From a friend and fellow memo reader regarding Soros: "Actually Soros controls Maher and the other vomitous voices of the left through the numerous organizations funded with his ill gotten billions. Yet with all of his negative power, Soros recently commented that he’s not winning, and must be living in a bubble.
Once the air is gone in that bubble, we can only hope that he and his accomplices will suffocate. L----"
My response: "Bill Maher should go to work for The New York Times as one of their Op Ed writers."
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Get ready for a deluge of conflicting interpretations of Trump's visit with N Korea's leader. Those who hate and distrust Trump will find nothing positive from the visit and, in fact, will engage in over reach in order to be scathingly critical.
Those, like myself, who are willing to give Trump space to see how matters evolve will be willing to cut him some slack.
I see Trump's visit as having more than one purpose because I believe he intended to send a signal to Iran as well as China and Russia. I believe Bibi has informed Putin they are prepared to destroy Syria's Assad if Russia allows Iranian troops to threaten Israel by taking over large parts of Syria knowing Trump is willing to back Israel in the event of a war.
I also believe Bibi warned Putin, Iran's interests are not synonymous with Russia's and if Putin wants a better relationship with America and Trump he would be wise to keep Iran 's involvement in Syria leashed.
Consequently, I believe what happens with N Korea is not limited but has broader ramifications.
I am willing to assume Trump, Pompeo and Bolton have constructed a broader strategy which is missed by the likes of The New York Times and other Trump haters.
When it comes to trade, Trump bruised some egos but facts support the argument America has been a "robbed piggy bank" which we will no longer allow. Trump understands when you take candy away you get a reaction but he loves to break idols. The E.U has two choices: continue their energy dependence on Russia and back themselves into a corner or swallow their false pride and maintain their relationship with the only nation they can depend upon to protect them and that happens to be America.
Trump also told them, in his blunt style, to start paying more for their own defense and put their oar in the water along with us because we are not going to be responsible for all the "oaring" while tolerating their "whoring."
Trump is not orthodox, he can be a bull in the China Shop. He understands sometimes you have to break some china to get results. Our State Department could learn from Trump, Pompeo and Bolton.
Time will tell . It always does. (See 1 below.)
And:
Peter Morici is a fellow memo reader. (See 1a below.)
Finally: A balanced assessment of Trump vs Europe. (See 1 b below.)
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"Deep State" Obama has every right to meddle in he 2020 Democrat selection of their nominee. That said, Americans probably have more to fear from him than Putin. (See 2 below.)
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Finally, The Justice Department/Jeff Sessions has shown some guts. http://www.foxnews.com/
Also:
Yesterday on a 5/4 decision The Supreme Court allowed Ohio to purge voter rolls under certain circumstances. The basis of the decision was maintaining confidence in the integrity of our sacred voting system. Once again it was a conservative versus liberal decision. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)Don’t Fear Regime Change in Iran
For the past century it has been in a struggle between oppressive rulers and a freedom-hungry public.
By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh
President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran deal, and to relentlessly pressure the Islamic Republic, has elicited a predictable response. Critics cite history, particularly a counterproductive 1953 coup, as a reason to oppose the strategy. But looking more closely at the past shows that a regime-collapse containment policy is the best way to effect change.
Westerners often look at Iran as an island of autocratic stability, as they once did with the U.S.S.R. American and European officials tend to see the mullahs’ tools of repression as indomitable. But for much of the past century Iran has been locked in a convulsive struggle between rulers wanting to maintain their prerogatives and the ruled seeking freedom.
The Constitutional Revolution of 1905 first injected the notions of popular representation into Iran’s bloodstream. During the first half of the 20th century, feisty Parliaments had little compunction about flexing their muscles. The local gentry would marshal the peasants, laborers and tribesmen into polls that would choose each Parliament. It wasn’t a Jeffersonian democracy, but the system had legitimacy. Bound to each other by land, family, tradition and the vote, the governing class and the people created mechanisms for addressing grievances. Consequently the Parliaments were sensitive to local concerns.
The first Pahlavi monarch, Reza Shah, challenged this system by imposing his will in the name of modernity. After his abdication in 1941, constitutional rule again gained strength. Yet it was Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, deposed in the 1953 coup, who tried to derail Iran’s democratic evolution. Forget for a moment the nefarious Central Intelligence Agency intrigue; what happened in 1953 was an Iranian initiative.
There is a fundamental rule about American interventionism today: It takes two to tango. The 1953 coup proves it. Mossadegh, who had once been a champion of the rule of law and national sovereignty, became increasingly autocratic and vainglorious after Parliament nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. in 1951. In trying to navigate the financially ruinous aftershocks of that decision, the prime minister rigged elections, sought to disband Parliament, and usurped the powers of the monarchy.
Iran’s politicians, military men and mullahs then came together to take down the premier. The public mostly rallied to the monarch, Mohammad Reza, a figurehead around whom diverse forces gathered. The CIA was involved in the coup planning but gave up once the initial operation failed. Iranians took control and removed the prime minister. In doing so, they sought to revive their economy and protect their political institutions. Mossadegh fell not because of a plot hatched in Langley but because he lost elite and popular support within his own country.
After naming himself “king of kings” in 1971, Mohammad Reza did his best to subvert good governance. He wasted much of Iran’s oil wealth on arms. He reduced the venerable Iranian Parliament to a rubber stamp. His secret police managed to be incompetent and hated. He alienated the clergy and replaced the old elite with a coterie of sycophants.
Yet the 1979 revolution, which overthrew the shah, was bound to disappoint a public clamoring for democracy. The first constituency to give up on theocracy was the students, whose protest in 1999 ended the attempt by the regime to reform itself. Then came the titanic Green Movement of 2009. A fraudulent presidential election sparked a massive protest that discredited the regime among the middle class. In December 2017, nearly 100 Iranian cities and towns erupted in protest. The poor were thought to be the regime’s last bastion of power, tied to theocracy by piety and the welfare state. Yet this time they hurled damning chants.
President Hassan Rouhani, a lackluster apparatchik of the security state, once thought that a nuclear deal would generate sufficient foreign investment to placate discontent. That aspiration failed even before the advent of President Trump. The Islamic Republic—with its lack of a reliable banking system or anything resembling the rule of law—is too turbulent to attract enough investors. It is probably internally weaker than the Soviet Union was in the 1970s.
The essential theme in modern Iranian history is a populace seeking to emancipate itself from tyranny—monarchal and Islamist. Devising a strategy to collapse the clerical regime isn’t difficult: The U.S. can draw on Persian history and on experience with the Soviet Union. It will require patience. Iranians usually don’t hold 1953 against the U.S. Neither do the children of the revolutionary elite, who so often find their way to the U.S. and Britain. The biggest hurdle for Washington is self-imposed: It needs to take seriously the Iranian quest for democracy.
Mr. Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations.
1a)MarketWatch
1a)MarketWatch
Should U.S. Tremble before Europe, No Just Look at Italy
The EU Is Hardly a United Prospering Trade Zone
By Peter Morici
President's Donald Trump's confrontational stance on trade and the non-U.S. participants' insistence on a joint statement that would have supported a rules-based trading system did much to spoil the annual stage play called the G-7 summit. What were more amusing than harmful were Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron overplaying their scripted roles to be both loyal ally to Lady Liberty and critic of Uncle Sam's dominance.
Canada may be an innocent victim in the latest trade imbroglio - Trump's hectoring about Canada's dairy carve out in NAFTA was paid for with similar concessions to the United States on sugar-but Macron's statement that the G-6 (the G-7 less America) is a bigger, united market than America is laughable and fools few.
The European Union component of the G-6 hardly is hardly cohesive or a genuine free-trade area thanks to the manifest distortions imposed by the euro EURUSD, +0.1103% , which is undervalued for the more efficient German and other Northern European economies and overvalued for other less modern European states.
Established in 1999, the single currency initially allowed virtually all European governments, businesses and private citizens to borrow more. This created an illusion of success by enabling excessive welfare spending and a run up of property values in sunny places like Spain.
Ultimately, government finances and banks collapsed in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, Ireland and Cyprus. Then EU financial rescues imposed Germany imperial prescriptions - perpetual trade and budget surpluses for Germany and burdensome taxes, crushing debt service, and economic servitude for Mediterranean and other peripheral states.
In varying measures, these policies have restored stability but only temporarily - in particular, it is doubtful that Italy can avoid another debt crisis even with the severe austerity - and at a terrible price of lost hope.
Since 2004, Italy has not grown. The traditionally poor South now has 30% of its population at risk of poverty-up from 26% before the financial crisis. The more prosperous and industrialized North, riveted by imports from Germany and Asia, has lost too many factory jobs.
Italian voters are disgusted with center-right and center-left parties that have governed for decades, and in the recent elections the majority cast ballots for antiestablishment parties offering radical change.
The 5 Star Movement, led by 31-year-old Luigi Di Maio, promised every citizen a guaranteed annual income, to roll back recent pension reforms and more generally, a break from the status quo ante-an Italian version of clean up the swamp. It won 36.4% of the vote.
The League promised a lower, flat tax-business taxes, as in America before President Trump, are smothering investment in the industrialized North-and tough immigration enforcement. It snared 17.7% of the vote.
Astonishing almost everyone-including themselves-these two parties have managed to achieve a post-election alliance and both are euroskeptics.
During the campaign, neither party promised to bolt from either the euro or broader EU buttheir ambivalence towards Brussels is clear. The combined consequences of implementing a guaranteed annual income and a flat tax at 15% for individuals and 20% for corporationswould surely cause a break with EU budget and austerity rules that are central to continuing the single currency.
If carried through, those could instigate sovereign-debt and banking crises that would either force Italy's exit from the euro or force the Germans to accept fundamental reforms in how the eurozone is run. These include large German budget deficits, larger EU budgets substantially financed by Germany, and significant reduction in Germany's trade surpluses-enabled by more imports from poorer member states like Italy.
France, Germany's big partner in enforcing orthodoxy on the Mediterranean states, might cozy up to such an agenda but that is not likely. Culturally, French governments don't like rule breakers and false pride requires that France, not Italy or another lesser state, provoke Germany to change.
Much of the new coalition's proposed policies is folly-Italy needs fiscal discipline as much as it needs the flexibility of its own currency. But if those precipitated a crisis that ended the euro, all this insanity could be followed by something more reasonable.
Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
1b) Why Trump Clashes With Europe
Sharp differences in style and substance threaten the trans-Atlantic alliance.
Donald Trump’s America-first diplomacy has shaken the foundations of many global institutions and alliances, but its most damaging effects so far have been on the trans-Atlantic relationship. The community of North American and European nations forming the nucleus of the alliance that won the Cold War for the West is closer to breaking up now than at any time since the 1940s.
Europe’s Trump problem is threefold. Temperamentally, Mr. Trump’s impulsive nature puts him at odds with the low-key norms of statesmanship upon which the European Union depends. Stylistically, his theatrical approach to politics strikes Europeans as both dangerous and unserious. But it is the deep ideological opposition between Mr. Trump’s worldview and the postwar European conception of statesmanship that converts this friction into a conflict threatening the Western alliance.
For some of Mr. Trump’s critics, it is absurd to speak of a Trumpian “ideology.” They see Mr. Trump’s foreign policy as a bundle of narcissistic impulses, transactional greediness, and knee-jerk reflex. Winston Churchill had written great works of history before becoming prime minister; both Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, though derided as lightweights in their time, filled their journals with carefully considered reflections about big ideas. The author of “The Art of the Deal”is not in that league. President Trump has no master project, many critics say, no fleshed-out political philosophy he seeks to impose on the world.
Still, one can speak of ideas basic to the European project that Mr. Trump categorically rejects. Mr. Trump doesn’t believe the future will be one of interdependent, postnationalist states engaged in win-win trade. He doesn’t believe military power will become less relevant as progress marches on. He doesn’t think international law and international institutions can, should or will dominate international life. Individual nation-states will remain, in Mr. Trump’s view, the dominant geopolitical force.
Mr. Trump therefore thinks the EU’s political establishment is just as blind and misguided as they believe he is. He thinks Europe is making itself steadily weaker and less relevant in international life, and that Vladimir Putin’s view of the world is almost infinitely more clear-eyed and rational than Angela Merkel’s .
When Mr. Trump looks at Germany today, he may not see much of an ally. Germany benefits immensely, the president believes, from America’s investments in NATO and more generally in Europe. But it responds with selfish trade policies, moral lectures, and security free-riding. Believing, as Mr. Trump does, that Russia isn’t a threat to the U.S., he feels no need to bury U.S.-German differences for the sake of anti-Russian unity.
Mr. Trump thinks Israel is a smarter and better ally than Germany. He listens to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more than he does to Mrs. Merkel because he thinks Israel’s aggressive defense of its national interests reflects a better understanding of the world, and because he thinks cooperating with Bibi brings more political benefit at home and more effective assistance abroad than anything the Germans are willing to provide.
Even worse from a European perspective, Mr. Trump believes international relations are driven by need and self-interest—and by Mr. Trump’s measure, Europe needs the U.S. much more than the U.S. needs Europe. Mr. Putin wants to break the EU’s unity so he can reassert Russian influence across the Continent. China’s industrial plans envision, among other things, the overthrow of German supremacy in automobile and machine-tool manufacturing. Europe lacks the military might and unified leadership to overcome the enormous security and migration challenges in North Africa and the Middle East, and the fracturing facade of European unity can’t conceal the deepening divides between East and West, North and South.
A perfect storm is brewing in the Atlantic. In personality and in style, Mr. Trump represents almost everything Europeans dislike most about American life. He is even more abrasive when it comes to matters of substance. The Trumpian mix of zero-sum trade policy, hard-nosed foreign-policy realism, and skepticism about Europe’s future leads him to think of Europe as both a weak partner and an unreliable one. Small wonder, then, that virtually every encounter between Mr. Trump and his European counterparts leaves the relationship under greater strain.
That Mr. Trump wants to renegotiate elements of America’s trade and security relationship with Europe is not, in itself, a bad or a destructive thing. And it is no tragedy that this weekend’s Group of 7 attendees failed to agree on yet another platitudinous, instantly forgotten communiqué. But given the poisonous nature of U.S.-European relations at the moment, the White House should consider the benefits of turning down the heat. For all its flaws, the trans-Atlantic community remains a vital asset for American influence in the world. Neither history nor, one suspects, the electorate will reward a president on whose watch it suffers irreparable harm.
2) Obama Secretly Meeting With Potential 2020 Candidates
BY: JackHeretik
Former President Barack Obama has been secretly holding meetings with multiple potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
Obama has so far met with at least nine possible candidates at his office in the World Wildlife Fund building in Washington, D.C., Politico reports.
All the meetings were arranged quietly, without even some close advisers to the people involved being told of the conversations, in part because of how much Obama bristles at his private meetings becoming public knowledge. All have been confirmed to POLITICO by multiple people who have been briefed on the secretive sit-downs.
The meetings have been at Obama’s personal office on the third floor of the World Wildlife Fund building in D.C.’s West End neighborhood, and they show how a stream of ambitious, searching politicians are looking for guidance and support from the man who has remained the reluctant leader of the Democratic Party, eager to be involved, though not directly. He's not making any promises of support, though, and is not expected to endorse in the 2020 race until after a nominee has emerged.
Among those Obama has met with in Washington, D.C. are Sens. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D.), and his former vice president, Joe Biden.
Other Democrats who have had recent meetings with Obama outside his office include Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti; former Missouri Secretary of State and failed Senate candidate Jason Kander; former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg; and former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
Obama has also met with his former attorney general, Eric Holder, who may be considering his own run for president and is now working with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
Since Republicans won the White House and retained control of both houses, many Democrats have struggled to point to a leader in the Democratic Party, and some continue to point to Obama. Obama for his part "doesn’t see himself as the person to come up with the plan, people who know about the meetings say, but he is eager to be a sounding board and counselor to the Democrats he sees as playing a role in shaping the party’s future," according to Politico.
The potential large field of Democratic candidates running for the party's nomination to challenge Trump in 2020 has caused turmoil and begun to pit different factions of the Democratic Party against one another. A vocal portion of the party has pushed it in a more liberal direction, while some others wish to take a more moderate stance.
Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has urged Obama to help Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections with fundraising.
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3) University Boardrooms Need Reform
3) University Boardrooms Need Reform
As in corporate America in the 1980s, self-serving managers are putting institutions at risk.
By Paul S. Levy
Since I quit, I have received an education in why universities can trample free expression with impunity. My letter of resignation was printed in full in the student newspaper and excerpted on this page. I received well over 150 supportive messages from, among others, trustees, students, law school professors and alumni. One was from Judge Ray Randolph, a 1969 law graduate who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “You . . . have disgraced an institution I had admired throughout my professional career,” Judge Randolph wrote, addressing Dean Ruger.
Mr. Ruger, meanwhile, directed his fundraisers to tell alumni that his treatment of Ms. Wax was “fairly common”—a brazen falsehood. No Penn professor’s teaching responsibilities had ever been changed or limited for speaking out on public issues. He also claimed that Penn Law did not “mandate” ethnic diversity in selecting applicants for law review, traditionally an anonymous, merit-based process. That was misleading, since Penn now encourages a subjective statement from law-review applicants, which is intended to reveal their identity and tip the ethnic scales rather than reward academic excellence.
Other than me, not a single Penn trustee, overseer or professor wrote publicly about Ms. Wax’s treatment or resigned in protest. Nobody in the university community has an incentive to speak out, and everyone seems afraid to do so. Professors fear retaliation; students worry about social ostracism. I sent my letter of resignation to Angela Duckworth, the Penn psychologist and author of the celebrated 2016 book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.” She and I met last year when I accepted the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award and had a lively email correspondence. She did not respond to my resignation email.
Trustees and donors candidly admit in private that they do not want to jeopardize their children’s chances for admission. Many serve out of genuine interest and affection for their alma mater, although they also enjoy the prestige, influence and perks, like access to the university’s medical system, that go with the positions. There’s no incentive to rock the boat, and universities make sure they don’t get much opportunity. At the trustee level, the board is large and its formal meetings are entirely show and tell, with discussion severely limited and vote outcomes never in doubt. Penn Law overseers do not vote on anything. One Penn medical school board member told me he was dropped because he had asked too many questions.
The corporate world offers a parallel to trustees’ abdication of their fiduciary duties. Reformers of the 1980s argued correctly that the interests of shareholders were too often subjugated to personal interest and small-group social dynamics on boards that compel unanimity. Just as the resulting realignment of interests between corporate boards and shareholders unleashed spectacular value for American investors, an activist response by the governing bodies of America’s universities is now essential.
The punishment of Ms. Wax coincides with the launch of the university’s latest fundraising campaigns, which seek $4.1 billion in all and $100 million for the law school alone. These philanthropic funds will maintain the massive bureaucracy that coddles hypersensitive students while issuing hollow claims to uphold academic freedom and dissent. When universities violate their values, trustees and overseers should resign, and donors should close their wallets. Until that happens, nothing will change.
Mr. Levy founded JLL Partners, a private equity firm, and created the Levy Scholars Scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
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4) A Victory for Voting Law
4) A Victory for Voting Law
A 5-4 Supreme Court majority saves the day for accurate voter rolls.
By The Editorial Board
A 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s policy of clearing from registration rolls voters who don’t show up for several years. This is a victory for federalism and the plain reading of the law, notwithstanding howls that this is somehow about purging minority voters.
In Husted v. Randolph Institute, left-leaning groups challenged Ohio’s procedure for removing people from its voter rolls under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which was intended to increase voter registration and protect the integrity of the ballot. More than 10% of Americans move every year, and 2.75 million are estimated to be registered in more than one state.
The federal law requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names” of voters who are ineligible “by reason of” death or change in residence. But it also prohibits states from removing registrants unless they fail to return a prepaid postage card ascertaining that they still live in the district. States also cannot remove people “solely” for failing to vote.
Within these limits states have wide latitude to cull their rolls to prevent fraud. Ohio sends postage cards to registered voters who haven’t voted for two years to verify that they still live at the same address. Those who don’t return cards or vote for four more years are removed from the rolls.
Liberals argued that the National Voter Registration Act says states can’t remove people “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” But the law says that “nothing in [this prohibition] may be construed to prohibit a State from using” other procedures identified in the law including the failure to return a card.
Congress added in 2002 that “registrants who have not responded to a notice” and “have not voted in two consecutive general elections for Federal office shall be removed.” It’s hard to be clearer than that. As Justice Samuel Alito explained in his majority opinion, “no sensible person would read the Failure-to-Vote Clause as prohibiting what [other sections of the law] expressly allow.”
The four liberal Justices disagreed, though their real gripe is with Congress. Justice Stephen Breyer opined that Ohio’s process violates the law’s requirement that states make a “reasonable effort” to remove ineligible voters because failing to return a postage card doesn’t provide enough information to make such a judgment. But the federal law expressly endorses the postcard test.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed the majority upholds a scheme that promotes the “disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters,” but there’s no evidence that the law has been applied in a biased fashion.
Voter registration has become an emotive political issue on the left, and the four liberals are riding that political wave in wanting judges to define what is reasonable under the federal statute. Too bad they don’t have the law on their side.
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