Are We Better Off Today Than During Obama's 8 Years? No "Snowflake" Exhibition To Date. Questionable Withdrawal?

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Are we better today than we were when Obama was first elected?  Hard to say yes if you still believe statistics do not lie as much as the mass media, CNN and The New York Times. Economy better, employment better, unemployment lower, consumer confidence up, wages are beginning to rise a bit, trade somewhat more even, red tape and power of various agencies clipped and more practical thinking now rules. Iran has been challenged, China is under a spotlight and is being told to correct their behaviour.  N Korea somewhat subdued but jury still out.  Terrorism has waned a bit but still lurks in the background. Illegal immigration unresolved but not for lack of effort. Energy development soaring. Judges have gone off the chess board and Democrats have reverted back to hypocrisy.

Obama continues to take credit for the improvement since Trump became president so our former "empty suit" president is still in his own dream world and no matter what he says the mass media continue to fawn and give credit where none was ever due. So much for objective thinking.

In a few weeks Democrats will have the opportunity to hound Trump more than they already have and they will try and hang him for all his bimbo activities, most of which occurred when he was not president.  They will also stretch and try and get him for other assorted alleged abuses and law breaking activity to make sure he accomplishes little more than he already has because they lust to re-seize power and return us to the path Obama had us on for 8 years.

To some degree, this is what the markets are currently assessing and are discomforted by what they  prospectively see out there.

One day, voters will have another chance to express themselves and to state whether they are pleased with the behaviour of our self-serving  politicians.  And so it goes!!!!(See 1 and 1a below.)
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As readers of these memos know, I serve on The Board of Advisors of The State Museum (GMOA) located on the Campus of UGA, in Athens. 

Consequently, I am interested in how museums function, what message they send through their various exhibitions and how they, like most everything else in our society, are going off track and becoming political entities busily engaged in making statements rather than displaying works of art to enhance the aesthetics of the viewer and assorted art patrons.

Because The National Museum is under the auspices of The Smithsonian,  located in D.C and funded largely by the government, it is subjected to today's fashionable trends of identity politics and various polemic activities that polarize society. Art displayed for the sake of politics is the new shtick.

During my tenure on GMOA's Board, I have also observed somewhat of  a shift in our own focus, board discussion and exhibits but not in an overly egregious manner.

It is possible that an important segment of our society is more interested in music than art but to mention this suggests I am an heretic and politically incorrect.  If so I plead guilty as charged.

At least GMOA has yet to exhibit art picturing "snowflakes"on a college campus. (See 2 below.)

And more (See 2a below.)
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Is Trump justified in a quick withdrawal from Syria.  Seems those I respect think not. (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
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Dick
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1)

Interpreting the Trump Meteor

By  Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

His survival fight may at least buy time for a few important lessons to sink in.

Nobody exaggerated Donald Trump’s Russia ties like Mr. Trump himself when he claimed, early in the 2016 campaign, “I know Putin.” He didn’t know Putin. Mr. Putin never gave him the time of day.

Recall that we started down today’s investigatory whirlpool as a direct result of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ seizing on Russia as an excuse for their loss to a president whom many considered a joke. Now poor Adam Schiff, incoming head of the House Intelligence Committee, is trying to catch up with the new Democratic theme: Mr. Trump’s real sin is not Russian collusion after all. It’s his tawdry but well-known business and personal life.

Not only must Mr. Schiff dream up some way to justify his committee’s fishing in these waters. His new patter also has to shed a semi-credible back glow on his earlier role as chief flogger of now-defunct Russian conspiracy theories.

Sadly, he would have benefited from an aide whispering in his ear when he was making his pitch to a New Yorker writer. “What should concern us most,” he explained to the magazine, “is anything can have a continuing impact on the foreign policy and national-security policy of the United States, and, if the Russians were laundering money for the Trump Organization, that would be totally compromising.”

Huh? For the Russians to be laundering money for him, Mr. Trump would need a large source of under-the-table cash from somewhere (his NBC show?). What the confused Mr. Schiff presumably means is that Mr. Trump was laundering money for Russians—i.e., selling them condos. Never mind that the entire Western financial system also participated in this business opportunity. Now it will be one more legal jeopardy in the swirl of investigations around the White House.

Still, the media will have to work hard to flap away the odor of selective prosecution. Mr. Trump was already an unusually heavily scrutinized figure. Now he’s attracting the kind of subatomic legal scrutiny reserved only for presidents of the opposite party when the press is inveterately hostile too. Example: the New York Times reauditing his family’s heavily audited tax returns to find a welter of abuses that somehow escaped the IRS and New York tax department.

You can argue whether this is fair or wise, but that’s our system, and a U.S. political party was poorly advised to nominate somebody with Mr. Trump’s baggage in the first place.

This column has long maintained that a high-level Russian criminal conspiracy is the one thing investigators won’t find when loosed on Mr. Trump’s colorful business and personal history. I especially have to laugh over the somber and knowing suggestions that the Russians have “dirt” on Mr. Trump. Every third-tier swimsuit model and ex-Playmate from here to Las Vegas probably has dirt on Mr. Trump.

Michael Cohen’s reported admission that the Trump Organization was pursuing Russian opportunities well into 2016 campaign is a smoking gun, all right, but not of Russian collusion. Why did Mr. Trump run for president in the first place? To become more famous, to add gaudy luster to his brand. He had no expectation of winning. Of course he used the campaign spotlight to market himself for deals in which others would pay to use his name.

Winning was his big mistake, a colossal if propitious miscalculation. Nobody would care about Stormy Daniels if he weren’t president. His decades-long pursuit of a Trump Tower in Moscow would be a non-story. Nobody would be raking him over the emoluments coals for owning a hotel in Washington.

Unfortunately, it will also occur to Mr. Trump now that his best move is to cling to the White House at all costs. That’s because under Justice Department guidelines he can expect not to be indicted as long as he remains in office. I wonder if his Torquemadas have taken this into account.

The moment is turning weird. Even President Obama stepped forward to tidy up the scene by claiming that the inconvenient Trump boom is really the Obama boom. By all lights, the media should have treated this as laughable. Had a Republican leg of lamb been victorious on election night 2016, markets would have priced upward on the news that the Obama agenda was finished. Investors aren’t clairvoyant but they respond to unexpected information. And seldom in history have circumstances conspired to give so clear a verdict on an outgoing administration.

When it’s all over, this will be one lesson worth holding on to. Mr. Trump’s personal fight for survival is likely to dominate our politics for the foreseeable future. And yet if anything justified his election in the first place, it was the wake-up call from 63 million voters to America’s leadership class. Alas, it’s hard to listen to people like James Comey and Mr. Obama himself and not see our political system trying hard to expel Mr. Trump so it can go back to doing exactly what it was doing before he was elected.

1a)More Lawsuits = Higher 

Drug Prices

The Editorial Board

The FDA pulls an Obama rule that was a trial-lawyer special.

What spreads holiday cheer like a defeat for the trial lawyers? So seasons greetings from the Food and Drug Administration, which last week withdrew a destructive rule that would have enriched the tort bar at the expense of patients who rely on prescription medicines.

The rule proposed by the Obama Administration in 2013 allowed generic drug makers to tailor their own safety labels, which historically must be identical to the branded product. The rule’s biggest supporter was the plaintiffs bar, which figured this would open up more opportunities for lawsuits for failing to warn consumers about all and sundry risks. The practical effect would be to make drug labels even more incomprehensible than they are now, varying among products that are chemically identical. Side effects may include confusion.

By some mercy the rule was never finalized, and Members of Congress have more than once registered their opposition. Alex Brill of Matrix Global Advisors has estimated the rule would increase generic drug costs at least $4 billion a year, even as headlines shout about the apocalyptic costs of medicine. Litigation costs would no doubt be passed on to customers at the pharmacy counter.

Generic drugs are one of the most effective forms of price discipline in health care. Generic firms already run small profit margins because they sell drugs at commodity prices, and competition is fierce. The generics trade association has been warning that even as a record number of generics are approved, some can’t fetch the returns to survive on the market. No doubt some of the crunch is driven by consolidation among the wholesalers who buy drugs, and low reimbursement rates from government.

Credit to FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb for recognizing that government shouldn’t pile on more costs, and he was right to put the trial-lawyer rule in the shredder. Whatever one thinks about high drug costs, it’s hard to argue that the route to lower prices runs through more lawsuits.

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2) The National Gallery of Identity Politics

By  Roger Kimball

Forget Monet or Hopper. The art museum’s new director wants to tackle ‘gender equality,’ ‘social justice’ and ‘diversity.’

‘Every thing is what it is and not another thing,” observed the 18th-century British philosopher Joseph Butler. If that seems obvious, you haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in the culture. Once upon a time (and it wasn’t that long ago), universities were what they claimed to be, institutions dedicated to the preservation and transmission of civilization’s highest values. Now they are bastions of political correctness, “intersectionality” and identity politics.

Something similar can be said of art museums. Although barely 200 years old as an institution, the art museum until recently existed primarily to preserve and nurture a love of art. Today, many art museums serve as fronts in battles that have little or nothing to do with art: entertainment, yes; snobbery and money, of course; and politics, politics, politics.

The latest example of this trend is particularly egregious because it involves one of America’s premier institutions, the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Established and endowed by Andrew Mellon in 1937, the National Gallery quickly became one of the nation’s two or three most exquisite art museums. In terms of the breadth, depth and excellence of its collection, its only real rival is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And because of its place in the nation’s capital (and its claim on the taxpayer’s purse—about $140 million of its $190 million budget comes from the U.S. Treasury), the National Gallery occupies a singular place in the metabolism of America’s cultural life.

Obituarists looking to write the epitaph of the American art museum could do worse than ponder the elevation of Kaywin Feldman, currently director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, to take the helm of the National Gallery in March when Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, director since 1993, retires.

All the announcements of Ms. Feldman’s appointment have breathlessly noted that she will be “the first woman to hold the top job at the museum.” It’s meant as homage, and I hope I will be forgiven if I point out how patronizing are such declarations. In any case, the thing to appreciate about Ms. Feldman is not her sex but her slavish devotion to transforming the museum into a left-wing political redoubt.

In an article for Apollo magazine last May, she began by establishing her anti-Trump bona fides, bemoaning the “psychological toll” that his presidency is “taking on our collective psyche.” That done, she proceeded to assure us that art museums are “intensely political organisations,” adducing not only such global themes as love, death and religion but also “imperialism, colonialism, war, oppression, discrimination, slavery, misogyny, rape, and more.”

Noting the changing demography of the U.S., Ms. Feldman welcomes the insinuation of “identity politics” into the center of the museum experience. “As long as the staff and trustees at American museums remain predominantly white,” she writes, museums risk “irrelevance” by failing to attract “younger and more diverse audiences” and “address formidable and pressing societal issues.”

The list of issues she believes an art museums must tackle reads like a far-left manifesto. “Gender equality,” naturally; “diversity, inclusion, equity, and access,” but of course; “social justice,” “global understanding,” “liberal education for all,” etc., etc.

To get a sense of what this would look like in action, ponder Ms. Feldman’s response at the Minneapolis Institute of Art to President Trump’s travel ban in 2017. “The museum’s staff and I felt compromised because that message didn’t align with our belief in inclusion,” she proudly notes. “This prompted us to come up with a quick and authentic response to express our values with a billboard campaign.”

Toward the end of her essay, Ms. Feldman asks: “What more important role could a museum have today than in attempting to ease people’s pain and bring them together in a safe place for difficult conversations?” The day before yesterday, one might have answered: A more important role for the art museum is to preserve the artistic treasures of the past.

Until the late 1950s, the museum was widely regarded as a “temple of art,” a special place set apart from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The decibel level was low, decorum high and crowds generally sparse. In the culture at large, there was broad agreement that the art museum had a twofold curatorial purpose: first, to preserve and exhibit objects of historical interest and commanding aesthetic achievement; second, to nurture the public’s direct experience of those objects. “Art,” not “amenity,” not “politics” or “social justice,” came first on the museum’s menu.

The 1960s put paid to all that. As that decade’s egalitarian imperatives insinuated themselves ever more thoroughly into mainstream culture, the ideal of aesthetic excellence came under fire. Critics castigated what they called “the masterpiece mentality,” the retrograde idea that adulated “hero objects” and presumed some works exerted a greater claim on our attention than others. Entertainment and diversion, not connoisseurship, were the order of the day.

Many commentators—even many artists—rejected outright the pursuit of excellence, which they repudiated as an “elitist” holdover from the discredited hierarchies of the past. Others subordinated the aesthetic dimension of art to one or another political program or social obsession. Notoriety, not artistic accomplishment, became the chief goal of art, even as terms like “challenging” and “transgressive” took precedence over “beautiful” and other traditional epithets in the lexicon of critical commendation.

Ms. Feldman’s appointment to run the National Gallery is the latest stop on an express train whose destination is the subordination of art to politics. At the end of her essay for Apollo, she asserts that “the national and global political climates have created a situation in which our essential principles are under attack.” She is right about that. But she fails to note that it is enemies of art like Kaywin Feldman who are leading the charge.

Mr. Kimball is editor and publisher of the New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books.

2a) Obama’s School Discipline Guidance Could Be Doomed. Here’s

 Why That’s Great News.

By Johnathan Butcher

This year started with a reminder that we cannot take the safety of our children for granted, and Washington has ended the year by taking the issue seriously.

The Federal Commission on School Safety released its final report Tuesday and recommended the removal of federal guidance that has cast the specter of federal investigation over school districts since 2014.

The report calls for rescinding federal directives on student suspensions and expulsions (otherwise known as “exclusionary discipline”) that were based on specious legal grounds and have had troubling results in schools around the country.

The Trump administration created the commission after the tragic event on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Florida. Among the commission’s responsibilities was to consider whether to recommend that Washington rescind federal guidance issued under President Barack Obama in 2014 that micromanaged local school discipline policies.

Billed as policy guidance to schools to prevent discrimination against minority students, the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter also contained instructions on how to limit student interaction with law enforcement and alternatives to exclusionary discipline.

Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky wrote in National Review that this agency-level guidance stands out because it violated federal rules regarding congressional approval for such action.

And a letter drafted by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and signed by state-based research institutes questioned the Dear Colleague letter’s use of “disparate impact.” The federal guidance used this legal theory to threaten schools with investigations if schools disciplined students from certain races more often—even if the same students broke rules more frequently than their peers.

In following the guidance, difficult and even dangerous students can remain in class at the expense of other students. Educators in districts following the federal letter such as Oklahoma City and Hillsborough, Florida, report school safety has deteriorated. A study of Philadelphia schools found that student achievement suffered among the peers of offending students when schools limited exclusionary discipline.

The Stoneman Douglas tragedy exposed the fact that Broward County’s student conduct policies (called “PROMISE”) predate the federal letter and may have even inspired the guidance.

Many of the same provisions and approaches to limiting exclusionary discipline are found in both documents. The district’s safety net proved to have holes too big to stop a student with a record of threats and assaults from committing more violence.

Yet after Feb. 14, county officials defended PROMISE by saying the policy had nothing to do with the disastrous event.

Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie dismissed claims that PROMISE was to blame as part of a witch hunt. “It goes with the whole narrative that anything under the Obama administration is no good and we have to get rid of it,” said Runcie, who had been honored by the Obama White House for PROMISE.

Remarkably, county officials later admitted that the alleged shooter had been referred to PROMISE, but they had no record of what was used to treat the individual.

Local media says “the school district launched a persistent effort to keep people from finding out what went wrong.” A state public safety commissionhas now sanctioned officials that the commission determined failed to protect Stoneman Douglas students.

Kenneth Preston, a Broward County student who challenged the district’s actions after the school shooting, said in an interview, “Rescinding the [federal] guidance is a huge part of this. That obviously in our situation wasn’t the only factor, but it was a huge factor in that student not having an arrest record or having a lot of school discipline.”

“The students that knew something told adults and the adults didn’t do something,” Preston says.

The Federal Commission on School Safety’s report said, “The guidance sent the unfortunate message that the federal government, rather than teachers and local administrators, best handles school discipline. As a result, fearful of potential investigations, some school districts may have driven their discipline policies and practices more by numbers than by teacher input.”

By recommending Washington remove the guidance, the commission lets parents, school officials, and law enforcement turn to “local solutions” that are “best suited for dealing with the unique needs of local communities.”

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3) Withdrawing US troops from Syria is a huge strategic mistake, Obama's style. 

It is a dream scenario for Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, the Assad regime, Erdoğan, 

Natan Nestel 

It will have dire consequences. 

Israel's and US' enemies in the area are celebrating.

John Bolton, Secretary of Defense Mattis, Republican and Democratic senators and many strategist and ME experts are against it.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said the president’s decision was shortsighted.

Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, called the decision “extraordinarily short-sighted and naive. ..... This move will look like a ‘withdrawal,’ not a ‘victory,’ and yet more evidence of the dangerous unpredictability of the US president,” Lister said. “This is not just a dream scenario for ISIS, but also for Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, all of whom stand to benefit substantially from a US withdrawal.”

In September US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warned that quitting Syria too fast would be a “strategic blunder” and James Jeffrey, the US special representative for Syria engagement, this month said the US was “not in a hurry” to leave the war-torn nation.

John Bolton pushed the idea of a US withdrawal even further off, tying such an event to Iran’s actions in Syria.

“We’re not going to leave (Syria) as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders,” Bolton told reporters.

“That includes Iranian proxies and militias,” he added.

3a) US ‘quickly’ pulling out troops from Syria as Trump says IS ‘defeated’

In surprise move, White House confirms soldiers have begun leaving country; president declares destroying Islamic State was only reason for being there

By AFP and TOI staff

WASHINGTON — The United States will withdraw its troops from Syria, a US official told AFP on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump said America has “defeated ISIS” in the war-ravaged country.

The stunning move will have extraordinary geopolitical ramifications and could fuel Israeli concerns that its enemies — primarily Iran — could gain a further foothold in the neighboring country through its various proxies.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” the Republican president tweeted, referring to the Islamic State group.

The US official said Trump’s decision was finalized Tuesday.

We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018

“Full withdrawal, all means all,” the official said when asked if the troops would be pulled from all of Syria.

Currently, about 2,000 US forces are in Syria, most of them on a train-and-advise mission to support local forces fighting IS.

The official would not provide a timeline for a withdrawal, saying only: “We will ensure force protection is adequately maintained, but as quickly as possible.”

Responding to the reports, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared to confirm a pullout.

“Five years ago, ISIS was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate. These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign. We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign,” she said.

“The United States and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, and any means of infiltrating our borders,” she added.

A US soldier sits on an armored vehicle at a newly installed position in Manbij, north Syria, April 4, 2018. (Hussein Malla/AP)

The Pentagon would not confirm the US troop pull-out.

“At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region,” Pentagon spokesman Colonel Rob Manning said.

Most US forces are stationed in northern Syria, though a small contingent is based at a garrison in Al-Tanaf, near the Jordanian and Iraqi border.

A large contingent of the main US-backed, anti-IS fighting force in Syria, an alliance known as the Syrian Democratic forces (SDF), is Kurdish and is viewed by Turkey as a “terrorist” group.

People familiar with the matter said that US officials have been telling allies in northeastern Syria that they plan to begin an immediate pullout, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The decision to withdraw marks a shocking development not just for Kurds in Syria, but for long-established US doctrine in the region.

Only last week Brett McGurk, the special envoy to defeat IS, said: “nobody is declaring a mission accomplished.”

“The military objective is the enduring defeat of ISIS. And if we’ve learned one thing over the years, enduring defeat of a group like this means you can’t just defeat their physical space and then leave.”

A US presence in Syria is seen as key to pushing against Iranian influence in the country and across the broader region. Tehran-backed militias have supported the regime of President Bashar Assad.

Israel has been working itself to keep Iran from gaining a foothold in Syria, an effort that has been complicated by Russia’s alliance with Assad.

A mock road sign for Damascus, the capital of Syria, and a cutout of a soldier, are displayed in an old outpost in the Golan Heights near the border with Syria, May 10, 2018. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Israeli UN envoy Danny Danon said Jerusalem respected the decision, but opposition lawmaker Yair Lapid tweeted that the pullout would “pave the way for Iran to achieve a foothold.”

In April two US officials told the Associated Press that a phone call at the time between Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grew tense over Israeli objections to US plans to leave Syria within six months.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said the president’s decision was shortsighted.

“President @realDonaldTrump is right to want to contain Iranian expansion,” Graham said on Twitter.

“However, withdrawal of our forces in Syria mightily undercuts that effort and put our allies, the Kurds at risk.”

Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, called the decision “extraordinarily short-sighted and naive.”

“This move will look like a ‘withdrawal,’ not a ‘victory,’ and yet more evidence of the dangerous unpredictability of the US president,” Lister said.

“This is not just a dream scenario for ISIS, but also for Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, all of whom stand to benefit substantially from a US withdrawal.”

IS swept across large swaths of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, implementing their brutal interpretation of Islamic law in areas they controlled.

But they have since seen their dream of a state crumble, as they have lost most of that territory to various offensives.

In Syria, IS fighters are holding out in what remains of the pocket that once included Hajin, including the villages of Al-Shaafa and Sousa.

In September US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warned that quitting Syria too fast would be a “strategic blunder” and James Jeffrey, the US special representative for Syria engagement, this month said the US was “not in a hurry” to leave the war-torn nation.

At the time, Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton, a long-time Iran hawk, pushed the idea of a US withdrawal even further off, tying such an event to Iran’s actions in Syria.

“We’re not going to leave (Syria) as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders,” he told reporters.

“That includes Iranian proxies and militias,” he added.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

3b) Netanyahu: We will protect ourselves after U.S. leaves Syria

By HERB KEINON

“The American administration told me that the intention of the president is to take their troops out of Syria,” he said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the US intention to withdraw its troops from Syria did not come as a surprise, and that he spoke about the matter with US President Donald Trump on Monday, and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday.

“The American administration told me that the intention of the president is to take their troops out of Syria,” he said. “They made clear that they have other ways to make their influence felt in the area.”

Netanyahu said this was obviously “an American decision,” and that Israel would would study the timetable, see how the withdrawal will be carried out, and gage “its ramifications on us.”

In any event, he added, “we will protect israel's security and defend ourselves from that front.”

Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, former director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and head of the Research Division of IDF Military Intelligence, was much less sanguine.

He said that if the US forces leave areas in southern Syria, “it would mean that the Assad forces and the Iranians will have full control over Syria and this would mean that they may try to deliver weapons from Iran through Iraq to Syria and then to Lebanon, and there’s not going to be anything in between to stop them.”

Kuperwasser said that the Iranians will “be empowered and feel much stronger” by this move, and “it’s not totally clear that Islamic State cannot re-emerge, taking advantage of the weakening of their adversaries in this area and rise again”.

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