;
“Civility is the sum of the many sacrifices we are called to make for the sake of living together.”
— Stephen L. Carter, American law professor, policy writer, and author; from his 1998 book, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy.
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Just more Democrat repetitive nonsense:Trickle down economic does not work, except, of course, when it gushes!https://www.washingtontimes.co
And:
MLK's niece is the equivalent of a female "Aunt" Tom in black circles because she pulls the rug out from under their bankrupt leadership .They also hate Justice Thomas for being her Uncle mate. (See 1 below.)
Fake news awards: http://fxn.ws/2DlEPVP
Finally:From The New York Times and not fake news for once.:
Savannah, a City With Charms Both Historical and Culinary
There is no shortage of history, sultry beauty and architectural delights. And a visit needn’t cost you much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0
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I am leaving for Detroit to be at my first great granddaughter's birthday and other family members so no more memos for several days. This one will be about a lot of random subjects. Mostly my own thinking.
I do, however, want to post a very insightful op ed from Dan Henninger and one about our depleted navy (See 2 below.)
I have said it is too early to judge the 2018 elections and I do not trust the polls because, as we know, many are skewed to produce the goal of the biased media. Secondly, it has become an increasing ploy to purposely give false information because of resentment and just too early to extrapolate. Third, the Democrats have little to offer by way of an appealing agenda. Radicals have taken over their party and support/encourage sanctuary cities, oppose domestic energy expansion, support illegal immigration, oppose spending on military and would rather spend on more welfare programs etc. (See 2a below.)
With respect to our Navy, I have been writing for years about the dangerous stage of our military and particularly our Navy I happened to have been given the privilege, by a former Sec. of The Navy, to attend some courses at The Naval War College, have been a modest contributor to their foundation and thus receive their published material which I avidly read and often report on in my memos. (See 2b Below.)
So here goes:
a) I have been given a subscription to "The Weekly Standard" by a dear friend, my personal attorney and a fellow memo reader.
I read the recent issue while having maintenance done on my car. I gleaned the following and will make very abbreviated summations
i) In an article by Reuel Marc Gerecht, he discussed: "The Crack-up Of Theocracy "referring to Iran. His main point is that over-educated and under-employed students will ultimately bring the government down.
ii) Elliott Abrams discusses: "The Princes and The Mullahs" and makes the distinction The Saudis are making a transition towards a more democratized society unlike Iran. though The Saudis are no more socially advanced. However,for the moment, this is why Saudis are not in the street whereas, the Iranians are.
I hope to finish Elliott's book and report on same after my Detroit trip. Only 28 pages to go. I am on the last chapter.
iii) Th Weekly Standard editorial discusses how liberals, and, most particularly, Obama, flubbed foreign policy. The article points out liberals/progressives generally feel more comfortable disregarding instances of injustice abroad and focusing on the same domestically. Obama approached foreign policy as a master of pragmatism. In the case of his Iran Deal,the editorial concludes, it has become so thoroughly discredited only Obama hangers on still support it.
iv) The more I think about what creates a significant difference between the philosophy of liberals and conservatives I would suggest both agree all Americans are created equal but the former do not understand not all results/outcomes are equal.
Consequently, in trying to create equal outcomes, liberals construct/believe in policies directed towards impossible and illusive dreams. When failure occurs, rather than try something else, they believe spending more money will correct the problem. This is true insanity but then Trump is considered insane for being rational because , at times, he uses vulgarity to express his frustration over the stupidity and/or cunning political tactics of those in the opposite party.(See 3 below.)
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New York's mayor has chosen to locate subsidized housing near a very wealthy neighborhood. He has done everything to p--- off those who live there but they keep electing him so I believe they are getting what they deserve. What concerns me is that those who live in New York and California want to continue imposing their own insanity on the rest of the nation.
I am all for decent subsidized housing but what benefit is accomplished by driving housing values down in order to make some social statement that will not improve the lives of the homeless but then deBlasio is a dreamer. I suggest he and Oprah get together and run on the next Democrat ticket.
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One of the female officers of this extraordinary family was assigned to a very dear friend and memo reader and he gave me his permission to post. Should put a lump in your throat and makes you wish our nation could produce more of these extraordinary citizens and I even wonder how we produce what we even do.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/
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Dick
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1)
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2)The Trump Paradox
By Daniel Henninger
I do, however, want to post a very insightful op ed from Dan Henninger and one about our depleted navy (See 2 below.)
I have said it is too early to judge the 2018 elections and I do not trust the polls because, as we know, many are skewed to produce the goal of the biased media. Secondly, it has become an increasing ploy to purposely give false information because of resentment and just too early to extrapolate. Third, the Democrats have little to offer by way of an appealing agenda. Radicals have taken over their party and support/encourage sanctuary cities, oppose domestic energy expansion, support illegal immigration, oppose spending on military and would rather spend on more welfare programs etc. (See 2a below.)
With respect to our Navy, I have been writing for years about the dangerous stage of our military and particularly our Navy I happened to have been given the privilege, by a former Sec. of The Navy, to attend some courses at The Naval War College, have been a modest contributor to their foundation and thus receive their published material which I avidly read and often report on in my memos. (See 2b Below.)
So here goes:
a) I have been given a subscription to "The Weekly Standard" by a dear friend, my personal attorney and a fellow memo reader.
I read the recent issue while having maintenance done on my car. I gleaned the following and will make very abbreviated summations
i) In an article by Reuel Marc Gerecht, he discussed: "The Crack-up Of Theocracy "referring to Iran. His main point is that over-educated and under-employed students will ultimately bring the government down.
ii) Elliott Abrams discusses: "The Princes and The Mullahs" and makes the distinction The Saudis are making a transition towards a more democratized society unlike Iran. though The Saudis are no more socially advanced. However,for the moment, this is why Saudis are not in the street whereas, the Iranians are.
I hope to finish Elliott's book and report on same after my Detroit trip. Only 28 pages to go. I am on the last chapter.
iii) Th Weekly Standard editorial discusses how liberals, and, most particularly, Obama, flubbed foreign policy. The article points out liberals/progressives generally feel more comfortable disregarding instances of injustice abroad and focusing on the same domestically. Obama approached foreign policy as a master of pragmatism. In the case of his Iran Deal,the editorial concludes, it has become so thoroughly discredited only Obama hangers on still support it.
iv) The more I think about what creates a significant difference between the philosophy of liberals and conservatives I would suggest both agree all Americans are created equal but the former do not understand not all results/outcomes are equal.
Consequently, in trying to create equal outcomes, liberals construct/believe in policies directed towards impossible and illusive dreams. When failure occurs, rather than try something else, they believe spending more money will correct the problem. This is true insanity but then Trump is considered insane for being rational because , at times, he uses vulgarity to express his frustration over the stupidity and/or cunning political tactics of those in the opposite party.(See 3 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
New York's mayor has chosen to locate subsidized housing near a very wealthy neighborhood. He has done everything to p--- off those who live there but they keep electing him so I believe they are getting what they deserve. What concerns me is that those who live in New York and California want to continue imposing their own insanity on the rest of the nation.
I am all for decent subsidized housing but what benefit is accomplished by driving housing values down in order to make some social statement that will not improve the lives of the homeless but then deBlasio is a dreamer. I suggest he and Oprah get together and run on the next Democrat ticket.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
One of the female officers of this extraordinary family was assigned to a very dear friend and memo reader and he gave me his permission to post. Should put a lump in your throat and makes you wish our nation could produce more of these extraordinary citizens and I even wonder how we produce what we even do.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
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1)
“I agree that President Trump is not a racist. He has done so much,” King stated.
“Just now … [Trump signed] the bill that was sponsored by Congressman John Lewis making the Martin Luther King Jr. historic site in Atlanta a national park — the first park to be named after an African-American man.” Later she continued to show her support for the President by claiming that some Democrats have been making up supposed remarks he has been making.
King went on to show her support for Trump saying,
And there’s all other kind of legislation and things that President Trump is passing, including getting a lot of black folks out of jail — he’s working on doing that believe it or not and putting them back to work. And putting America back to work — African-Americans especially because our job rate or our hiring rate was so low and it’s going up along with everybody else’s rate. So President Trump is not a racist. He cares about America period. And he said, “No matter what color our skin is, we all bleed red.” So he sees black people, all people as people. He sees Americans as the people he is supposed to serve and he’s doing that. And he is not a racist. I just really want to say that.
2)The Trump Paradox
This era’s most disliked president has produced a successful first year in office.
By Daniel Henninger
What’s the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump ?
Mr. Zuckerberg saw that the destructive political forces set loose by social media were threatening the core of Facebook and made adjustments last week to protect his crown jewel.
A Twitter account and the tides of media are undermining Mr. Trump’s presidency, but he’ll never adjust.
Which leads us to the Trump Paradox: Donald Trump may be the most disliked president in the postwar era, even as he presides over one of the most solid first-year policy performances of that era, most notably a strengthening economy.
(A colleague asked if by “postwar,” I meant World War II or the American Revolution.)
For most of the first year, the Trump paradox didn’t matter much beyond the altered psychological state of his audience. Reacting to “Trump” became, like uncontrollable weather, a daily routine.
But in Year Two, the story line is about to change. Everything in 2018 will be defined in terms of its effect on the November midterm election. Including any meeting with Dick Durbin.
The phrase “political animal” was invented for people like Sen. Durbin. Lost down the Trump-Durbin you-know-what hole is a question: Why did Dick Durbin do it?
The answer is inescapable: Sen. Durbin poisoned the well of the immigration negotiations. He instantly recognized that Democrats would gain more politically from public exposure of Mr. Trump’s private words than they would from any DACA deal.
For Democrats, every waking moment has telescoped down to one thing: gaining control of the House in November. They have concluded, not without reason, that success at the polls will correlate directly to public dislike of Mr. Trump personally. For Sen. Durbin, the Trump expletive was a gift from the gods. As to the 800,000 dreamers who had a deal in sight at last Tuesday’s White House meeting, well, they can wait.
If the Trump economic record was pouring out of a different, more agreeable vessel, the Democrats would be floating out to sea. Instead, Democrats and the nonsectarian Trump opposition are billing him as the apotheosis of evil, arguing that his personality and words discredit all his policy accomplishments—whether the historically low black unemployment rate of 6.8% that eluded Barack Obama or the defeat of an Islamic State that beheaded journalists on camera and sold Yazidi girls into sexual bondage.
Teeing up Donald Trump as a cartoon villain is preposterous—but rational. Normally, politicians strive to enlarge the circles of empathy between themselves and the public. The empathy may be fake, but it’s necessary. Mr. Trump is uniquely content to limit his personal appeal.
The Democratic “resistance,” which looked pathetic and irresponsible in Year One, suddenly makes sense in Year Two. The generic-ballot numbers, which show the public preferring a Democratic Congress by an astounding 11-point average, are suddenly relevant. Suddenly it matters that Mr. Trump’s approval in Georgia, which he carried in 2016 with 51.3%, is now 38%.
This one-man meltdown is occurring almost entirely among women, driven by a relentlessly smirking, I-could-care-less demeanor. The beer-and-shot base loves it. Women? They just don’t. Women came out of the woodwork to vote against Mr. Trump in the Virginia gubernatorial election that Ed Gillespie lost.
The bedrock Trump base, always around 35%, carried him through the presidential competition. But the 2016 victory was made possible by adding the topsoil of wealthier suburban voters. The Trump topsoil is eroding. Men who voted for Mr. Trump in these suburban towns won’t bother trying to talk their wives out of turning their 2018 vote into an anti-Trump statement. Donald Trump never had a bad day in his life. His supporters have one every week.
It will be a remarkable accomplishment if the Democrats pull this off—a victory not linked to an opposition’s major policy failure, an unpopular war or economic downturn. Beyond the Trump persona, the policy substance of the Democratic case is approximately zero. But running every candidate on the ballot against Donald Trump relieves them of having to think much.
Post-2018, the Pelosi-resurrected House would use the threat of impeachment, however baseless, to make Mr. Trump do deals with them on issues like infrastructure, while poking him just enough to keep him in a snarling rage until a professional empathizer like Joe Biden arrives in 2020. Tempting and taunting Donald Trump will be the capstone to Nancy Pelosi’s career.
The Democrats, now dominated by street-theater progressives, could blow it by making their return to public view more annoying than Mr. Trump’s tweets. They are planning to attend the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday dressed in black, like Hollywood stars, and carrying #HandsOff signs. That would be the people whose eight years of hands on the American economy put Donald Trump in the White House.
2a) DACA Debate Shows the Unbelievable Arrogance of Democrats
There was, for a moment, a spark of hope.
When we saw the headline in the Opinion section of the New York Times, we thought there were at least a few people on the left with a couple of brain cells still firing synapses at this late stage. “Democrats, Make a Deal With Trump to Protect Dreamers,” the headline read. The op-ed, written by Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, seemed designed to slap Democrats off their collective high horse and make them see reason. Hey, turkeys, it would surely shout, you lost an election. Trump supporters don’t want amnesty. If you want to “save” your precious DACA recipients, you’re going to have to give them what they want. And you’d better hurry, because time’s running out.
Alas, as we so often are when we get our hopes up about the drivel written in The New York Times, we were quickly dismayed. Wilkinson did encourage the Democrats to compromise, but his version of “compromise” isn’t the kind we need. And if Democrats think that this is all they have to do to get amnesty for Dreamers, they have another think coming.
“A deal that includes money for the wall ought to be a no-brainer for Democrats,” he wrote, using the same bait-and-switch writing style that characterized the headline. “The wall Mr. Trump promised isn’t going to materialize, and he’s not going to insist on it. Of course, Mr. Trump will say that new border security enhancements constitute a wall. But Democrats can vote for them without following suit.
So Wilkinson’s big idea is that Democrats should vote for these “border enhancements,” let Trump crow about it being the promised wall (even though it isn’t), and everything will be good. This is liberal elitism at its worst, appearing to suggest that Trump’s voters are so stupid that they don’t know the difference between a wall and a drone. Or a wall and a camera. It assumes that Democrats and the Trump administration are on such uneven playing grounds of intelligence that the left can get away with virtually anything as long as they say the right things. It’s actually astounding that this was deemed publishable in one of the nation’s top papers, but it shows you what the New York Times really thinks about this president and his supporters.
Here’s our favorite part, though: “But Democrats should reject a DACA compromise that would reduce the overall level of immigration. Immigrants yet to arrive matter too. Consistent worst-case-scenario thinking means assuming new legislation will set immigration policy for the foreseeable future. A DACA fix that cuts legal immigration could eventually deprive at least as many people as are currently covered by DACA from ever having a shot at the American dream.”
If the first paragraph shows the left’s contempt for Trump’s intelligence, the second gives you a clear window into how they think about this country’s responsibilities. To them, it is some sort of universal human right to come and live in America. Where they caught this idea or why they believe it is a mystery. But you can’t help but want to sit down with Wilkinson and ask him: “If we let in every yahoo from every misbegotten country on the planet, what will be left of the American dream in twenty years’ time?”
And if you don’t like the term “misbegotten country,” there are other phrases you can use.
If this is the sort of “compromise” Democrats are willing to make, then we hope with all our hearts that DACA is finished. These idiots still seem to believe they won the election. It’s time to make them understand otherwise.
2b) The U.S. Navy Lowers Its Sights
Has Trump given up on expanding the size of the fleet? If so, there’s still time to reverse course.
By Seth Cropsey
The episode should serve as a wake-up call to military and civilian leaders alike. The U.S. has entered a new age of peer and near-peer competition for which the Navy is unprepared, according to the review’s findings. A much diminished fleet has been overloaded with tasks in recent years, yet the number of ships deployed around the world has remained constant. The Navy has managed this by increasing the time that ships and their crews spend at sea. “The net result has been a dramatic increase in the operating tempo of individual ships, and accompanying reductions in the time available to perform maintenance, training, and readiness certification,” according to the review’s authors. “The growing mismatch between the supply and demand of ships taxed fleet personnel and consumed material readiness at unsustainable rates.”
Accidents are inevitable under these circumstances. While enlisted sailors are spending more time away from their home ports, junior officers are spending less time at sea than is necessary to develop what the review calls “deep maritime operating skills.” Sailing a desk on a headquarters staff has became a path to timely career advancement. The review recommends freeing up officers from staff requirements so they can spend more time honing their war-fighting skills. It also urges a better fiscal balance among the operation of ships, equipment maintenance and personnel training—all vital, all expensive.
The most problematic recommendation requires acknowledging a difficult political reality. The Navy must communicate to political leaders “that the higher cost and time to achieve established readiness standards will mean less Navy presence worldwide.”
In September, the Government Accountability Office told the House Armed Services Committee that more than a third of the ships in the Navy’s Japan-based Seventh Fleet had expired warfare-training certifications. The review calls this a “normalization of deviation,” a problem that will persist so long as the Navy lacks the resources to fulfill its obligations.
If implemented, the review’s recommendations would restore the Navy’s readiness to respond to threats and flare-ups as they present themselves. But how, and at what price?
One option—a bad one—is for the Navy to reduce its global presence. As the review’s first sentence acknowledges, the Navy’s global primacy “is being challenged as it sails into a security environment not seen since before the collapse of the Soviet Union.” If achieving naval readiness requires ceding control of the seas to aggressive rising powers like China, Russia or Iran, it won’t be worth it.
A better alternative is to increase the size of the fleet so that necessary maintenance, repairs and training can ensure America’s ability to project naval power from the Western Pacific to the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Arctic to the Arabian Gulf, and to other areas of current—and future—competition with rivals. At the top of this list must be the Baltic and Black seas, where Russian influence is expanding.
As a candidate, Donald Trump pledged to increase the size of the Navy from approximately 275 combat vessels to 350 or more. But in December the administration’s national security strategy document signaled a shift in the president’s thinking. While the document claims the Trump administration supports modernization, acquisition reform, improved readiness and a “full spectrum force,” it does not call for a 350-ship fleet. When it comes to sea power, the U.S. is lowering its sights.
A flexible Navy that retains the ability to respond to threats as they emerge and a fleet large enough to defend vital U.S. interests are not mutually exclusive. But the Trump administration appears to have concluded that since lawmakers are unlikely to pay for construction of a large number of new warships, it won’t even ask them to. It’s a different vision for America’s naval future from the one Mr. Trump outlined on the campaign trail. He was right then; he is wrong now. There’s still time to reverse course.
Mr. Cropsey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he directs the Center for American Seapower. He served as an officer in the Navy and as deputy undersecretary in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and is author of “Seablindness” (Encounter, 2017).
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