Archive for 2018
January 25, 2018
and WAIT, I WAS TOLD BY ALL THE EXPERTS THAT THE ECONOMY WOULD NEVER RECOVER FROM TRUMP’S ELECTION: Bloomberg: U.S. Heads For 3% Growth Trifecta. “The U.S. economy probably ended last year with the longest stretch of 3 percent-or-better growth since 2005.”
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Text Message Recovery, DACA Deal, FISA Fight and Much, Much More. “Just to make sure you are keeping track of all the absurdities surrounding this investigation, McCabe’s wife took almost $700,000 for a failed political campaign in Virginia from Clinton chum and VA governor Terry McAuliffe, WHILE McAuliffe was under investigation by the feds for accepting campaign donations from shifty sources.”
THE FACEBOOK STASI STRIKES AGAIN: Libertarian Banned from Facebook for Tide Pod Joke That Mocked Liberals.
CRONY CAPITALISM ONLY WORKS WHEN YOUR CRONIES ARE IN OFFICE: The decline and fall of General Electric, the poster child of Obamanomics.
NOW AT #1 ON AMAZON, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
ALL THE EXPERTS TOLD ME THE ECONOMY WOULD NEVER RECOVER FROM TRUMP’S ELECTION:
MOPPING UP IS A DANGEROUS CHORE: Islamic State desert bases still a headache for Iraq.
With police being targeted in their homes near Ramadi, and with the Islamic State (IS) still in possession of bases in the vast Iraqi desert, counterattacks on forces across the border in Syria are of growing concern to the Iraqis.
Security sources deployed to the area told Al-Monitor that with the recent military campaign launched by Turkey in northern Syria against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), there is a risk that the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), dominated by the YPG, might withdraw from their positions in nearby eastern Syria to assist their fellow Kurds to the north. Such a development could make it easier for remaining IS forces in Syria to slip across the border and cause trouble.
Despite a Dec. 7 Russian declaration that IS had been defeated in Syria, some villages and areas in the east near the Iraqi border remain under the extremist group’s control.
More airstrikes like last weekend’s body blow would be nice.
IT STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN: Charles Lipson: The Stench At Obama’s DOJ and FBI. “These questions are not directed at apolitical, career agents, who serve with honor. They are directed at senior executive branch officials at the FBI, DOJ, CIA, and perhaps the NSA and White House. Except for Comey, who now spends his days tweeting about ethical behavior, many of those officials are still at their desks. It would be naive for Congress to follow CNN’s advice and share this evidence with the very people now being investigated.”
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Colorado Democrats silent on contributions from Backpage executives.
DAN MCLAUGHLIN: Chuck Schumer Doesn’t Want An Immigration Deal.
• Trump will sign basically anything that he can claim includes “The Wall.”
• Trump would be effectively admitting defeat if he signs something that he can’t claim includes “The Wall”
• If Trump is on board with an immigration deal with the Senate, that will give cover for it to pass the Republican-controlled House.
• Most of the Republican voters who care about restricting immigration will take their cues from Trump if he says he got a wall from Schumer, and will be happy and encouraged regardless of what else is in the bill.
• Most of the Democratic voting base will be furious at Democrats that they did something to make Trump happy – especially on his signature issue – regardless of what else is in the bill. The “Resistance” will treat this as the equivalent of a deal with Hitler.
• The optics of a smiling Trump signing a bipartisan immigration deal will play well overall for Trump and Republicans, and will help defuse some of the most polarizing arguments against Trump.
• Schumer expects to have more leverage to extract better terms in 2019, given that the Democrats are universally expected, at a minimum, to gain seats in the House in November.
Dan concludes, “Now that both Schumer and Trump have declared the wall non-negotiable, one of them has to cave or there’s no deal – a situation that was completely predictable when Schumer made his announcement.”
I’ve been reading Dan for years and respect the heck out of him, but his take might be too generous to Schumer. It isn’t that he doesn’t have any plays to make, but I don’t see any — at least not yet — which overcome his essential bind:
• Democrats can’t deliver the immigration deal which their most energized voters demand, even to the point of protesting at Schumer’s home.
• Continued Democratic obstruction on immigration restrictions — which poll surprisingly well (surprising to Beltway types, anyway) — risks turning off the very same Obama-to-Trump voters who Democrats need to win back in November.
This is far from over and Schumer is a crafty Washington player, but for now it looks like a “bad” deal for Schumer might be better than no deal at all.
THE FBI HAS REALLY GOTTEN ITSELF IN AN AWKWARD SITUATION: GOP feud with FBI ratchets up.
Conservative lawmakers from four separate committees are raising alarm bells about a tranche of missing text messages between two FBI agents assigned to the investigation into Russia and President Trump’s campaign, saying it calls into “further question the credibility and objectivity of certain officials at the FBI.”
Meanwhile, House Intelligence Committee lawmakers are refusing to allow the FBI to view a classified four-page memo that GOP members say shows abuse by the bureau of government surveillance powers.
“Well, yeah, they’re the ones that had the problem,” Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) said Tuesday, when asked why the bureau’s request to see the document is being denied.
In another sign of tension, Axios reported Monday night that FBI Director Christopher Wray threatened to resign over pressure from the White House to dismiss Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a longtime GOP target.
It all comes amid signs that special counsel Robert Mueller is moving closer to interviewing Trump as he continues his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, including possible collusion with members of Trump’s campaign.
If Trump’s smart, he’ll refuse to cooperate with an obviously-tainted investigation.
Related: WSJ: The FBI’s Missing Texts: More reasons to question the bureau’s 2016 election actions:
The Justice Department has dropped a second tranche of text exchanges between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page —conveniently delivering them to the Senate at the start of last Friday night’s government shutdown. Investigators are still plowing through the 384 pages, but preliminary findings raise new questions about FBI political maneuvering during the 2016 election.
Among the biggest news is what wasn’t in the Friday delivery: The FBI claims to have “failed” to capture text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017. This period coincides with the height of the FBI’s investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion, on which Mr. Strzok was a lead investigator. The FBI is blaming this five-month missing link on “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades.”
These are the folks tasked with investigating Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson on Saturday wrote to FBI director Christopher Wray asking how many other FBI records were lost. Imagine how Mr. Wray’s agents would treat a private individual’s failure to turn over comparable records.
Mr. Johnson’s letter also revealed more reason to believe the FBI’s probe into Mrs. Clinton’s email server may have included political calculations. Congress already knows through internal memos that the FBI watered down the language in Mr. Comey’s July 2016 Clinton exoneration statement—from the legally culpable “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.”
But the latest texts show the FBI also eliminated evidence that Mrs. Clinton compromised high-level communications. A June 30, 2016 draft of Mr. Comey’s statement noted that Mrs. Clinton had engaged in “an email exchange with [President Obama ]” via her private server while on the “territory of sophisticated adversaries.” That same afternoon, Mr. Strzok texts Ms. Page to tell her that, in fact, senior officials had decided to water down the reference to President Obama to “another senior government official.” By the time Mr. Comey gave his public statement on July 5, both references—to Mr. Obama and to “another senior government official”—had disappeared.
And while Mr. Comey made much in his statement about how he had “not coordinated or reviewed [his] statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government,” the Strzok-Page texts indicate otherwise.
This thing stinks to high heaven.
DEVIN NUNES’ MOM DIDN’T RAISE NO FOOL: The House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman was told yesterday by the Department of Justice that it would be reckless to make public his four-page summary of classified information on FBI surveillance abuses during the 2016 presidential campaign. Let us review it beforehand to remove anything that shouldn’t become public in order to protect U.S. intel “sources and methods,” DOJ said. Right.
Well, that ain’t gonna happen, if Rep. Peter King of New York is to be believed. King, who is a senior GOPer on the intel panel, told Laura Ingraham late last night that Nunes, a California Republican, will send the memo straight to President Donald Trump, pending release. Trump has already said he favors #ReleaseTheMemo, so why circumvent DOJ? Nearly 200 House members have already reviewed the memo in a secure setting (though only a handful of Democrats).
“If we gave them this memo [in advance], what they would do is, it would be passed out to all their friends in the media to tear it down before it even gets out there,” King told Ingraham, LifeZette’s Kathryn Blackhurst reports.
“Everything that’s in that memo is from the Justice Department — information we found. There’s no surprises there to them. They just want to be ready to … make a pre-emptive attack on it. We’re not going to let them,” King said.
Judging by the reaction of DOJ and the onslaught of attacks by Dems and their allies in the Mainstream Media claiming the document is merely a partisan screed, Nunes must have succinctly captured a mountain of information that these people are desperate to keep out of the public’s gaze. You don’t suppose it shows Obama’s coteries at DOJ and the FBI trying to help Hillary gain the Oval Office instead of jail, do you? Really?
THE FINAL YEAR REVEALS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S NAÏVETY AND ARROGANCE:
Rhodes twice reassures us that Clinton will win. “I’m sure,” he says with a smirk on a trip to Southeast Asia. Asked later whether a Trump administration might endanger his accomplishments, he says, “I’ve never really considered that he has any opportunity to win the election.” So what does the speechwriter and former aspiring novelist have to say when Trump does in fact win? “I mean, uh, I can’t even [long pause] I can’t, I ca— [long pause] I mean I, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t put it into words. I don’t know what the words are.”
The Final Year, though, is chiefly a study of Obama-administration foreign policy as overseen by Secretary of State John Kerry, Power, and Rhodes, who at the time of filming had become (in)famous for telling The New York Times Magazine that he had set up an “echo chamber” in Washington of Obama sycophants in order to mislead the American people about expert opinion on the Iran deal, and for pouring contempt on D.C. reporters, who he said were typically 27 and “literally know nothing.”
From the doc, it appears that Rhodes, not Kerry, was running U.S. foreign policy in 2016, and perhaps for some time before that. At an event in Vietnam, for instance, Rhodes is seen giving orders to Kerry and telling him how many questions he’s allowed to answer — two. Kerry spends much of the film flitting around trying to look useful. On a visit to Greenland, he says, “This is seeing firsthand things I’ve read about and I think it’ll make me a more urgent advocate.”
I’m pretty sure Hilary Henkin and David Mamet didn’t write Wag the Dog as a how-to guide for presidential administrations.
ALLIES (AND THIS TIME I’M NOT USING THAT WORD IRONICALLY): Japan PM Abe reveals country’s first mission to defend US military aircraft.
“With tensions growing over North Korea, the Self-Defense Forces carried out a mission to protect U.S. vessels and aircraft for the first time,” Abe said on Monday. “An alliance gets stronger if the partners can help each other. The Japan-U.S. alliance has without a doubt become stronger than ever.”
The comments were the first confirmation of a cooperative U.S.-Japan air mission. Last spring, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force helicopter carrier JS Izumo escorted the USNS Richard E. Byrd off Chiba Prefecture to resupply an unnamed warship that was helping defend against North Korean missiles.
If Beijing doesn’t like these developments, well, tough — they have no one to blame but themselves.
TRADITIONALLY, THE HILL’S REPORTING HAS BEEN LESS PARTISAN THAN THAT OF, SAY, THE WAPO OR THE NYT, BUT I’VE NOTICED A DEGRADATION IN QUALITY LATELY: ‘Trump is mocking them, you morons’: Another day, another wrong and totally misleading headline from @TheHill.
RUPERT DARWALL: Europe’s Energy Crack-Up.
Europe’s energy policies are worse than stupid. At the end of last year, Sir John Beddington, a former chief scientific adviser to the British government, lifted the lid on the scandal at the heart of the EU’s renewable policies. According to Sir John, since the EU’s first renewables directive in 2008, the growth of bioenergy — much of it sourced from North American woods and forests — has provided around half the expansion of renewable energy. To supply even one third of the additional renewable energy needed to meet Europe’s new 2030 target will require an amount of wood roughly equivalent to the combined harvest in the U.S. and Canada. The fiction currently being peddled is that Europe is only burning wood residues — the bits of trees left over from other uses — but new EU rules agreed to last week by the European Parliament will expand the definition of bioenergy to include trees specifically harvested to be burnt in power stations.
This, Sir John says, will result in higher emissions than from using natural gas or coal. Burning wood releases four times as much carbon dioxide per MWh of electricity as natural gas does, and over 50 percent more than coal. At the same time, cutting down trees reduces carbon sinks. Even so-called sustainable forestry practices incur “carbon debt,” with carbon paybacks running into decades and even centuries. EU policies, Sir John argues, gives a green light to developing countries for vastly greater forest removals, potentially risking “the incredibly valuable tropical forests that are not only valuable sources of biodiversity, but also form vast carbon sinks which are one of our best tools of defense against climate change.”
Whichever way you look at it, burning the world’s carbon sinks to meet the EU’s arbitrary renewable-energy targets is environmentally insane.
It isn’t insane if your goal is to gain political power and money for cronies, instead of “saving” the environment.
ROBERT STEINBUCH: A Different Take On Why Law Schools Are Not Admitting More Black Students. “For example, in data from 40 law schools gathered from their 2005-2007 admissions cycles, the median odds ratio on black compared to white admissions was 150 – meaning black applicants had far greater odds of admission than white applicants. At a large majority of these law schools, if you examine what we can call the ‘credential point’ where white applicant had a 10 percent chance of admission, comparable black applicants had a better than 80 percent chance of admission. Here’s the bottom line: the claim that law schools are generally biased against black applicants relative to white applicants is not only incorrect, it’s ridiculous. When black and white applicants with similar credentials apply to any given law school, black applicants are far more likely to gain admission than white applicants, and even more likely to be admitted when compared to Asian applicants. (The latter phenomenon is known in the literature as the ‘Asian Tax.’ A more apt label would be a ‘soft quota’ that caps Asian admissions to law schools.)”
THE ECONOMIST: Donald Trump’s economic policy has not been as bad as expected.
A friend on Facebook comments: “The poor anonymous Economist scribe who wrote this must have had to sip two and a half white wine spritzers after he filed to deal with the shame.”
EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE: If you’re using an Android phone, Google may be tracking every move you make.
The Alphabet subsidiary’s location-hungry tentacles are quietly lurking behind some of the most innovative features of its Android mobile operating system. Once those tentacles latch on, phones using Android begin silently transmitting data back to the servers of Google, including everything from GPS coordinates to nearby wifi networks, barometric pressure, and even a guess at the phone-holder’s current activity. Although the product behind those transmissions is opt-in, for Android users it can be hard to avoid and even harder to understand. Opting in is also required to use several of Android’s marquee features.
As a result, Google holds more extensive data on Android users than some ever realize. That data can be used by the company to sell targeted advertising. It can also be used to track into stores those consumers who saw ads on their phone or computer urging them to visit.1 This also means governments and courts can request the detailed data on an individual’s whereabouts.
While you’ve probably never heard of it, “Location History” is a longtime Google product with origins in the now-defunct Google Latitude. (Launched in 2009, that app allowed users to constantly broadcast their location to friends.) Today, Location History is used to power features like traffic predictions and restaurant recommendations. While it is not enabled on an Android phone by default—or even suggested to be turned on when setting up a new phone—activating Location History is subtly baked into setup for apps like Google Maps, Photos, the Google Assistant, and the primary Google app. In testing multiple phones, Quartz found that none of those apps use the same language to describe what happens when Location History is enabled, and none explicitly indicate that activation will allow every Google app, not just the one seeking permission, to access Location History data.
Google gave up on “Don’t be evil” a long time ago, assuming they ever meant it.
WAIT, ALL THE EXPERTS TOLD ME THAT ONLY A FEW BILLIONAIRES WOULD BENEFIT: Starbucks gives workers raises, stock grants due to tax law.
JASON L. RILEY: Public Seems To Care More About Trump’s Actions As President Than Porn Star Rumors:
The ho-hum public response to the allegations could reflect scandal fatigue or, sadly, the widespread belief that Donald Trump covering up affairs with porn stars is neither out of character nor any big deal.
But it also could mean that what the president has accomplished in his first year matters more. Jobless claims last week were the lowest on record in 45 years. Target and Wal-Mart are increasing pay and handing out bonuses. Apple, which has deferred paying taxes on foreign earning for years, has announced that it is bringing billions in cash back to the U.S. to invest. Visa and Aflac are increasing their 401(k) match for employees. Mr. Trump not only promised tax reform and delivered tax reform but every early indication is that the tax reform is doing what he said it would do.
How about that?