Amb. Bolton - Feb 19th. Fake News - Trump's Vendetta Against Obama? Rino's Have A Problem. Male - Female Scouts and Sex.

What is there about the letter "H?"  Hell. Hurricane, Harvey, Heffner

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Food for thought. (See 1 below.)
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Just more evidence that unfunded pensions will bring us down. (See 2 below.)

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Tables are filling fast for Amb. John Bolton's appearance on Feb 19, at SIRC"s Presidential Dinner, Plantation Club.

You do not have to be a Landings Resident to Attend.  The cost for the dinner and meeting is $150 PP.

This is going to be a very informative evening and I urge you come.  If you have questions contact me and I will forward you to the correct person.

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We know what we are doing but ain't sure as to why. (See 3 below.)

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The new shtick used by Democrats, who still cannot swallow the fact that Hillary lost and Obama's policies were based on lies and mostly unconstitutional disasters, is that Trump has a personal vendetta against Obama.

It is obvious Trump does not think Obama's policies were right for the nation.  I have not asked him what he thinks about Obama, as a person, and will never get the chance.  Unlike the mass media types, I will not guess and report as fake news..

Meanwhile, my take on why Rino's are fearful of Trump, is a mixture of acceptable concern but more cover for their own failures and feckless behaviour. They campaign one way and then change their modus operandi.

Trump is an impatient builder/ doer and is trying to keep his campaign promises because he believes they are what will "Make "America Great Again." Rinos obviously feel threatened by Trump's agenda and are resisting at, what could peril, their own political status and Trump's re-election.  This also causes them severe angst. 

It is obvious to most, Obama operated as a monarch and Trump is acting more in a constitutional manner. (See 4 below.)

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I asked a friend and sporadic fellow memo reader what he thought about my comments regarding the previous Noonan and Coker postings.  He said I could post his response: "I am basically in agreement with you. Maybe 90%. 

What troubles me is this part: Does he truly “understand the special meaning of what it is to be an American?” I’m not sure.

To me, cutting refugee admissions suggests maybe not. Refugees love America fiercely and have brought the nation so much. As to the Constitution, he seems never to have read it. On the other hand, his court appointments are spectacular, and he has fully kept to the law the way Obama did not. 

I think he is still seduced a bit by Bannon’s view of America, which I think is constipated and bigoted and wrong; same with Stephen Miller, who remains on staff and has what is to me a horribly sick view of immigration.

But that said I agree he is not the ogre the MSM presents to us, and the coverage is shockingly biased, and he is doing a lot of good. "

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A few more comments.

The Boy - Girl Scout issue is simply another push by strong women issue groups that want to press their agenda, ie. there is no difference between the sexes.Of course there are significant differences in virtually every manifestation but once these groups accept nature, facts, statistics and most any other measurement/metric  etc. they lose their reason for existence.

I once spoke to God and he confirmed that he intended there to be differences and checked with his wife and she told him she agreed.

And

The Boy - Girl Scout matter brings to mind the fact that Hollywood may respond to Harvey's behaviour as they have because their pocket books and public viewing were at stake but sex will always be a constant and I seriously doubt Harvey's conduct can be eliminated.  What is likely to happen is, those engaged might now run the risk of sooner public exposure. .

.I seriously doubt the Wilbur Mills water fountain occurrence will not re-surface time and again.  

Why do I believe this?  Because Boys and girls are different and differences and curiosity attracts.  Not an overwhelmingly brilliant thought but probably an accurate one. 

Since same sex attraction has also come out of the closet this simply compounds the issue.

What do you think?

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Dick

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1) Is ‘Classical Liberalism’ Conservative?

Trump didn’t divide the right. Centuries-old philosophical divisions have re-emerged

By

Yoram Hazony

American conservatism is having something of an identity crisis. Most conservatives supported Donald Trump last November. But many prominent conservative intellectuals—journalists, academics and think-tank personalities—have entrenched themselves in bitter opposition. Some have left the Republican Party, while others are waging guerrilla warfare against a Republican administration. Longtime friendships have been ended and resignations tendered. Talk of establishing a new political party alternates with declarations that Mr. Trump will be denied the GOP nomination in 2020.

Those in the “Never Trump” camp say the cause of the split is the president—that he’s mentally unstable, morally unspeakable, a leftist populist, a rightist authoritarian, a danger to the republic. One prominent Republican told me he is praying for Mr. Trump to have a brain aneurysm so the nightmare can end.

But the conservative unity that Never Trumpers seek won’t be coming back, even if the president leaves office prematurely. An apparently unbridgeable ideological chasm is opening between two camps that were once closely allied. Mr. Trump’s rise is the effect, not the cause, of this rift.

There are two principal causes: first, the increasingly rigid ideology conservative intellectuals have promoted since the end of the Cold War; second, a series of events—from the failed attempt to bring democracy to Iraq to the implosion of Wall Street—that have made the prevailing conservative ideology seem naive and reckless to the broader conservative public.

A good place to start thinking about this is a 1989 essay in the National Interest by Charles Krauthammer. The Cold War was coming to an end, and Mr. Krauthammer proposed it should be supplanted by what he called “Universal Dominion” (the title of the essay): America was going to create a Western “super-sovereign” that would establish peace and prosperity throughout the world. The cost would be “the conscious depreciation not only of American sovereignty, but of the notion of sovereignty in general.”

William Kristol and Robert Kagan presented a similar view in their 1996 essay “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” in Foreign Affairs, which proposed an American “benevolent global hegemony” that would have “preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain.”

Then, as now, conservative commentators insisted that the world should want such an arrangement because the U.S. knows best: The American way of politics, based on individual liberties and free markets, is the right way for human beings to live everywhere. Japan and Germany, after all, were once-hostile authoritarian nations that had flourished after being conquered and acquiescing in American political principles. With the collapse of communism, dozens of countries—from Eastern Europe to East Asia to Latin America—seemed to need, and in differing degrees to be open to, American tutelage of this kind. As the bearer of universal political truth, the U.S. was said to have an obligation to ensure that every nation was coaxed, maybe even coerced, into adopting its principles.

Any foreign policy aimed at establishing American universal dominion faces considerable practical challenges, not least because many nations don’t want to live under U.S. authority. But the conservative intellectuals who have set out to promote this Hegelian world revolution must also contend with a problem of different kind: Their aim cannot be squared with the political tradition for which they are ostensibly the spokesmen.

For centuries, Anglo-American conservatism has favored individual liberty and economic freedom. But as the Oxford historian of conservatism Anthony Quinton emphasized, this tradition is empiricist and regards successful political arrangements as developing through an unceasing process of trial and error. As such, it is deeply skeptical of claims about universal political truths. The most important conservative figures—including John Fortescue, John Selden, Montesquieu, Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton —believed that different political arrangements would be fitting for different nations, each in keeping with the specific conditions it faces and traditions it inherits. What works in one country can’t easily be transplanted.

On that view, the U.S. Constitution worked so well because it preserved principles the American colonists had brought with them from England. The framework—the balance between the executive and legislative branches, the bicameral legislature, the jury trial and due process, the bill of rights—was already familiar from the English constitution. Attempts to transplant Anglo-American political institutions in places such as Mexico, Nigeria, Russia and Iraq have collapsed time and again, because the political traditions needed to maintain them did not exist. Even in France, Germany and Italy, representative government failed repeatedly into the mid-20th century (recall the collapse of France’s Fourth Republic in 1958), and has now been shunted aside by a European Union whose notorious “democracy deficit” reflects a continuing inability to adopt Anglo-American constitutional norms.

The “universal dominion” agenda is flatly contradicted by centuries of Anglo-American conservative political thought. This may be one reason that some post-Cold War conservative intellectuals have shifted to calling themselves “classical liberals.” Last year Paul Ryan insisted: “I really call myself a classical liberal more than a conservative.” Mr. Kristol tweeted in August: “Conservatives could ‘rebrand’ as liberals. Seriously. We’re for liberal democracy, liberal world order, liberal economy, liberal education.”

What is “classical liberalism,” and how does it differ from conservatism? As Quinton pointed out, the liberal tradition descends from Hobbes and Locke, who were not empiricists but rationalists: Their aim was to deduce universally valid political principles from self-evident axioms, as in mathematics.

In his “Second Treatise on Government” (1689), Locke asserts that universal reason teaches the same political truths to all human beings; that all individuals are by nature “perfectly free” and “perfectly equal”; and that obligation to political institutions arises only from the consent of the individual. From these assumptions, Locke deduces a political doctrine that he supposes must hold good in all times and places.

The term “classical liberal” came into use in 20th-century America to distinguish the supporters of old-school laissez-faire from the welfare-state liberalism of figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt. Modern classical liberals, inheriting the rationalism of Hobbes and Locke, believe they can speak authoritatively to the political needs of every human society, everywhere. In his seminal work, “Liberalism” (1927), the great classical-liberal economist Ludwig von Mises thus advocates a “world super-state really deserving of the name,” which will arise if we “succeed in creating throughout the world . . . nothing less than unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions.”

Friedrich Hayek, the leading classical-liberal theorist of the 20th century, likewise argued, in a 1939 essay, for replacing independent nations with a world-wide federation: “The abrogation of national sovereignties and the creation of an effective international order of law is a necessary complement and the logical consummation of the liberal program.”

Classical liberalism thus offers ground for imposing a single doctrine on all nations for their own good. It provides an ideological basis for an American universal dominion.

By contrast, Anglo-American conservatism historically has had little interest in putatively self-evident political axioms. Conservatives want to learn from experience what actually holds societies together, benefits them and destroys them. That empiricism has persuaded most Anglo-American conservative thinkers of the importance of traditional Protestant institutions such as the independent national state, biblical religion and the family.

As an English Protestant, Locke could have endorsed these institutions as well. But his rationalist theory provides little basis for understanding their role in political life. Even today liberals are plagued by this failing: The rigidly Lockean assumptions of classical-liberal writers such as Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand place the nation, the family and religion outside the scope of what is essential to know about politics and government. Students who grow up reading these brilliant writers develop an excellent grasp of how an economy works. But they are often marvelously ignorant about much else, having no clue why a flourishing state requires a cohesive nation, or how such bonds are established through family and religious ties.

The differences between the classical-liberal and conservative traditions have immense consequences for policy. Establishing democracy in Egypt or Iraq looks doable to classical liberals because they assume that human reason is everywhere the same, and that a commitment to individual liberties and free markets will arise rapidly once the benefits have been demonstrated and the impediments removed. Conservatives, on the other hand, see foreign civilizations as powerfully motivated—for bad reasons as well as good ones—to fight the dissolution of their way of life and the imposition of American values.

Integrating millions of immigrants from the Middle East also looks easy to classical liberals, because they believe virtually everyone will quickly see the advantages of American (or European) ways and accept them upon arrival. Conservatives recognize that large-scale assimilation can happen only when both sides are highly motivated to see it through. When that motivation is weak or absent, conservatives see an unassimilated migration, resulting in chronic mutual hatred and violence, as a perfectly plausible outcome.

Since classical liberals assume reason is everywhere the same, they see no great danger in “depreciating” national independence and outsourcing power to foreign bodies. American and British conservatives see such schemes as destroying the unique political foundation upon which their traditional freedoms are built.

Liberalism and conservatism had been opposed political positions since the day liberal theorizing first appeared in England in the 17th century. During the 20th-century battles against totalitarianism, necessity brought their adherents into close alliance. Classical liberals and conservatives fought together, along with communists, against Nazism. After 1945 they remained allies against communism. Over many decades of joint struggle, their differences were relegated to a back burner, creating a “fusionist” movement (as William F. Buckley’s National Review called it) in which one and all saw themselves as “conservatives.”

But since the fall of the Berlin Wall, circumstances have changed. Margaret Thatcher’s ouster from power in 1990 marked the end of serious resistance in Britain to the coming European “super-sovereign.” Within a few years the classical liberals’ agenda of universal dominion was the only game in town—ascendant not only among American Republicans and British Tories but even among center-left politicians such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

Only it didn’t work. China, Russia and large portions of the Muslim world resisted a “new world order” whose express purpose was to bring liberalism to their countries. The attempt to impose a classical-liberal regime in Iraq by force, followed by strong-arm tactics aimed at bringing democracy to Egypt and Libya, led to the meltdown of political order in these states as well as in Syria and Yemen. Meanwhile, the world banking crisis made a mockery of classical liberals’ claim to know how to govern a world-wide market and bring prosperity to all. The shockingly rapid disintegration of the American family once again raised the question of whether classical liberalism has the resources to answer any political question outside the economic sphere.

Brexit and Mr. Trump’s rise are the direct result of a quarter-century of classical-liberal hegemony over the parties of the right. Neither Mr. Trump nor the Brexiteers were necessarily seeking a conservative revival. But in placing a renewed nationalism at the center of their politics, they shattered classical liberalism’s grip, paving the way for a return to empiricist conservatism. Once you start trying to understand politics by learning from experience rather than by deducing your views from 17th-century rationalist dogma, you never know what you may end up discovering.

Mr. Hazony is president of the Jerusalem-based Herzl Institute. His book “The Virtue of Nationalism” will be published next year by Basic.

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2) Does New Jersey’s Next Governor Want to Live in Connecticut?

The Garden State should learn from Hartford’s bad example: You can’t tax your way to prosperity. 

By Regina Egea and Stephen Eide

No matter what this year’s gubernatorial candidates may say, painless solutions to New Jersey’s fiscal challenges don’t exist. The state’s budget may be balanced on a “cash” basis, but a massive structural deficit lurks beneath. New Jersey’s property taxes, already the highest in the nation, are being driven up further by the state’s pension burden and escalating health-care costs for government workers.

Some politicians seem to think New Jersey can tax its way to budgetary stability. At a debate this week in Newark, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Phil Murphy, pledged to spend more on education and to “fully fund our pension obligations.” But he refused to say whether he would extend a soon-to-expire 2% cap on raises for firefighters and police, even though it is credited with keeping property taxes in check. Polls show Mr. Murphy is leading his Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, by double digits. But just taxing more would risk making New Jersey’s fiscal woes even worse.

A useful comparison is Connecticut, which has tried to tax its way out of a similar set of problems. The two states have much in common: a relatively low poverty rate, high levels of personal income, a dependence on New York City, and unsustainable pension costs. The Pew Charitable Trusts ranks New Jersey and Connecticut as having among the worst-funded pensions in the nation.

The difference is that while New Jersey has held the line on taxes lately, Connecticut has enacted three substantial tax increases since 2009. They haven’t solved the state’s problems. Deficits have continued to recur, and Connecticut lawmakers are arguing even now about how to close a $3.5 billion gap for the next two fiscal years.

But the tax increases do appear to have dampened Connecticut’s economy. Only this past June did the state finally regain the private-sector jobs it lost during the Great Recession, more than three years after the nation as a whole did, and over a year after New Jersey. Still, big business is fleeing Connecticut: General Electric and Aetna are moving their corporate headquarters elsewhere. The latter was an especially hard blow, given that Aetna was founded in Hartford more than 150 years ago and helped turn the city into an insurance hub. “The state’s persistent financial woes and refusal to recalibrate to 21st-century realities have been pushing out people and businesses for years,” the Hartford Courant lamented.

Although Connecticut has gotten more responsible in recent years about making its pension payments, officials have had to resort to questionable fiscal maneuvers. Early this year, Connecticut restructured the long-term payment schedule for its State Employees Retirement System in a way that added at least $14 billion in costs after 2032. As for the other major pension system, which covers teachers, Gov. Dannel Malloy has proposed shifting onto cities and towns hundreds of millions in annual costs that today are borne by the state.

Connecticut has found that taxing wealthy residents has limits. Although the top income-tax rate has risen from 5% to 6.99% since 2009, the state has also found it necessary to tap the middle class. Lawmakers raised income taxes on filers making as little as $50,000. Property taxes are already the second highest in the nation, but they’ll go even higher if Mr. Malloy’s plan to shift teacher pension costs goes through.

New Jersey is grasping at the same straws. During the current fiscal year, the state’s pension contribution is $2.5 billion, only about half the amount actuarially recommended. The so-called millionaire’s tax, a proposal Gov. Chris Christie has vetoed several times since taking office in 2010, will no doubt make a comeback if Mr. Murphy is elected. Yet it would bring in only an estimated $600 million a year. Other ideas for filling the gap, such as taxing marijuana, still fall far short of what New Jersey needs.

Of course, more revenue is not New Jersey’s only option. In 2015, the New Jersey Pension and Health Benefit Study Commission proposed bringing health benefits for active and retired public workers into line with private-sector norms. Active workers would shoulder higher out-of-pocket expenses, though their premiums would go down. Retirees would be given reimbursement accounts to purchase insurance on private exchanges. This plan would save billions a year, which the commission suggested be dedicated to funding a reformed pension system.

Connecticut’s experience shows the folly of taxing the middle class to support platinum benefits for the public workforce while shifting the burden of legacy pensions onto future taxpayers. The result has been a slower economy and no serious drive to address the underlying problem, namely the constantly escalating cost of government. If New Jerseyites think things can’t get much worse, they ought to look a little to the northeast.

Ms. Egea is the president of the Garden State Initiative. Mr. Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “Connecticut’s Fiscal Crisis Is a Cautionary Tale for New Jersey,” forthcoming from the Garden State Initiative.
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3)NEW YORK (World News Bureau) - In a recent polling of 585 NFL players, nearly all of them were unsure of exactly what they are protesting.

Here's a sampling of responses to the question "What are you protesting by kneeling during the National Anthem?"

"Pretty sure it's against Nazis - especially the white ones."

"We're protesting America becoming capitalistic instead of equal."

"I'm protesting against Trump saying black lives don't matter."

"We're against global warming and the police."

"We're showing the world that we care about, ahh, things such as... such as...ahh, freedom from suppression?"

"Me and my fellow players are protesting the Constitution of Independence because of what it does to people of color."

"We are displaying our right to stand up by kneeling for our beliefs."

"We are protesting Trump, because he, you know, keeping the black man down and shit."

"Myself is kneeling to show that just because I'm American don't mean I got to act like one." 

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4)

Why the polls are still wrong

BY MARK PENN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR

 THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

The polls that failed to detect the full strength of President Trump on Election Day continue to underestimate the president’s support for the job he is doing, paying way too much attention to the Twitter wars and ignoring the public support for many of the actions is undertaking.

This can create some serious misjudgments by organizations like the NFL and some Republican senators, who find out later that they buck the president only to their own detriment. And nothing was more devastating to Democrats than believing the election was over when it wasn’t.

Polls show the president’s approval rating all over the lot. An Associated Press poll put it at 32 percent and suggests that only 24 percent see the country as going in the right direction. This strains credulity given what happened in the special elections against the Democrats.

The methodology of some of these polls is to poll “all adults” without any qualification as to citizenship or voting intent. A lot of the nonvoters dislike politics and all politicians, and these polls also include them along with undocumented immigrants who are not screened out. Another group of polls has Trump’s approval in the low 40s, and Harvard-Harris Poll, which eliminates all undecideds, has it at 45 percent, similar to Rasmussen.

Generally, the president does best with voters polled online, as opposed to with live operators. He got 46 percent of the electorate in the election and little has changed since then as 90 percent of his voters support him, unchanged over many months.

When we break down his approval ratings by specific areas, we get a more complex picture of his image. The president gets 65 percent approval for hurricane response and 53 percent approval for the economy and fighting terrorism. He gets his lowest marks for the way he is administering the government. And he is a divider when people want a uniter.

No question that 68 percent or more say they would like to see Trump stop tweeting, but is measuring that really reflective of his underlying political power compared to what’s happening in the economy? In the end, will voters cast ballots on tweets or jobs?

We see the same dynamic being played out over and over again: The president grabs the spotlight with strong statements (typically on Twitter) of his policies, for which he is savaged as over the top on social and mainstream media. Then, over time, he often wins the underlying policy argument. You can see how this played out on the economy and taxes, the national anthem, attacks on bad trade deals and calls for more border controls.

Remember, Americans liked President Obama for his way with words and his calm leadership style. They just opposed many of his policies, so Obama’s numbers gave a false sense of approval. Trump is the mirror opposite. People are put on edge by his words while favoring a lot of the positions he is taking on issues.

When it comes to rank-and-file Republican voters, Trump is the undisputed leader of the Republican Party. No poll I’ve seen puts his support from Republicans at below 80 percent and we at Harvard-Harris have it at 84 percent, which is remarkable, given his knock-down-drag-out fight with some mainstream Republicans.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has dropped to the least-liked politician on the national scene today. Polls in Tennessee showed retiring Sen. Bob Corker’s reelect with Republican primary votes is at 42, putting him in a weak position with those core voters.

The remarkable thing is that, in response to a president ready to sign their legislation, the Republican leadership is committing hari-kari in failing to pass the very things that won them their elections: opposing Obamacare, enacting tax reform, taking a tougher position on Iran. (Remember when they invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress on the Iran deal?)

They are, puzzlingly, walking away from everything they have pledged to their voters, and the revolution they are about to face from those voters is real, much to the benefit of the Democrats at this point. And if the Democrats do cut some more deals with Trump, those deals will boost the Democrats to a major 2018 victory.

The United States is currently locked in difficult struggles with North Korea and Iran. North Korea is one of the most despotic regimes on the planet, with a ruler who hired assassins to kill his own half brother with nerve agents, uses torture and holds purges of any threats to his rule. He recently tortured a U.S. student and sent him back to die here in America in the arms of his parents.

Iran’s national anthem is “Death to America,” and no one is taking a knee to that one over there. The regime once held our embassy hostage, and 70 percent of America believes it will cheat on the nuclear arms deal. So senators who attack Trump for being too tough on these known despots and killers may get a lot of coverage but are swimming upstream, giving indirect comfort to our fiercest enemies.

For the first time in a decade, a plurality of people see the economy as moving in the right direction and 64 percent see the economy as growing. The voters give Trump significant credit for the economic upswing, and any read on his approval ratings have to take into account that moving the economy forward these days is seen as Job No. 1 for the president.

When it comes to the NFL, 57 percent believe that football players should stand and respect the flag, according to a Reuters poll. While voters are taken aback by the roughness with which Trump took on the issue, there is no question that a solid majority support his position. Moreover, the backpedaling we are seeing by the NFL is reflective of a country that wants its athletes to respect those who went into real battle, without the millions of dollars of pay these athletes receive.

On the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, 80 percent believe it is Congress that should fix the problem, as opposed to the president, and overwhelming majorities want both DACA work permits and increased border security. In our last poll, 70 percent opposed sanctuary city policies that ignore immigration status when someone is arrested for a crime. This issue is highly divisive, but it would be a mistake to read opinion as all in one direction. The public wants compassion and tough borders.

The failure to understand the 2016 election was in large measure not a failure of the final polls, many of which showed a close race, but a failure to understand the powerful storyline of Trump’s appeal with his respect for cops and the military, taking a more aggressive position against our enemies, and pushing for tax and health-care reform. His style is not what won him the presidency. It was, remarkably, his substance.

I, frankly, didn’t at the time see his rise in the Republican primary as realistic. I don’t believe he has advanced his coalition from Election Day, and rank-and-file Democratic opposition has hardened. But he hasn’t lost his support either, and taking on “The Swamp” only empowers him further.

It is by watching the underlying public sentiment of what he is doing, and not his methods, that you see how polling better watch out here, as reality versus research will again be tested, and reality always wins.

Mark Penn is co-director of the Harvard-Harris Poll and was a pollster for Bill Clinton during six years of his presidency.

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