Walls, Guns & Wealth: Today’s Democrat Party and leftist activists feel the same way about walls, guns and wealth. It’s OK for them BUT not OK for you/us. Why voters (at least legal voters who are citizens) still support these Democrats is beyond me. The hypocrisy is astounding.
State Legislative Suggestion for Electoral Reform: I believe states, whether by state legislative action or initiative, should adopt the “American Electoral Reform Plan†as state constitutional amendments. It’s simple, straight forward, makes sense and I believe would get broad bipartisan support. The plan should have 3 provision in one initiative:
ONLY certified U.S. citizens can vote in ANY local, state or federal elections
Appropriate and valid state id must be used for voting to prove citizenship (free id’s provided for those who can’t afford it)
Death Certificates are automatically filed with the local elections official and dead people are removed from voter registration roles at the time of filing those death certificates
These reforms would be easy to implement, relatively inexpensive and MORE importantly, the right this to do in order to protect our democratic republican form of government.
Just simple, common sense!
60 Plus Weekly Newsreel: A great, short and easy to listen to summary of the week’s news in a short video who just don’t want to read it all:) Please enjoy and share with friends.
-Saul Anuzis
Trump’s massive reelection campaign has 2016 themes — and a 2020 infrastructure
President Trump and his advisers are launching a behemoth 2020 campaign operation combining his raw populist message from 2016 with a massive data-gathering and get-out-the-vote push aimed at dwarfing any previous presidential reelection effort, according to campaign advisers, White House aides, Republican officials and others briefed on the emerging strategy.
Trump’s advisers also believe the Democratic Party’s recent shift to the left on a host of issues, from the push for Medicare-for-all to a proposed Green New Deal, will help the president and other Republicans focus on a Trumpian message of strong economic growth, nationalist border restrictions and “America First†trade policies. Trump’s “Make America Great Again†slogan will become, in signs and rally chants, “Keep America Great!â€
The president’s strategy, however, relies on a risky and relatively narrow path for victory, hinged on demonizing Trump’s eventual opponent and juicing turnout among his most avid supporters in Florida, Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest — the same areas that won him the White House but where his popularity has waned since he was elected. Some advisers are particularly concerned about the president’s persistent unpopularity among female and suburban voters, and fear it will be difficult to replicate the outcome of 2016 without former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as a foil.
Trump’s Policy “Magic Wand” Boosts Manufacturing Jobs 399{ef3b36ba7c11cac64d81b79cc51b0b7cc80daf5ccfa9ea032b2ab3ebe6b0c4c9} In First 26 Months Over Obama’s Last 26
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump consistently promised to revive America’s manufacturing economy.
Trump’s focus on manufacturing brought out high-profile critics who scoffed at the notion. President Obama notably said in June 2016 that manufacturing jobs “are just not going to come back.†He said this at a time when manufacturing job growth had flatlined, falling by 31,000 from January of 2016 to when he delivered his pessimistic comments in June of that year.
While President Obama’s time in office did see job gains, even in manufacturing, it’s important to note that jobs always come back in a post-recession recovery. But comparing the nation’s most-recent economic recovery from the trough in June 2009, the pace of job growth was slower in Obama’s tenure than in any past recovery—except for the rebound from the mild eight-month recession in 2001, following the deflation of the dot-com bubble.
Much of the blame for the weak economy can be set at the feet of two failed economic policies: monetary and fiscal. From the reliance on the Federal Reserve’s easy money—$4.5 trillion of “quantitative easing”—to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) started under President Bush to Obama’s Cash For Clunkers program, the post-2009 recovery was marked by government intervention at levels not seen since the Great Depression 70 years earlier.
Never What?
I wrote a book, The Case for Trump, in an effort — as an outsider who has no career investment in Trump and has never met him or visited the Trump White House — to analyze how and why Donald J. Trump was elected president and why his agenda so far has been successful. One Gabriel Schoenfeld has just published a hysterical attack on that effort in the Bill Kristol–Charles Sykes new Bulwark, and it is emblematic of that venue’s promised Never Trump ad hominem assault on individual supporters of the president. A writer for The Atlantic recently interviewed Sykes, noting:
But in the coming months, he [Sykes] tells me, The Bulwark will home in on a specific class of “grifters and trolls†— those opportunistic Trump enablers who still get invited on Meet the Press and write for prestigious newspapers. To Sykes, these are the true sellouts, and he wants to ensure that their public flirtations with Trumpism leave a stench on them.
Though wishing to leave “a stench on them,†Schoenfeld instead gives us a sad exercise in self-abasement. And his review offers an illustration of the poverty of Never Trump personal venom and incoherence.
Democratic Big Money Flows Into Four Key States
As Democratic presidential candidates spend much of their time and money in the early primary states needed to win the nomination, the party’s biggest donors are training their sights on a different set of states, which they view as key to winning the White House.
Two of the Democrats’ best-funded outside groups—both of which are backed in part by New York billionaire George Soros—are planning at least a $130 million campaign to attack President Trump and build support for Democrats in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida, where Mr. Trump narrowly prevailed over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. A third group, an $80 million voter-engagement effort, is at work in these and three other battleground states.
Together, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida make up 75 of the 538 electoral votes. Mr. Trump won 304 votes to Mrs. Clinton’s 227, even though she won a majority of the popular vote. Democrats could prevail in 2020 by rebuilding most of what they had considered their “Blue Wall†in the middle of the country. If the other states vote as they did in 2016, and Democrats flip Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, they could lose Florida and still have enough electoral votes to win. Democratic governors flipped statehouses in elections last year in Wisconsin and Michigan, and held Pennsylvania.
Hillary Clinton received what amounts to a secret pre-pardon from the Obama DOJ
Bombshell testimony released this week revealed that Hillary Clinton received what amounts to a secret pre-pardon to avoid the possibility that she would be charged under the Espionage Act for her gross negligence in the handling and dissemination of classified material.
According to the newly disclosed testimony of former FBI official Lisa Page, the Obama Justice Department instructed the FBI not to pursue charges against Clinton.
Page said in her testimony that the FBI held “multiple conversations†with the Obama.
Department of Justice about charging Clinton with gross negligence, but the Bureau was told that such a charge would not be brought forward.
Lisa Page said FBI discussed charging Hillary Clinton with ‘gross negligence’ in 2016, and DOJ told them no
Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified last year that officials in the bureau, including then-FBI Director James Comey, discussed Espionage Act charges against Hillary Clinton, citing “gross negligence,” but the Justice Department shut them down.
Newly released transcripts from Page’s private testimony in front of a joint task force of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees in July 2018 sheds new light on the internal discussions about an investigation into Clinton’s emails. This goes back to the FBI’s “Midyear Exam” investigation, which looked into whether Clinton committed crimes when she sent and received classified information on her unauthorized private email server while serving as secretary of state.
Comey cleared Clinton of all charges in a press conference on July 5, 2016.
Page told the committee that the FBI “did not blow over gross negligence.†Responding to a question from Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, Page testified the FBI, including Comey, believed Clinton may have committed gross negligence. “We, in fact — and, in fact, the Director — because, on its face, it did seem like, well, maybe there’s a potential here for this to be the charge. And we had multiple conversations, multiple conversations with the Justice Department about charging gross negligence,” she said.
The Swamp Fights Back
Never before in the history of the presidency had a commander-in-chief earned the antipathy of so many — and lived to tell the tale.
Trump was warned by friends, enemies, and neutrals that his fight against the deep state was suicidal. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, cheerfully forecast (in a precursor to Samantha Power’s later admonition) what might happen to Trump once he attacked the intelligence services: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.â€
Trump was warned by friends, enemies, and neutrals that his fight against the deep state was suicidal. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, cheerfully forecast (in a precursor to Samantha Power’s later admonition) what might happen to Trump once he attacked the intelligence services: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.â€
Former administrative-state careerists were not shy about warning Trump of what was ahead. The counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd, who had worked in the CIA and the FBI under Robert Mueller, warned CNN host Jake Tapper in August 2017 that “the government is going to kill†President Donald Trump. Kill? And what was the reason the melodramatic Mudd adduced for his astounding prediction? “Because he doesn’t support them.†Mudd then elaborated: “Let me give you one bottom line as a former government official. The government is going to kill this guy. The government is going to kill this guy because he doesn’t support them.†Mudd further clarified his assassination metaphor: “What I’m saying is government — people talk about the deep state — when you disrespect government officials who’ve done 30 years, they’re going to say, ‘Really?’â€
It was difficult to ascertain to what degree Mudd was serious or exaggerating the depth of deep-state loathing of Trump.
Key House Republican on Pelosi impeachment pullback: ‘I don’t buy it.’
Rep. Kevin Brady is the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee. As chairman in 2017, he pushed through the tax cuts that remain President Trump’s top legislative achievement. Now, he’s dealing with the role that Ways and Means might play in a possible Trump impeachment. (It is the only House committee that is permitted by law to demand the president’s tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service, and Democrats are currently taking steps to do just that.)
Brady and I discussed the committee’s role in the Trump investigations in a conversation for a new podcast Tuesday morning, but we started off with the news that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has come out (mostly) against impeachment. Pelosi told the Washington Post that impeachment is simply too divisive for the country, unless there are grounds that are “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” that impeachment is justified.
Brady doesn’t believe her. “Respectfully, I don’t buy it,” he said. The reason, he explained, is not that he doubts Pelosi’s sentiments. It is that he doubts her ability to impose her will on House Democrats.
Bold Plan? Replace the Border Wall with an Energy–Water Corridor
Here’s an idea: Instead of an endless, inert wall along the U.S.–Mexico border, line the boundary with 2,000 miles of natural gas, solar and wind power plants. Use some of the energy to desalinate water from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean and ship it through pipelines to thirsty towns, businesses and new farms along the entire border zone. Hire hundreds of thousands of people from both countries to build and run it all. Companies would make money and provide security to safeguard their assets. A contentious, costly no-man’s-land would be transformed into a corridor of opportunity.
Crazy? Maybe—or maybe not. History is full of ideas that initially sounded wacky yet ended up changing society.
The idea is more than a pipe dream. A consortium of 27 engineers and scientists from a dozen U.S. universities has developed a plan. Last week they delivered it to three U.S. representatives and one senator. “Let’s put the best scientists and engineers together to create a new way to deal with migration, trafficking—and access to water. These are regions of severe drought,†says Luciano Castillo, a professor of energy and power at Purdue University who leads the group. “Water supply is a huge future issue for all the states along the border in both countries.â€
The Convincing Call From Central Europe: Let Us Into NATO
Twenty years ago today, the first major post–Cold War expansion of NATO took place in an unlikely locale: Independence, Missouri. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland officially entered NATO in a ceremony at the Truman Library organized by the U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, herself a refugee from Czechoslovakia. She had arranged for the accession ceremony to take place at the Missouri site to honor the president on whose watch the alliance had formed fifty years earlier. The foreign ministers of the new member-states got a ride to Missouri on the secretary’s plane and, while in flight, the Polish foreign minister, Bronislaw Geremek, expressed his gratitude to Albright. He told her that NATO enlargement was “the most important event that has happened to Poland since the onset of Christianity.â€
Today historians hotly contest the matter of when, exactly, the idea arose to include central and eastern Europe in NATO. The timing is of more than academic interest, because Moscow’s grievance about when the West decided to make allies out of the countries in the region remains a hot-button issue in U.S.-Russian relations to this day. Some scholars have dismissed the notion that the issue arose soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1989, saying it only came up much later, in the nineties. But evidence now available—including documents that I have gotten declassified from the George H. W. Bush Library and, most recently, the Clinton Presidential Library—shows that speculation about the role of the alliance in central Europe began early in the year 1990 among top policymakers. The evidence also shows that in the early to mid-nineties, the Czechs, the Hungarians, and above all the Poles campaigned vocally for accession, particularly after the Clinton team came into office.
How to rig an election, In the digital age, democracy is becoming a delusion
Andrés Sepúlveda sleeps behind bombproof doors in a maximum-security prison in central Bogota, Colombia. When travelling to judicial hearings or to meet prosecutors, he is accompanied by a caravan of armed guards with serious firepower. As they move at high speed through the capital, the motorcade uses sophisticated equipment to jam mobile phones to lower the risk of a coordinated assassination attempt.
Sepúlveda is one of the world’s most notorious election-rigging specialists. Now that he has been caught and put in jail, he is helping atone for his crimes by explaining how he fixed elections — and the people he used to work with want him dead.
But Sepúlveda isn’t the only specialist in this field. The tools he was using are deployed around the world. They’re costly, sometimes scandalous, but often legal. The disruption of democracy has become a great global game, and it’s one that British companies are playing too.
The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal raised an obvious question: did its role in mining Facebook data help send Donald Trump to the White House? But there is another angle that is just as important: what did Alexander Nix, its (now suspended) chief executive, mean when he said that his company is ‘used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows’? That question was buried under the deluge of headlines about Facebook. This is a shame because it appears that there is an even bigger scandal than data-mining waiting to be exposed.
What Google knows about you
For all the many controversies around Facebook’s mishandling of personal data, Google actually knows way more about most of us.
The bottom line: Just how much Google knows depends to some degree on your privacy settings — and to a larger degree on which devices, products and services you use.
Google is the undisputed leader in the tech giants’ race to accumulate user data, thanks to its huge array of services, devices and leading share of the digital ad business (37{ef3b36ba7c11cac64d81b79cc51b0b7cc80daf5ccfa9ea032b2ab3ebe6b0c4c9} to Facebook’s 22{ef3b36ba7c11cac64d81b79cc51b0b7cc80daf5ccfa9ea032b2ab3ebe6b0c4c9}). It likely knows everything you’ve ever typed into your browser’s search bar and every YouTube video you’ve ever watched.
But that’s just the beginning. It may also know where you’ve been, what you’ve bought and who you communicate with.
The US and China are gearing up for a missile fight — and the US is at a huge disadvantage
The US is doomed to lose an increasingly hot missile race in Asia and the Pacific because of severe geographic, political, and military disadvantages against China.
A treaty prevented the US and Russia from building missiles with medium-length ranges, but China has built a large fleet of such missiles designed to take out US military bases in the Pacific and aircraft carriers.
The US can try to counter these missiles with missiles of their own, but it’s a fight it’s sure to lose. There may be other options, however.
The US announced on Thursday that it would begin testing a whole new class of previously banned missiles in August, but the US’s chief rival, China, has a miles-long head start in that department.
The US’s new class of missiles are designed to destroy targets in intermediate ranges, or between 300 and 3,000 miles.
The US has many shorter-range systems and a fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles that can travel almost around the world.
A 1987 treaty with Russia banned these mid-range missiles, but the treaty’s recent demise has now opened an opportunity for the US to counter China’s arsenal of “carrier-killer” missiles.
Putting America’s huge $20.5T economy into perspective by comparing US state GDPs to entire countries
The map above matches the economic output (Gross Domestic Product) for each US state (and the District of Columbia) in 2018 to a foreign country with a comparable nominal GDP last year, using data from the BEA for GDP by US state (average of Q2 and Q3 state GDP, since Q4 data aren’t yet available) and data for GDP by country from the International Monetary Fund. Like in past years, for each US state (and the District of Columbia), I’ve identified the country closest in economic size in 2018 (measured by nominal GDP) and those matching countries are displayed in the map above and in the table below. Obviously, in some cases, the closest match was a country that produced slightly more, or slightly less, economic output in 2018 than a given US state.
It’s pretty difficult to even comprehend how ridiculously large the US economy is, and the map above helps put America’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $20.5 trillion ($20,500,000,000,000) in 2018 into perspective by comparing the economic size (GDP) of individual US states to the entire national output of other countries.
