I am in that kind of holiday mood today.
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Random thoughts, a posting and another Rant (See 1, 1a, 1b and 1c below.)
Trump is our first " total commercialism transactional " president. Politics does not drive him as much as doing a deal based on what he sees as logical and common sense. Therefore, he does not look at decisions through a sensitivity prism or even one based on what is lawful if the results prove negative. This, I am sure, among other reasons, is why Trump and Tillerson did not get along.
I am currently reading "The Accidental President. It is the story of Truman's first four months in office. In some ways Trump and Truman are alike. Both did not have patience, a willingness to suffer fools. Truman was direct, to the point, blunt and very orderly and methodical. He could make a momentous decision and then go to bed and sleep well. Trump's personality is more combative and driven by both insecurity and egotism but Truman had many self-doubts as well and was unprepared for the presidency nor wanted to be president. Bess hated the limelight.
Unlike Truman, who was a prodigious reader, Trump lacks Harry's depth. Trump's decisions are driven by ideology whereas Truman's were more measured and thoughtful. Both sought advice but I suspect Truman's views were more shape-able by it as long as the advice did not violate certain personal norms and values. I suspect Trump listens more than the biased mass media give him credit for doing but I also suspect his boundaries are narrower than Truman's.
In the case of the atom bomb, Truman did everything in his power to warn the Japanese they would be totally destroyed and yet, believed by dropping the first two bombs it would save more lives even though it would kill many. Like the Israelis, he warned Japanese civilians to vacate their homes and move away from targeted zones. That said, he also had no love for "Japs" and felt deeply the pain they inflicted upon the world.
I believe both Truman and Trump had/have a special feeling for the military , Truman's was more fleshed out because he served in the artillery during WW 1 but Trump attended a Military prep school and was infused with discipline at an early and impressionable age. I can relate because I spent four years at Georgia Military Academy near Atlanta and loved my brief time in The Marines. Spit and polish is part of my DNA and my closet could stand an inspection to this day. I am orderly in a disorganized way.
Salena Vito is an acquaintance who predicted Trump's election in 2016. She reminds me of Jack Germond. Jack, a fiend, was an old type professional cardiologist type reporter who dug, went to bars, got out among the real people, understood and took the pulse of America. He was based in Baltimore but loved traveling even though grossly overweight.
My own view of the market remains the same. It will be driven as much by statistics and economic events as it will by psychology and what goes on in D.C. I believe The Fed would be wise to not raise rates in Dec. and let the Christmas Season clear inventories.
I agree the market is not a steal but a lot of damage has been done and there are some values for those with a willingness to be patient and truly think long term. I believe Apple is a value as is Qualcomm among the tech stocks, IBM is a gutsy call. Still like BMY and TEVA. I have had my head handed to me in my energy names but long term the world needs gas and oil and technology to get it above ground.T and AIG also seem to be beaten down to levels that appear to comprehend the risks .
Oh That pesky dossier.
What is happening to leaders in France and Germany suggests we are experiencing a reversal period away from the pendulum of insanity, brought about by progressive radicals. There is only so much people are willing to take and when they are up to their necks in what they find distasteful they begin to spit. This is why Trump was elected and why his policies have now become the leading edge of why deplorables are rejecting garbage ideas that have not worked, have lowered societal standards and need curbing.
The meeting with Trump, Schumer and Pelosi went about as I expected.
In that regard I believe Kavanaugh was wrong not to side with Thomas and allow The SCOTUS to hear the case about medicaid funding Planned Parenthood. https://dailycaller.com/2018/
The government funds many organizations with my tax dollars that I oppose even though I contribute to some out of my own pocket (like the arts.).
I believe the government should fund Asian Massage Parlors with your tax dollars because a relaxing massage will "Make America Great Again."
What would you like the government to fund?
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This op ed puts statistics to what I have been stating. (See 2 below.)
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Radical progressives seek disruptive causes because that keeps the political pot boiling.
They are against energy development because it "destroys the environment, particularly water." Apparently they want America to remain dependent on The Middle East.
They fear we are going to die from pollution/climate change and thus want us to spend billions, become economically non-competitive while pollution continues to belch from Russia, China and India. They want to keep everyone arguing about sex and who is what because that evokes emotion and it also pits everyone against each other. (See 3 below.)
They want to change the Constitution from protecting our freedoms to making us dependent and having every entitlement we want - all free.
They seek to replace Capitalism with Socialism because the latter has been so successful where embraced. Of course few have ever lived in a socialist run government.
They want larger government because they believe bigger is better. They do not believe in the market place when it comes to re-allocating resources.
They want government to run our health care.
They want to transfer earned and/or inherited wealth because they believe in fairness - whatever that means.
I assume, by now, you get the message.
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Dick
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1)
By Salena Zito
YOUNGSTOWN — There is a house I see every so often in my travels. It is perched where the alabaster 33-mile marker stands along the long-defunct Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad line, by an old stone foundation that has likely stood for over a century.
Every year, ivy and wild vines suffocate its simple charm, climbing up and over its slanted gingerbread slate roof on its right side, the one that faces Cedar Street. And every year, it loses one more shingle and sheds more luster from its ancient apricot-colored paint.
In the back of its sloped property, a smaller structure sits — likely a cold cellar, where the family would have stored roots, canned fruits and vegetables, and jerky. The elements have been less kind to it, and its roof has nearly peeled off.
Once upon a time, a man and a woman likely walked through the threshold of its front door and began their lives together, with the same hopes and aspirations most young couples share. They may have struggled; they may have sacrificed; they may have raised their family; and they may have grown old in this home after their children left for far-off places.
At least, that's how I imagine this story goes. I don't know the ending other than to say the owners are gone, and I wonder why no one came back to love this home again.
It is a line of thought my mind travels down every time I see a place, whether it is a home or a business, that time and people have left behind. How did that impact the neighbors? The community?
It's increasingly popular to criticize journalists today for spending too much time reporting on places that used to be something much greater. Those who are not populists have become bored, and ultimately dismissive, of places that used to prosper and the people who made them thrive.
The reaction has gone from a mild annoyance to full-on hostility — placing the blame of the places' collapse on some sort of racism, denialism or lack of intelligence. The root of this hostility may be irritation at who is president and how that insults their sense of place in society.
"People like to talk about the dichotomy between coastal elites/fly-over; rural/urban; low density/high density," said Tom Maraffa, professor emeritus of geography at Youngstown State University. "I would add that the difference is between the placed and placeless, or people who are rooted in their places versus people who are essentially nomads."
These placeless people, like those highly critical of fly-over folks, develop affinities for ideology and abstractions, as opposed to neighborhoods and cities. The lives of the coastal elites, academics, big-business owners, high-tech innovators, entertainers and media personalities have led to this, because they are so mobile.
People who live in the heartland are not so mobile. Neither the rooted nor the rootless are "better." But too often, the cultures clash, with one spending an inordinate amount of time putting the other down, usually on a widely read platform.
"Many people in small towns, rural areas and some cities ... are tied to their places for generations. So, issues such as climate change and globalization are therefore viewed fundamentally different," said Maraffa.
The placeless think of global policies, abstract efficiencies and lofty ideas like social justice.
The placed think of how things will affect their neighborhood, town and city.
"Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both demagogues," Maraffa said, referring to the president and the independent Vermont senator. "Trump is the demagogue of the placed. Bernie Sanders is the demagogue of the placeless."
Examples abound, said Maraffa: "People who voted for Trump share a rootedness in place. Think of people in J.D. Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy' or the TV series 'Justified,' which was tied by the phrase 'We dug coal together,' an expression of place."
"The recent GM/Lordstown discussion is fundamentally about corporate abstraction versus the impact on places," he said on the Detroit carmaker's decision to render the 52-year-old plant "unallocated" to make a car beginning next year.
1a) Trying to predict much of anything right now is very hard. Brexit is headed toward a hard Brexit, but we don’t know what, if anything, might really change in the deal before the March deadline. Clearly the deal May negotiated is dead, and she has to make major changes to get thru parliament. The EU said it will not go along, and there is little time left. In the meantime France is a mess politically and economically, and Macron is now unable to put through the reforms France desperately needs to avoid being toast, Italy is still a disaster and insolvent, and there is not likely a good solution to the budget battle with Brussels in the next week or so, German GDP is declining, Merkel is essentially moving out of power. Denmark is in serious financial trouble. The EU mess is just continuing to get worse. This is not helpful to the US economy.
By Guest Contributor on November 23, 2018
We, The Damned Collective, are delighted to host the work of The Damned. Below you will read and certainly be inspired by this collective statement from Williams College Students. This is their response to the “Chicago Statement.” We honor these students. We support them and their courage to #doitfortheDAMNED #doitfortheDAMMM
To the Williams community,
Recently, a petition has circulated throughout the faculty urging the College to adopt a statement released by the University of Chicago in 2015, which claims to defend the right to “free speech and free expression” on college campuses. The authors of the Williams petition assert that “while there is an understandable desire to protect our students from speech they find offensive, doing so risks putting down legitimate dialogue and failing to prepare our students to deal effectively with a diversity of opinions, including views they might vehemently disagree with.” We, the undersigned, take grave issue with the premises of this petition and the potential harm it may inflict upon our community.
We are at once angered by the context in which this petition has emerged and highly critical of its content. This process is not only engaged against Williams College’s Mission and Principles, but also against those of the petition itself. Not allowing students into the discussion and circulation of the petition limits the potential for conflicting viewpoints and is thus completely antithetical to a free speech premise. According to the college’s Mission Statement, “Faculty members invite students to become partners in the process of intellectual discovery.” We see none of this. With increasingly visible violence towards those most marginalized by our society, why is this discussion happening now? “Free Speech,” as a term, has been co-opted by right-wing and liberal parties as a discursive cover for racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism. The creation of this petition at Williams cannot be separated from those dehumanizing associations. Nor can it be separated from a national pattern where certain amendments are upheld and protected at all costs and others are completely denigrated, ignored, and targeted. Take the privileging of the 2nd amendment over the 14th amendment, for example. Mirroring this harmful prioritization, Williams’ sudden and urgent need to protect “free speech” over all other issues for students and community members is evidence of white fragility, ideological anxiety, and discursive violence. This petition and the Chicago Statement are purely semantics and posturing. Why can’t we actually have a campus-wide discussion on this issue, one that is not dominated by conservative and white faculty? Can this instead be an opportunity to take a critical eye to how free speech is constructed and weaponized at institutions like Williams?
We would like to draw attention to specific elements of the petition. The use of “controversy” in the piece is oversimplified and reductive. The petition prioritizes the protection of ideas over the protection of people and fails to recognize that behind every idea is a person with a particular subjectivity. Our beliefs, and the consequences of our actions, are choices we make. Any claim to the “protection of ideas” that is not founded in the insurance of people’s safety poses a real threat – one which targets most pointedly marginalized people. An ideology of free speech absolutism that prioritizes ideas over people, giving “deeply offensive” language a platform at this institution, will inevitably imperil marginalized students.
Liberal ideology asserts that morality is logical— that dehumanizing ideas can be fixed with logic and therefore need to be debated. However, oppression is the result of centuries of real emotional and material interests, and dehumanization cannot be discussed away. In truth, a liberal framework for “rational debate” rests upon a cognitive hierarchy that says intelligence equals morality and discussion equals good actions. The reality is that the academy has a dark history of enacting racism. Topics like eugenics, once debated as “civil rational discussion,” have now been acknowledged as indefensibly racist frameworks. Finally, those who dictate what gets to be debated are generally overrepresented folks from backgrounds of privilege. Therefore, this petition has grave potential to further silence the voices of people of color, queer people, disabled people, poor people, and others outside the center of power.
And while the University of Chicago statement says that students “may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject,” the issue is that these are not views we reject; they are views that reject us, and our very right to speak/breathe. The UChicago Statement, in failing to see this, has rejected our right to counter-protest, to “interfere.” Thus, our rights protected by the 1st amendment are eradicated by a petition that claims to support “free speech.” This document does not promote free speech: it punishes it. In a time when members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are asking for activists to be tried under the Patriot Act, and counter-terrorism legislation has continued to increase world governments’ abilities to violently deny the right to peaceful protest, the College cannot support and thereby strengthen such absolute, reckless, and dangerous policies. We are also skeptical of the “free speech” debate more broadly. The faculty petition is based on the false premise that the free dissemination of viewpoints means that all speech has an equal chance of being heard. Simply letting all speech be spoken does not, in practice, accomplish the petition’s stated goal of ensuring that different and diverse viewpoints, particularly those of marginalized people, are heard. Ultimately, power determines whose speech is given space and taken seriously. By putting resources and publicity behind certain speakers, we affirm their thoughts and ideas, bolstering their reputation with the weight of our institution’s academic legitimacy. When it comes to the actual choice of who comes to speak or how we otherwise engage in discourse at Williams, we must curate those speakers carefully, because ultimately all speaking engagements on campus are curated. Giving one person space/time to speak on campus means that another person is not given that space/time. We have to become attuned to the absences that accompany people’s presence on campus.
Whom does this campus prioritize, and whom does this statement truly aim to protect? John Derbyshire is a self-proclaimed “racist” and “homophobe” who was invited to speak at Williams by Uncomfortable Learning in 2016. He wrote an article proclaiming, among many other atrocious, untrue things, that “the mean intelligence of Blacks is much lower than for whites” and adamant advice like “[do] not attend events likely to draw a lot of Blacks.” Adam Falk disinvited him to campus, but a free speech absolutism policy, like the one in this petition, would have limited the President and allowed Derbyshire to spew homophobia and anti-Black racism on campus. To quote Aiyana Porter at last week’s Black Student Union town hall, “John Derbyshire literally said that Black people are not humans. I’m not going to consider that in my classroom….Who are we okay with making uncomfortable? Why are we so driven to making those particular people uncomfortable? If we are so insistent on making them uncomfortable, then we at least need some institutional support to get through all of the discomfort that you are thrusting upon us.” Williams College continually fails to support its most marginalized students, staff, and faculty members, despite claiming to have a deep commitment to “diversity.” Cheryl Shanks’ letter to the editor states that “To sign on to this statement is not to reject safe spaces. The College should allow for, and even provide, safe spaces. In fact, it does.” As noted by dozens of students at the BSU town hall and the phenomenal letter, Lessons from the Damned, 2018; written by Professor Kimberly S. Love and Dr. G — this is simply untrue! Many students with marginalized identities feel as if the College does not provide adequate support for them. Students of color feel tokenized in entries, Campus Safety and Security has a history of racist actions, queer faculty of color are subjected to racism and homophobia/transphobia, minority students lack autonomous space, etc. If we are to engage in this discussion, let us take a critical lens to the ways that “free speech” has been leveraged to silence dissent, not strengthen it.
1b) Defeat and the Dossier Explain Everything
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2) The Debt Threat to the Economy
By Phil Gramm and Michael Solon
The same driving forces have propelled every strong American economic recovery since World War II: a sustained rise in business investment and increases in new-home building. The resulting increases in the demand for credit have driven up interest rates. As the current recovery builds and extraordinarily low interest rates normalize, the economy will begin to feel for the first time the effects of the unparalleled borrowing of the past decade. Exploding debt-servicing costs and the new federal borrowing could crowd out private borrowing at levels never before experienced in any of the 10 previous postwar recovers.
<http://twitter.com/tperkins>
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*
"There is absolutely no rigorous science that has found a trait called
'gender identity' in the brain, body, or DNA," Dr. Michelle Cretella says.
(Photo: joxxxxjo/Getty Images)
Reading the headlines this week is like taking a trip to an alternate
universe. Ten years ago, if you'd have said that in 2018 teachers would get
fired for calling a girl a girl, most people wouldn't have believed you.
Unfortunately, that's the ridiculous world Americans are waking up to every
morning. But to most people's relief, not everyone is playing along with
this charade. And that includes President Donald Trump.
Almost two years in, this administration is still trying to mop up the mess
made by Barack Obama. And considering the huge disaster it inherited, it's
amazing how much progress the White House has already made rolling back the
absurdity of Obama's LGBT legacy.
After squashing the government's gender-free bathroom mandate, Trump moved
on to the military. Now, he's directed his agencies to make one of the most
important changes of all: protecting the 54-year-old Civil Rights Act.
Obama chose to read the law the way he wanted-not how it was written by
Congress. For the last few years of his administration, he started using his
own interpretation of the Civil Rights Act to give special protections to
people who identify as transgender. There's just one problem: that's not
what the 1964 Congress meant-and it's not what the statute says.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American
values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>
<https://www.dailysignal.com/2
So, Trump issued his own memo
<https://www.frcaction.org/upd
purposes of his administration, the Justice Department explained, "sex
discrimination" would not include "gender identity."
That was music to the ears of a lot more than conservatives. In the medical
community, experts were relieved to see that the president's policy matched
what was wise and prudent for patients. In a letter to the departments of
Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services
<https://www.acpeds.org/wordpr
12.4.18-Joint-letter-to-HHS-DO
coalition of doctors, bioethicists, therapists, academics, and policy groups
all praised the president for taking a scientifically-sound approach.
Dr. Michelle Cretella, head of the American College of Pediatricians,
explained why that's so important in an interview on Thursday's "Washington
Watch." The letter, she points out, represents the views of more than 30,000
physicians who all understand that gender identity is a very real threat to
modern health care.
"Transgenders are saying, 'I think and feel this way, therefore, I am.' And
it's one thing for us to, as physicians, [to] treat the person with respect
and honor their name change, but it would be a complete malpractice to treat
them as the opposite sex."
As she explains, there is nothing any of us can do to change our binary,
biologically-determined-at-con
woman. He is a man with a male physiology on estrogen, and that's how a
physician must approach him." The very serious problem, she points out, is
that people are so ideologically-driven that they want to ignore the medical
research.
More than ever, Cretella says, "Medicine is at the point now where we
understand that men and women have-at a minimum-6,500 genetic differences
between us. And this impacts every cell of our bodies-our organ systems, how
diseases manifest, how we diagnose, and even treat in some cases."
Treating a person differently based on their feelings isn't just harmful,
she argues, but deadly. In cases like heart disease, certain drugs can
endanger women and not men. Even diagnoses present differently in men and
women. The symptoms for certain diseases, she explains, can manifest
themselves in completely opposite ways. "And these are nuances that medicine
is finally studying and bringing to light. And it's actually ironic that the
transgender movement [is] so anti-science."
"There is absolutely no rigorous science that has found a trait called
'gender identity' in the brain, body, or DNA. Now sex-I can show you that.
It's in our chromosomes. It's in the body. It's in the reproductive organs.
Over 99.98 percent of the times, our sexual development is clearly and
unambiguously either male or female." The sex differences, she explains, are
real and consequential.
If she had one message for America, Cretella said, it would be this: "Stick
with science." Thank goodness for us, the president has.
This was originally published in Tony Perkins' Washington Update, which is
written with the aid of Family Research Council senior writers.
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1a) Trying to predict much of anything right now is very hard. Brexit is headed toward a hard Brexit, but we don’t know what, if anything, might really change in the deal before the March deadline. Clearly the deal May negotiated is dead, and she has to make major changes to get thru parliament. The EU said it will not go along, and there is little time left. In the meantime France is a mess politically and economically, and Macron is now unable to put through the reforms France desperately needs to avoid being toast, Italy is still a disaster and insolvent, and there is not likely a good solution to the budget battle with Brussels in the next week or so, German GDP is declining, Merkel is essentially moving out of power. Denmark is in serious financial trouble. The EU mess is just continuing to get worse. This is not helpful to the US economy.
It appears that the EU is potentially on the edge of coming apart with Germany and some northern nations on one side, and the eastern and southern blocs on the other. The flood of refugees Merkel allowed in to be the cheap labor Germany needed to fuel its export driven economy was the straw that broke the back, and is ripping apart Europe. (Lesson for the US). It highlights that the socialist politics directed by Germany, of the past 70 years is failing, and populism is fed up with the elites who are running Brussels, and the capitols. DC has no monopoly on elites running the government, and the people becoming fed up. France is now headed the wrong way with the riots and demands to go back to failed higher taxes on the rich and more entitlements. Their economy will become much worse. Macron even said, nobody wants to invest in France any longer, and large companies are leaving. Unemployment is over 8.5%. The far left in the US should look, but they will not see what is happening and why. Instead the press promotes that kid socialist from Queens, and Beto, or whatever his name is, as the new heroes. The Obama led Democrat policies of more government control in DC, higher taxes, and more regulation, would have led to the same sort of outcome as France, and that is why Trump got elected. Drain the swamp was really- stop the rule by the DC elites. It is why the left is so anxious to impeach him. He has crushed the elite shift to centralized, socialistic, over regulation, and more entitlements which are used to bribe the people to vote for representatives who will give them more freebies, and pay for it by taxing the successful.
The EU slowdown also means oil demand is less than it might have been. At the same time it is impossible to really know what is going to happen in March with China. The spokesmen for China are sounding positive and optimistic, and there is reason to believe Xi now believes it is in China’s best interest to cut a deal. What that means, and do they abide, is a total unknown right now. If Xi really wants to make a deal, he is not going to let the arrest stop that. Likely there will be some sort of deal for her return to China, a fine, and some agreement to say Huawei is barred from selling product in the US for some period, which we have essentially already done. Having a spectacle trial in New York is not in anyone’s best interest. In the meantime China’s economy continues to slow. Notably the same spokesman in China who attacked the US and Canada one day over the arrest, made it clear the next day that now China wants to do a deal-a complete reversal of the prior day pronouncement. The Chinese have made it clear the arrest is a separate issue. This is very significant.
We are just three weeks from the end of Christmas and post-holiday sales. When numbers are released in early January we will know where the economy is much more clearly. Until then, we need to just wait and see. If the Fed raises in December, but is very much more dovish in their statement for 2019, if Christmas is very strong, and if some sort of deal is cut for the Huawei CFO, then you could see a major market turnaround in January. OPEC had its meeting and their production cut was not going to offset the increase in production increases in the US. Experts estimate break even in shale is now down to $45, and technology is driving that lower. The shale producers are very careful with costs now, and technology is being pushed hard, so a spike in oil prices is unlikely as long as the world economy, and China in particular, is slowing. Somewhere around $55 is possible for the next few months at least. Very good for the US economy as it is continuing to put a lot more money in consumer pockets, just as tax refunds will begin in a couple of months, and that is a price where US drillers will keep going increasing production. The US now exports more oil than it imports. If the prevailing market view remains negative or cautious, then interest rates remain low, around 3%, or lower, and mortgage rates stabilize. Good for housing. All of this is good for inflation, and so keeps it more likely no Fed raise in March, and maybe none in June.
Objective legal experts have now said the election finance laws are extremely complex, and it is very likely Trump has several good defenses. He was protecting his brand, not the election, it was his own personal money, intent and whose money is used is a key issue in election law, it is normal for wealthy guys to pay off mistresses, and possibly Trump did it before he ran for office. If they were not out to trap Trump, you never would have heard any further on this. They will say 14 people in Trump world had some contact with a Russian. So the Russians tried and nothing happened. So one Russian talked about symmetry, but even Cohen never returned his calls. Nothing happened on any of this. Unless Mueller has something nobody in DC knows about, there is no collusion, and no obstruction. Just a lot of unrelated charges against various people near Trump and lives ruined. There is no impeachable offense, and the Dems know it. The Mueller report will make Trump look bad, but there is going to be nothing there. The press will take it and run with it , and claim Trump is going to be impeached and ousted. You will become ill seeing Schiff and Nadler on TV bloviating with BS on a near daily basis. For Schiff to say Trump will go to jail just makes him look like an idiot, but it feeds the reelection news feed.
Read the attachment and you will see what is really happening on campuses. U of Chicago has a stated policy that everyone is free to speak, and if you don’t like that, go elsewhere. The attached is from a group of Williams College students who clearly never took a history class, and never took a class in English composition or comprehension, which just emphasizes that even at top rated schools such as Williams, the students are uneducated and unprepared for the real world of private sector industry. The names on the letter, which I deleted due to space, suggest they are mostly diversity applicants who did not get a decent high school education. The attached should scare everyone regardless of your political views.
Attachment:
A Collective Student
Response to the “Chicago Statement”
By Guest Contributor on November 23, 2018
We, The Damned Collective, are delighted to host the work of The Damned. Below you will read and certainly be inspired by this collective statement from Williams College Students. This is their response to the “Chicago Statement.” We honor these students. We support them and their courage to #doitfortheDAMNED #doitfortheDAMMM
To the Williams community,
Recently, a petition has circulated throughout the faculty urging the College to adopt a statement released by the University of Chicago in 2015, which claims to defend the right to “free speech and free expression” on college campuses. The authors of the Williams petition assert that “while there is an understandable desire to protect our students from speech they find offensive, doing so risks putting down legitimate dialogue and failing to prepare our students to deal effectively with a diversity of opinions, including views they might vehemently disagree with.” We, the undersigned, take grave issue with the premises of this petition and the potential harm it may inflict upon our community.
We are at once angered by the context in which this petition has emerged and highly critical of its content. This process is not only engaged against Williams College’s Mission and Principles, but also against those of the petition itself. Not allowing students into the discussion and circulation of the petition limits the potential for conflicting viewpoints and is thus completely antithetical to a free speech premise. According to the college’s Mission Statement, “Faculty members invite students to become partners in the process of intellectual discovery.” We see none of this. With increasingly visible violence towards those most marginalized by our society, why is this discussion happening now? “Free Speech,” as a term, has been co-opted by right-wing and liberal parties as a discursive cover for racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism. The creation of this petition at Williams cannot be separated from those dehumanizing associations. Nor can it be separated from a national pattern where certain amendments are upheld and protected at all costs and others are completely denigrated, ignored, and targeted. Take the privileging of the 2nd amendment over the 14th amendment, for example. Mirroring this harmful prioritization, Williams’ sudden and urgent need to protect “free speech” over all other issues for students and community members is evidence of white fragility, ideological anxiety, and discursive violence. This petition and the Chicago Statement are purely semantics and posturing. Why can’t we actually have a campus-wide discussion on this issue, one that is not dominated by conservative and white faculty? Can this instead be an opportunity to take a critical eye to how free speech is constructed and weaponized at institutions like Williams?
We would like to draw attention to specific elements of the petition. The use of “controversy” in the piece is oversimplified and reductive. The petition prioritizes the protection of ideas over the protection of people and fails to recognize that behind every idea is a person with a particular subjectivity. Our beliefs, and the consequences of our actions, are choices we make. Any claim to the “protection of ideas” that is not founded in the insurance of people’s safety poses a real threat – one which targets most pointedly marginalized people. An ideology of free speech absolutism that prioritizes ideas over people, giving “deeply offensive” language a platform at this institution, will inevitably imperil marginalized students.
Liberal ideology asserts that morality is logical— that dehumanizing ideas can be fixed with logic and therefore need to be debated. However, oppression is the result of centuries of real emotional and material interests, and dehumanization cannot be discussed away. In truth, a liberal framework for “rational debate” rests upon a cognitive hierarchy that says intelligence equals morality and discussion equals good actions. The reality is that the academy has a dark history of enacting racism. Topics like eugenics, once debated as “civil rational discussion,” have now been acknowledged as indefensibly racist frameworks. Finally, those who dictate what gets to be debated are generally overrepresented folks from backgrounds of privilege. Therefore, this petition has grave potential to further silence the voices of people of color, queer people, disabled people, poor people, and others outside the center of power.
And while the University of Chicago statement says that students “may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject,” the issue is that these are not views we reject; they are views that reject us, and our very right to speak/breathe. The UChicago Statement, in failing to see this, has rejected our right to counter-protest, to “interfere.” Thus, our rights protected by the 1st amendment are eradicated by a petition that claims to support “free speech.” This document does not promote free speech: it punishes it. In a time when members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are asking for activists to be tried under the Patriot Act, and counter-terrorism legislation has continued to increase world governments’ abilities to violently deny the right to peaceful protest, the College cannot support and thereby strengthen such absolute, reckless, and dangerous policies. We are also skeptical of the “free speech” debate more broadly. The faculty petition is based on the false premise that the free dissemination of viewpoints means that all speech has an equal chance of being heard. Simply letting all speech be spoken does not, in practice, accomplish the petition’s stated goal of ensuring that different and diverse viewpoints, particularly those of marginalized people, are heard. Ultimately, power determines whose speech is given space and taken seriously. By putting resources and publicity behind certain speakers, we affirm their thoughts and ideas, bolstering their reputation with the weight of our institution’s academic legitimacy. When it comes to the actual choice of who comes to speak or how we otherwise engage in discourse at Williams, we must curate those speakers carefully, because ultimately all speaking engagements on campus are curated. Giving one person space/time to speak on campus means that another person is not given that space/time. We have to become attuned to the absences that accompany people’s presence on campus.
Whom does this campus prioritize, and whom does this statement truly aim to protect? John Derbyshire is a self-proclaimed “racist” and “homophobe” who was invited to speak at Williams by Uncomfortable Learning in 2016. He wrote an article proclaiming, among many other atrocious, untrue things, that “the mean intelligence of Blacks is much lower than for whites” and adamant advice like “[do] not attend events likely to draw a lot of Blacks.” Adam Falk disinvited him to campus, but a free speech absolutism policy, like the one in this petition, would have limited the President and allowed Derbyshire to spew homophobia and anti-Black racism on campus. To quote Aiyana Porter at last week’s Black Student Union town hall, “John Derbyshire literally said that Black people are not humans. I’m not going to consider that in my classroom….Who are we okay with making uncomfortable? Why are we so driven to making those particular people uncomfortable? If we are so insistent on making them uncomfortable, then we at least need some institutional support to get through all of the discomfort that you are thrusting upon us.” Williams College continually fails to support its most marginalized students, staff, and faculty members, despite claiming to have a deep commitment to “diversity.” Cheryl Shanks’ letter to the editor states that “To sign on to this statement is not to reject safe spaces. The College should allow for, and even provide, safe spaces. In fact, it does.” As noted by dozens of students at the BSU town hall and the phenomenal letter, Lessons from the Damned, 2018; written by Professor Kimberly S. Love and Dr. G — this is simply untrue! Many students with marginalized identities feel as if the College does not provide adequate support for them. Students of color feel tokenized in entries, Campus Safety and Security has a history of racist actions, queer faculty of color are subjected to racism and homophobia/transphobia, minority students lack autonomous space, etc. If we are to engage in this discussion, let us take a critical lens to the ways that “free speech” has been leveraged to silence dissent, not strengthen it.
1b) Defeat and the Dossier Explain Everything
Donald Trump’s former consiglieri Michael Cohen, along with being charged with tax avoidance and improper business deals, allegedly is guilty also of trying to leverage money and attention by exaggerating his influence with candidate and later President Trump.
In other words, Cohen to spec followed the standard creepy daily fare for Washington and New York wannabe fixers. But did we need Robert Mueller’s 18 months and $40 million to uncover and redirect to federal attorneys what was largely self-evident? Could not the U.S. government long ago, without the prompt of a special counsel, have uncovered that Michael Cohen did not fully pay his taxes—in the manner of an Al Sharpton, Timothy Geithner, and Tom Daschle?
The diabolical Cohen also tried to enforce, extend, or create non-disclosure agreements (Swampese for hush money) with two women from Trump’s past. The two reappeared out of nowhere in 2016, apparently to translate their alleged Trump hookups of a few hours in years past to notoriety and additional profit in the new age of “President Trump.”
Swamp Crimes
In other words, Michael Cohen was a sort of rough-hewn version of former Bill Clinton crony Vernon Jordan. The latter, remember, was the erstwhile Clinton fixer who in 1998 had sought to keep the still unknown Clinton paramour Monica Lewinsky quiet—and to whisk her away from the Washington media, by arranging for Monica a quid pro quo $40,000 a year job with Revlon in New York, via Clinton friend and Revlon CEO Ron Perelman—all with impunity.
Cohen certainly lacked the tact and savvy of another Clinton clean-up specialist, Betsey Wright, who in 1992 coined the term “bimbo eruptions” for her efforts to track down and neutralize any sudden public confessionals from the legions of past Clinton hookups.
Who knows, had we a Robert Mueller in 1933 he might have been able to charge General Douglas MacArthur and his alleged bag man, aide Major Dwight Eisenhower, with at least something for secretly delivering a bribe of $15,000 to MacArthur’s then 19-year old mistress, Isabel Rosario Cooper(who allegedly had been the general’s mistress since she was 16). The plan was to get her out of the United States and away from the reporting of sleazy muckraker Drew Pearson, who was eager to break the story.
Cohen’s efforts to pay off the Trump gals were understandably re-branded by federal attorneys into the acquitted John Edwards-style “campaign finance violations.” And who knows, now Cohen may well have to pay far more than the existing record federal elections commission fine of $375,000 involving 1,300 undisclosed contributions levied on the 2008 Barack Obama campaign—an event generally ignored by the media given the extenuating hurrahs of 2009.
Mueller and the New York federal attorneys were rightly upset that Cohen allegedly lied and admitted that he lied under oath. By all means, let us jail Cohen for subverting the entire foundation of our legal system that must rely on honest testimonies in all government inquiries.
And in that same spirit, let the Department of Justice also charge former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for lying under oath when he deliberately misled congress about NSA surveillance (and admitted to lying), and John Brennan as well, who as CIA director lied on two occasions about drone collateral damage and CIA surveillance of Senate staff computers (and admitted to such), and has serially misrepresented his efforts with then-Senator Harry Reid to seed the Steele dossier.
And let us indict either the former director James Comey or the deputy director Andrew McCabe of the FBI—or both—for making false statements to federal investigators and Congress, given their respective testimonies under oath about leaking to the press and the role of the Steele dossier in FISA warrants cannot be reconciled.
With all due respect to Michael Cohen, what is currently destroying the concept of the American system of jurisprudence are not the self-serving lies of such a minor shady operator, but rather the deliberate and more artful prevarication under oath of the nation’s top intelligence and law enforcement officers.
The Loco Act
General Michael Flynn, the special counsel also asserts, might have sort of, kind of not registered as a foreign agent when making contracts with the Turkish government, the normal stuff of Washington revolving door entrepreneurs.
I think any good D.C. journalist could swiftly send Mueller the names of 1,000 Washington wheeler-dealers, starting with Bill Clinton and Tony Podesta, who might fit his definition of failing to register under the statutes of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Any time a prosecutor resorts to name dropping ominously the ossified “Logan Act” (as in criminalizing Flynn’s talking to Russians), it is a de facto admission that he has no credible case and is throwing around smears and slanders to see what will stick. The Logan Act never does.
To the degree there even exists a real 1799 Logan Act any more—which is meant to outlaw private citizens freelancing at foreign policy to undermine the current U.S. government—the locus classicus would obviously be citizen John Kerry’s secretive meetings this year with the Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. Kerry allegedly commiserated with Zarif over the Trump Administration’s cancellation of the Iran Deal and was seeking ways to keep the vestiges of the deal and their joint anti-Trump private channels alive until there was regime change in Washington.
If Mueller is more concerned about transition teams than with purely private citizens like Kerry, he could look back to 2008 rumors that senator and candidate Obama allegedly suggested to Iraqis that they reconsider and put off their ongoing basing arrangements discussions with the Bush Administration until there was a new administration in power in 2009. The Logan Act, then, is nothing other than a talking point brought up whenever the exasperated out-of-power party wishes to suggest it was once undermined by the current in-power party.
While being threatened with the Logan Act, Flynn allegedly did not recount his conversations in a way that matched transcripts of furtive surveillance of the Russian ambassador. Translated, that means Flynn was likely reversed targeted on the chance of catching him in a perjury trap. In the old days, liberals would have argued that the warrant for such surveillance—originally based in part on a fictitious Steele dossier that created a sort of government hysteria to monitor all things Trump and Russian—contaminated all that followed as the “fruit of a poisonous tree.” And according to the “exclusionary rule,” Flynn would have never faced perjury charges had he not been reverse targeted for perfectly proper conversations with the Russian ambassador who was targeted for surveillance.
Flynn may have been unmasked largely due to a mysterious last-minute Obama executive order vastly expanding government access to surveillance transcripts—and in hope of guaranteeing that the names of those whom the Obama Administration had spied on would be unmasked and leaked to the press.
In other words, “Russian collusion” that spread throughout the government and the media after the 2016 election to undermine Trump’s transition and presidency can be traced almost entirely to Christopher Steele’s machinations.
The Font
What then is the Mueller chase all about?
In reductionist terms, in the midst of a political campaign, and as “insurance” for an expected Clinton victory, had Hillary Clinton not hired the Perkins Coie law firm (masking her own role) to hire Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS, to hire foreign national Christopher Steele, to hire foreign national Russian sources, to spin yarns about Donald Trump’s alleged “collusion” (spiced up for media leakage with lurid stories of Trump urolagnia), to create 11th-hour election anti-Trump hysteria throughout the media and federal government, then special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation would never have existed.
Or is it even worse than that?
Had Hillary Clinton just won the election as she was supposed to do, and Donald Trump, as he too was supposed to do, just sulked back in humiliation and media ridicule to his penthouse suite at Trump Tower, then the 2016 campaign’s sensationalized leaked yarns from the Steele dossier would have at best warranted a tiny lurid goodbye hit piece on Trump from the New Yorker or Vanity Fair. But simply by winning, Donald Trump brought untold misery upon his family, friends, associates—and himself.
What all the later unmaskings of U.S. citizens’ names by Obama officials, all the daily leaking of “bombshell” rumors to warp an election, transition, and presidency, all the lying under oath, all the texting of Page and Strzok, all the machinations of Andrew McCabe and James Comey, all the FBI insertions of informants, all the involvement of the CIA, Justice, and State Department in seeding the rumors and slander, all the collusion of a foreign national spying on a presidential candidate—what it was all about in the end was simple: In 2016, legions of bureaucrats wanted to score points in Hillary Clinton’s foreordained new administration by vying with each other to “insure” her blowout, to brag they had done in the ogre Trump, and to expect not so much impunity as adoration for their illegal but supposedly patriotic service beyond the call of duty. Trump was not just to be defeated but humiliated and destroyed as a lesson.
Then Clinton lost—or rather she blew a sure Electoral College victory.
All at once, the embarrassing comic-book contents of the ridiculous Steele dossier became the scapegoat. Accordingly, those still stunned, dumbfounded,and furious in the media and government immediately once again found the campaign collusionary dossier useful—now not to destroy candidate Trump, but rather to explain the inexplicable, and to ruin the culprit for her defeat and overturn the verdict of the election.
And given the ensuing hysteria, within about seven months the creation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller was the result.
Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, and Robert Mueller are all joined at the hip.
1c)
The Crisis of Good Intentions
By
From Paris to Palo Alto, ‘clean and green’ policies punish the poor.
Almost everywhere you turn these days, someone is claiming that capitalism is facing an existential crisis.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old who will soon be a congresswoman from New York, declares that our “no-holds-barred Wild West hyper capitalism” is on the way out. French economist Thomas Piketty, by contrast, frets about a future where we are all governed by a ruling class drawn from billionaires, what he calls “patrimonial capitalism.” Meanwhile the archbishop of Canterbury hails the gig economy as “the reincarnation of an ancient evil.”
Let us stipulate it’s foolish to pretend the market is without its costs. A 57-year-old General Motors worker in Ohio who will be laid off as his company expands production in Mexico may understandably balk at the argument that, in the larger scheme of things, it’s all for the best.
Yet the recent protests across France ought to remind us that market decisions aren’t the only ones that can make life difficult for those trying to get by on their paychecks. For in these protests are we not seeing French citizens who have lost faith in the ability of their government to fulfill its most basic tasks, along with a growing resentment of the high price inflicted on ordinary French men and women by the good intentions of their elites?
The “Yellow Vest” protests across France were triggered by an increase in the gasoline tax. But even before this planned increase, the French were already the most taxed people in the European Union, one reason they pay more than double the American average at the pump. A gallon of gas in France costs drivers roughly $6, nearly two-thirds of which is tax.
Americans spend about $2,000 a year each on gas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If the U.S. price were at French levels, that would rise to at least $4,000 a year—a considerable hit for most families. To make matters worse, the French taxes have increasingly diminishing returns because France accounts for such a small fraction of global emissions.
Nor are the French the only ones with doubts about the judgment of their elites. Whatever the merits of Brexit, at its core it reflects the British people’s distrust of the proposition that a supranational government in Brussels knows best. Given how their own government has botched things, it’s hard to conceive of any ending for Brexit that doesn’t promise even less British confidence in their leaders.
The U.S. has its own versions. Until recently Exhibit A was the war America lost—the “war on poverty.” More than 50 years and trillions of dollars after Lyndon B. Johnson launched it with the best of intentions, all we have to show for it is the devastation of the black family and the dysfunctions of our inner cities.
Today, however, the crisis of good intentions is manifested most dramatically in the green movement, particularly in California. In a recent article for the Orange County Register, Chapman University’s Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky write that “California is creating a feudalized society characterized by the ultra-rich, a diminishing middle class and a large, rising segment of the population that is in or near poverty.” California now has the highest overall poverty rate in the nation, they write, and suffers from a level of inequality “closer to that of Central American banana republics.”
Much of this is the fault of California’s green agenda, which chokes off economic growth and has been imposed more as a theological imperative than the result of any sober, cost-benefit analysis. As Mr. Kotkin frequently points out, the upward mobility of any family that isn’t part of Hollywood or Silicon Valley or doesn’t already own their own home is being killed by the state’s climate regime.
Though California hasn’t reached French levels of rebellion, its own protests are taking interesting forms. Earlier this year a coalition of more than 200 prominent civil-rights leaders filed suit against the California Air Resources Board. They argue California’s greenhouse gas policies are disproportionately raising housing, transportation and electricity costs for Latinos and African-Americans. The suit contests California’s claims that it has a “clean and green” economy is a “fiction.”
The climate regime, the suit notes, is imperious. Though Los Angeles and the Bay Area already rank among the worst in the nation for traffic congestion, the suit contends California’s climate leaders “have decided to intentionally increase traffic congestion” in the hope of getting more people to opt for public transport. In other words, California’s greens are willing to inconvenience the poor to get them to do what their feudal lords want them to do.
So maybe what’s going on in France isn’t as foreign as it may seem. When a once-thriving manufacturing town loses jobs to China, we hear all about the crisis of capitalism. But when progressives squeeze the American worker with high taxes, green agendas and failed government programs, where are the headlines about the crisis of good intentions?
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2) The Debt Threat to the Economy
By Phil Gramm and Michael Solon
As rates rise, paying back government borrowing will consume the credit needed to sustain growth.
The same driving forces have propelled every strong American economic recovery since World War II: a sustained rise in business investment and increases in new-home building. The resulting increases in the demand for credit have driven up interest rates. As the current recovery builds and extraordinarily low interest rates normalize, the economy will begin to feel for the first time the effects of the unparalleled borrowing of the past decade. Exploding debt-servicing costs and the new federal borrowing could crowd out private borrowing at levels never before experienced in any of the 10 previous postwar recovers.
During the weak Obama recovery, business investment lagged behind the norm, and new-home construction remained at the recessionary level. Today business investment is at the highest level in a decade, and housing starts are up 42% from the average level of the Obama era. With the economy now growing at the average postwar rate of 3.5%, interest rates also should be expected to rise toward their postwar norms as government and the private sector compete for available credit.
Nominal interest rates in the postwar period were highly affected by inflation, which rose at an annual rate of 3.8% from 1948-2008. Interest rates surged when inflation approached double-digit levels from 1977-82, and Treasury borrowing costs reached their highest postwar levels, averaging 10.6%. If that six-year period is set aside as an anomaly, the Treasury’s average borrowing cost from 1948-2009 was 4.8%. For the entire 1948-2008 period, real Treasury borrowing costs—the nominal borrowing costs minus the inflation rate—were 1.2%.
This suggests that if the Fed could meet its 2% inflation target during this recovery, Treasury borrowing costs might stay close to the 3.2% range. But because interest on 10-year Treasurys is already above 3%, it may be optimistic to assume that the Fed could hold rates at this level during another five years of strong recovery even if inflation stays around 2%.
If the economy continues to grow at the normal postwar rate, growth-driven federal revenues will overwhelm the costs of the tax cut, paying for virtually all of its originally projected 10-year revenue losses in just five years. But if Treasury borrowing cost normalizes to 3.2% over the next five years, the cost of servicing the federal debt will more than double, from $316 billion this year to $666 billion in 2023.
If borrowing costs rose to 4.8% over the next five years, federal debt-servicing costs would more than triple, reaching $1.1 trillion in 2023. In that scenario, the cost of servicing the $7.5 trillion increase in the public debt incurred during the 2009-16 period alone would cost $362 billion—more than the current cost of servicing the entire federal debt.
Even with the strong revenue gains that would come from sustained 3.5% growth, a 4.8% average borrowing cost by 2023 would force the Treasury to borrow $1.3 trillion, 5.2% of gross domestic product. If the Fed could hold inflation rates in the 2% range and Treasury borrowing costs only grew to 3.2%, total federal borrowing by 2023 would still be $985 billion, 3.7% of GDP.
Federal borrowing levels between 3.7% and 5.2% of GDP annually would be quite similar to the Obama-era average of 4.6%. But 40% of that era’s unprecedented new borrowing was offset by the Fed’s purchases of Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities. Also, in the failed recovery, the economy had little pulse and never felt the fever of high interest rates that would have come from such massive federal borrowing if private demand for loanable funds had matched the levels experienced in other postwar recoveries.
In postwar America before 2009, gross private domestic investment averaged 17.5% of GDP while federal borrowing absorbed only 1.6% of GDP (including the high-deficit Reagan presidency, when federal borrowing averaged 1.8% of GDP). By comparison, Congressional Budget Office projections of federal outlays plus normalized rates would produce Treasury borrowing by 2023 that could pre-empt 3.5 times the amount of credit as a percentage of GDP that federal borrowing pre-empted on average during other strong postwar recoveries.
With an already bloated balance sheet and banks holding huge levels of excess reserves, the Fed would risk spiking inflation if it tried to hold interest rates below the level dictated by public and private demand for capital. But even in a divided government, where compromise and legislative success will be difficult, the Trump administration can act unilaterally to soften the headwinds of rising interest rates that will threaten the recovery.
Every dollar the federal government doesn’t spend is a dollar it doesn’t have to borrow. The caps on discretionary spending should not be lifted in 2019, and any new spending program should require a real spending offset. An acceleration of the administration’s deregulatory effort, especially in the financial sector, would enhance efficiency, expand growth and reduce federal borrowing.
Strong economic growth and rising interest rates will attract foreign capital, which can help prevent a surge in interest rates that could derail the recovery, but foreign capital will come at a cost of higher trade deficits. President Trump is obligated to make China live up to its World Trade Organization commitments and end the piracy of American technology. But fighting a trade war and maintaining a strong recovery may be mutually exclusive objectives. To ensure the U.S. has sufficient capital resources to sustain the recovery, the president needs to cut his deal with China. It’s time to make peace on trade and wage war on the deficit.
Mr. Gramm, a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Solon is a partner at US Policy Metrics. This article is adapted from a paper with Thomas R. Saving to be published by the Cato Institute next year.
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3)On Gender, the Science Is Deafening
Tony Perkins <https://www.dailysignal.com/a<http://twitter.com/tperkins>
*
*
"There is absolutely no rigorous science that has found a trait called
'gender identity' in the brain, body, or DNA," Dr. Michelle Cretella says.
(Photo: joxxxxjo/Getty Images)
Reading the headlines this week is like taking a trip to an alternate
universe. Ten years ago, if you'd have said that in 2018 teachers would get
fired for calling a girl a girl, most people wouldn't have believed you.
Unfortunately, that's the ridiculous world Americans are waking up to every
morning. But to most people's relief, not everyone is playing along with
this charade. And that includes President Donald Trump.
Almost two years in, this administration is still trying to mop up the mess
made by Barack Obama. And considering the huge disaster it inherited, it's
amazing how much progress the White House has already made rolling back the
absurdity of Obama's LGBT legacy.
After squashing the government's gender-free bathroom mandate, Trump moved
on to the military. Now, he's directed his agencies to make one of the most
important changes of all: protecting the 54-year-old Civil Rights Act.
Obama chose to read the law the way he wanted-not how it was written by
Congress. For the last few years of his administration, he started using his
own interpretation of the Civil Rights Act to give special protections to
people who identify as transgender. There's just one problem: that's not
what the 1964 Congress meant-and it's not what the statute says.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American
values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>
<https://www.dailysignal.com/2
So, Trump issued his own memo
<https://www.frcaction.org/upd
purposes of his administration, the Justice Department explained, "sex
discrimination" would not include "gender identity."
That was music to the ears of a lot more than conservatives. In the medical
community, experts were relieved to see that the president's policy matched
what was wise and prudent for patients. In a letter to the departments of
Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services
<https://www.acpeds.org/wordpr
12.4.18-Joint-letter-to-HHS-DO
coalition of doctors, bioethicists, therapists, academics, and policy groups
all praised the president for taking a scientifically-sound approach.
Dr. Michelle Cretella, head of the American College of Pediatricians,
explained why that's so important in an interview on Thursday's "Washington
Watch." The letter, she points out, represents the views of more than 30,000
physicians who all understand that gender identity is a very real threat to
modern health care.
"Transgenders are saying, 'I think and feel this way, therefore, I am.' And
it's one thing for us to, as physicians, [to] treat the person with respect
and honor their name change, but it would be a complete malpractice to treat
them as the opposite sex."
As she explains, there is nothing any of us can do to change our binary,
biologically-determined-at-con
woman. He is a man with a male physiology on estrogen, and that's how a
physician must approach him." The very serious problem, she points out, is
that people are so ideologically-driven that they want to ignore the medical
research.
More than ever, Cretella says, "Medicine is at the point now where we
understand that men and women have-at a minimum-6,500 genetic differences
between us. And this impacts every cell of our bodies-our organ systems, how
diseases manifest, how we diagnose, and even treat in some cases."
Treating a person differently based on their feelings isn't just harmful,
she argues, but deadly. In cases like heart disease, certain drugs can
endanger women and not men. Even diagnoses present differently in men and
women. The symptoms for certain diseases, she explains, can manifest
themselves in completely opposite ways. "And these are nuances that medicine
is finally studying and bringing to light. And it's actually ironic that the
transgender movement [is] so anti-science."
"There is absolutely no rigorous science that has found a trait called
'gender identity' in the brain, body, or DNA. Now sex-I can show you that.
It's in our chromosomes. It's in the body. It's in the reproductive organs.
Over 99.98 percent of the times, our sexual development is clearly and
unambiguously either male or female." The sex differences, she explains, are
real and consequential.
If she had one message for America, Cretella said, it would be this: "Stick
with science." Thank goodness for us, the president has.
This was originally published in Tony Perkins' Washington Update, which is
written with the aid of Family Research Council senior writers.
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