate moment to offer that advice — right when the August Jobs Report hits the newsstands.

Long-awaited wage growth posted its biggest increase of the economic recovery in August while payroll gains beat expectations and the unemployment rate held near a generational low of 3.9 percent, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Friday.

Average hourly earnings rose 2.9 percent for the month on an annualized basis, while nonfarm payrolls grew by 201,000. Economists surveyed by Reuters had been expecting earnings to rise 2.7 percent, payrolls to increase by 191,000 and the jobless level to decline one-tenth of a point to 3.8 percent.

The wage growth was the highest since April 2009.

[...]

[T] he rolls of those at work part time for economic reasons, or the underemployed, fell by 188,000 to 4.4 million. That number has declined by 830,000 over the past year.

Well, what do you know? Underemployed, those who work less than 35 hours per week because they are unable to find full-time work, are now finding full-time jobs.  Those are the folks that were left behind during the Obama administration. Is that the trend that Gerson would like us to pay attention to?  Probably not. America's economic engine is roaring along at a very inconvenient time for Never Trumpers like Gerson, damn the luck.  And that's Gerson's problem.  He thinks it's luck.

But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why the economy has suddenly taken off.  If we cut taxes on the wealthy, investment will grow.  Contrary to current liberal doctrine, they will not hide their money in their mattresses, they will invest it so as to make more money.  That investment will spur growth in jobs.  If we reduce burdensome regulations, smaller business will have an easier time of it.  It will be easier to start one, and easier to grow one, and guess what that means — more jobs.  If we fight back on unfair trade deals, say we level the playing field by putting tariffs on imported steel, our domestic steel industry will grow.  If we remove impediments to oil fracking we will get more domestic energy, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and reduce energy costs.  And how about immigration enforcement?

A recent analysis by Breitbart News also reviewed the wage and job opportunity benefits of workplace immigration enforcement by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

In the most famous case, 600 jobs were secured for black Americans and wages were increased in February when ICE raided the Cloverhill Bakery in northwest Chicago, Illinois. Black Americans’ wages rose 25 cents thanks to enforcement.

Most recently, the tight labor market helped reintegrate retirees back into the workforce. Breitbart News has also reported extensively on how the tight labor market in Trump’s “hire American” economy has brought new job opportunities for Americans with disabilities and helped lower the demographic group’s unemployment rate.

There has also been history-making wage growth for American workers in the construction industry, the garment industry, for workers employed at small businesses, black Americans, and restaurant workers.

The tight labor market has also secured higher wages for overtime workers and high-paying, coveted white-collar jobs for American teenagers. Most recently, Breitbart News reported that the construction industry has had to recruit women to take jobs at higher wages rather than hiring illegal aliens. A Chick-Fil-A in California has even raised wages to $18 an hour to retain workers.

But Gerson sees no need to explain all that.  Instead he makes blithe reference to "whole sections of the country" that have been "marginalized."  Well, what sections and how have they been marginalized? Gerson doesn't say.

We should pay attention to the economic trends that have marginalized whole sections of the country. We should be alert to the failures and indifference of American elites. But we also need to understand that these trends — which might have produced a responsible populism — have, through a cruel trick of history, elevated a dangerous, prejudiced fool. Trump cannot claim the legitimacy of the genuine anxiety that helped produce him. The political and social wave is real, but it is ridden by an unworthy leader. The right reasons have produced the wrong man.

The testimony of the tell-alls is remarkably consistent. Some around Trump are completely corrupted by the access to power. But others — who might have served in any Republican administration — spend much of their time preventing the president from doing stupid and dangerous things.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Gerson will never be mistaken for a rocket scientist.  Oh, he's not dumb.  A former White House speech writer, he left the George W. Bush administration in 2006, joining the Washington Post in 2007 where he remains as the token establishment conservative who can be depended upon to bash other conservatives who are not moderate enough.  He makes a good living, and that's smart.  But he has no clue about Trump.  Our current accelerating economy is the result of Trump economic policy.  Gerson mistakes tweets for policy, writing that "a discussion on 'Fox & Friends' can so often set the agenda of the president."  In what dream world does Gerson live?

The testimony of the tell-alls is remarkably consistent. Some around Trump are completely corrupted by the access to power. But others — who might have served in any Republican administration — spend much of their time preventing the president from doing stupid and dangerous things.

The clueless Gerson, all too typical of Trump's enemies, seems utterly incapable of understanding.  And that's why we keep winning.  Trump's enemies don't get it.  They go apeshit over some tweet, hyperventilating for days on end.  Meanwhile, ISIS all but disappears from the battlefield, NATO countries begin paying their share of the costs of their own defense, North Korea comes to the bargaining table to talk nuclear disarmament, trade deals move forward, and the American economy shifts into high gear.  Gerson & friends never notice.  They seem to think, and want us to believe, that it's all because an army of faceless bureaucrats has our back, making it all happen while swiping papers off the Oval Office desk.  Sure.

"The testimony of the tell-alls is remarkably consistent," Gerson writes. It is. And the tell-alls, themselves, are remarkably consistent with the rest of the anti-Trump establishment. Like a herd of cows. Cows are remarkably consistent.

Trump's October Surprise

I'm waiting for that shoe to drop.  Which shoe is that, you might ask?  This is the shoe that will have the media tearing their hair and weeping over the outrageous President Trump.  There have been others, but the most notable example of such a shoe is this tweet:

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

Typical of the headlines flooding the media after Trump's tweet, was this from the New York Daily News: Trump, citing no evidence, accuses Obama of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower before election on Twitter.

Trump offered no evidence of his explosive claim, which was quickly denied by an Obama spokesman and shot down by White House insiders past and present.

"A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice," said Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis.

"As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."

For some context, on Presidential Inauguration Day, January 20, 2108, the New York Times print edition arrived at newsstands sporting this front page, over the fold headline: Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides. The online version was quickly amended to read: Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates.

Jan. 19, 2017

WASHINGTON — American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.

Bottom line: the Trump campaign was under surveillance by the Obama administration on the pretext that Trump campaign associate Carter Page colluded with Russians to fix the U.S. presidential election.  Several weeks after Trump tweeted "Wiretap!" Jonathan Turley wrote, Trump was right after all about the Obama administration wiretaps.   

He [Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)] also said that the inadvertent interceptions were then subject to “unmasking” where intelligence officials actively and knowingly attached the names of the parties to transcripts and then circulated the information widely within the intelligence community. If true, that would clearly support a part of the president’s allegations and raise very serious questions about the improper use of surveillance. It would be Trump’s ultimate “redrum” moment.

Yet, when this disclosure was made by the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, CNN and other news outlets immediately proclaimed that it did not prove anything about the Trump allegations — again emphasizing that he said Obama “wiretapped” Trump’s phone. That is like saying that an alleged victim is not to be believed because he said that some “second story man broke into my home” when the evidence showed that there was no second story on the house and the burglar entered through an open window.

We have since learned that FISA warrants issued on Page meant that anyone in the Trump campaign with whom Page communicated electronically was subject to surveillance by the FBI.  We have since also learned the the FBI sent at least one informant to spy on the Trump campaign.  To protect it from the Russians, so they said, but they never informed the Trump campaign of the supposed threat or the "protections" provided.

Collusion with Russia was a fairy tale that only grew legs after Hillary Clinton lost the election.  Up until that time nobody believed there was any Russian collusion including Hillary, Barack Obama, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign.  After she lost, Russian Collusion became the Democratic Party's lead talking point.  It did not resonate with most Americans.

Within three months of Turley's article an opinion poll from The Hill found this:

On the question of collusion, 52 percent said they don’t believe Trump coordinated with Moscow to influence the 2016 presidential election. But 54 percent said they believe Trump’s associates may have been involved.

Either way, 62 percent of voters say there is currently no hard evidence to support the collusion claims.

Further:

In addition, 62 percent said there exists a campaign to delegitimize the president. This includes 87 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of independents and 40 percent of Democrats. [My emphasis]

The media is not winning points on this issue.  Trump has been masterful at forcing their biases out into the open where voters can see them and see that it is largely a media driven campaign to delegitimize.  Trust in the media sinks to new depths. 

Poll: 77 percent say major news outlets report 'fake news'

By CRISTIANO LIMA 04/02/2018 10:50 AM EDT

President Donald Trump is not alone in thinking media outlets spread "fake news."

More than 3-in-4 of 803 American respondents, or 77 percent, said they believe that major traditional television and newspaper media outlets report “fake news,” according to a Monmouth University poll released Monday, marking a sharp increase in distrust of those news organizations from a year ago, when 63 percent registered concerns about the spread of misinformation.

Among those, 31 percent said they believe those media outlets spread "fake news" regularly, and 46 percent said it happens occasionally.

The findings also showed Americans diverging on what constitutes "fake news," with 65 percent saying it applies broadly to the editorial decisions outlets make over what topics to cover and 25 percent more narrowly defining it to apply only to the spread of factually incorrect information.

The time is ripe.  The midterms are two months away.  Rather than sit back and wait, prepare his defenses, Trump, I expect, will spring his own October Surprise.  When it hits the media will erupt in an all consuming outrage — 24/7 wall to wall coverage.  But a solid majority of Americans will read past the shocking headlines and will look to alternative news sources, maybe even to the president himself.  And then they'll decide the media are mostly lying, and they'll back Trump.

I expect Trump to trigger new rounds of media outrage in three to four weeks.  Maybe it will be in the form of an "outrageous" tweet, or perhaps in a press conference he will let slip remark like the one in Helsinki where he "misspoke" and everyone took him to task for failing to back U.S. intelligence agencies.  Or better still, maybe there will be a high profile indictment of a former high ranking DOJ or FBI official, a hero of the left.

Blue Wave Theory of Operation

In The Glory of Timely Leftist Overreach Dov Fischer offers some needed perspective on that "socialist wave" that swept Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Democratic nomination for a Bronx congressional seat.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got 16,000 votes and Joseph Crowley got 11,000 in a District of, uh, 691,000 people. Even ten percent is not an endorsement of an ideology. Look more closely at that District: (i) more than 40% of the population speak Spanish at home; (ii) 57% were born in Latin America; (iii) ethnic-racial composition 50% Hispanic, 11% Black, and 18% White.

The passage above illustrates the leftist/Democrat strategy as it was meant to work. Our totalitarian Democrats have abandoned all attempts at appealing to more conservative American voters, adopting a strategy, instead, of importing a new socialistically oriented electorate from Central and South America. Keys to the success of this strategy are 1.) lax or nonexistent enforcement of immigration laws and 2.) lax or nonexistent validation of voter identification.

Read the whole thing.  Fischer makes quite a few other entertaining observations.

Formula For Failure - A Retrospective

George Packer's New Yorker article, Witnessing the Obama Presidency, from Start to Finish, is a look at the Obama presidency through the eyes of Ben Rhodes, Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser.  Rhodes has just written a book about it.

Ben Rhodes was the President’s speechwriter, foreign-policy adviser, and confidant. His book records the Administration’s struggle to shape its own narrative.

No doubt Packer considers the Obama presidency a success of historic proportions, and if there is any failure to be associated with it, it is a failure of the American people to fully appreciate and get behind Obama.  But the impact of Packer's article is that it explains the failures of the Obama Presidency, unintentionally of course.

Barack Obama was a writer before he became a politician, and he saw his Presidency as a struggle over narrative. “We’re telling a story about who we are,” he instructed his aide Ben Rhodes early in the first year of his first term. He said it again in his last months in office, on a trip to Asia—“I mean, that’s our job. To tell a really good story about who we are”—adding that the book he happened to be reading argued for storytelling as the trait that distinguishes us from other primates.

Seems a misguided theory that the United State presidency would be a struggle over narrative.  In retrospect it's a theory that fits the Obama presidency.  Think of ObamaCare as not so much an effort to improve health care than as a statement, a narrative: "This is who we are."  It went through congress and was signed into law on a strictly partisan vote with Republicans shut out of the negotiations.  It was Democrats saying who they were and who the Republicans were not.  When finally implemented — as much as it could be — health care costs went up instead of down as promised.  Some people were helped, and others — most — were not.  If you liked your health care plan, you could not keep your health insurance plan, as Obama had promised.  And if you liked your doctor, you couldn't necessarily keep your doctor, as Obama had promised.  Your doctor had to be part of your new health insurance network that replaced the one you couldn't keep because it didn't meet Obama's requirements — like men having to be covered for birth control pills.

The presidency as narrative is risky business when there is an ever changing narrative, especially when elements of it seemed to have a shorter and shorter shelf life.  But there is no doubting the centrality of narrative to Obama's presidency. 

Obama’s audience was both the American public and the rest of the world. His characteristic rhetorical mode was to describe and understand both sides of a divide—black and white, liberal and conservative, Muslim and non-Muslim—before synthesizing them into a unifying story that seemed to originate in and affirm his own.

Unfortunately, it was only in rhetorical mode that Obama understood both sides of a divide, but that was the narrative.  In reality, Obama had no interest in the any side of any divide other than his own.  This is a point that Packer himself inadvertently reinforced when he described the rise of Ben Rhodes.

The journalistic cliché of a “mind meld” doesn’t capture the totality of Rhodes’s identification with the President. He came to Obama with an M.F.A. in fiction writing from New York University and a few years on the staff of a Washington think tank. He became so adept at anticipating Obama’s thoughts and finding Obamaesque words for them that the President made him a top foreign-policy adviser, with a say on every major issue. Rhodes’s advice mostly took the form of a continuous effort to understand and apply the President’s thinking.

Rhodes brought nothing to the table other than a world view in lockstep with Obama's and a talent for putting it in grandiose words.  And that accounts for his meteoric rise in Washington politics.  Ben Rhodes didn't bring a specialized knowledge of foreign policy.  He was not the man to point out alternate perspectives to Obama, to shed new light on issues, or, heaven forbid, to challenge Obama's assumptions.  Rhodes was a magnificently successful sycophant, a yes man.  His selection as an adviser meant that U.S. foreign policy was guided almost solely by Obama, or more accurately by Obama's whim when reality stepped in to crush Obama's naivete.  Syrian red line?  Tell Vlad I'll have more flexibility after the election?  It was a foreign policy that almost invariably reacted to world events rather than dictated them, always with an eye towards domestic political consumption rather than productive results on the international stage.

There were two moments during their ten years together when a gap opened up between the President and his aide. The first came at the start of Obama’s second term, when the promises of the Arab Spring were unravelling. The second came with the election of a successor who pledged to dismantle everything Obama had stood for. In each case, Obama was forced into a reconsideration of his idea of progress, and Rhodes, a step or two behind, had to catch up. The drama of “The World as It Is” lies between these points.

A step or two behind and having to catch up.  That was Obama's idea of an adviser.  What advice could Rhodes possibly have given that Obama didn't already know about?  As a sympathetic observer George Packer is fully on board with the Obama/Rhodes approach, and equally oblivious.

In “The Final Year,” a new documentary that focuses on Obama’s foreign policy at the end of his Presidency, Trump’s victory leaves Rhodes unable to speak for almost a full minute. It had been inconceivable, like the repeal of a law of nature—not just because of who Trump was but also because of who Obama was. Rhodes and Obama briefly sought refuge in the high-mindedness of the long view—“Progress doesn’t move in a straight line,” Rhodes messaged his boss on Election Night, a reference to one of Obama’s own sayings, which the President then revived for the occasion: “History doesn’t move in a straight line, it zigs and zags.” But that was not much consolation. On Obama’s last trip abroad, he sat quietly with Rhodes in the Beast as they passed the cheering Peruvian crowds. “What if we were wrong?” Obama suddenly asked. Rhodes didn’t know what he meant. “Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” Obama took the thought to its natural conclusion: “Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or twenty years too early.”

Ponder the sentences I highlighted in bold print.  You question, could you have been wrong?  Of course not.  The "natural conclusion" is that you're ahead of your time.  Isn't that a relief.  Ben Rhodes thought so.

Rhodes wrestled with this painful blow. It sounded like a repudiation of everything they had done. But then he found an answer, and it was in keeping with the spirit of his years in service to Obama: “We were right, but all that progress depended upon him, and now he was out of time.”

"And now he was out of time."  Thank God!

Well, Do You Think About Things That You Do Think About?

Something is a recent blog post by Rod Dreher reminded me of a scene from a play.  The play, Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, dramatizes the 1925 trial of John Scopes who was eventually convicted and fined $100 for the crime of teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school.  It was the conflict of science vs. religion, enlightenment vs. bigotry, knowledge vs. ignorance.  In a dramatic climax science and enlightenment delivered a crushing defeat to the forces of ignorance. Though John Scopes and his fictional counterpart Bert Cates were both convicted, science and knowledge were vindicated in a fiery courtroom confrontation in which the progressive defense attorney thoroughly discredited the Christian conservative.

DRUMMOND (Sharply) The first day. Was it a twenty-four-hour day?

BRADY The Bible says it was a day.

DRUMMOND There wasn’t any sun. How do you know how long it was?

BRADY (Determined) The Bible says it was a day.

DRUMMOND A normal day, a literal day, a twenty-four-hour day? (Pause. BRADY is unsure.)

BRADY I do not know.

DRUMMOND What do you think?

BRADY (Floundering) I do not think about things that . . . I do not think about!

DRUMMOND Do you ever think about things that you do think about? (There is some laughter. But it is dampened by the knowledge and awareness throughout the courtroom, that the trap is about to be sprung) Isn’t it possible that first day was twenty-five hours long? There was no way to measure it, no way to tell! Could it have been twenty-five hours?

But in his blog post, The Backlash Is Building, Dreher shows that roles have gotten reversed over the decades.  In 1925 the public school teacher was punished for teaching the forbidden knowledge, the theory of evolution because it was said to contradict the story of Genesis as told in the Bible.  Progressives fought against that law and fought against the notion that there are some ideas that need to be suppressed.  Nowadays the progressives are the ones who punish heretical thought. 

When former Google engineer James Damore wrote an internal memo suggesting that Google's management might try a different strategies in their efforts to promote diversity at Google, retribution against him was swift and harsh.  His sin was to suggest that there are differences between men and women that might be taken into consideration.  Damore was fired.  But then unexpectedly, Damore's firing raised something of a backlash in the progressive ranks.

One of Dreher's readers writes:

The firing of James Damore back in August was what really made me start hesitating about my previous view that “political correctness” was, as Vox, the New Yorker, and all the other right-thinking people say, a Fox News attempt to discredit politeness. Here was a guy who was making a calm, carefully reasoned argument that some of Google’s diversity initiatives might not be the best way to achieve diversity, and that Googlers should be free to criticize such policies. In response, not only was he fired (and with a publicity that basically guarantees he’ll never work for a Silicon Valley firm again), but he was subjected to a regularly scheduled bout of Two Minutes’ Hate every day for weeks.

Now, I have no idea whether Damore’s arguments were sound. For all I know, the studies he cited might be garbage or his inferences might be wrong, although I doubt it, in light of at least some psychologists’ willingness to come forward and defend some of his claims. I have no investment in whether his arguments were successful, and for that matter, I doubt he did either. The point is that the very possibility of debate on this issue was foreclosed.

Dreher's leftist reader gets it about the nature of political correctness:  it's purpose is to end debate or preclude the possibility of it.  But I find the reader's disinterest in the soundness of Damore's arguments to be astonishing.  Why would one not examine Damore's arguments and form an opinion?  If Damore's ideas are so heretical that to voice them is to risk firing, blackball, and possibly financial ruin, isn't it worth the investment of a little time and effort to understand what they are?  What could be that bad about them?  Dreher's reader wasn't interested.

Or maybe there is some defensive self censorship going on.  But doesn't that seem particularly timid? Don't progressives pride themselves on speaking truth to power?  In this case truth was spoken anonymously.  Still, it's an encouraging development that progressive authority is questioned.  But even as they inch away from progressive dogma, doubters seem reluctant to think about things that they don't think about -- not interested in the soundness of opposing arguments.

Another of Dreher's leftist readers confessed:

I found myself perplexed that so many of the wonderful, God fearing people that I knew and loved had voted for Trump.

And so, for the first time in my life I began to really read people with whom I did not agree. I read conservative Reformed writers. I began to read your blog. I sought out other voices, some that had voted for Trump, some that fell closer to the “Never Trumper” category.

An amazing thing happened. I began to see that there were enormous logical inconsistencies in some of the things that I had thought, especially on cultural issues. I saw that my beliefs couldn’t stand up to rigorous thought and scrutiny. And more than that, if I claimed Christ, there were things that I believed and espoused, especially regarding abortion and sexuality, that had to change. I had gone looking for intellectual rigor and much to my surprise I found it not in Cultural Leftism, but in orthodox Christian, especially Reformed (broadly defined), thought.

So where do I find myself now? I still see Trump and his crew as an existential threat to our Republic. The wholesale destruction of democratic norms and the open and blatant corruption pains me (I might be unusual among [former] Leftists in that I have always had a great love of the Republic, with all of its flaws and foibles. It comes, I think, from being a deep student of the Revolutionary era).

The first thing that astonishes me is the confession that it might be unusual for leftists to harbor any "great love of the Republic."  We on the right always suspected as much.  There is certainly no love of the Constitution among progressives, but we never expected anyone come right out and say it.

The second thing that stood out was the admission of awakening to "enormous logical inconsistencies" in his own thinking, which came about when he began reading conservative writers.  Then in the very next paragraph, he says that he sees "Trump and his crew as an existential threat to our Republic."  He is pained by the "wholesale destruction of democratic norms," though it's not obvious to me what democratic norms have been destroyed.  But allow me to point out a logical inconsistency.  DACA.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.  DACA was the invention of former President Barack Obama.  Neither the House nor the Senate passed any legislation that would protect "undocumented" children -- those who were illegally brought to America, through no fault of their own -- from deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Obama provided such protections for "Dreamers" by executive order. Doing so was so far outside of traditional democratic norms, that it should be considered unconstitutional.  Congress, the legislative branch, is supposed to pass legislation that the president signs or vetoes.  The president, the executive branch, is not supposed to make law on his own, yet the left embraces Obama's undemocratic imposition of DACA.

The DACA program was formed through executive action by former President Barack Obama in 2012 and allowed certain people who came to the U.S. illegally as minors to be protected from immediate deportation. Recipients, called Dreamers, were able to request “consideration of deferred action” for a period of two years, which was subject to renewal.

When Trump set a March 5, 2018 deadline to end the DACA program, unilaterally rescinding what Obama unilaterally imposed, the left howled in rage and ran to the courts where they found a sympathetic judge who ruled that a sitting president did not have the power to rescind the undemocratic action of his predecessor, and ordered that the DACA program continue.  The Trump administration appealed, but the Supreme Court declined to take up the case until the normal appeals process has completed. 

Here's the irony.  Trump imposed the March 5th deadline in order to push the House and Senate toward passage of comprehensive immigration reform that would include resolving the status of the Dreamers. The passage of comprehensive immigration reform by the House and Senate would be in keeping with the founding fathers' notion of democratic norms.  Trump was attempting to empower Congress.  Somehow, progressives consider this an existential threat to our Republic.

As to Inherit the Wind, it turns out there was more dramatic license taken than I had originally imagined.  Henry Drummond, fictional attorney for the defense and enlightened hero of the play, defeated a straw man in his cross examination of the hapless and bigoted Matthew Harrison Brady.  Brady was a creature from the imaginations of Lawrence and Lee.  He represented William Jennings Bryan who submitted to cross examination by Clarence Darrow in the real life Scopes trial.  But Clarence Darrow did not do as well the fictional Drummond in his cross examination.  Here is how the real life confrontation went, according to a University of Minnesota Law Library paper by Michael Hannon.  Questions are from Clarence Darrow.  Answers are from William Jennings Bryan.

Q—Then, when the Bible said, for in stance, "and God called the firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day," that does not necessarily mean twenty-four hours?
A—I do not think it necessarily does.
Q—Do you think it does or does not?
A—I know a great many think so.
Q—What do you think?
A—I do not think it does.
Q—You think those were not literal days?
A—I do not think they were twenty-four-hour days.
Q—What do you think about it?
A—That is my opinion--I do not know that my opinion is better on that subject than those who think it does.
Q—You do not think that?
A—No. But I think it would be just as easy for the kind of God we believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in 6,000,000 years or in 600,000,000 years. I do not think it important whether we believe one or the other.
Q—Do you think those were literal days?
A—My impression is they were periods, but I would not attempt to argue as against anybody who wanted to believe in literal days.

Unlike Brady, who lost all composure under the pressure of Drummond's questions, William Jennings Bryan was unflustered by Darrow's badgering.  Reading through the exchange I would have expected opposing counsel be jumping up to object: "Asked and answered," "Badgering the witness."  Further in the Hannon paper:

For later accounts it seems to make a difference whether the commentator actually read the transcripts of the two hour exchange between Darrow and Bryan and the contemporary accounts of the trial. Alan Dershowitz wrote of the Bryan versus Darrow duel:

"As usual, the real story, as told in the trial transcript and in contemporaneous accounts, was more complex and far more interesting. The actual William Jennings Bryan was no simple-minded literalist, and he certainly was no bigot. He was a great populist who cared deeply about equality and about the down-trodden."

Dershowitz also gives Bryan more credit than many other writers: “All in all, a reading of the transcript shows Bryan doing quite well defending himself, while it is Darrow who comes off quite poorly—in fact, as something of an antireligious cynic.”

There was an informality about the Scopes trial.  Bryan's testimony was voluntary. He was not sworn in.  As the trial progressed it was moved outside due to extreme summer heat.  They weren't sure at the end whether the judge or the jury should set the fine at $100.  It was a circus.  Through it all William Jennings Bryan held his own, contrary to what you might think if you get your history from the entertainment industry.

Funny to think that Inherit the Wind certain facts were suppressed in order to create the proper dramatic effect.  The play was about the battle to open young minds to theories of evolution, yet in making their point progressive playwrights had to hide the fact that the real life Christian conservative had held his own against the progressive in their debate over it.  Progressives are still busy hiding unfortunate facts.

The Secret Comey Memos

Byron York asks, "Why are the Comey memos secret?" You may recall that James Comey memorialized certain conversations he had with President Trump in form of memos to himself.  He then leaked them to the New York Times through a friend of his, Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman.  He leaked the memos, he told Congress, for the purpose of getting a special prosecutor appointed.

Success!  That special prosecutor is Robert Mueller, who has convinced Judge James Boasberg that disclosure of those very memos "could reasonably be expected to interfere" with Mueller's ongoing investigation.  According to Congressman Trey Gowdy, Mueller and the Judge are correct.  Disclosure would interfere with the investigation.

"I have read the memos," Gowdy said on Fox News "Special Report" Monday. "They would be defense Exhibit A in an obstruction of justice case — not prosecution exhibit, defense Exhibit A. If Comey felt obstructed, he did a masterful job of keeping it out of the memos."

An obvious explanation for keeping the secret memos secret is that disclosure might reveal how utterly without merit an investigation into Trump campaign collusion with Russia really is, and by extension the pointlessness of trying to obstruct it.  All of which might hasten the point at which Mueller and his team of Clinton-contributing, Democratic prosecutors are out of work.

On the other hand, maybe Mueller is not really investigating Trump connections to Russia, but has other reasons for keeping the investigation open.  The Mueller-wears-a-White-Hat theory has Mueller investigating the investigators, perhaps in cooperation with the DOJ Inspector General.  Seems unlikely, but it's possible.  If we see indictments for lying to, or misleading, the FISA Court, or falsifying FBI form 302s, we will know which hat Robert Mueller wears, white or black.

Last updated February 15, 2018 at 12.38

The Democrats Respond To Trump's SOTU

How fitting that it was a Kennedy who delivered the Democrats' response to President Trump's State of the Union address.  Real Clear Politics billed it this way:

"Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, scion of one of America’s top political dynasties, is speaking after President Trump’s State of the Union address."

Last night the latest Kennedy aristocrat to burst onto the national scene launched into a diatribe remarkable for being so transparently dishonest, vicious, spiteful, and hypocritical. One straw man after another bit the dust as the photogenic Kennedy sought to establish himself as the new face of the same old Democratic party.  Good luck with that. 

Democrats may be looking to Joe Kennedy III to follow in the footsteps of Barack Obama whose breakout speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention inspired the nation and led to his election to the presidency only four years later.  Yet their speeches were not that alike.  Obama's held out the promise of unity, false promise that it was.  Funny that he noted there were those who would divide Americans, and then later we find that he, Obama, would be the divider.

"Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."

Kennedy on the other hand takes division as the given.  The good, represented by himself and like minded aristocrats, must defeat the Trump-inspired racist rabble.

"This administration isn’t just targeting the laws that protect us – they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.
For them, dignity isn’t something you’re born with but something you measure.

By your net worth, your celebrity, your headlines, your crowd size.

Not to mention, the gender of your spouse. The country of your birth. The color of your skin. The God of your prayers.

Their record is a rebuke of our highest American ideal: the belief that we are all worthy, we are all equal and we all count. In the eyes of our law and our leaders, our God and our government.

That is the American promise."

According the Joe Kennedy III, we are all worthy, equal, and we all count in the eyes of our law, our leaders, our God, and government.  Except somehow I don't think Hillary, or James Comey, or Loretta Lynch, or even Kennedy himself believe any of it.  In light of the sham investigation that held Hillary blameless for ignoring laws that sent others to jail, how could they believe it?  The law was certainly not intended to apply to Joe's great uncle Ted.  Ted Kennedy, you may recall, drove his car off a bridge and into a Chappaquiddick Island tidal channel with Mary Jo Kopechne in it.  He saved his own skin, but then didn't bother to report the accident for nine hours.  And he didn't bother to save Mary Joe.  She drowned, trapped in his car underwater.

Yes, Joe's speech was dishonest, vicious, and spiteful, but Joe Kennedy III was also being really dumb.  Really dumb.  Dumb like Hillary with her deplorables comment.  Kennedy had this to say about our year of strong economic growth and optimism:

"We see an economy that makes stocks soar, investor portfolios bulge and corporate profits climb but fails to give workers their fair share of the reward.
A government that struggles to keep itself open.

Russia knee-deep in our democracy.

An all-out war on environmental protection.

A Justice Department rolling back civil rights by the day.

Hatred and supremacy proudly marching in our streets."

The Democrats have painted themselves into a corner with identity politics.  Americans tend to reject policies that they see as encroachments on their freedoms, yet that's what the Democrats are constantly trying to sell to the voters.  Democrats have no issues that are not transparently about increasing their own power.  Democrats support labor unions and mandatory unionization wherever possible because union dues become party contributions.  Democrats support federal regulations on anything and everything because it provides an army of federal employees whose jobs depend on the Democrat vision of an ever expanding government, and because regulations can be used as weapons against political opponents.  Democrats support open borders and illegal immigration because Democrats depend on a stream of low income, unskilled workers who are more likely to become future Democratic voters.  Democrats oppose any form of voter ID validation because they make use of voter fraud in tight elections.

Most Americans do not belong to labor unions and many of those that do would prefer not to have mandatory dues automatically deducted from their pay.  Most Americans oppose unnecessary regulation and would prefer, if not smaller government, at least government that is efficient and cost effective.  Most Americans oppose illegal immigration.  Most Americans would like vote tallies to reflect an accurate count of legally cast ballots by eligible voters.  Democrats have decided that to win on these issues they have to convince voters that opposition is racist or cruel.

That leaves little else for Democrats to campaign on but the evil, the racism, the homophobia of whoever opposes them.  At the moment that happens to be Republicans, but the club could grow to include independents.  To use Hillary's words opponents are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it."  And just as Hillary miscalculated, Joe Kennedy III is not likely to shame anybody into anything.  Instead he will create even greater resentment in the hearts of Americans to those moralizing, pretentious progressives who want only to dictate to the rest of us.  Good luck, Joe.

Are We Looking at a Standoff?

Yesterday Michael Flynn entered a guilty plea to the charge of lying to the FBI about two meetings he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December of 2016.  According to reports Flynn is now cooperating in the investigation of alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russia as it allegedly attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.  The stock market took a dive when Brian Ross of ABC News reported that candidate Donald Trump had instructed Flynn to reach out to Russian officials.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average which was hitting record highs suddenly dropped 350 points. 

Meanwhile euphoria gripped the fever swamps of the left.  Mueller had his "smoking gun."  With Flynn apparently poised to testify that Trump ordered him to make contact with the Russians when he was a candidate, Mueller had proof that Trump colluded with Russians to rig the U.S. presidential election.  Then came ABC's correction.

Ross issued a “clarification” to his report on ABC “World Tonight,” hours after the initial bombshell allegation about pre-election Russia contacts was made on air.

“A clarification tonight on something one of Flynn’s confidants told us and we reported earlier today,” Ross told ABC “World Tonight” host David Muir.

“He said the president had asked Flynn to contact Russia during the campaign. He’s now clarifying that, saying, according to Flynn, candidate Trump asked him during the campaign to find ways to repair relations with Russia and other world hot spots. And then after the election, the president-elect asked him to contact Russia on issues including working together to fight ISIS.”

The stock market began to rebound even before Ross's correction was announced, probably buoyed by the anticipated Senate tax reform vote.  By market close the Dow had recovered to where it was only 40 points down from its previous close, still well above the 24,000 barrier it had broken through on the day before.  Lefty dreams of impeachment began to fade.  There's still nothing about contacts between Trump's transition team and foreign leaders that was anything but the normal practice for an incoming administration.

But with Flynn's guilty plea we finally have a crime related to the 2016 elections.  Up to now the only known illegality is the leaking of unmasked names of Trump campaign personnel who were under surveillance by the Obama administration.  There may be other illegalities and in my opinion there probably are, like the surveillance itself, but the leaking of unmasked names are the only actions we know of with a certainty that are against the law.

Also since Flynn entered his plea, there's been a lot of talk about all the leverage Special Counsel Robert Mueller might now have for getting Flynn to incriminate President Trump.  With Mueller breathing down his neck, you get the sense that all the pressure is on Trump, but that may not be quite true.  The saying goes, if you take a shot at the king, you better kill him, so what might Mueller have to worry about if he takes his shot? 

Answer:  Uranium One.  

An FBI investigation that began prior to 2010 had accumulated substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in a scheme of bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering that was intended to expand Russia's atomic energy business inside the United States.  Documentary evidence showed that President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation received millions of dollars during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.

The first decision occurred in October 2010, when the State Department and government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States unanimously approved the partial sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom, giving Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply.

When this sale was used by Trump on the campaign trail last year, Hillary Clinton’s spokesman said she was not involved in the committee review and noted the State Department official who handled it said she “never intervened ... on any [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] matter.”

In 2011, the administration gave approval for Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary to sell commercial uranium to U.S. nuclear power plants in a partnership with the United States Enrichment Corp. Before then, Tenex had been limited to selling U.S. nuclear power plants reprocessed uranium recovered from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons under the 1990s Megatons to Megawatts peace program.

“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions,” a person who worked on the case told The Hill, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by U.S. or Russian officials.

So how would all of this be a problem for Mueller?  Answer:  Robert Mueller was head of the FBI when the investigation began in 2009.  And, oddly enough, James Comey was FBI director when it ended in 2015.  

The investigation was ultimately supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, now the deputy FBI director under Trump, Justice Department documents show.

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from investigations of all things related to Russia, his deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as Special Counsel.  It was Andrew McCabe's wife, you may recall, who received more than a half million dollar campaign contribution from now Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe for her Virginia state Senate campaign.  Thicker than thieves.

To sum up the Uranium One scandal, a lot of money changed hands, Russia got uranium, the Clintons got millions, the Clinton Foundation got hundreds of millions, and the investigating team, that included Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey, were apparently looking the other way while it all went down.  Inquiring minds are beginning to ask questions.

So, what will Robert Mueller do?  Can he keep himself out of the crosshairs when Congress begins to demand to know how the Uranium One deal really went down?  What does Robert Mueller know about Uranium One?  Will he help himself by going hard after President Trump, or somebody in his family like Jared Kushner?  

Or would he be better off looking into the origins and financing of the Steele Dossier?  That would turn his focus on the Democrats and Hillary Clinton, since it's been reported that Hillary and the DNC paid for the dossier, transactions that sent Clinton campaign and DNC money through Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to "Russian sources."  And once his attention turns to Hillary's indirect collusion with the Russians, would his investigation then be expanded to include the Clinton Foundation.

Trump and Mueller may be at something of a standoff.  Trump can't fire Mueller, and Mueller doesn't seem to have anything on Trump.  So far Mueller's investigation looks like a rerun of the Scooter Libby persecution.  Is Michael Flynn playing the Scooter Libby role in Robert Mueller's shot at bringing Trump down?  And what happens if his shot doesn't kill the king?

Uranium One

The Uranium One scandal is back in the news, not that it was ever really gone.  According to The Hill, an undercover FBI informant who has gathered extensive evidence of corruption surrounding Russia's purchase of Uranium One and its U.S. assets, will soon testify before Congress.  The Hill has reviewed the documents.

An FBI informant gathered extensive evidence during his six years undercover about a Russian plot to corner the American uranium market, ranging from corruption inside a U.S. nuclear transport company to Obama administration approvals that let Moscow buy and sell more atomic fuels, according to more than 5,000 pages of documents from the counterintelligence investigation.

The memos, reviewed by The Hill, conflict with statements made by Justice Department officials in recent days that informant William Campbell’s prior work won’t shed much light on the U.S. government’s controversial decision in 2010 to approve Russia’s purchase of the Uranium One mining company and its substantial U.S. assets.

Campbell documented for his FBI handlers the first illegal activity by Russians nuclear industry officials in fall 2009, nearly an entire year before the Russian state-owned Rosatom nuclear firm won Obama administration approval for the Uranium One deal, the memos show.

The FBI and the DOJ have been less than cooperative with congressional investigations, seeking to prevent Congress from hearing testimony from its informant.  One gets the picture that there was a coordinated effort by Deep State officials and Clinton friendly media to kill the story and block the evidence from coming out.

Uranium One was a large enough concern for the informant that he confronted one of his FBI handlers after learning the CFIUS had approved the sale and that the U.S. had given Mikerin a work visa despite the extensive evidence of his criminal activity, the source said.

The agent responded back to the informant with a comment suggesting “politics” was involved, the source familiar with Campbell’s planned testimony said.

Justice officials said federal prosecutors have no records that Campbell or his lawyer made any allegations about the Uranium One deal during his debriefings in the criminal case that started in 2013, but acknowledged he collected evidence about the mining deal during the FBI counterintelligence investigation that preceded it.

In recent days, news media including The Washington Post and Fox News anchor Shepard Smith have inaccurately reported another element of the story: that Uranium One never exported its American uranium because the Obama administration did not allow it.

However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorized Uranium One to export through a third party tons of uranium to Canada for enrichment processing, and some of that product ended up in Europe, NRC documents state.

A Uranium One executive acknowledged to The Hill that 25 percent of the uranium it shipped to Canada under the third-party export license ended up with either European or Asian customers through what it known in the nuclear business as “book transfers.” 

The Uranium One scandal has been around for more than a year.  It was first revealed by Peter Schweizer in Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, which was released in July of 2016.  A few months later Andrew McCarthy reported on it in a National Review article entitled Clinton’s State Department: A RICO Enterprise.

In a nutshell, in 2005, under the guise of addressing the incidence of HIV/AIDS in Kazakhstan (where the disease is nearly nonexistent), Bill Clinton helped his Canadian billionaire pal Frank Giustra to convince the ruling despot, Nursultan Nazarbayev (an infamous torturer and human-rights violator), to grant coveted uranium-mining rights to Giustra’s company, Ur-Asia Energy (notwithstanding that it had no background in the highly competitive uranium business). Uranium is a key component of nuclear power, from which the United States derives 20 percent of its total electrical power.

In the months that followed, Giustra gave an astonishing $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation and pledged $100 million more. With the Kazakh rights secured, Ur-Asia was able to expand its holdings and attract new investors, like Ian Telfer, who also donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. Ur-Asia merged with Uranium One, a South African company, in a $3.5 billion deal — with Telfer becoming Uranium One’s chairman. The new company proceeded to buy up major uranium assets in the United States.

Documentation provided by Campbell and his testimony will soon be in front of Congress.  Will the Clinton Crime Family be finally brought to justice?  Time will tell, but it's an encouraging sign to see Bill's liberal allies, who once gave him a pass for his sexual harrassment and abuse, now backing away. 

Rats Moving Towards the Portholes?

There is an emerging picture that shows a Special Prosecutor who might just be taking very special care to avoid appearances of a Republican driven witch hunt.  Although Robert Mueller was ostensibly appointed to investigate Trump campaign connections to Russia, it's the Democratic presidential campaign that may be the one to come under fire from the Justice Department.  This particular suspicion is not new for me, though at times it has seemed quite far fetched.  It begins to seem less far fetched in light of an essay by Donna Brazile in today's Politico.

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC tells of Brazile's discovery that Hillary Clinton and the DNC may not have behaved in an entirely ethical manner in their treatment of Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primaries.   Brazile writes:

I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.

The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

This is an astonishing admission, given Brazile's well known loyalty to the Clintons and the Democratic party.  So, why does she bare her soul at this particular moment.  The answer may lie in the tenuous, verging on nonexistent link between the Trump campaign and indictments just handed down by Robert Mueller.

Greg Jarrett of Fox News reminds us today that no one in the Trump campaign has committed the crime of colluding with Russia.  There is a good reason to believe this.  "Collusion" is not a crime. 

It is not a crime to talk to a Russian. Not that the media would ever understand that.  They have never managed to point to a single statute that makes “colluding” with a foreign government in a political campaign a crime, likely because it does not exist in the criminal codes.

In fact, the indictments against Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, are all related to tax evasion, money laundering, and failure to register as a foreign agent, and all of those alleged misdeeds occurred before Manafort was connected to the Trump campaign.   As to the guilty plea by George Papadopoulos, he pled to a single charge of making false statements to the FBI, in which he misstated certain sequences of events around his attempts to arrange a Trump campaign meeting with Russians that never occurred.

But, as Greg Jarrett reports, there is evidence of other crimes committed by a political campaign in the 2016 presidential election.

It is against the law for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to funnel millions of dollars to a British spy and to Russian sources in order to obtain the infamous and discredited Trump “dossier.” The Federal Election Campaign Act (52 USC 30101) prohibits foreign nationals and governments from giving or receiving money in U.S. campaigns. It also prohibits the filing of false or misleading campaign reports to hide the true purpose of the money (52 USC 30121). This is what Clinton and the DNC appear to have done.

Most often the penalty for violating this law is a fine, but in egregious cases, like this one, criminal prosecutions have been sought and convictions obtained. In this sense, it could be said that Hillary Clinton is the one who was conspiring with the Russians by breaking campaign finance laws with impunity.

It is, perhaps, telling that today is the day that Politico carries an article by Donna Brazile lamenting a moral lapse where Hillary and the DNC stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders?  Brazile seems such an unlikely candidate for raising questions of integrity.  Back in November of 2016, Brazile was not in the least bit apologetic about helping Hillary beat out Bernie for the Democratic presidential nomination, even though CNN dropped her as contributor after they found she had leaked debate questions to Hillary ahead of a primary debate.

Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, is not only refusing to apologize for giving debate questions to candidate Hillary Clinton. She's also saying she would do it again if given the opportunity.

“My conscience — as an activist, a strategist — is very clear,” she said in an interview with talk-radio host Joe Madison that aired on Monday.

...

The far-from-contrite political veteran also recycled her discredited claims that the hacked emails that exposed her perfidy against presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders were somehow altered by Russian intelligence agents.

A year has gone by.  The Hillary presidency, almost universally expected to be a slam dunk as the election returns began to come in, evaporated overnight.  And now today Brazile tells us about her emotional apology to Bernie.  She made it, she said, right after her alleged search for evidence of DNC corruption did not come up empty.

I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.

“Hello, senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”

...

I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.

Last year Brazile had no regrets after she had cheated for Hillary in the debates.  She said she would do it all again.  But this year she tells us Hillary was a cancer, or Hillary's actions were a cancer, and that she knew it before the election.  Donna Brazile is one of the Democratic party's most faithful.  She is a nationally prominent Democratic activist, and she has been for decades.  She was an adviser to Bill Clinton in his presidential campaigns of 1992 and 1996.  Twice she was interim head of the Democratic National Committee.

But today she throws Hillary under the bus, and in the process throws Debbie Wasserman-Schultz under with her.  Both of them might soon be in potentially serious legal trouble — DWS for her connections to and employment of Imran Awan, Hillary for the offenses described above by Greg Jarrett.

It has been reported that President Trump met with Robert Mueller the day before Mueller was appointed to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.  It has also been reported that Robert Mueller loaded up his team with prosecutors who have personally contributed — some rather heavily — to the Democratic party and/or  Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton.  The total amount contributed by Team Mueller is reported to be in the vicinity of $50,000.  It makes sense to me that, if any Democrats are ever to be prosecuted by the Trump Department of Justice, it had better be loyal Democrats who do the prosecuting.

Hillary is toxic and the Democratic party is deep trouble.  For Hillary to take such a smack from Donna Brazile, an activist Democrat whose party loyalty seems to outweigh her honesty, it signals, at the very least, an astounding decline in Hillary's political influence.  The Clinton crime family remains afloat, but signs are it will soon be taking on water.  Today's confession by Donna Brazile suggests that the rats are headed for the portholes.

Congressmen Press the U.S. Mint for Action on Counterfeit Gold and Silver Coins

The following article was provided by Jp Cortez, assistant director at Sound Money Defense League.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Washington, DC (October 27, 2017) -- Congressmen Alex Mooney (R-WV) and Frank Lucas (R-OK) today delivered a formal letter to the United States Mint and Secret Service, urging aggressive action on the growing problem of high-quality counterfeits of U.S. precious metals coins entering the country from China and elsewhere.

“Enclosed herewith is a 1995 1 oz. Gold American Eagle coin, carrying a face value $50 and ostensibly minted by the U.S. Mint,” Mooney and Lucas wrote.  “You are free to keep it, as it’s a worthless tungsten fake.”

As members of the House Financial Services subcommittee which oversees the U.S. Mint, Congressmen Mooney and Lucas are seeking information from the government institution responsible for the production of coinage for the United States, such as “the nature and quantity of complaints – and resulting investigations – regarding counterfeit U.S. gold, silver, and platinum coins within the last two years,” and “what anti-counterfeiting programs, if any, are in place to protect the integrity of U.S. coins minted specifically of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.”

The congressmen request information as to whether, and to what extent, the U.S. Mint has taken proactive steps to protect the integrity of America’s minted coins, including reviewing and implementing the anti-counterfeiting measures already put in place certain foreign government and private mints.

And they seek clarification regarding the “expected roles of the Secret Service, U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement, and other federal law enforcement agencies in detecting and investigating counterfeits of U.S. coins minted of precious metals and the extent of their coordination with the U.S. Mint.”

The congressmen also raised concerns about a Secret Service decision not to investigate the origin of a counterfeit batch of Gold American Eagle coins when the matter was recently brought to its attention.

“We commend Representative Mooney and Representative Lucas for their actions in defending sound money and for beginning to exercise Congressional oversight duties in accordance with Article I, Section 8, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution,” said Stefan Gleason, director of the Sound Money Defense League.

“We look forward to a meaningful explanation from the U.S. Mint and the Secret Service for what appears to be a lackadaisical attitude toward protecting the only constitutional currency that is currently even produced by the federal government,” said Gleason.

A full copy of the congressional letter can be found here.

The U.S. Mint produces American Gold Eagles, Silver Eagles, and other precious metals coins.

 

Crickets

Hey, Lefties: Where Are Your Pussyhats Now?   Good question!

No group was more offended by Trump’s remarks, or so it seemed, than the newly minted Puritans of Hollywood. Celebrities went ballistic, firing off furious and anguished tweets about the Republican presidential candidate. Film producers, television actors, movie stars: everyone had something to say about Trump and many equated his remarks to sexual assault. 

Oh but that was so last year.

Now, here we are, one year later, and the New York Times just published a bombshell expose about one of Hollywood’s most powerful men, Harvey Weinstein. The lecherous behavior of this disgusting man is one of Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets; no doubt the Times could have an ongoing series of articles about this movie-making, sexual predator. Like many Hollywood moguls, Weinstein parlayed his fortune and influence into political power, becoming a major Democratic party donor and fundraiser. Since 1990, he has contributed more than $1 million to Democratic PACs, officeholders, and candidates, many of whom must have been aware of Weinstein’s reputation as a first-rate vulture.

[...]

The ire about the p*ssy tape never was about sexual harassment or women’s empowerment. It’s just liberal politics as usual.

Media Ignores Massive September Employment Growth

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy lost of 33,000 jobs in September according to its payroll survey, buts its household survey shows "Employed" went up by 906,000.  That's an astonishing number.  In general, the media are focusing on decline in company payrolls and ignoring the household survey.  Under the headline "U.S. Sheds Jobs on Hurricane Loss, but Unemployment Falls" the Wall Street Journal highlights the 33,000 jobs reportedly lost in September. The Labor Department Friday reported the first decline in U.S. nonfarm payrolls in seven years, suggesting the economy took a hit from hurricanes in Florida and Texas. The "economy took a hit" but "unemployment falls."  How does that happen?  Easier than you might think.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures employment using two surveys, the payroll survey and the household survey.  The payroll survey counts the number of people on company payrolls as reported by the companies.  In the household survey, a households are queried as to the number of people in the household and how many are employed.  The household survey is generally considered more accurate because it takes self-employment into account and other forms of employment that might not show up on company payrolls. So the Journal reported on the payroll survey for jobs numbers and on the household survey for the unemployment rate, but it said nothing about the jobs numbers as reported in the household survey.  The household survey numbers are strikingly at variance with the payroll survey numbers.  Take a look at the snapshot below taken from the Household Data in the BLS Employment Situation Summary Table.

The unemployment rate is calculated as the percentage of people considered to be in the civilian labor force who do not have paying jobs.  The civilian labor force number is a moving target because people who have given up looking for a job, even though they may be employable and not employed, are not considered to be in civilian labor force.  In September the civilian labor force grew by 575,000.  Some of this is attributed to workforce population growth of 205,000, but the larger number, 368,000, includes the number of people who have started looking for work again after having previously given up.  Scrolling down on the BLS Employment Situation page brings you to Frequently Asked Questions and this (boldface is mine): 1. Why are there two monthly measures of employment? The household survey and establishment survey both produce sample-based estimates of employment, and both have strengths and limitations. The establishment survey employment series has a smaller margin of error on the measurement of month-to-month change than the household survey because of its much larger sample size. An over-the-month employment change of about 100,000 is statistically significant in the establishment survey, while the threshold for a statistically significant change in the household survey is about 500,000. However, the household survey has a more expansive scope than the establishment survey because it includes self-employed workers whose businesses are unincorporated, unpaid family workers, agricultural workers, and private household workers, who are excluded by the establishment survey. The household survey also provides estimates of employment for demographic groups. For more information on the differences between the two surveys, please visit https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ces_cps_trends.htm. It's safe to say that 906,000 is a statistically significant change.  In order for the unemployment rate to go down, employment had to increase by more than 575,000, and it did.  It went up by an astonishing number.  Compare that to August where, if you do the arithmetic, the chart shows that "Employed" went down by 74,000. What might account for a statistically significant change in the household survey?  One factor could be the business climate under the business friendlier Trump administration.  Another could be consumer confidence and general confidence which has seems to have gone up since Trump took office.  Improvements in technology and internet services might also have had an impact by making it easier for people to launch home based businesses.  And finally, the reduction in federal regulations may be making the prospects of joining the ranks of the self-employed less and less daunting.  Whatever, 906,000 is an astounding number. What is not astonishing is the media's unwillingness to report it.  They just can't bear the thought of good news on Trump's watch.

Facebook's Fight Against Fake News -- Under Direction of Then-President Obama

Who would have guessed that it was at President Barack Obama's urging that Facebook disabled Libertarian Leanings ad account?  Connecting the dots here!

A Fox News report describes Embarrassment at The Washington Post over a story implying that Obama reached out to Mark Zuckerberg specifically about Russian Facebook ads in the 2016 election.  The truth is Obama did not mention Russia when he spoke to Zuckerberg, but he did want Facebook to filter out other "Fake News."

The Washington Post has made a correction to an explosive cover story that undermines the entire premise of Monday’s front-page article headlined, "Obama sought to prod Facebook on Russia role."

The problem, according to a Facebook executive, is that when Obama reached out to the social media giant in 2016 to discuss political disinformation spreading on the site, he didn’t actually call out Russia – essentially making the Post’s headline misleading and inaccurate. Or, as President Trump would call it, “fake news.”

As first reported by Axios, the Post added significant information to the digital version of the story with the disclaimer, “This story has been updated with an additional response from Facebook.” The response from Facebook that didn’t make the paper’s print edition is vital and changed the story enough that the word “Russia” was removed from the updated headline.

The story detailed how then-President Obama gave Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a “wake-up call” regarding fake news spreading on his social media platform. After reporting that Obama “made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously," the paper has added that Obama “did not single out Russia specifically."

So far as I know, while Obama did not specifically single Russia, he did not single out out Libertarian Leanings either.  However, Facebook did respond to Obama's appeal, and it did disable Libertarian Leanings' Facebook ad account in the aftermath.  Yes, my friends, the opinions that I have shared on Libertarian Leanings are fake news according to Facebook.  

My story begins in February of 2015 when I created a Libertarian Leanings Facebook page with the objective of increasing the reach of the Libertarian Leanings blog.  One of Facebook's tools that I thought would help me do this is Facebook advertising.  For a small fee, my range was $5 to $20, Facebook would promote a Libertarian Leanings post by advertising it on the Facebook pages of an audience that I could target within a certain set of parameters.  Truth be told, the advertising didn't help much.  Most Facebook users never bothered to click through to the Libertarian Leanings article that I hoped to promote.  Be that as it may, that advertising tool is no longer available to Libertarian Leanings.

Libertarian Leanings apparently fell from favor shortly before the November 8th presidential election.  On the Friday, November 4th I published an essay on the Libertarian Leanings blog stating my intention to vote for Donald Trump and the reasons for my choice.  Simultaneously, a link to the essay was established on the Libertarian Leanings Facebook page.  I went to Facebook and clicked on the button "boost" the post.  My ad was accepted and I began to see increasing numbers of "people reached" by my Facebook entry.

Then, inexplicably, I received notification that my ad was rejected.  I appealed the rejection, asking why the ad was rejected.  I got a reply saying that after further review my ad was acceptable.  The display showing number of people reached resumed its upward progress, and for an added bonus the boost button offered me the opportunity to add to advertising budget and reach even more people.  I took it.  Wrong move.

Clicking on the boost button got the ad rejected again.  Here is the exchange between me and Facebook.

What you submitted

Nov 4, 2016

Ad ID

6060171929831

Additional Information

I'd like to know specifically why the ad was rejected. What profanity should be removed? What viewers were harrassed, or whose racial, ethnic, or other attributes were disparaged?

Our reply

Nov 5, 2016

Hi Tom,

Thank you for notifying us about your ad disapproval.

We've reviewed your ad again and have determined it complies with our policies. Your ad is now approved.

Your ad is now active and will start delivering soon. You can track your results in Facebook Ads Manager.

Have a great day!

Did you find our support helpful? Please give us feedback

Thanks, Michael Facebook Ads Team >On Fri Nov 4, 2016 16:06:03, Tom Bowler wrote: >Ad ID : 6060171929831 >Additional Information : I'd like to know specifically why the ad was rejected. What profanity should be removed? What viewers were harrassed, or whose racial, ethnic, or other attributes were disparaged? >

Your reply

Nov 6, 2016

So now that you've reconsidered my ad and decided that it complies, and offered me the option to boost it, you've rejected the boost for the same reasons you rejected the original ad. Can you explain that to me?

Apparently, appealing the decision was no longer an option because the ad had been appealed once and then ultimately denied.

I was annoyed, but in the end I prevailed.  In spite of Facebook's efforts at blocking my message, I was able to get Donald Trump elected!  Of course, it's within the realm of possibility that other factors contributed to Trump's victory.  In any event, I didn't bother to pursue the issue of my rejected Facebook ad.

And then, on February 20, 2017 I received five identical emails from the Facebook ad team notifying me that my advertising account was disable

"Ad Account Disabled for Policy Violation
From Facebook Ads Team advertise-noreply@support.facebook.com              
Sent Mon, Feb 20, 2017 12:26 pm
To Tom Bowler [redacted]*

Header Ad Account Disabled for Policy Violation
Account Id: [redacted]*

Hi Tom,

Your ad account has been disabled for promoting ads which violate our Facebook Ad Guidelines.

Any ads you are running under the Ad Account ID listed above have been turned off. If you believe this has been a mistake, please contact us.

We also suggest reviewing our e-learning Blueprint module to better understand Facebook Ad Guidelines."

*Account Id redacted by the Libertarian Leanings security team

There was a button that said I could "Learn More."  The button took me a form where I could sign up to learn by providing my name and email address.  I decided I'd pass on the educational opportunity.  Five messages.  In case I missed the point.  I replied to one of them:

From: [redacted]*
To:
Subject: Policy Disabled Ad Account Help

Account Admin Name: Tom Bowler
Account Id: [redacted]*
Account Admin Email: [redacted]*
Is this your account?: Yes
Advertiser Account ID: 10152309798028414
Please provide information that will help us investigate: I haven't boosted any of my posts since November 4th when my boost was inexplicably rejected. I was never told why it was rejected, just as there is no indication why you are disabling my account at this time. I would like to know why, but only out of curiosity. I have no plans to spend money advertising on Facebook in the future.

*Account Id and email address redacted by the Libertarian Leanings security team

Oddly enough, later that afternoon I was given a reason that my original boost was rejected. And then rejected again after it was temporarily given a pass.

Your Ad Is Not Delivering
From Facebook notification+odv=ofg1@facebookmail.comhide details
Mon, Feb 20, 2017 5:26 pm
To Tom Bowler [redacted]*

Your Ad Is Not Delivering

Your ad's image contains too much text which is preventing delivery of your ad to your audience. Click any of the links below to manage your ad, and make changes to reduce the amount of text in your ad's image to fix this issue.

The following ad needs your attention (1) View Ads

Account: Tom Bowler Campaign: Post: "I will be voting for Donald Trump next Tuesday...."Ad Set: Post: "I will be voting for Donald Trump next Tuesday...."
Boosted Post: Post: "I will be voting for Donald Trump next Tuesday...."

Three days later, on February 23rd, I got a note from Mary of the Facebook Ad Team explaining nothing.

Facebook info+j3r1n1sa.aeaskwoqp4bua@support.facebook.com
Re: Policy Disabled Ad Account Help From Facebook info+j3r1n1sa.aeaskwoqp4bua@support.facebook.comhide details
Thu, Feb 23, 2017 7:25 am
To Tom Bowler [redacted]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for reaching out to us. Your account has been disabled for not following Facebook's Advertising Guidelines.

Ad accounts are evaluated for policy compliance and quality of ad content. When accounts have run ads that are not policy compliant, they are disabled.

Your account was disabled for running misleading ads that resulted in high negative feedback from people on Facebook. Our goal is to provide the highest quality user experience. We reserve the right to reject any advertising that we deem contrary to these objectives. Similarly, we reserve the right to close an account creating ads contrary to these objectives.

For this reason, if any of your ads have been removed or your ad account has been disabled, we will be unable to reactivate either. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please consider this decision final.

Thanks for your understanding,

Mary
Facebook Ads Team
Facebook

I replied to Mary of the Facebook Ad Team:

-----Original Message----
From: Tom Bowler [redaced]

To: Facebook
Subject: Re: Policy Disabled Ad Account Help

 

Hi Mary,

Thanks for your reply. Sadly, you have not answered my question. Specifically, why was my account disabled? To say that my ads were misleading provides no information. What ad? How was it misleading? What was the substance of the negative feedback?

I'm suspicious because the last thing I attempted to advertise on Facebook was a post explaining my vote for Donald Trump. The post was not so much a plug for Donald Trump as it was a slam of Hillary Clinton. That was November 4th. Then three months later you decide to disable my account. No advertising in the meantime.

Is this part of Facebook's crackdown on "fake news?" The sequence of events leads me to only wonder if it was my extremely negative view of Hillary Clinton that was considered "misleading" by the Facebook Ads Team. Undoubtedly there are some in the Facebook community who would find the appearance of so a negative view of Hillary Clinton on Facebook something less than "the highest quality user experience." Is that the real problem?

This is not an appeal of your decision to disable my account. When the ad for my November 4th post was rejected, I immediately decided that I had purchased advertising on Facebook for the last time. That decision is final.

That said, I would still like answers to my questions and I believe I deserve them. What ads were misleading? In what way were they misleading? What was the substance of the negative feedback?

Sincerely,

Tom Bowler

 

Mary from the Facebook Ad Team replied the next morning:

 

Re: Policy Disabled Ad Account Help

From: Facebook info+j3r1n1sa.aeaskwoqp5kle@support.facebook.com
Fri, Feb 24, 2017 8:40 am
To: Tom Bowler [redacted]

Hi Tom,

After careful review, I’ve determined that we’re unable to take further action regarding this matter.

Thanks,

Mary
Facebook Ads Team
Facebook

 

After careful review, no explanation -- none forthcoming, and none needed really.  Facebook's fight against Fake News was a transparent ploy to suppress conservative and libertarian viewpoints, or anything that might have negatively impacted Hillary's presidential aspirations.  This was exactly what President Obama was asking Zuckerberg to do.  And so the good folks at Facebook took action,but their effort failed.  While they might have limited the reach of Libertarian Leanings and others like me, they were unable to suppress Hillary.