Tom Sowell is America's Churchill when it comes to erudition.And
Just learned we are now overbooked for Amb. Bolton's address, Feb. 19, and are now only taking standbys but even they are overbooked.
Finally:
More ranting but not from me (See 1 below.).
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Were I being asked to write some of Trump's first SOTU speech I would write the following:
Thank you America for electing me president. This is my first SOTU address and I would like to make a few prefatory comments.
First, you did not elect me because I am a gifted speaker with a golden tongue. You already had that along with a pitiful GDP, law breaking by Federal Agencies and now it appears a lot of Collusion my friends, dressed in black and those who chose to stay home, want to hang around my neck and, apparently, were busily engaged in themselves .
Second, I am not your usual president because when I use vulgarity the mass media let you know. Bet you never knew all the bad stuff that has now begun to dribble out about some of my predecessors? It was important that they be protected.
Third, I not not a racist, I am not insane, I am not incapable of doing the job you elected me to do but I admit to having been a bad boy at times and done some things I now wish I had not. I guess I am human after all even if I have funny hair.
Fourth, I believe you elected me to accomplish things that others have kicked down the field, used as wedge issues to get votes, divided the nation, reduced our military ability to protect our nation and paid more attention to their own desires for power than what was best for our nation.
Fifth, I am a doer, I am impatient, I am trying my best to keep most of my campaign promises and I am realizing some were said in the heat of battle, some I have had to rethink as I received more facts but I am accomplishing many. So judge me by what I and my fellow administration members do and not by what I say. Also, remember, I am working against a lot of odds because Sen. Schumer and Minority Speaker Pelosi, Rep. Schiff and even some in my own party do not want me to succeed.
Sixth, well let's see what we have been able to accomplish.
a)We now have a Supreme Court Justice who is not going to vote for outcomes he wants but what the founding Fathers thought we should have.
b) We have an economy and employment that are moving upward, jobs being created that pay decent wages, factories being built to make products here and , it seems, a renewed spirit, as evidence by the confidence index. And, oh, by the way, you Deplorables out there are soon going to receive some crumbs which you can spend or save as you wish.
c) Yes, corporate America did get a "uge" tax cut but they also seem to be willing to share some of their crumbs. Perhaps it is because we have gutted a lot of burdensome and depressing red tape that simply crushed business, gave employment to bureaucrats who want more power and dispirited capitalists.
d) I am struggling with illegal immigration, judge shopping and sanctuary cities but I have offered a reasonable compromise that irritates a lot of my own supporters and promised to take the heat in order to put another wedge issue to bed that has been used by Democrats to garner Hispanic votes for over 30 years. Once again Sen. Schumer accuses me of being Jello but I am serious and any structure I build will not wiggle.
e) Now let's talk about some of the things we must do. We must stop N Korea and Iran's nuclear ambitions. We must rebuild our military, we must face challenges from those who wish to do us harm and we must support our friends and encourage them to help us with the tasks ahead. Oh, I forgot to mention we are moving our Embassy in Israel to where it should have been all along , to Jerusalem and we have a fabulous Amb. in The U.N named Haley, like the comet. Yes, we also have stopped funding some programs and leaders who have taken advantage of both our generosity and stupidity.
f) Democrats want to recapture The House in 2018 so they can do several things. First, they want to slow down and/or reverse our progress and maybe even take back some of your crumbs. Second, they want to impeach me and finally they want to turn America into a socialist nation because Socialism has been such a success wherever it has been tried/imposed.
I will stop here and let the professional speech writers finish what I have begun. so we can have a discussion about trade and other sticky issues. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) For those of you who were aware of my situation, I completed prostate cancer treatment on Friday, and all went well. Two minutes of radiation each day for 5 days, and done. In and out of the hospital in 20-25 minutes each day including changing clothes. Cure rate for this procedure is close to 100%. I expect to be back playing tennis by Monday. I have attached a detailed memo about prostate cancer and the treatment for guys who may be interested. It was my specific situation, and very probably will not be directly applicable to others. Each patient is different. I had all the right metrics for the 5 day short treatment, but I was told I was unusual according to the doc. Main thing, you have to be in excellent health in every metric. Side effects are slight and will go away in 2 weeks. Work out regularly, stay very healthy. It matters greatly when bad things happen.
Every CEO, including the head of the IMF, said when interviewed at Davos, that the tax bill made all the difference, and they expect a terrific 2018. The IMF raised its economic forecast for the world as a direct result of the tax bill. S&P earnings are projected to be in excess of 20% growth. That is unheard of. The S&P 500 is already up 8% for the month, and the Dow similar. Virtually everyone at Davos also forecast that the value fixed income securities will decline this year as rates are already rising, and there could be as many as 4 increases by the FED if things go really well in the economy, and inflation starts to increase materially. If you have been all equity since Jan 1 2017, your portfolio should be us close to 30%. If your money manager is not even close to that -fire him. He cost you a fortune by using the typical asset allocation model. Obviously this cannot go on forever, but almost everyone at Davos thinks there is still much room to go in equities in 2018. Virtually every pundit last year was as wrong as they could be. All the technical analysis, studies of past cycles, and just plain ego forecasts were wrong. My view is, all equity is still the only thing to do for now. There is a huge momentum across the world right now, and all economies are rising in tandem. The IMF believes the Trump tax cut was beneficial to everyone because when the US does well, the world does well. Many CEO’s stated they changed their investment plans and are now switching their capital investment to the US. That is hundreds of billions. The ability to write off 100% of new cap ex in year one is making a major difference in accelerating capital investment in just the few weeks since passage. The tax bill will have enormous good outcomes for everyone. Workers are getting a piece of the action which to them is meaningful. $1000 plus wage increases plus 401K contribution increases to a guy making $55,000 matters when paired with the tax cut. Nancy and Chuck and the press sound like a bunch of spoiled 5 year olds who did not get their share of the birthday cake when they say it is crumbs or otherwise of no benefit. Reality is, 2018 is going to be a terrific year assuming no black swans. The stock market is already up 8%, and it is possible it could rise an additional 10%. The market is up so much already in January, that if there is a 5% correction, you are still up 3% which is more than if you are in bonds, which are losing value.
This is not the same as the dot com bubble yet. That was a large group of basically start up companies with no real business, all saying they just were after a few percent of IBM’s business. They were not real businesses, and they had no real product, no assets or management. Today it is multibillion dollar companies with strong products and strong balance sheets that are surging up. The banks are solid today. These companies and banks are not going away. Even if there was to be some sort of disruption, these companies will be fine. That is the difference between now and dot com and the 2008 Lehman crash. In addition, for almost the first time in history, almost the entire world is on an upward trend. The big problem is many people under 30 according to big brokerage firms are plunging into crypto coin and pot companies. Pot at least has a real product and in several states is legal. Crypto is just a pure fantasy and get rich quick scheme. This is where the damage will happen to those least able to afford the major losses they will suffer. The big guys playing at the edge are trading and not investing, and likely will not be so badly hurt, and in almost no case is it a major portion of their overall portfolio. While some financial institutions will have trading in the crypto, they will not be holders of the coins, so will not lose much. Since almost everyone seems to say loudly that this is all a scam, and governments are shutting it down in various places, anyone who gets hurt is a fool.
What just shows the idiocy of private investors, is the series of ICO’s, initial coin offerings. So in one case a group raised $12.5 million in 11 minutes. The investor got GNO coins- whatever that is. They used crypto coin to raise this money for a pure shell company that had no business, only had a white paper, and no real managers, but was valued soon after the offering at $300 million based on the value of the coins just like in the dot com era. They do not have to register with any regulator. There is no prospectus. They claim they are selling crypto coins, not shares, so they are not regulated. The investor gets no shares, no vote, no financials-nothing. There is just an online invite to buy the coin to fund a shell with some silly idea. They just create a crypto coin and then go out online to raise millions in minutes. Yes minutes. Two months later the GNO coins was way up in value so the shell company with no business was now worth $3 billion. The value of all these scams now is over $100 billion. There is a network called Etherium, whose “currency is called Ether-(appropriate since it is as tangible as the ether) which seems to be the main channel for much of this fraud. It is based on blockchain, but these shell offerings are still a fraud. There are now more than 900 crypto currencies out there with a new one almost every day. Anyone can launch a coin. Some group called IOTA listed a token and almost immediately the value got up to $1.8 billion dollars for an idea that nobody knows really what it is and if the people behind it have any ability to execute. You see that this is dot com 2 but the difference now is there are not going to be banks or major investors who get hurt so the real market should not suffer when it crashes. There are young investors who use their credit cards to finance these coin purchases who are going to be destroyed when the crash comes. If you think this is the most bizarre thing you have heard of and the investors are the stupidest people in the world, you are right. It is pure speculation.
Despite the media and Soros claiming Trump would get a cold shoulder at Davos, that did not happen. Nobody can afford now to piss off Trump and the US. His speech was very moderate and he had good meetings with world leaders despite claims May does not like him. Maybe she does not, but we all sometimes do business with people we do not like because we need to, and she needs Trump. It is very clear everything is now different. Pakistan has finally been cut off. The Palestinians have been cut off. The UN is seeing reductions. Trump is not going along with the decades of just hoping money will buy cooperation, only to see our money used for bad purposes, like paying Palestinian terrorist families in the West Bank. The traditionalists and liberals are horrified, and claim this is all terrible, but what have we gotten for tens of billions and policies of Obama and Hilary that just wrote checks and rolled over for everyone. We got wars, terror, millions of homeless refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead. Maybe it is time to play tough and demand something for our money.
I continue what I have said from day one about Trump. Ignore the stupid tweets and just pay attention to what the cabinet actually implements. So far the economy and investors love it, in spite of the politics.
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2)Haley: Abbas lacks 'courage and the will' to seek 'real peace'
By Max Greenwood
Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, delivered on Thursday a scathing rebuke of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, saying that he lacks the "courage and the will" to strive for a lasting peace deal with the Israelis.
Speaking at a U.N. Security Council meeting, Haley assailed Abbas for abandoning the landmark Oslo Accord and turning his back on the prospect of U.S.-brokered peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
She said that Abbas had "insulted" President Trump and advanced wild conspiracy theories in a speech before the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Council earlier this month.
"In his speech, President Abbas declared the landmark Oslo Peace Accords dead," Haley said. "He rejected any American role in peace talks. He insulted the American president. He called for suspending recognition of Israel. He invoked an ugly and fictional past, reaching back to the 17th century, to paint Israel as a colonialist project engineered by European powers."
"A speech that indulges in outrageous and discredited conspiracy theories is not the speech of a person with the courage and the will to seek peace," she added.
In her sweeping remarks, Haley retraced the accomplishments of Arab leaders, particularly Anwar Sadat, the former Egyptian president who helped negotiate a peace deal with Israel nearly four decades ago.
Haley's remarks underscored deepening tensions between Washington and Ramallah, as well as the increasing difficulty that Trump faces in his stated mission to mediate a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Those tensions soared in December, after Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a move that reversed decades of U.S. policy and prompted anger throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Jerusalem is revered by Jews, Muslims and Christians, and its status has long been a matter of controversy in the region. Israelis consider the city their eternal capital, while Palestinians have long aspired to establish east Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
In a speech before the PLO's Central Council this month, Abbas railed against the Trump administration's handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and declared that the Palestinians see no role for the U.S. in any peace negotiations in the region.
"The deal of the century is the slap of the century," Abbas said, referencing Trump's claim that a U.S.-brokered agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians would be "the ultimate deal."
The Trump administration has sought in recent weeks to bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table with the Israelis, threatening steep aid cuts if Ramallah continued to reject the U.S. as a mediator for talks.
Earlier this month, the State Department announced that it would withhold $65 million in funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the organization charged with assisting Palestinian refugees. That amounts to more than half of a planned $125 million tranche of funding to the agency.
Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Trump suggested that more funding cuts for the Palestinians could come soon if they do not return to peace talks.
"That money is on the table and that money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace," Trump said.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Abbas, told CNN on Thursday, however, that the Palestinians would not recognize the U.S. as a mediator in any negotiations with Israel.
"If Jerusalem is off the table, then America is off the table as well," he said
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