IIt's Not About the Nail
And
What Is Politics? (Comedy)
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Another Rant! (See 1 below.)
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Nympho-mic Democrats accuse Kavanaugh of being a serial rapist drunk but ignore the fact that they are drunk with lust for power to destroy those with whom they disagree and those whose reputations they wish to smear because they stand in their way.
Assuming Kavanaugh is approved, the Democrats will probably do several things to continue their march toward trying to win the mid-term elections in November.
a) They will continue to use the Kavanaugh Hearings to berate him so they can keep the flame flickering in order to gin up the female and abortion vote.
b) They will turn their bloodied knives back on Trump believing he is America's number one enemy and Trump will continue to gin up his base and make clear what his administration has accomplished on behalf of all Americans.
c) Democrats will now have to defend against revelations of how the various departments and agencies under control of the Obama Administration did everything they could to prevent Trump from becoming president. (See 2 below.)
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Some comparative military statistics. (See 3 below.)
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As my longtime dear family friend and fellow memo reader noted once Democrats could not win characterizing themselves as liberals they changed their label to progressives.
Now we have progressives struggling to survive. (See 4 below.)
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Bolton and the Palestinian state or lack thereof? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) The best measure of unemployment is U6 which measures people who are not working, but want to, like the regular number of U3, but also the marginally working who just decided to work as little as one hour a week, as unemployed. It is now at 7.4% which is closing in on the historic lows of around 6.8% in 2000. Dec 2000 was the last time it was lower than today. Many part time workers are now full time, and part time is just 2.7% of the workforce. A huge improvement. Jobs available are more than people available to fill them.
New NAFTA, (USMCA), is a major event, not for the deal itself, but it makes a template for the EU and Japan to follow and do deals quickly. That will leave China isolated and the west united against them led by the US. It totally changes the dynamics. Trump is likely holding off further discussion with China until he has all his ducks in a row with the others. USMCA is a huge game changer, more for being the breakthrough of doing a deal everyone waited for, than the deal itself, which seems to be an improvement, but not a dramatic change in terms. One leading expert told me it is neither here nor there in terms of any dramatic change in trade terms, but it is an improvement. It is also a game changer for the election in close senate races with this agreement on top of Kavanaugh. Dems in heavily Red states, mainly in the Midwest, are suddenly way behind in the polls.
More respected economists are concerned we are headed to a recession in 2020 or 2021 due to excessive asset prices driven up by ultralow rates, and QE for the past ten years, and the trailing off over the next 18 months of the massive fiscal stimulus we now have. As the Fed raises rates, the differential between stock yields and ten year bond yields shrinks, and capital begins to shift out of stocks to bonds. As the ten year moves toward its historical norm range of 5%-6%, then a lot of capital moves and asset prices drop-stock prices go down. Economic growth slows, capital investment slows, and stocks decline further. Earnings decline as rates increase borrowing costs. The issue now is when does this happen, 2020, 2021???. There is a real concern that over the past several years too many companies and governments around the country and the world levered up to levels that are unsustainable, and when the ten year is back up around 5%, bad things will happen with a growing number of companies and governments not able to pay debt service. This is how a serious recession happens. In addition, the US government deficit is out of control now, and Congress needs to do a major shift in spending. November will determine if there is any hope of this happening. None of this means get out of stocks now. Rates are still 3%, earnings growth is still over 20%, and inflation remains low. Job creation was very strong in Sept, as was service industry growth, which is the bulk of the economy. On the other side, factory orders are down a little in September, home prices are slowing their rise, new auto sales slowed in September, and maybe some things are topping out. Or maybe not. However the manufacturing index is still 59, which is still very high, consumer confidence is historically high, and home prices have risen so much they are likely too high and needed to level off. The rest of the world is much slower, which hurts exports, but exports, other than to Canada, is not so high that a slowdown will materially impact GDP growth to the point of triggering recession. We have a long way to go before a recession hits. I am staying in all equities for now. Even if GDP is only 3.5% in Q3, that is still very strong growth. It might surprise on the upside. The big risk to equities is still Dems getting control of Congress and spending all their time trying to impeach Trump and Kavanaugh, ripping apart the country even more.
Do not be mislead by the current rising oil prices. The new inventory number was much higher than expected. It is mainly speculation and greed by traders. While Iran goes offline in November, and Venezuela is already offline, in November the US is releasing 11 million barrels from the reserve, and can keep that up for a while if needed. The Saudis are stepping up production as is Iraq, Nigeria and Libya. In addition, we are going into the slow season for demand. Once the new pipelines in Permian are on line, the flow will be more than enough to cover shortages should they occur. That is a year away, Here is reality. Because Obama and the EPA worked to stop pipelines and crimp oil production, now consumers are paying the price in the form of higher prices. As usual, the left, in the person of Obama, wanted to crimp and manage the free market in the name of climate change, and in the end, as always happens, the consumer gets screwed by the government trying to manage supply down instead of the market determining price and production.
The strongest bit of evidence that Ford might be imagining the incident is her friend saying it never happened, she can’t recall if she ever knew Kavanaugh, and most telling, that the friend never called her to ask what happened after she suddenly disappeared from the party when there were only the two girls in attendance. Also how did a 15 year old get home at night alone, she cannot recall. She lied about fear of flying, and the Dems had her hidden all week in Delaware, but said she could not appear earlier because of her fear of flying. Now her ex-boyfriend says she lied at the hearing. If he is telling the truth, that is a game changer if she lied. There is a report that her second front door was actually added in 2008, 4 years before she testified it happened. Also her yearbook has been found and it is very revealing that she was no choir girl at all in high school. She drank too much as well per her own notes in the yearbook, if that is a true copy. She just is not credible. This is now looking like it could have been a setup, or maybe she was drunk at another party. Clearly the new FBI report clears him or they would not be voting. Flake comes off as a very weak individual every time he talks to the press, and rather confused as to what he really believes. Mitchell, the AZ prosecutor may be the real decider for the Republican holdouts because she has pointed out major flaws in Ford’s testimony that raise real issues of possible perjury, or maybe a setup. Her report to the Republicans was devasting for Ford.
Now that all of the women making charges, including Ford, are proving unreliable, they are trying to change the script and claim he lied about being so drunk he blacked out, or he lied about what the jokes in the yearbook really mean, or that he threw an ice cube. So now it becomes perjury. Having my own experience passed out and gone to sleep for many hours when I was young and drunk, passing out is not blacking out. He said he went to sleep, I can relate to that. It does not make Ford’s claim credible as the Dems are trying to claim. It proves nothing other than sometimes, as a kid, he drank a lot of beer.
The Dems complain now Kavanaugh has the wrong temperament and a lack of objectivity. This, despite 12 years of being considered a very calm, very temperate judge. Here is a quote from Justice Ginsberg and an example of the Dems idea of judicial temperament. “I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as president” “Now it is time to move to New Zealand”. They attack Kavanaugh over uncorroborated claims, but defend Bill Clinton after his rape of a woman, and other improper acts was proven as fact. He was found guilty of perjury. They defend Hilary for crushing the accusers of Bill.
Flake is a weak idiot, and Collins and Murkowski are no better. Time is up. The screaming protestors in the halls of the Capitol should be arrested for impeding Congress. They are taking the terrible lessons they learned on campus of disruption and screaming at people they oppose, and applying them to Congress. This is exactly what I have been warning about for a couple of years in the Rant, and now we are seeing it happen. What is happening on campus has spread to the grown up world, and it is terribly dangerous to democracy. It upends the basis of our nation- the constitution. And Soros is behind it all. Someone needs to accuse Soros and sue him. I hear Judicial Watch is about to do so. We are seeing the very soul of our nation at real risk of mob rule now, and they learned it all on campus, but now they have Soros money backing them.
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2)DNC Lawyers Met With FBI on Russia Before Warrant
Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm.
That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the presidential election.
The dossier, though mostly unverified, was then used by the FBI as the main evidence seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in the final days of the campaign.
The revelation was confirmed both in contemporaneous evidence and testimony secured by a joint investigation by Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees, my source tells me.
This confirms the FBI had good reason to believe the dossier amounted to an opposition-research effort to defeat Trump.
Agents failed to disclose that information in court when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to bug Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Evidence the FBI used partisan "intelligence" to justify spying on American citizens has prompted increasing numbers of Republicans calling on President Trump to declassify all of the FBI's documents in the Russia collusion probe.
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3) With More Divisions, the Army Can Win
This is an armed service that has been asked to do a lot, yet this service is often stretched thin. By Harold Hutchison
We’ve been looking recently at the plans to expand the Air Force by 74 squadrons, and the Navy’s effort to ramp up to 355 ships. What about the Army? This is an armed service that has been asked to do a lot, yet this service is often stretched thin.
This may sound absurd on its face. After all, at present, the Army has 476,00 active-duty personnel, according to GlobalSecurity.org, with another 343,000 in the National Guard, and 199,000 in the Army Reserve. But those numbers don’t quite tell the whole story. What we need to do is look at the units.
In 1991, the United States Army had 18 active divisions. The National Guard back then had another 10 divisions. Today, those numbers are 11 and eight, respectively. This is a sharp decline of over a third of the active divisions, and 20% of the National Guard units. That decline is magnified when one considers the loss of various independent brigades.
Now, what does it matter these days? Well, keep this in mind. With Russia reawakening as a threat, the United States Army has only the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Europe. The former is a light unit, while the latter used various Stryker vehicles. They would be facing hordes of Russian tanks. Three decades ago, the United States had all or part of six divisions forward-deployed to NATO — and those divisions had tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.
We managed to denude Europe of the very types of forces we would need to deter Russian aggression — or to send the Ruskies packing if they did decide to start something. Worse, other NATO countries haven’t lived up to their commitments regarding readiness. The sad fact of the matter is that it is much easier to lose a capable force structure than it is to build one up, and the United States and NATO foolishly let their defenses degrade to this point.
Poland, for instance, has been offering to build a permanent base for American troops. This is an offer that we should take up — Poland is a good place to put a heavy division or two. Yet that’s also not enough. The United States needs to place brigades in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. True, these brigades may be vulnerable if Russia attacks, but a Russian attack on American troops would mean a major war.
In conjunction with a larger Air Force that deploys additional squadrons to Europe, Russia could be deterred. But Russia is not the only reason to expand the force. The War on Terror requires that the Army become larger as well.
The 10-division force has been stretched so thin that the National Guard has to do regular deployments as well, and as such was misused, just as the Air National Guard has been. The National Guard is meant to be a backup — intended to help hold the line in a major war while the United States mobilizes.
It should be noted that the 19 active and National Guard divisions in service today are roughly the equivalent to the 1989 active-duty Army’s 18 divisions — and the active duty Army of 1989 had separate brigades to even things out. Perhaps it’s time to bring back more divisions to help ease the burden. Adding more National Guard forces should help.
For those who think it might be difficult, keep in mind, the United States fielded a total of 28 Army and National Guard divisions with a much smaller population than we have today. This force will cost money, but it’s better to spend money than to have to fight a major war — which costs not only money, but the lives of America’s finest. We need to look for the real bargain
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4) Insight: "The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals,but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!" -Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
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5) White House national security adviser John Bolton says Palestine is 'not a state'
ByHunter Walker
President Trump’s top national security adviser, John Bolton, dismissed the Palestinian territories as a “so-called state” during an appearance in the White House press briefing on Wednesday. Though he emphatically declared that Palestine is “not a state,” Bolton said it “could become” one and reiterated Trump’s support for a two-state solution to the ongoing dispute between Israel and Palestine.
Bolton brought up the situation when he discussed a pair of steps the Trump administration is taking to shield itself from binding decisions made by the International Court of Justice, which is the U.N. body that resolves international disputes. Bolton said “politicized” use of the court led the U.S. to exit the 1955 treaty of amity with Iran. Bolton also announced that the U.S. would withdraw from what he called the “optional protocol” in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The moves come after a ruling from the court that American sanctions against Iran were a violation of the 1955 treaty and after a complaint made by the Palestinians about the Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel last December.
“The president has decided that the United States will withdraw from the optional protocol and dispute resolution to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. This is in connection with a case brought by the so-called state of Palestine naming the United States as a defendant challenging our move of our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” Bolton said.
President Trump expressed support for a two-state solution at the U.N. General Assembly last week. The president’s son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, has been working on a peace plan that is highly anticipated in the region and due to be unveiled soon. While the White House has a strong relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this planning has proceeded without input from the Palestinians, who cut off contact with the U.S. in the wake of the embassy move. Since then, the Trump administration has cut aid and shuttered the Palestinians’ mission in Washington.
Bolton was subsequently questioned about whether his characterization of Palestine as a “so-called state” was “productive,” given Trump’s stated goal of a two-state solution. While he said Trump does support the creation of two states in the region, Bolton described his characterization of Palestine’s current status as “accurate.”
“Of course it’s not a state now. It does not meet the customary international law test of statehood. It doesn’t control defined boundaries. It doesn’t fulfill the normal functions of government. There are a whole host of reasons why it’s not a state. It could become a state, as the president said, but that requires diplomatic negotiations with Israel and others.”
The Palestinian territories include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The majority of the West Bank is under Israeli military control, but portions of it are under the joint control of Israel and the Palestinian authority. The Gaza Strip is governed by Hamas, but Israel maintains control of its airspace and coastline. While the U.S. does not recognize Palestine as a state, 137 of the 193 U.N. member countries do.
Bolton went on to say that his view of Palestine was in line with “a position that the United States government has pursued uniformly since 1988, when the Palestinian Authority declared itself to be the state of Palestine.”
“We don’t recognize it as the state of Palestine,” Bolton said. “We have consistently across Democratic and Republican administrations opposed the admission of Palestine to the United Nations as a state because it’s not a state.”
After Trump expressed support for a two-state solution, Netanyahu said that based on his conversations with the president, he was confident that the Americans “understand” that Israel would not relinquish security control in the region as part of the creation of a Palestinian state. At the briefing, Bolton was asked whether the Trump administration’s peace plan would indeed call for Israel to retain security control.
“We’ve been working, as you well know, on a peace plan involving Israel and the Palestinians. We’ll be rolling it out in due course when we decide it’s the most appropriate time to do it, and I’m sure that will answer your question then,” Bolton said.
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