FACTS AND NARRATIVE: “The DNC raised $4.7 million in April. Meanwhile, the RNC raised $9.6 million in April. The RNC has $41 million cash on hand. and the DNC $8.8 million. But Trump’s in trouble. Wait for those midterms. The Dems will flip the House and the Senate. That’s what I read in the MSM.”
Archive for 2017
May 23, 2017
HAVE YOU MET MISS ROSY SCENARIO? Mnuchin Comments On Trump’s “Historic” Budget Proposal: “It Will Prevent Taxpayer Bailouts”
In a statement issued moments ago discussing Trump’s proposed, if completely impossible, budget proposal, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that Trump’s “budget will achieve savings through reforms that prevent taxpayer bailouts and reverse burdensome regulations that have been harmful to small businesses and American workers.” Translation: taxpayer bailouts are imminent, especially now that the current economic cycle is the 3rd longest of all time and a recession grows likelier with every passing day.
Mnuchin also said that Trump’s proposed initiatives “coupled with comprehensive tax reform and other key priorities, will move America one step closer to sustained economic growth of 3 percent or higher.”
While we will clearly take the under, what we find most amazing about Trump’s budget proposal, is that it does not anticipated a recession until 2027. That would imply 18 years of economic growth since the 2009 recession, without a single contraction! Good luck with that.
That does seem a little optimistic.
IT’S A GOOD START: Austerity: Trump budget cuts $3.6 trillion over next decade.
RIP ROGER MOORE, 89: Tyler O’Neil looks back at 13 of the Best Roger Moore James Bond Scenes.
DAVID FRUM: Take a moment while mourning Manchester dead to remember Trump’s intel leak.
You stay classy, David.
IN THE MAIL: From Matthew Palmer, Enemy of the Good.
Plus, today only at Amazon: 42 percent off Dremel Rotary Tool Kit.
And, also today only: Save Big on Intex Easy Set Pool Sets.
Also, Save Big On Kitchenware.
And, remember, Amazon has brand new Lightning Deals updated every hour.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN OFFERS HELPFUL TIPS FOR THIS SUMMER’S COLLEGE DIVERSITY TRAINING WORKSHOPS: Bros are people, too: Title IX enforcers need to fix the toxic environment they have created for men. I take a bold stand against “hormone shaming” and the gendering of rape. Weirdly, some of the commenters at USA Today deny that there’s anti-male sentiment at colleges.
ANOTHER VICTIM OF T.D.S.? Max Boot, the Perpetually Unhappy Camper.
CONFEDERATE STATUES IN RETREAT AT LAST.
Don’t overthink this, because it’s quite simple, really. When Democrats’ national position depended on unwavering support from “the Solid South,” we got lots of pro-Southern propaganda: the Lost Cause, Gone With The Wind, Disneyfied Uncle Remus, etc. As a vital Democrat constituency group, southerners, even practical neo-Confederates, were absolved of all sins as long as they stayed in line.
Now the South isn’t “solid” anymore — or, more accurate, it’s becoming pretty solidly Republican — so rather than receiving cultural dispensations, it now gets targeted for cultural warfare.
That’s all that’s going on here. It has nothing to do with morality or decency, any more than it did a half-century or more ago when the national cultural machine took a different position. It’s just politics by other means. The rest is just noise.
Is this analysis highly cynical? Yes. But still probably not cynical enough.
WILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS MEDDLESOME REGIME? Venezuela’s paradox: People are hungry, but farmers can’t feed them.
With cash running low and debts piling up, Venezuela’s socialist government has cut back sharply on food imports. And for farmers in most countries, that would present an opportunity.
But this is Venezuela, whose economy operates on its own special plane of dysfunction. At a time of empty supermarkets and spreading hunger, the country’s farms are producing less and less, not more, making the caloric deficit even worse.
Drive around the countryside outside the capital, Caracas, and there’s everything a farmer needs: fertile land, water, sunshine and gasoline at 4 cents a gallon, cheapest in the world. Yet somehow families here are just as scrawny-looking as the city-dwelling Venezuelans waiting in bread lines or picking through garbage for scraps.
Having attempted for years to defy conventional economics, the country now faces a painful reckoning with basic arithmetic.
“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.”
As the wise man once said, “Get the hell out of my way!”
NO MORE HASHTAGS OR CANDLELIGHT VIGILS: Brendan O’Neill: After Manchester, It’s Time For Anger. “The great fear of both officialdom and the media class in the wake of terror attacks is that the volatile masses will turn wild and hateful. This is why every attack is followed by warnings of an ‘Islamophobic backlash’ and heightened policing of speech on Twitter and gatherings in public: because what they fundamentally fear is public passion, our passion. They want us passive, empathetic, upset, not angry, active, questioning. They prefer us as a lonely crowd of dutiful, disconnected mourners rather than a real collective of citizens demanding to know why our fellow citizens died and how we might prevent others from dying. We should stop playing the role they’ve allotted us.”
SOUNDS LIKE AN EASY WIN: Lawsuit Accuses California University of Liberal Bias in Student Activity Funding.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN OFFERS HELPFUL TIPS FOR THIS SUMMER’S COLLEGE DIVERSITY TRAINING WORKSHOPS: Bros are people, too: Title IX enforcers need to fix the toxic environment they have created for men.
AFTER MANCHESTER: Are we, the West, ready to get serious?
OLD BUT RELIABLE, DEADLY AND UPGRADED: Why Special Operations Command sticks with the MH-6 helicopter.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH A WIRE SERVICE AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: AP Hires Leftist Activist as Freelancer to Sneak Into Closed Press NH GOP Event to Attack KellyAnne Conway.
BATTLE FOR MOSUL: The slow fight continues.
Iraqi military engineers installed a new floating bridge across the Tigris river on Wednesday, reconnecting the two halves of Mosul to facilitate troop deployments ahead of a final assault to dislodge Islamic State.
All five bridges connecting the two sides of the city bisected by the Tigris were struck by the U.S.-led coalition in order to hinder the militants’ movements in the early stages of the campaign to retake Mosul last year.
Seven months on, Iraqi forces have removed Islamic State from all but a pocket of territory in the western half of Mosul, including the Old City, where the militants are expected to make their last stand.
It is set to be the most complex battleground yet.
CONNECTICUT DEMOCRATS CONSIDER SPENDING CUTS: I’m so old I remember when cutting spending made you a terrorist.
Governor Malloy says negotiations over the state budget, which began this week, have a long way to go, but after wobbling on taxes he has accomplished something remarkable. He has pushed his party’s majority in the General Assembly, the Democrats, to agree that state government’s financial collapse must be fixed mainly by cutting spending, and has induced the Republican minority, which is just a few votes short of displacing the Democrats, to propose cutting spending even more and to get specific about some spending cuts.
It’s amazing what a Democratic governor can accomplish when, forswearing re-election, he no longer must play the tool of the special interests that run the party, the state employee and teacher unions, and can pursue the public interest instead.
Of course the unions, working through Democratic legislators, will try to induce the governor to go wobbly on taxes again. After all, government in Connecticut long has been less a mechanism of public service than of financing the Democratic Party, keeping the party’s most active members on the government payroll. This makes ironic the Republican opposition to the Citizens’ Election Program, which makes all election campaigns, not just campaigns supported by government employee unions, eligible for government funding.