IT'S FUTILE TO STAND IN FRONT OF A FREIGHT TRAIN, so the stock selloff will continue until it doesn't. But look at the fundamentals . . .
- The economy is growing by about 3%, with a robust labor market and rising wages.
- Inflation data last week looked exceptionally tame, below the Fed's targets.
- The Fed should pause tomorrow but probably won't; in any event, Treasury rates will stay steady.
- Both the U.S. and China need a trade deal, and they're making progress behind-the-scenes.
- A government shutdown is likely but will have virtually no impact on the markets.
SO -- WHY ARE THE MARKETS SO PANICKY? There's a fear of weaker economic growth virtually everywhere, as the world emerges from quantitative easing and confronts tighter monetary policy. That, in a nutshell, is the greatest concern -- and that is based on a false premise about monetary policy.
MONETARY POLICY WILL STAY ACCOMMODATIVE, and that will be the implicit message when Fed Chairman Jay Powell speaks at the most important press conference in recent Fed history on Wednesday. He will hedge on further tightening, and the Treasury 10-year bond yield will stay below 3%.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE -- Low interest rates, modest inflation, solid economic growth, an eventual trade deal -- looks good to us! Of course, the economy isn't as red-hot as it was nine months ago, but the key is sustainability -- and this economy can grow at a very respectable but unexciting 2-1/2 percent; the 4% growth rate of last spring wasn't sustainable.
THERE'S AN 'X" FACTOR, TO BE ADDRESSED DELICATELY: Republicans need to tell Donald Trump that he's becoming part of the problem. A strong president doesn't mock the Fed Chairman; a strong president doesn't seek a trade deal one day then proclaim he's "Tariff Man" the next day. The world needs a strong and predictable U.S. president but this one clearly is flailing, unable to contain the scandals, and that may be affecting confidence.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) Trump launches unprecedented reelection machine
Unique structure of the president’s reelection campaign is an expression of his iron grip on the party.
President Donald Trump is planning to roll out an unprecedented structure for his 2020 re-election, a streamlined organization that incorporates the Republican National Committee and the president’s campaign into a single entity.
It’s a stark expression of Trump’s stranglehold over the Republican Party: Traditionally, a presidential re-election committee has worked in tandem with the national party committee, not subsumed it.
Under the plan, which has been in the works for several weeks, the Trump re-election campaign and the RNC will merge their field and fundraising programs into a joint outfit dubbed Trump Victory. The two teams will also share office space rather than operate out of separate buildings, as has been custom.
The goal is to create a single, seamless organization that moves quickly, saves resources, and — perhaps most crucially — minimizes staff overlap and the kind of infighting that marked the 2016 relationship between the Trump campaign and the party. While a splintered field of Democrats fight for the nomination, Republicans expect to gain an organizational advantage.
The race for 2020 starts now. Stay in the know. Follow our presidential election coverage.
There is another benefit as well: With talk of a primary challenge to Trump simmering, the act of formally tying the president’s re-election campaign to the resource-rich national party will make it only harder for would-be Republican opponents to mount a bid.
“We are going to streamline this presidential campaign like no presidential campaign has been streamlined before,” said Chris Carr, a veteran party strategist who has been tapped to serve as political director on the Trump reelection effort.
Speaking to the departure from presidential campaign tradition, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called it “the biggest, most efficient and unified campaign operation in American history.”
While many senior party officials recognize the potential upside of the arrangement, they also privately acknowledge the political risk of linking the party apparatus so closely to the president at a time when he’s under increasing political and legal duress.
“There are some people who choose for whatever reason to handcuff themselves to the Titanic,” said John Weaver, an adviser to Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is considering challenging Trump in the Republican primary. “Why, I have no idea.”
Planning has accelerated in the weeks following the Republican Party’s midterm shellacking — a defeat, GOP officials concede, that foreshadows a treacherous presidential election ahead. Last Thursday, a group of top Trump political advisers huddled in a nondescript Rosslyn, Va., office building where much of the 2020 operation will be based. The group, which included McDaniel and campaign manager Brad Parscale, discussed how the vehicle will be organized and financed, and how they expect it to function.
Deliberations about who will oversee the field efforts in key states are underway. During a recent meeting of senior party operatives at the GOP’s Capitol Hill headquarters, Carr projected the names of 2016 Trump and RNC swing state staffers onto a screen. The group discussed which of those former aides could return for the 2020 campaign, and they tossed around the names of others who might be worth reaching out to.
2a) California muscles into 2020 presidential race
By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO
And last week, Carr holed up at a Courtyard hotel in Washington’s Navy Yard neighborhood for a series of one-on-one meetings with the RNC’s 2018 battleground state directors, another group of potential hires who could become the nucleus of a 2020 field effort.
Formal interviews are expected to begin in January and initial hires are expected to be made early next year.
By melding the Trump campaign and the RNC field programs, party officials hope to avoid the tensions that hampered the 2016 effort. In one notable instance, Trump organizers in Florida bitterly clashed with committee officials who’d been dispatched to the state — a dispute that led to a late personnel shake-up in the all-important battleground.
In other key states like Michigan, party officials recalled confusion between the two sides over how to plan for rallies and get-out-the-vote events.
Carr, who’s convened a working group to discuss how the field program should be structured in each target state and is conducting an after-action report on the 2018 midterms, said he was well acquainted with past flare-ups.
“The problem has been, you’re hiring people to play the same role and with the same titles, and that a lot of the time causes friction in the teams,” he said.
The setup contrasts sharply with past Republican presidential bids, which were divided between official campaigns and the national committee. Veterans of George W. Bush’s 2004 effort — regarded as a model for how reelection campaigns should function — recall isolated instances of tension with the RNC.
2b) Pennsylvania meltdown triggers Republican alarms
By HOLLY OTTERBEIN
“While we had good cohesion in my experience on the ground in three presidential campaigns, it’s always better when chains of command are unified,” said Scott Jennings, a longtime Republican strategist who worked on the George W. Bush and Mitt Romney White House bids. “It improves efficiency and heads off rivalries about who had what organization on their business card.”
Party officials are in talks about how to finance the apparatus and who will lead the fundraising effort. Trump aides are looking to build out high- and low-dollar fundraising and bundling programs, and they say the president may return to the donor circuit in the coming months.
As he faces mounting pressure from the special counsel and braces for an array of House Democrat-led investigations, Trump has been getting regular updates on his reelection campaign. Parscale spent much of Friday in the White House.
For all the chaos surrounding the administration, those involved in the campaign insist they’re having no problem finding people interested in jobs.
“I get inundated with résumés from not only operatives, but people who just want to volunteer,” Carr said. “We’re not going to have a shortage of people with good résumés, that’s for sure.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3)
Danish Minister Tells Somalis ‘Go Home and Rebuild Your Country’
Denmark’s migration minister Inger Støjberg has told the country’s Somali migrants to return home and work on improving their own country after the Danish government ruled parts of Somalia safe.
Since the Immigration Service began its review of refugee residency permits in early 2017, nearly 1,000 Somalis have had their Danish residency permit revoked, reports the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.
Of those, 516 had been directly granted asylum while another 412 were family members who joined them as through chain migration, also known as “family reunion” or “family reunification”.
“If you no longer need our protection and your life and health are no longer at risk in your home country, and specifically in Somalia, you must of course return home and rebuild the country from which you came from,” Ms Støjberg said.
The automatic right to asylum from countries like Somalia was revoked in Denmark’s 2015 amendment to its Immigration Act.
As a result, the Immigration Service announced in autumn 2016 that it would use the new legal basis to review about 1,200 residence permits given to Somalis because of changes to “general conditions” in parts of their country, whereby “there is no longer a basis for asylum, simply because they come from there”.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4)
The Gospel According to Nancy: No Borders, Kill Babies
Tucker Carlson pointed out a few days ago how the already insufferable leader of the Congressional Democrats has recently been "ordained….an archbishop in the church of progressive sanctimony." For a while now, Nancy Pelosi's been the country's expert on morality (e.g., border wall: immoral; abortion on demand: moral). She's now taken to telling the country how much she prays, and she's urging others to do it, too – at least that old sinner, Donald Trump. After last Thursday's televised squabble in the Oval Office, Pelosi shared with reporters how she told Trump she was praying for him and urged the president (whom she also called a "skunk" while ridiculing his manhood) to accept the Democrats' budget proposal with no funding for a border wall. "In fact," she said with stomach-turning piety, "I asked him to pray over it."
When a smug person ends an argument by telling you to "pray over it," she's really saying, "Ask God. He knows I'm right!"
Summarizing her and Chuck Schumer's meeting with Trump, she told the media, "I myself thought we should open the meeting with a prayer, which I did. I told him about King Solomon, when he was to become king of the Jews, he prayed to God, he said: 'I need you to give me great understanding and wisdom, Lord.'"
King Solomon is Pelosi's favorite Bible character, especially because he proposed solving a problem by cutting a baby in half.
Now Sister Nancy's praying for Trump to keep the government open so federal employees can finish their Christmas shopping.
It's an axiom that if a conservative says his faith informs his political decisions, he'll be condemned for establishing a state religion, while liberals get to veer back and forth over the church-state centerline as freely as those motorists who love to text while driving. Right now the liberal media are applauding the way Pelosi "schooled President Donald Trump about the Bible," but it's not clear why. It's not as if they're suddenly in favor of anyone being schooled in the Bible, especially anyone in a public classroom.
Pelosi never bats an eye without a political motive. This Saint Nancy act might be her attempt to occupy the spiritual high ground that, obviously, Donald Trump has shown no interest in occupying himself. Pelosi wouldn't dare try this with a president like George W. Bush, who, while he didn't boast about his piety on TV, was recognized as genuine in his Christian faith – prompting the left's usual reaction: Ross Douthat wrote in 2006 that "the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era."
Theology was less of an issue for liberals during the Obama years; he was their messiah, and they just worshiped him. Meantime, Obama conspicuously dissed orthodox Christians with everything from calculated snubs and criticism to gratuitously tormenting the Little Sisters of the Poor, all the while devotedly celebrating the unblemished virtues of Islam. In 2015, Hillary bluntly stated that "[d]eep-seated ... religious beliefs ... have to be changed" to accommodate the unlimited abortion license. Then, last year, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said it is "not negotiable" that "[e]very Democrat" support abortion. Pelosi tried to mitigate Perez's remarks by saying "of course" there's room for pro-lifers in the Democratic Party, but try to find one who's not actually voting Perez-style.
This year, Pelosi watched the Democrats lurch wildly to the extreme left. For decades before that, they were trusted allies in the left's war on conventional morality and religion (except Islam!) for being repressive, patriarchal, and counterrevolutionary. It may be that, alarmed that the Democrat brand has become too materialistic, amoral, and atheist, she thinks she can give it religion. Maybe she can draw an unfavorable comparison between the reprobate and undisciplined Donald Trump and herself: the "ardent, practicing Catholic," who exhorts the President to beg for "the great understanding and wisdom" that she (and Chuck Schumer?) have already been granted by God. Haven't Republicans marched under the banner of morality and Christian values long enough? Now that they've elected the unholy Trump, why can't the Democrats seize that banner for themselves?
For one thing, because no evangelical or conservative Catholic would ever buy it. Sure, the Democratic Party is crowded with Catholics, but the serious ones left years ago. The leading unserious Catholic is Pelosi herself, who professes her devotion to the faith but does it while living in open, willful defiance of the Church's crystal-clear teaching against abortion: "It is the teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning that the killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified."
When her duplicity threatened to become an issue in 2004, Pelosi pretended that, moved by her "ardent" devotion to the Church, she had been studying the Church's teaching on the beginning of life "a long time," and she stated falsely to Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press that the Church has never defined it. Asked when human life begins, she replied, "We don't know," and that "[t]he point is, that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose" – the "it" being when a human life begins, which shouldn't have an impact on the decision to get an abortion. Easy mistake to make when your catechism is Roe v. Wade.
Later, when a reporter mentioned the Gosnell infanticides and challenged her own support for partial-birth abortion, an agitated Pelosi snarled back that "[a]s a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this[.] ... This shouldn't have anything to do with politics." But as a politician, she never stops talking about it, and the sacred ground she was talking about wasn't human life, but the exercise of a mother's "free will" to terminate her child. In response, New York's Cardinal Egan said, "Anyone who dares to defend that [the unborn] may be legitimately killed because another human being 'chooses' to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name." Her own bishop reluctantly corrected her misstatements in a public letter, necessitated by "the widespread consternation among Catholics" of her deliberate distortions of Catholic doctrine. Pope Benedict counseled her, in person, on the Church's express teaching, "which enjoins all Catholics, and especially legislators," to protect "human life at all stages of its development." Pelosi, " the respectful Catholic" who presumed to tell Trump to pray for wisdom, emerged from thatmeeting no wiser for it, obtusely extolling the "Church's leadership in fighting poverty, hunger and global warming."
Jesus warned against hypocrites who make a public display of praying "that they may be seen by men." The way Pelosi pretends to exemplify "prayerful" politics, and the way she told Trump "in private" that she's praying for him – and immediately announced it in a televised press conference – is pure Pelosi: cynical, addlebrained, phony. If it might hurt Trump, she'll pontificate how every MS-13 killer retains a "spark of divinity," then goes right back to her life's work snuffing out that spark from 60 million innocents and counting. The Bible never says it's intrinsically evil to build a wall or protect a border, but it's still got that commandment against murder.
Let the Democrats canonize this Pharisee if they need a patron saint. Her feast day can fall on January 22.
T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
/
No comments:
Post a Comment