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Ocasio talks the talk but fails to walk the walk. She is all mouth!
She has become the radical spokesperson for the do-nothing Democrat Party (See 1 below.)
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Let's hear it for Victor Davis Hanson. (See 2 below.)
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Another Rant. (See 3 below.)
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I am a very modest contributor to Media Research Center and thus, I receive their material. The company was formed by Brent Bozell and is similar to Honest Reporting.
Their recent "Watchdog" circular discusses Brent's latest book: "Unmasked." The book is devoted to condemning the press with its own words and seeks to prove the mass media is anything but objective fair and balanced. In fact, Bozell concludes the mass media is aggressive and a threat to our democracy and I tend to concur.
They list ten mass media types who are hell bent on wanting to destroy the president as follows:
10) Brian Williams - MSNBC
9) Brian Stetler - CNN
7) Phillip Rucker - WAP
6) Chris Matthews - MSNBC
5) Chris Cuomo - CNN
4) Every Late Night show host, unlike Carson and Steve Allen.
2) Joe Scarborugh & Mika Brezezinski - MSNBC
1) Jim Acosta - CNN
One can have disagreements with Trump's un-orthodox style, his personal mannerism etc. but the mass media find nothing redeeming and it has already been noted over 90% write unfavorable articles and all fall in the progressive radical camp and find sneering at "deplorables" part of their make-up.
The favorite soup is drinking their own bath water.
Finally:
Today Bernie came up with a brilliant idea. Tax payers should pay off all student loans. By tax payers he meant Wall Street and the wealthy.
I would make several comments.
First, though Bernie did not realize it he concluded the wealth generated by capitalism, not socialism, was his first target. In other words, capitalism should bail out socialism
Second, why stop at education debt. What about student car loans?
Third, by having an educated class free of debt think of the benefits to America. By creating more indebted students the benefits just keep on growing. In fact the more the indebted the wealthier we become based on his logic.
Fourth, Bernie needed to come up with another brilliant idea after proposing we pay for everyone's free health because it is only a few days before he has to debate Biden and Pocahontas and Bernie needs to prove to American voters what a smart and generous asshole he would be were he elected.
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Dick
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1)
Ocasio-Cortez Refuses Invite To Visit Concentration Camps With Holocaust Survivor
On Sunday, socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) declined an invitation from a Holocaust remembrance group to visit Nazi concentration camps with a Holocaust survivor, suggesting that it was part of a "far-right" scheme designed for "political gain."
Ocasio-Cortez made the remarks in response to a tweet from Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who was kicked off his congressional committees by Republican leaders after remarks he made about white nationalism.
In a tweet tagging Ocasio-Cortez and linking to a report from The Hill, King encouraged Ocasio-Cortez to accept the invite from the Holocaust remembrance group.
King wrote: ".@AOC I went to Auschwitz & Birkenau with Eddie Mausberg & Jonny Daniels with In the Depths. I went with a deep understanding of the Shoah and had a profound personal experience. Please accept their offer."
Ocasio-Cortez responded by saying she was rejecting the offer as she believed it was part of how "the far-right manipulates these moments for political gain."
Ocasio-Cortez wrote: "The last time you went on this trip it was reported that you also met w/ fringe Austrian neo-Nazi groups to talk shop. So I’m going to have to decline your invite. But thank you for revealing to all how transparently the far-right manipulates these moments for political gain."
It's important to note that King was not inviting her to visit the Nazi concentration camps with him but rather was encouraging her to accept the offer from the Holocaust remembrance group. The article from The Hill that King included in his tweet stated:
A Holocaust commemoration group on Friday invited Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to tour the Nazi death camp Auschwitz with a 93-year-old survivor.Jonny Daniels, the founder of From the Depths, wrote the open invitation to the progressive freshman asking her to participate in the educational tour during her summer recess from Congress.From the Depths president Edward Mosberg, a Holocaust survivor, would travel with her for the tour, which includes visits to the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen and Majdanek concentration camps.
"We at From The Depths, have brought over 100 international parliamentarians to visit the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination camps, parliamentarians from across the political spectrum, including over 20 Representatives of the United States Congress, both Republicans and Democrats alike," Daniels wrote in the invitation to Ocasio-Cortez. "From The Depths is the only foundation dealing with Holocaust memory, memorial and education run entirely by millennials, we feel that this would be great opportunity for you to learn more about this horrendous past, and understand how it impacts lives and education until today."
"In the invitation, Daniels wrote: "The opportunity you will have of visiting the German Nazi Concentration Camps along with Mr. Mosberg, a 93 year old survivor of history's most brutal genocidal regime, will enable you to become a witness of a witness, something that our generation will sadly be the last to do, as result of the fact that the survivors are passing away at an ever increasing rate," Daniels concluded. "We await your response and look forward to learning together with you about this painful history."
Our invitation sent to Congresswoman Cortez after her remarks this week...
"Dear Congresswoman Cortez
We at From The Depths, would like to invite you as our guest during your summer recess from The United Congress, to join us along with Holocaust Survivor, United States Citizen and President of From The Depths, Mr. Edward Mosberg on an educational tour, specifically built for legislators, of the German Nazi Concentration Camps. The educational tour will visit Mauthausen, Ausc...
See More
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2) When Normality Became Abnormal
By Victor Davis Hanson
By Victor Davis Hanson
;http://r20.rs6.net/tn.js ?f=001pYUMP- xhCfl9Y7jXfLnCawUgn3JkZDdOqAj3 YmJ99WwsuF7gDe5VfEF580JysGDNWf FhFg4cBGEBokRYQzmzj81EdMzdk1OO Ql__FZEg5UjNU_ q9q6hE3k5wXaLhcQ8bc31tDc73gMM- M3B9bu9akK4SzhvaIsFwv8Fh5VJcxu UnCDw9puxDSSTaPL-hyHDk&c= wmYIk- xfQVmzPD9iYRnhiYqVU7ayFl_ fHQygn8aeFOAZ0aGTt_BZGQ==&ch= 1Hw9Xlx_ OHn32XdMre2uqTSyKT2ZFMfhh9mXaE 1uKPpGb30wJ9wzww==> |
Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention.
Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.
Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.
No one wished to say that. Trump did. He canceled the flawed deal without a second thought.
Iran is furious, but in a far weaker—and eroding—strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest. So a desperate Tehran knows that it must make some show of defiance. Yet it accepts that if it were to launch a missile at a U.S. ship, hijack an American boat, or shoot down an American plane, the ensuing tit-for-tat retaliation might target the point of Iranian origin (the port that launched the ship, the airbase from which the plane took off, the silo from which the missile was launched) rather than the mere point of contact—and signal a serial stand-off 10-1 disproportionate response to every Iranian attack without ever causing a Persian Gulf war.
Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for elites to virtue signal their green bona fides while making no adjustments in their global managerial lifestyles—at best. At worst, it was a shake-down both to transfer assets from the industrialized West to the “developing world” and to dull Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China.
Not now. Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed convention. The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S. departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance to their own targeted goals.
Rich NATO allies either could not or would not pay their promised defense commitments to the alliance. To embarrass them into doing so was seen as heretical. No more.
Trump jawboned and ranted about the asymmetries. And more nations are increasing rather than decreasing their defense budgets.
The private consensus is that the NATO allies knew all along that they were exactly what Barack Obama once called “free riders” and justified that subsidization by ankle-biting the foreign policies of the United States—as if an uncouth America was lucky to underwrite such principled members. Again, no more fantasies.
China was fated to rule the world. Period. Whining about its systematic commercial cheating was supposedly merely delaying the inevitable or would have bad repercussions later on. Progressives knew the Communists put tens of thousands of people in camps, rounded up Muslims, and destroyed civil liberties, and yet in “woke” fashion tip-toed around criticizing the Other.
Trump then destroyed the mirage of China as a Westernizing aspirant to the family of nations. In a protracted tariff struggle, there are lots of countries in Asia that could produce cheap goods as readily as China, but far fewer countries like the United States that have money to be siphoned off in mercantilist trade deals, or the technology to steal, or the preferred homes and universities in which to invest.
The Palestinians were canonized as permanent refugees. The U.S. embassy could never safely move to the Israeli capital in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights were Syrian. Only a two-state solution requiring Israel to give back all the strategic border land it inherited when its defeated enemies sought to destroy it in five prior losing wars would bring peace. Not now.
The Palestinians for the last 50 years were always about as much refugees as the East Prussian Germans or the Egyptian Jews and Greeks that were cleansed from their ancestral homelands in the Middle East in the same period of turbulence as the birth of Israel.
“Occupied” land more likely conjures up Tibet and Cyprus not the West Bank, and persecuted Muslims are not found in Israel, but in China.
Suddenly Redeemable
An aging population, the veritable end to U.S. manufacturing and heavy industry, and an opioid epidemic meant that America needed to get used to stagnant 1 percent growth, a declining standard of living, a permanent large pool of the unemployed, an annual increasing labor non-participation rate, and a lasting rust belt of deplorables, irredeemables, clingers and “crazies” who needed to be analyzed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. At best, a middle-aged deplorable was supposed to learn to code or relocate to the Texas fracking fields. Perhaps not now.
In the last 30 months, the question of the Rust Belt has been reframed to why, with a great workforce, cheap energy, good administrative talent, and a business-friendly administration, cannot the United States make more of what it needs? Why, if trade deficits are irrelevant, do Germany, China, Japan, and Mexico find them so unpleasant? If unfettered trade is so essential, why do so many of our enemies and friends insist that we almost alone trade “fairly,” while they trade freely and unfairly? Why do not Germany and China argue that their vast global account surpluses are largely irrelevant?
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) assured us that the world would be suffocating under greenhouse gases within 12 years.
Doom-and-gloom prophecies of “peak” oil warned us that our oil reserves would dry up by the early 21st century. Former Vice President Al Gore warned us that our port cities would soon be underwater.
Economists claimed Saudi Arabia or Russia would one day control the world by opening and closing their oil spigots. Not now.
Three million more barrels of American oil are being produced per day just since Trump took office. New pipelines will ensure that the United States is not just the world’s greatest producer of natural gas but perhaps its largest exporter as well.
Trump blew up those prognostications and replaced them with an optimistic agenda that the working- and middle classes deserve affordable energy, that the United States could produce fossil fuels more cleanly, wisely, and efficiently than the Middle East, and that ensuring increased energy could revive places in the United States that were supposedly fossilized and irrelevant.
Normal is utilizing to the fullest extent a resource that can discourage military adventurism in the Middle East, provide jobs to the unemployed, and reduce the cost of living for the middle class; abnormal is listening to the progressive elite for whom spiking gasoline and power bills were a very minor nuisance.
Changing Roles
Open borders were our unspoken future. The best of the Chamber of Commerce Republicans felt that millions of illegal aliens might eventually break faith with the progressive party of entitlements; the worst of the open borders lot argued that cheap labor was more important than sovereignty and certainly more in their interests than any worry over the poor working classes of their own country. And so Republicans for the last 40 years joined progressives in ensuring that illegal immigration was mostly not measured, meritocratic, diverse, or lawful, but instead a means to serve a number of political agendas.
Most Americans demurred, but kept silent given the barrage of “racist,” “xenophobe,” and “nativist” cries that met any measured objection. Not so much now.
Few any longer claim that the southern border is not being overrun, much less that allowing a non-diverse million illegal aliens in six months to flood into the United States without audit is proof that “diversity is our strength.”
The Republican Party’s prior role was to slow down the inevitable trajectory to European socialism, the end of American exceptionalism, and homogenized globalized culture. Losing nobly in national elections was one way of keeping one’s dignity, weepy wounded-fawn style, while the progressive historical arc kept bending to our collective future. Rolling one’s eyes on Sunday talk shows as a progressive outlined the next unhinged agenda was proof of tough resistance.
Like it or not, now lines are drawn. Trump so unhinged the Left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and showed us what progressives had in store for America.
On one side in 2020 is socialism, “Medicare for All,” wealth taxes, top income tax rates of 70 or 80 or 90 percent, a desire for a Supreme Court full of “wise Latinas” like Sonia Sotomayor, insidious curtailment of the First and Second Amendments, open borders, blanket amnesties, reparations, judges as progressive legislators, permissible infanticide, abolition of student debt, elimination of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau and the Electoral College, voting rights for 16-year-olds and felons, and free college tuition.
On the other side is free-market capitalism but within a framework of fair rather than unfettered international trade, a smaller administrative state, less taxation and regulation, constitutionalist judges, more gas and oil, record low unemployment, 3-4 percent economic growth, and pressure on colleges to honor the Bill of Rights.
The New, New Normal
The choices are at least starker now. The strategy is not, as in 2008 and 2012, to offer a moderate slow-down of progressivism, but rather a complete repudiation of it.
One way is to see this as a collision between Trump, the proverbial bull, and the administrative state as a targeted precious china shop—with all the inevitable nihilistic mix-up of horns, hooves, and flying porcelain shards. But quite another is to conclude that what we recently used to think was abjectly abnormal twenty years ago had become not just “normal,” but so orthodoxly normal that even suggesting it was not was judged to be heretical and deserving of censure and worse.
The current normal correctives were denounced as abnormal—as if living in a sovereign state with secure borders, assuming that the law was enforced equally among all Americans, demanding that citizenship was something more than mere residence, and remembering that successful Americans, not their government, built their own businesses and lives is now somehow aberrant or perverse.
Trump’s political problem, then, may be that the accelerating aberration of 2009-2016 was of such magnitude that normalcy is now seen as sacrilege.
Weaponizing the IRS, unleashing the FBI to spy on political enemies and to plot the removal of an elected president, politicizing the CIA to help to warp U.S. politics, allying the Justice Department with the Democratic National Committee, and reducing FISA courts to rubber stamps for pursuing administration enemies became the new normal. Calling all that a near coup <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001pYUMP- xhCfl9Y7jXfLnCawUgn3JkZDdOqAj3 YmJ99WwsuF7gDe5VfDBMtx8RCCKUm8 uDOKei__cgpIU43E3z- 9Sa8MQbIgvnT_Bv5- OAfsCkGqLIPUrgc5URGb2D9BVkDj_ 8ZAmNaSflmLxu7DYd6ckeMXW60xCUz 2cJnkDlmhcN76yxwW5tJlkLIxjy7mS Ey0Vk7otm1TscmXlieZwFn- YNV8N4A0qUVoCAEnk7wlYG2Kr44I2P Gw==&c=wmYIk- xfQVmzPD9iYRnhiYqVU7ayFl_ fHQygn8aeFOAZ0aGTt_BZGQ==&ch= 1Hw9Xlx_ OHn32XdMre2uqTSyKT2ZFMfhh9mXaE 1uKPpGb30wJ9wzww==> was abnormal.
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Let us hope that most Americans still prefer the abnormal remedy to the normal pathology.
3) The market has hit a record high. Xi and Trump appear to agree they both need a deal, and it is highly likely tariffs get postponed for 60 days. Xi comes with a proposal to get Kim in line and agreeing to a nuke deal as part of the China-US deal. Canada passes USMCA next week, and then Pelosi has no choice but to bring it to a vote in July with no changes. Trudeau told her no changes will be accepted. I presume Mexico has said the same. The Fed made it clear there will be likely be a rate cut soon. Interest rates remain near historic lows, and maybe drop below 2%. The big banks passed their stress tests well and are judged to be able to handle any crisis that may happen, unlike 2008. In July, the IG report is issued, and then later Barr issues his report, and maybe indictments. At that point the Dems are toast. Boris Johnson, who is actually American by birth, becomes PM and pushes Brexit through by fall. Very probably hard Brexit. If all of this occurs, a big if, then the stock market takes off to new record highs. If the China talks fail next week, then the market tanks. This next week is everything. The huge unknown is Iran, and do they exceed the JCPOA limits. If so, all bets are off. There is a story that the real reason Trump called off the attack is there was hard intelligence that US determined there was no final approval by the ayatollah for the downing of the drone and Trump knew that. Maybe.
There is also a story that we launched a major cyberattack instead. We may never know. Maybe the Europeans said wait until we see if they go over the enrichment limit, then we are with you in a week. We don’t know what is really happening in this whole situation, what secret communications there are, what US intelligence knows, or not. It is clear that if Iran does anything like this again, then an attack will happen because then it is not a rogue general. This is another separate issue that will play out over the next week. Meantime the Iranian economy is crashing. With the added sanctions this week, it will crash further. Just think, if Obama had continued the sanctions, and ramped them up instead of doing that insane deal bailing them out, giving them $150 billion plus $1.7 billion cash, and a 10 year path to the bomb, how much better things would be in Syria, and Iraq and the Gulf area, as well as the safety of Israel. If you do not get it how stupid Obama and Kerry were, then consider that-Iran might have crashed by now, and the whole world was with us 3 years ago. It is one of history’s tragic, stupid deals that will, in the end, cost thousands of lives, and changed history for the far worse. But the press will never acknowledge that.
A week from now the market will be far higher, or far lower. My bet is higher, but nobody knows. It is a big bet. Oil prices are likely to decline again now that the immediate crisis is past. It is indicative that even in the face of imminent war in the Gulf, oil prices did not get above $58.00. That suggests that we are very likely to continue to have prices in the mid-fifty dollar range. Good news for the economy and consumers. Clearly the Iran confrontation is far from over, and the next 7 days will determine if they go over the enrichment limit. If so then the whole world will be with the US against Iran. There is nothing Putin can do to bail them out. With heavy new sanctions going in place, Iran will be economically crushed. Then we will see what happens if they exceed to nuke limits. By not launching the attack Trump gave the EU time and an opening to pressure Iran. If they exceed the limits now the EU will have a much easier time reinstituting sanctions.
The Fed can boost the economy in more ways than just lowering rates. As I have pointed out, they can slow the resale of securities which will keep tens of billions more liquidity into the system which encourages lending. They also can lower the reserve rate which will mean banks will keep less on reserve with the Fed and will put that cash into greater circulation. All of this helps boost lending. It is likely that if Iran does not do any other bad acts in the gulf in the near term the stock market will go higher from here at least until the Fed July meeting, and then if there is no cut, it will probably go lower. I continue my all equities strategy which so far has increased my portfolio value YTD 26%. That is based on almost no trades other than to change out of two stocks into ones I felt were more promising of relatively bigger increases over time. One thing I have found is that some stocks I traded out of when they seemed to be going nowhere, was a mistake. My initial belief in the long term growth of them turned out to be correct, and in a couple of cases I would have done very well had I not sold them, ILMN being a prime example-it more than doubled since I sold it. If a stock is one you believe is very solid, and has strong management and finances, and top quality products, hold it. We will see what the next week at the G 20 brings-it is key. Clearly Xi is intending to use N Korea as a bargaining chip. Something is happening there we have not heard about yet.
One thing I find very disappointing is how some very smart, successful and wealthy friends, hate Trump so much they have lost all attachment to facts, and just spout CNN and Dem talking points. One friend who is highly successful and wealthy, even said he would vote for Pocahontas over Trump because Trump lies and is corrupt taking profits from his hotel where foreigners stay, ignoring that the hotel paid those profits to Treasury. He repeated the left talking points- Biden is ahead in polls -I mentioned -so was Hilary on election night. Trump lied 8,000 times, Obama did not lie about Benghazi or anything else, Obama did not have a scandal-brushing off 4 dead Americans in Benghazi, ISIS was formed before Obama came to office, Obama is the one responsible for the booming economy, etc. It boggles my mind that when I point out hard objective sourced data and publicly known facts, they get dismissed as “not true- you got that from Hannity”- who I never watch. I said look I up yourself, which was rejected as not reliable. In short, there is no willingness to even research or accept simple objective data facts like GDP growth since Q2 2016 which was declining until Trump was in office . That is how bad things, are and how the press has brainwashed even very smart people to think Pocahontas is better for the economy and the country than Trump. I left my friend with the advice, he better get used to Trump as president for 6 more years.
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