Puerto Rico - All Trump's Fault! Tax Simplification Will Give Democrats Another Opportunity To Blame Trump. Hefner Dies At 91.

This was on Facebook from Dagny's mother:

Anyone have a Puerto Rico flag I can borrow next weekend? Dagny wants to do a lemonade stand and send all the proceeds to Puerto Rico so I want to help her really make it a nice event. Anyone else interested in joining in, I think it's a great idea.

Hope our Government does not shut her down!

Meanwhile, everyone is dumping on Trump regarding the effort to restore Puerto Rico. They forget, or choose to forget, before the latest hurricane hit the Island the liberal government brought it to its bankruptcy  "knees" because of excessive pensions and spending.  Also, do not forget the entire island is without power so one has to believe it is difficult to communicate.

The problem is not as much related to failure to send necessary supplies but the logistical inability to get sufficient drivers to get them trucked and delivered.  But, since Trump beat Hillary, is boorish and vulgar at times and the mass media are mostly against him, because they are in the pocket of Democrats, everything he does will be micro scoped and criticized. Perhaps, when people begin to look more at what he does than what he says Trump will be judged more objectively.

In terms of Obama those who fawned over him focused more on his words and less on what he did.

As for myself, I still believe words are cheap. If I thought otherwise, I would try and charge for my memos.

and


What’s the secret to success? You can find a plethora of books, seminars, and gurus that promise to let you in on this “secret.” But all you really need to know can be found in this week’s video. Watch as NBC Sunday Night Football’s sideline reporter Michele Tafoya reveals how she got to the top of her profession – and how the formula she applied can work for you, too.

Finally;

If we get a tax cut and simplification those who have a vested interest in attacking Trump will claim the benefits accrue only to the wealthy. Once again, logic should dictate those who pay the most generally receive the most when it comes to cuts. Also, there has seldom been a tax cut that failed because when tax payers receive more income they spend more.

Any tax relief will, initially, increase the deficit but the administration hopes, and bets, the assumed economic recovery will produce more income to the government. If GDP does grow beyond Obama's lame 2%, every 1% rise beyond 3% should accomplish Trump's claim.
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Democrat Trump/collusion boomerangs and hits them in the face. (See 1 below.)
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Hugh Hefner's passing, at age 91, proves being around naked women is not dangerous to one's life. (See 2 below.)
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A dour view regarding N Korea. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)RUTHFULLY YOURS

THE RIGHT NEWS, FRONT AND CENTER

Narrative Fail: Russia Facebook Ads Showed Support For Black Lives Matter, Clinton By Debra Heine

By Ruth King 

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/09/28/narrative-fail-russia-facebook-ads-showed-support-black-lives-matter-clinton/

The Democrat’s Trump/Russia collusion narrative took a major hit this week when Facebook leaks about Russia-linked ads forced disappointed Dems to walk back their anti-Trump messaging. Congressional leaders, in the meantime, have reportedly renewed their focus on team Obama’s election year political espionage.

The anti-Trumpers had a promising story-line — “Trump and Russia colluded on Facebook” — that had to be downgraded to merely “Russia sought to create incivility and chaos” when it was discovered that the Russia-linked group in question promoted issues and groups on both sides of the political spectrum.

According to Facebook’s investigators, the company sold up to $150,000 worth of ads to a Russian government-affiliated troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency which bought the ads through hundreds of phony Facebook pages and accounts.

The intelligence community describes the Internet Research Agency as “a state-funded organization that blogs and tweets on behalf of the Kremlin.”

At least one of the over 3,000 Russia-bought ads, which Facebook will soon turn over to Congress, promoted Black Lives Matter and specifically targeted audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, CNN reported, Wednesday.

The Black Lives Matter ad appeared on Facebook at some point in late 2015 or early 2016, the sources said. The sources said it appears the ad was meant to appear both as supporting Black Lives Matter but also could be seen as portraying the group as threatening to some residents of Baltimore and Ferguson.

New descriptions of the Russian-bought ads shared with CNN suggest that the apparent goal of the Russian buyers was to amplify political discord and fuel an atmosphere of incivility and chaos, though not necessarily to promote one candidate or cause over another. Facebook’s review of Russian efforts on its platform focused on a timeframe from June 2015 to May 2017.

These ranged from posts promoting Black Lives Matter to posts promoting gun rights and the Second Amendment to posts warning about what they said was the threat undocumented immigrants posed to American democracy. Beyond the election, Russians have sought to raise questions about western democracies.

According to the Washington Post, other ads showed support for Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

“This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst. “It shows they the level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues.”

Republican Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman of the committee, said Tuesday that there’s “no evidence yet” that Russians and Trump officials colluded on the Facebook ads, but said “it’s an area the committee continues to investigate.”

While the Trump/Russia collusion investigation ran into a speed bump, this week, the unmasking probe gained steam.

Congressional republicans have turned their attention to team Obama’s efforts to obtain highly classified intelligence information on Trump and his allies before the inauguration.

U.S officials familiar with the situation told the Washington Free Beacon that Obama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee “place renewed attention on the investigation” into why highly classified intelligence community reports were obtained and then leaked to the press.

Congressional leaders are also reportedly interested in finding out why former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power and other senior Obama officials made an unusually high number of unmasking requests during the final months of the Obama administration.

“It was understood in the Bush administration that unmasking was out of the ordinary; it was something rare that you might sometimes do but needed a special and easily defensible reason for doing,” said a former official who served in several Republican administrations. “You could not ask out of mere curiosity, nor obviously for political reasons. There needed to be a clear, direct national security justification.”

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2) Hugh Hefner’s Legacy Is About More Than Sex

Hefner’s life will be derided as profane, but his work celebrates the sexual complementarity that has bound men and women together since the dawn of time. By Ben Domenech

The passing of Playboy creator Hugh Hefner at the impressive age of 91 marks the end of a life that had an enormous impact on media, culture, and sex. Hefner will be for the most part hailed this week as having a legacy of progressive advancement of sexual mores, with nostalgic references to the culture of free love and plaudits as a champion in the libertine battle against prudish Bible thumpers. But in fact, Hefner’s legacy is much more complicated than that, and much of Playboy’s struggles in recent years have more to do with the persistence of an underlying conservatism and traditionalism in view of sex roles and the nature of manhood. The inheritors of his magazine have attempted in awkward fashion to shove the now-problematic aspects of Hefner’s worldview out of view – including, in a most obvious fashion, the very thing he was known for in the first place. But it turned out that yes, the magazine still needed pictures of naked ladies to sell.

Hefner’s bet in 1953 was an salacious one at the time, but now it seems practically quaint. Hefner saw art in the naked female form. He saw the value in a purposeful life, but preferred it be more hedonistic. He liked fine tobacco and strong cocktails and stylish dress and fast cars, all while permanently surrounded by a habitat of gorgeous and willing women. Hefner was creating a brand out of thin air, and his publication was a presentation. It was a thumb in the eye of contemporary mores. But it was also a promise of a lifetime of escapist responsibility-free fun, and that if you followed his advice about being an American James Bond without the gadgets, you too could get that girl.

Along the way, he built a magazine that became known for excellent interviews and feature pieces written by some of the best writers alive. Among them was William F. Buckley, who wrote frequently for Playboy on all manner of topics. The magazine featured his 9,000 word debate with Norman Mailer, an 8,500 word essay on Richard Nixon in China, and writings on everything from communism to Y2K. James Rosen has a lengthy piece on the relationship between WFB and Hefner here.

Why did Bill Buckley, if he found the Playboy Philosophy so abhorrent, write for Hugh Hefner’s magazine so often and for so long? This question Buckley answered by noting that “the best writers in the world publish in Playboy”; but this alone did not explain the heresy, for the same was true, he acknowledged, of the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s (for which he also wrote, though far less frequently). There were also Playboy’s five million readers and, best of all, Buckley quipped, it was “the fastest way to communicate with my seventeen-year-old son.

(Buckley managed to conclude his 1970 interview with the magazine with the line “I know that my Redeemer liveth”, and he took obvious joy in subverting their aims in their own pages.)

Hefner embodied a culture of libertinism and excessive excess, providing his readers a larger-than-life example of what one could do, if not necessarily what one should do. He also showed how the American entrepreneurial idea can be applied: with a thought and a little gumption, one can build an empire, and even if the magazine sales have dipped and fewer people read it for the articles, that sparkly little bunny with a bow tie slapped on all manner of product is as profitable as ever.

It is striking to consider the problems within Hefner’s throwback approach to sex and sexual relations, his obvious tensions in relations with the changing attitudes of modern feminism, and an enduring preference for free speech in all things. Hefner’s creation now seems less like a courageous progressive middle finger to the modern establishment, and more like the wishful thinking of an adolescent in grown-ups clothing. The vulgar side of what he did at the time seems positively quaint compared to the images and offerings that surround us today. You will find more explicit pornographic scenes in an hour of watching original HBO programming than you can find in a decade of Playboys, and images of women as scantily clad as his original purchased shots of Norma Jean are on the covers of magazines next to the Altoids in the supermarket. The confusion about where prudishness remains appropriate extends to CNN, which apologized to viewers recently for a guest’s use of “the B-double-O-B-S word”, but will go right along in highlighting the reaction to Hefner’s death from women he made famous for showing theirs off.

The Playboy Philosophy was inherently a part of the sexual revolution, yes, and Buckley was right to critique it. But it is apparent in retrospect that Hefner was not, as he perceived it, the captain of that revolution. What separates him from the more lurid members of his industry is an appreciation for manners and a particular form of American masculinity: he advised you to be a gentleman, not a cad, in your pursuit of the centerfold or the girl next door. As Lileks put it on Twitter yesterday, “Few men wanted to be Hef. They wanted to be the guy Hef was happy showed up at his party.”

Hefner’s death comes at a time of deep confusion for the country about all sorts of things sexual in nature. Embedded in his work was the idea that what we appreciate in one another isn’t sexless. It’s deeply rooted in our differences. Without those differences, sex itself becomes much less interesting. So while he was derided as selling prurience and stereotypes to the profane and stereotypical, he was actually celebrating the sexual complementarity that has bound men and women together since the dawn of time. The fact this idea has become a problematic one in some pockets of American culture is one Hefner would doubtless find absurd – he built an entire empire on it, after all.

Should you instruct your sons to follow his example, or your daughters to follow the example of those in his orbit? No, obviously not. But his joie de vivre, his appreciation of the beautiful, the finer things life has to offer? As Walker Percy wrote in Love in the Ruins: “What does a man live for but to have a girl, use his mind, practice his trade, drink a drink, read a book, and watch the martins wing it for the Amazon and the three-fingered sassafras turn red in October? Art Immelmann is right. Man is not made for suffering, night sweats, and morning terrors.” RIP.

Ben Domenech is the publisher of The Federalist. Sign up for a free trial of his daily newsletter, The Transom.

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3)

Prepare for the Worst With North Korea

By Matthew R. Costlow

Failure is an option, especially when it comes to U.S. policy towards North Korea. Decades of diplomatic efforts have failed to de-nuclearize and pacify Kim Jong Un’s regime while parallel efforts to deter small-scale conventional and large-scale cyber-attacks have also failed.

Despite these failures, however, U.S. policy-makers appear to still be enamored with the idea of getting up, dusting themselves off, and going for one more spin on the North Korean nuclear merry-go-round: provocation, emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, a new round of sanctions, failure of diplomatic talks, provocation, ad infinitum.

There are ways to break this cycle and achieve some form of success, options which the Trump administration appears to be considering.

However, while the Trump administration hopes for success in these endeavors, it should not forget to prepare for failure. Previous failures in U.S. and allied diplomacy and deterrence have led to dozens of deaths and millions of dollars in damages. Future failures could lead to the death of millions and damages measured in trillions of dollars.

Paradoxically, preparing for failure, in either diplomacy or deterrence, is the greatest way to increase the probability of success. If Kim Jong Un believes the United States can mitigate or significantly contain the consequences of a failure of diplomacy or deterrence, he may be less likely to initiate a provocation in the first place.

So what does preparing for failure look like in U.S. policy?

To begin, U.S. and allied policy-makers must examine why deterrence has failed, or nearly failed, in the past. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara both lobbied for the use of Soviet nuclear weapons against the United States to advance the cause of the “socialist camp.” The Cuban leaders were rational in their own atypical non-Western way but were willing, even eager, to die for their cause. Kim Jong Un may not be all that different. His provocations may look crazy to the Western mind, but coldly rational to him.

The difficulty of deterrence is that it does not work in the same way universally, considering the diverse set of cultural values that each foreign leader holds. Demonstrating this reality in an academic setting, researchers in comparative psychology recently showed East Asians and Westerners the same picture for a short period of time and then asked the subjects what they remembered about the picture. The two groups, who saw the exact same picture, gave very different answers, in part, due to their cultural values which compelled them to focus on some things in the picture and not others.

This same dynamic recently manifest itself on the Korean peninsula. A few weeks ago, the U.S. military made the decision to withhold U.S. bombers from bilateral exercises with the South Koreans to signal North Korea its willingness to de-escalate the situation. Days later North Korea tested its largest-yield nuclear weapon ever. In the words of General Vincent K. Brooks, Commander of U.S. Forces Korea: “Apparently the changes in the exercise did not matter.” Both sides saw the same picture but gave different answers.

In fact, there is very good evidence that North Korean leaders hold dramatically different cultural values than the United States, namely, their elevation and devout protection of their leader’s “honor.” U.S. leaders regularly accept offenses to their honor as the price of politics. However, East Asian cultures in general, and North Korea, in particular, hold honor in much higher regard and are willing to go to greater lengths to defend it. This has major implications for the failure of deterrence and diplomacy.

Recognizing that deterrence and diplomacy can fail, the United States should take political and military steps now in order to lessen the effects of failure.

Should military deterrence fail, for instance, the United States must be able to confidently intercept North Korean nuclear missiles at all feasible ranges. This means Congress must fund further R&D on missile defense systems, strengthen joint-technology development with Japan, accelerate work on the “multi-object kill vehicle,” and improve radar and satellite detection capabilities. Hardening military bases on Guam and Okinawa would similarly signal the futility of attacking U.S. forces.

Should diplomacy fail, the United States should broaden its sanctions beyond North Korea to any country that significantly supports North Korea economically. Begin with the smaller supporters like Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Namibia, and Uganda. Then gradually increase to larger supporters like Iran, Russia, and finally, China.

In addition, the United States should support the greater use of naval interdiction missions under the Proliferation Security Initiative and encourage states not party to the Initiative, like China, to set aside political opposition for security cooperation.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have pledgedto hold North Korea accountable for its actions, using all the diplomatic and military means at their disposal. The world wishes them the best. But lest they become too reliant on hoping for the best, they should also prepare for the worst.

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Matthew R. Costlow is an analyst at the National Institute for Public Policy and a Ph.D. student at George Mason University.

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