The minute I heard about the earthquake in Alaska I checked with my friend Kim and though she was out of town, she texted the kids and her husband Nick are fine though it all occurred under where they live.
I suggested she leave Alaska and earthquakes and come to Savannah where hurricanes blow trees down.
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Bari's dad sent this to me. (See 1 below.)
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Another Rant. (See 2 below.)
This from a dear long time friend and fellow memo reader:
Courts tell Democrats to cool it over global warming. (See 3 below.)
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Great article about my cousin Sam and how he rose to where he is now.
https://www.jpost.com//Opinion
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This from a friend and fellow memo reader: "I watched a you tube today of Elizabeth Warren and Sharrod Brown drilling Ben Carson in a Senate hearing. Warren and Brown were so hateful and full of vinegar. Warren hatefully said Carson should be fired. If this is what is coming with the House in charge by Democrats for the next two years, hold onto your pants. It is going to be brutal. Z---"
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More Wisdom from Sowell:
More Wisdom from Sowell:
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Is The FBI intimidating a whistle-blower who gave Congress the scoop on Clinton's alleged misdeeds which also implicates Mueller.
I believe Mueller will keep digging until he find enough on Trump to at least embarrass him politically even though he may not find anything of a serious criminal violation. Mueller has a lot that he needs to account for if there is ever an investigation of how he politicized The FBI while he was in charge. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, Trump warns Democrats he can play the game as well. (See 4 and 4a below.)
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We leave for Sarasota this coming Wednesday to attend the wedding of a dear friend, returning Sunday. Memos will be sporadic.
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Dick
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1)Europe’s Jew Hatred, and Ours
Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin.
According to The New York Post:
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1)Europe’s Jew Hatred, and Ours
A new CNN poll reveals that one in four Europeans are anti-Semitic.
By Bari Weiss
Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin.
For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate.
Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is the place where in 2012 three Jewish children and a teacher were murdered at school.
Malmo doesn’t call to mind the Swedish coast so much as fire bombs planted outside a Jewish burial chapel. Copenhagen? Copenhagen is where a 37-year-old Jewish economist and voluntary security guard was gunned down as he was guarding a bat mitzvah at the city’s main synagogue in 2015. (The notion that synagogues require armed guards has long since stopped making us flinch.)
Brussels is where in 2014 four people were murdered at the Jewish museum. Berlin is a dateline we associate with news of people getting pummeled or harassed, for the sin of wearing a kippah or speaking Hebrew.
And this is to say nothing of the nonviolent attacks, which are impossible to keep up with. The desecration of cemeteries. Swastikas painted on synagogues and schools. Calling Jews “apes and pigs” at anti-Israel rallies.
On Tuesday, a CNN poll about the state of anti-Semitism in Europe startled many Americans — and confirmed what Jews who have been paying attention already knew about the Continent.
Not 74 years since the Holocaust ended, a third of respondents said they knew only a little or nothing at all about it.
The poll, which surveyed more than 7,000 people across Austria, France, Germany, Britain, Hungary, Poland and Sweden, didn’t only discover ignorance. It exposed bigotry.
Nearly a quarter of the respondents said Jews have too much influence in conflict and wars. More than a quarter believe that Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in five believe that most anti-Semitism is a response to the behavior of Jews. Roughly a third say Jews use the Holocaust to advance their own goals. Just 54 percent say Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state.
It’s no wonder that to be a Jew in Europe today is to live your life in the closet.
Many religious Jews in Paris and Berlin wear baseball hats instead of kippot in public. Nearly half of Dutch Jews say they are afraid to identify publicly as Jewish. Every French Jew I’ve ever met who can afford it has bought an apartment in Israel or Montreal.
How did Europe reach this pass?
In many ways, it never left it. Anti-Semitism has been a fact of European life for more than 2,000 years. The postwar generation who lived with the shame of the Holocaust is dying out. Their children and grandchildren are less abashed when it comes to the old prejudices.
In her forthcoming book, “Anti-Semitism: Here and Now,” the scholar Deborah Lipstadt discusses a 2013 study of overtly anti-Semitic letters, emails and faxes received over the previous decade by the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The study found that 60 percent of the messages “came from educated, middle-class Germans, including lawyers, scholars, doctors, priests, professors, and university and secondary school students.” Even more remarkable, most of the letter writers provided their names and addresses.
Bigotry extends to the ballot box. The Alternative für Deutschland, led by a man who dismissed the Nazis as a mere “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s otherwise glorious history, is now the country’s third-largest party. The National Front in France, founded by a man who called the gas chambers a “detail in the history of World War II,” got 33.9 percent of the vote in the last presidential runoff elections. The Freedom Party in Austria, founded by ex-Nazis, is now part of the governing coalition. Then there is the rise of Law and Justice in Poland and Golden Dawn in Greece — developments cheered by those countries’ Jew haters.
But the story of European anti-Semitism isn’t simply a case of the resurgence of the neo-fascist right.
A large number of physically violent acts committed against Jews in Europe are perpetrated by radical Muslims. The incidents at the top of this article were not carried out by far-right goons but by Islamists, most of them young and some of them immigrants.
Now add a third ingredient to this toxic brew: the fashionable anti-Semitism of the far left that masquerades as anti-Zionism and anti-racism.
No political leader in Europe embodies that sentiment more than Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. He paid respects at the memorial of the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. He objected to the destruction of a street mural depicting despotic hook nosed Jewish bankers. He participated for over a decade in the activities of a group called Deir Yassin Remembered, which was led by a Holocaust denier. He publicly defended a virulently anti-Semitic vicar named Stephen Sizer. He invited an Islamist preacher who believes Jews use gentile blood for religious reasons to tea at Parliament. And so on.
And yet he adamantly denies being an anti-Semite, on the grounds that he has devoted his life to “exposing racism in any form.”
Anti-Semitism, though, isn’t just a brand of bigotry. It’s a conspiracy theory in which Jews play the starring role in spreading evil in the world. While racists see themselves as proudly punching down, anti-Semites perceive themselves as punching up.
The Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi put it elegantly: “What anti-Semitism does is turn the Jews — the Jew — into the symbol of whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities.” When you look through this dark lens, you can understand how, under Communism, the Jews were the capitalists. How under Nazism, the Jews were the race contaminators. And how for Mr. Corbyn and his ilk on the left, Israel, the Jew among the nations, is the last bastion of white, racist colonialism.
European Jews must now contend with this three-headed dragon: Physical fear of violent assault, often by young Muslim men, which leads many Jews to hide evidence of their religious identity. Moral fear of ideological vilification, mainly by the far left, which causes at least some Jews to downplay their sympathies for Israel. And political fear of resurgent fascism, which can cause some cognitive dissonance since at least some of Europe’s neo-fascists profess sympathy for Israel while expressing open hostility to Muslims.
Now these three strains of hate are beginning to show up on this side of the Atlantic.
The biggest threat is on the far right. This is the anti-Semitism of “Jews will not replace us” marchers in Charlottesville, Va., and the killer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh who ranted against globalists and the “kike infestation.” It is the anti-Semitism of Representative Steve King of Iowa and of alt-right Reddit boards and some of Donald Trump’s supporters.
Islamism is far less of a threat in the United States than in Europe — we do not, contrary to what the president would have you believe, have caravans of terrorists crossing our border. Still, a Muslim-American who expressed hatred of Israel shot six people, killing one of them, at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, in 2006. Four Muslim men were arrested in a plot to bomb two Bronx synagogues in 2009. A Muslim convert was thwarted by the F.B.I. in his plan to blow up a Florida synagogue in 2016. Just last week, Mohamed Mohamed Abdi, a Somalian immigrant, shouted anti-Semitic slurs while trying to run down with his car people leaving a Los Angeles synagogue.
Finally there is the hatred from the left, which comes cloaked in the language of progressive values. This includes the perhaps unwitting anti-Semitism of college professors who refuse to write letters of recommendation for students wanting to study abroad in Israel or who seek to suspend study-abroad programs to Israel entirely, without thinking of sanctioning, say, China or Russia. Or turning a blind eye to unconscionable comments like one from Minnesota’s new congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who tweeted in 2012 “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel” — because she is breaking ground as a Muslim woman of color.
For reasons historic, aesthetic and political, we Jews are most attuned to the anti-Semitism of the far right — and we find the most sympathy among our progressive allies when these are our attackers. But when Jews point out the other two kinds, we are often dismissed as sensitive or hysterical, or as mistaking legitimate criticism of Israel for something darker.
This is nonsense. The same was said of the Jews in Europe when they sounded the alarm bells. Look where they are now.
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2)As I regularly warn, be careful what polls and analysts you pay attention to. One service says traffic in brick and mortar is down 9%, one says down 1%, the retail federation said it was down 5% total including online shoppers, and the former CEO of Saks says not really down much, but that there is far better inventory management with the technology tools stores now have, so there are fewer markdowns and better margins, and people were buying higher priced merchandise on average. One Wall St analyst says margins are down a lot. Moody’s says it has a more positive forecast for retail than it has had ever, and margins are not down. I am betting the CEO of Saks knows more than the 28 year old analyst who thinks retail is not doing well. While it is true that labor costs and logistics are costing more, the improvements in inventory management, employee scheduling, better margins and higher sales volume, and some price increases are able to absorb these added costs. EPS will beat expectations. Well run retail companies will surprise on the upside when revenue and earnings come out for Q4. So far this selling season, the revenue numbers are excellent and higher priced goods are selling well with less markdowns. What is also interesting is the notable increase in consumers spending by mid to low income consumers. Very good news for Wal Mart, Target and the dollar stores. All data indicate the increase in wages and take home, job security and much lower gas and heating prices are making a real difference this Christmas. The oil price decline was perfectly timed.
On Jan 1, the ECB will end QE, as will BOJ. At that point almost all of the QE boost to excess liquidity by central banks will cease, and asset prices will possibly decline further. They are taking away the sugar cube. This has been a contributor to the decline in prices of stocks, real estate, commodities, and other things that trade. However, the Fed took away the sugar long ago, and the stock market still went on to achieve record levels due to the Trump policies of deregulation and tax reform. Most real estate values flattened or dropped slightly. So while monetary policy has a major impact, it is not everything in terms of value determination. There is going to be an interesting situation in the EU come year end when Brexit may not yet have been approved by Parliament, if ever, and it is questionable what will happen with Italy. It is also unclear what happens to the EU economy in 2019 as German growth has stalled out, and with Brexit and Italy still unresolved, and now the riots in Paris and calls for Macron to resign. If Macron resigns, or is unable to rule effectively, Merkel is no longer the power she was, Italy rebelling, and who knows what happens to May. The political dysfunction in the EU could become a real leadership crisis. Just as the ECB pulls away the sugar bowl. It could get very unpleasant in the EU in 2019. That is not helpful to US corporate earnings as the dollar will rise further, and sales in the EU by US companies will decline further. The ECB will have no tools left. Impossible to predict what will happen, but it is not likely to be pretty. The QE from all the major central banks bailed out the world in 2009, and for the next 9 years, but now we will see what the world economy can do when it is back on its own and liquidity is no longer pumped into the markets. European banks are still loaded with bad loans, and Italian and Greek bonds, so that problem continues to fester.
Trump’s latest tirade against Powell is very unhelpful and out of line. The Fed may just raise rates to show it is not being influenced. Trump needs to shut up.
80% of new mortgages this past quarter were either a higher refi, or a heloc, to generate a cash out to the borrower. In 2006-7 these cash out loans were based on liar loans, fraudulent appraisals, and no underwriting. That is mostly ended now except for the $10 billion of loans FHA is dealing with that are in default. Banks, and even the non-banks are not putting themselves at risk again by making all the same stupid mistakes of last time. Instead of over lending, there is now still a margin of real equity after taking out the higher loan amount, and the borrower can afford it. The extra $15 billion that has been loaned will mainly be spent on renovation of the home, or used to repay credit card debt, so in many cases the borrower is replacing 18% credit card debt with 4.8% mortgage debt. The risk is some lenders are now stretching underwriting to fill their pipeline of deals as the housing market slows. Nowhere like 2007 yet but needs watching
If you are an investor, and not a trader, then let’s assume a company’s earnings grow at 7% per year for the next 3 years instead of the 26% it just was growing at. Assume EPS of $7.00 today, and a PE now, and again in three years of 18x. Stock price today $126, stock price in 3 years $154.35, or 22.5% higher. I would take that investment all day long. Keep perspective. You could reasonably say earnings may not grow at 7% a year going forward, but maybe they will on average. Point is, if you invest in a solid growing company, a drop in earnings growth from 26% this year to 7% for the next three years as the tax cut boost is no longer there comparing 2019 with 2018, is still a very good investment. Over the past 68 years the S&P has averaged EPS growth of just under 6%, for 43 years 6.4%, and for the past 8 years 7%. So $100,000 invested in this stock today if earnings grow at 7%, could be worth $122,500 in three years. It is likely that EPS will grow 9%, or so. in 2019. We are not going to see EPS and stock price growth going forward as we did the past two years, but over the long term (40 years) S&P stocks have grown on average around 8.84% per annum including the crash in 2008. With interest rates likely to remain relatively low for the next few years, the risk premium on stocks is worth it. Depends on your risk tolerance and stage of life, and do you think we have a recession in 2020.
Now politicians and Trump think they should decide what factories GM closes or operates, despite the fact that the cars produced at these plants are no longer selling. Trump promised jobs to Ohio so he has to posture, but the idea that politicians should tell companies how to run their business is anathema, and Trump knows that. That is what they do in China.
One million people emigrate to the US each year with no charging of fences, illegal entry, rock throwing, or other violence. What mother drags along her little kid into a charging, violent mob. One who is told to, so that the TV cameras can get the picture and create a press event which then becomes a political focal point, which is exactly what has happened with that one picture of the mother running with her kids. The border patrol used tear gas under Obama multiple times. There is nothing new about using tear gas on the border. No press mention of that. All Trump is asking is -do what everyone else does- apply legally and if you have a real case you will be allowed in. I am sure conditions in central America are horrible, but they are just, as bad, or much worse in much of the world, Syria, Yemen, western China, Iraq, northern Africa, Nigeria and on and on. You want to see poor, go to Africa or India. You want to see violence go to Yemen or Syria. The central America refugees have no corner on suffering or violence. They have no special case like the Vietnamese who fled at the end of the war, or the Haitians who were wiped out by an earthquake. This is all a political game by the left. It is all staged for TV cameras and judges in San Francisco. Illegal immigrants get drivers licenses in CA, OR and Washington. In CA they are allowed to vote in some school board elections, as step one in the plan to have that morph to become voters in all local, state and over several years, federal elections. If the Dems are given credit for allowing them in, and then protecting them and providing free everything, guess who they then vote for. This whole situation is being staged for a purpose. It is why judge shopping happens, and why who sits on the courts is so important. The ninth circuit is overturned 80% of the time. Roberts knows that. He should have stayed out of the discussion as he was being the political person he said did not exist in the judiciary—kinda like when Ginsberg called Trump unfit. This next two weeks will determine how the whole migrant mess turns out as they get disillusioned and decide to stay in Mexico or return home, or try to rush the border again and fail.
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3) Democrats Will Use US Climate Report Against Trump In Court
Becerra, a Democrat, has filed nearly two dozen lawsuits to stop the Trump administration from rolling back Obama-era energy and environment policies, including suing to stop the building of a U.S.-Mexico border wall on environmental grounds.
California is not alone. The Golden State generally leads coalitions of other Democratic-controlled states to oppose Trump administration policies. Becerra, for example, led a group of 17 states suing to keep the Trump administration from undoing Obama-era fuel economy standards.
Becerra and others see the NCA, released on Nov. 23, as another tool to use in court. The NCA made dire predictions about future global warming, including rising seas, higher temperatures, and slower economic growth—though the most headline-grabbing claims relied on extreme climate projections that experts questioned.
“It is not a matter of resisting,” Becerra told the Post. “It is a matter of doing what we are doing. And as long as we are doing it according to the law, don’t get in our way.”
It’s not just Democratic attorneys general who will likely use the NCA in court. Environmental groups suing the Trump administration will likely cite the report, and trial lawyers teaming up with cities to sue energy companies may also cite its findings.
“This report will be used in court in significant ways,” Richard Revesz, an environmental law expert at New York University, told The New York Times on Sunday.
Environmental groups have filed dozens of lawsuits against Trump administration policies. The group Earthjustice has alone filed 115 lawsuits against the administration, aiming to stop regulatory rollbacks, energy permitting, and demanding government records.
“This report will weaken the Trump administration’s legal case for undoing climate change regulations, and it strengthens the hands of those who go to court to fight them,” longtime climate activist and Princeton University geo-scientist Michael Oppenheimer told the Times on the NCA’s release.
On the other hand, the study may also be used by environmental lawyers bringing suit on behalf of 21 youths against the Trump administration over global warming. The 3-year-old litigation, now sitting in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asserts Americans have a right to a “stable climate.”
“I can imagine a lawyer for the Trump administration being asked by a federal judge, ‘How can the federal government acknowledge the seriousness of the problem, and then set aside the rules that protect the American people from the problem?’” Revesz told The Times.
“And they might squirm around coming up with an answer,” Revesz said.
Cities litigating climate claims may also seize on the report’s dire predictions to extract billions of dollars from energy companies because the latest NCA has a regional focus.
A handful of local governments teamed up with trial lawyers to sue energy companies, including major oil companies Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP, for damages from sea level rise and extreme weather allegedly made worse by global warming.
Judges have so far tossed out claims brought by several localities, including Oakland, California; San Francisco; and New York City. Those judges ruled global warming was an issue for Congress, not the courts, to solve.
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4) Deep State Raids Clinton Opponent True Dail
A whitstleblower who revealed to Congress the Clinton Foundation’s Uranium One dealings has been raided by the Department of Justice.
A whitstleblower who revealed to Congress the Clinton Foundation’s Uranium One dealings has been raided by the Department of Justice.
FBI agents raided the home of a recognized Department of Justice whistleblower who privately delivered documents pertaining to the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One to a government watchdog, according to the whistleblower’s attorney.The Justice Department’s inspector general was informed that the documents show that federal officials failed to investigate potential criminal activity regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, the Russian company that purchased Uranium One, a document reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation alleges.The delivered documents also show that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller failed to investigate allegations of criminal misconduct pertaining to Rosatom and to other Russian government entities attached to Uranium One, the document reviewed by TheDCNF alleges. Mueller is now the special counsel investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.“The bureau raided my client to seize what he legally gave Congress about the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One,” the whistleblower’s lawyer, Michael Socarras, told TheDCNF, noting that he considered the FBI’s raid to be an “outrageous disregard” of whistleblower protections.
This is particularly shocking, since this has never been fully investigated, and it looks like the deep state is trying to shut down any further evidence of Clinton wrongdoing.
4a) Trump Threatens to Declassify Damaging Dem Docs
By TNN Staff
President Trump issued a threat to House Democrats who will have investigtive power when they take control of Congress in January. Trump stated in an interview that if they want to undertake "presidential harrassment" he will declassify damaging documents that will harm the Democrats.
According to The New York Post:
President Trump went on to say that he will save the document release for the proper time, asserting that if he releases them now they will lose the power that they wield.In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with The Post, President Trump said Wednesday that if House Democrats launched probes into his administration — which he called “presidential harassment” — they’d pay a heavy price.
“If they go down the presidential harassment track, if they want go and harass the president and the administration, I think that would be the best thing that would happen to me. I’m a counter-puncher and I will hit them so hard they’d never been hit like that,” he said during a 36-minute Oval Office sitdown.
The commander-in-chief said he could declassify FISA warrant applications and other documents from Robert Mueller’s probe — and predicted the disclosure would expose the FBI, the Justice Department and the Clinton campaign as being in cahoots to set him up.
“I think that would help my campaign. If they want to play tough, I will do it. They will see how devastating those pages are.”
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