Author Archive: Stephen Green
June 22, 2016
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Obamanomics: R.I.P.
The previously bullish Fed finally and openly acknowledged that sluggish growth is the long term new normal for America. Secular stagnation is here to stay. The growth rate has limped out of the 2008-09 recession at a 2 percent pace now for seven years. The Joint Economic Committee of Congress tells us a normal recovery gives us about 3.5 percent growth and the Reagan and JFK booms were closer to 4 percent. So the GDP today thanks to President Obama is about $2 to $3 trillion smaller than it should be. This is roughly the equivalent of losing the entire annual output of every business and worker in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana combined.
R.I.P.? But Hillary Clinton’s just-revealed plan is for more of the same.
NYT OP-ED: The L.G.B.T. Case for Guns.
I’ll never forget the first piece of safety advice I got when I began my transition from the male body in which I was born to the female body I now occupy: Carry a whistle. If I was attacked, I was supposed to blow it in hopes it would alert some do-gooder to dash into a dark alley to break up a brutal hate crime.
The idea was not only preposterous, it was also insulting. The implication was that I, being transgender, wouldn’t be able to save myself. But I didn’t need a whistle; I had a gun.
Since the attack in Orlando, Fla., many L.G.B.T. groups have been calling loudly for laws restricting gun ownership. But if anyone should be concerned about protecting the individual right to bear arms, it’s L.G.B.T. people. We need to stop preaching nonviolence and voting for politicians who don’t protect us.
Read the whole thing.
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S CULTURE OF DENIAL: Friend Who Told FBI About Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen Saw a ‘Red Flag’
In 2014, American-born Mateen was remarried to a second wife and had a new son — and his friend, Mohammad Malik, had never heard him express extremist views or say anything homophobic.
But after a young man who went to their Florida mosque was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria that year, one thing did trouble Malik: Mateen said he was listening to recordings of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Islamic cleric killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen three years earlier. The suicide bomber, Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, had said in videos before he was killed that al-Awlaki inspired him.
So Mateen wasn’t radicalized by Donald Trump rallies or Bible classes after all?
June 21, 2016
NO, JUST NO: New Belgium is making a cookie dough beer with Ben and Jerry’s.
New Belgium brews a couple of my go-to beers, but this is just wrong.
21ST CENTURY DINING: A long-awaited vegan burger from Silicon Valley startup Impossible Foods hits select restaurants this month.
At Impossible Foods, [CEO Patrick] Brown, along with 125 colleagues—pedigreed scientists, nutritionists, techno-marketing experts—is working to perfect a vegan version of the all-American ground-beef patty. His elevator pitch is straight-up Silicon Valley: meatless burgers as a “platform to disrupt” the international meat supply. Cows, according to Brown, are “an inefficient technology” requiring too many inputs to create beef, an output that hasn’t evolved since the Paleolithic age. “The whole mission of this company is to make eating animals unnecessary,” he says. “So, we don’t want our product to just be delicious, we want it to be as delicious as meat.” He would never describe his innovation as “a veggie burger,” which conjures images of bland, frozen constellations of grains and beans. His patty is officially “a combination of proteins, fats, amino acids and vitamins derived from wheat, the roots of soybean plants, coconuts, potatoes and other plant sources.” The goal? To reverse-engineer flavors and textures heretofore exclusive to cows.
But will they ever be able to simulate a ribeye?
READY TO BE A BLACKMAILED PRESIDENT ON DAY ONE: Clinton Foundation Said to Be Breached by Russian Hackers.
FOLLOW THE MONEY: GOP leaders alarmed by Trump’s ‘devastating’ fundraising start.
GOP strategist and fundraiser Austin Barbour said Trump’s dismal fundraising efforts “could have a devastating impact” on the Republican Party generally.
“If they don’t fix this in a massive way, it’s going to have widespread implications down the ballot. It just is,” Barbour said. “If he’s not raising hundreds of millions of dollars, there are gubernatorial races, Senate races, congressional races, attorney general races, you name it, that will be impacted. Those races are dependent upon get-out-the-vote efforts from the RNC and the presidential campaign.”
If we had better GOP leaders, they might not have a Trump to be alarmed by.
UNEXPECTEDLY:
DWI arrests are up 7.5% in Austin, Texas since the city banned Uber and Lyft. ?https://t.co/iw6e3m5xU5
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) June 21, 2016
Apparently, saving lives and preventing needless arrests is less important to the Austin City Council than staying in bed with entrenched business and labor interests.
LEFTY COLUMNIST NEIL STEINBERG TRIES TO BUY AR-15, GETS SHOT DOWN:
“At 5:13 Sarah from Maxon called. They were canceling my sale and refunding my money. No gun for you. I called back. Why? ‘I don’t have to tell you,’ she said. I knew that, but was curious. I wasn’t rejected by the government? No. So what is it? ‘I’m not at liberty,’ she said,” he wrote.
Steinberg told the woman he suspected his application was rejected because he’s in media. She denied the charge.
Maxon Shooter’s explained later in a statement to the Chicago Sun-Times that it rejected Stenberg’s application because a background check had, “uncovered that Mr. Steinberg has an admitted history of alcohol abuse, and a charge for domestic battery involving his wife,” he wrote.
That’s exactly what background checks are supposed to do.
Also, this is the same writer who got three Pinocchios for claiming that 40% of gun sales in the US don’t have a background check.
DON’T BE LIKE MIKE: What Mike Dukakis Could Teach Donald Trump About Winning.
QUESTION ASKED: What Will Gun Controllers Do When Americans Ignore an ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban?
Why, they’ll send in men with assault weapons, of course.
CALIFORNIA’S LAST NUCLEAR POWER PLANT TO CLOSE: PG&E agrees to close Diablo Canyon in 2025.
The closure is part of an agreement with labor and environmental organizations announced Tuesday in which the utility agrees to increase investment in energy efficiency, renewable power and electricity storage to offset the power that will no longer be produced by the nuclear plant.
If California’s labor and environmental organizations were serious about reducing carbon emissions (or powering desalinization plants to curtail the state’s permanent water crisis) they’d be demanding more nuclear power plants instead of shutting them down.
CROOKED HILLARY: CNN poll shows public trust deteriorating on Emailgate.
Notice that “no opinion” is stuck in the low single digits and unlikely (in the extreme) to go any higher.
HMM:
Trump directed ~20% of his campaign spending in May—$1.1M—to firms he owns & travel reimbursements for his kids https://t.co/y4yboQ2lm0
— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) June 21, 2016
The good news is that isn’t very much money for a presidential campaign to spend on anything.
Or is that the bad news?
REEFER MADNESS: Teen marijuana use in Colorado found lower than national average.
To be fair, it isn’t much lower. The report says that “21.2 percent of Colorado high school students surveyed in 2015 had used marijuana during the preceding 30 days,” compared to a national average of 21.7%. But it’s also lower than the 22% figure from 2011, three years before Colorado legalized the sale of recreational marijuana.
These aren’t big differences, whether within Colorado or across the country.
What the report may illustrate best is that fewer than one of four teens will smoke illegal weed, while fewer than one in four teens will smoke legal weed.
FALLUJAH: The Iraq Victory That Could Lose the War.
For now, the Iraqi government has buoyed its chances at short-term survival by more or less ending ISIS’s presence in Fallujah, which Baghdad’s politicians connected to a series of bombings in Sadr City that harmed the Iraqi government’s reputation for providing security.
Even so, the Shia militias’ military autonomy and sectarian abuses in addition to the Iraqi Security Forces’ tacit cooperation with them to enter Fallujah should raise serious concerns in Baghdad and Washington.
“Obviously, the Shia militias’ offensive against Fallujah complicates things in important ways,” Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former CIA intelligence analyst, said in an email. “They don’t fully respond to the Iraqi government. They frighten the Sunnis, largely because they have participated in ethnic cleansing.”
The long-awaited effort to retake Mosul was put on hold to retake Fallujah instead — almost certainly to please Iran. That the offensive has bolstered Tehran-backed Shia militias is a feature, not a bug.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hillary Clinton most bought, paid for candidate.
DONALD VS HILARY: Filings Show Huge Fundraising Gap.
Trump raised just over $3 million in May — the month he secured enough delegates to win the Republican nomination — while Clinton raked in more than $26 million, according to the latest filings from the Federal Election Commission.
Those numbers — weak for a Congressional campaign, let alone a run at the White House — have put Trump and the Republican Party at an extraordinary financial disadvantage heading into the general election.
Filings also showed that Trump had $1.29 million in cash at the start of June, while Clinton had $42 million.
June 20, 2016
A FATHER’S DAY GIFT FOR MY KIDS: An AR-15 and some time on the range.
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE “END OF ISRAEL AS WE KNOW IT”: Secret Deal Exposed Between Israeli Opposition Leader Yitzhak Herzog and Abbas.
June 19, 2016
HMM:
Stunning –> Team Clinton has a 100% ad-spending edge in battlegrounds.
In June 2012, it was 54%-46% for Obama pic.twitter.com/0odrbXFSyU
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) June 19, 2016
“Free media” had better be worth more — a lot more — than Trump pays for it.