Could Not Resist. Don't Push It. Zito on S.C, Democrats. Another Rant. Biden Not Big Enough Hater To Suit Democrat Candidates.

Could not resist, a few more and possibly some duplicates:

Now back to "normalcy."



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Every once in a while a danger to world peace dies: https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/06/22/caroline-glick-mohamed-morsi-death-is-a-reminder-of-why-he-was-dangerous/
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Don't push it!

Lawyers should never ask a Georgia grandma a question if they aren't prepared for the answer.

In a trial, a Southern small-town prosecuting attorney called his first witness, a grandmotherly, elderly woman to the stand. He approached her and asked, 'Mrs. Jones, do you know me?' 

She responded, 'Why, yes, I do know you, Mr. Williams. I've known you since you were a boy, and frankly, you've been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife, and you manipulate people and talk about them behind their backs. You think you're a big shot when you haven't the brains to realize you'll never amount to anything more than a two-bit paper pusher. Yes, I know you.'

The lawyer was stunned. Not knowing what else to do, he pointed across the room and asked, 'Mrs. Jones, do you know the defense attorney?'

She again replied, 'Why yes, I do. I've known Mr. Bradley since he was a youngster, too. He's lazy, bigoted, and he has a drinking problem. He can't build a normal relationship with anyone, and his law practice is one of the worst in the entire state. Not to mention he cheated on his wife with three different women. One of them was your wife. Yes, I know him.'

The defense attorney nearly died.

The judge asked both counselors to approach the bench and, in a very quiet voice, said,
'If either of you idiots asks her if she knows me, I'll send you both to the electric chair.'

And then:

 Screams of passion An Italian, a Frenchman and an Aussie were talking about screams of passion.

The Italian said:

"Last night I massaged my wife all over her body with the finest extra virgin Olive oil.

Then we made passionate love and I made her scream, non-stop for five minutes."

The Frenchman said:

"Last night I massaged my wife all over her body with special Aphrodisiac oil from Provence and then we made passionate love. I made her scream for fifteen minutes straight."

The Aussie said:

That's nothing!  Last night I massaged my wife, all over her body with a special butter. I caressed her entire body with the butter and then made love and I made her scream for two long hours."

The Italian and Frenchman, astonished, asked, "Two full hours? ......Wow! That's phenomenal.  How did you do it, to make her scream for two hours?"

The Aussie replied, "I wiped my hands on the curtains."
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ZITO ON S.C, DEMOCRATS THINKING. (SEE 1 BELOW.)
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Another Rant. (See 2 below.)
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Like the song from South Pacific you have to hate to be a true Democrat. (See 3 below.)
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I listened to Jonathan Schanzer being interviewed  on Wall Street Week today by Gigot and still remain conflicted. "Trump Calls Off Strike Against Iran; Here's the Bigger Picture
See a map of Iranian provocations just this past month Read and Watch "+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
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1)What do South Carolina Democrats think of the 2020 candidates? 

CHARLESTON, SC- I outline on Face the Nation this morning my reporting across the backroads of South Carolina on Democrats in the first in the South primary for this weeks Washington Examiner. 

Click here for the full story.

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2)The Chinese government is not at risk, but Hong Kong has to be a canary in the coal mine for Xi and his inner circle. Clearly they had no idea the extent of the protests could ever reach the levels we see. 30% of the total population were on the street, and protests continue. They are too large to use real force to stop. If they try a Tiananmen crackdown in HK, the whole world will scream, and all hell will happen, and Xi and China will pay a huge price. Inside China, the economy is weakening. Companies are leaving. There is a massive disruption of tradition with tens of millions moving to the cities and leaving the old people on the farm. There is poor social underpinning in China to provide care and medical care for these people left behind. Real estate values will be declining in cities as jobs decline and thousands of condos stand empty. Their stock market is way down. None of this will build comfort in the people who are being surveilled and suppressed.  Millions  of Chinese now travel and study in the US and Europe. Young people see what it means to live in a free society. Then they go back to an Orwellian existence. There is no risk of a revolution of any kind, but underneath the façade, there has to be a population feeling their lives are too controlled and restricted at a time of a materially slowing economy, and a major decline in investment values. If there is no deal with Trump, things will only get much worse with the added tariffs.

What most people do not seem to understand is that this is classic NY real estate negotiation, and Trump will do what he says regardless of pressure not to impose more tariffs.  He cannot blink now, or he and the whole world loses the whole negotiation. Trump intends to win, not to get meaningless better poll numbers in the short run. You have to pay attention to how Trump dealt with the banks and others when he was bankrupt. My ex-partner was worldwide head of real estate at Citi at the time. She had extensive dealings with him personally. Another close friend was worldwide head of real estate at another major bank, and he was the senior negotiator sitting across from Trump in the big collapse of his empire, so I have a very good sense of how Trump thinks and functions. You see it with N Korea.  He just walked out. No politician would ever have done that. He just does not care what other people think if he thinks he is right, and going to win. He will take it to the very edge. He will do whatever he thinks he needs to do to prevail. He did win the big prize -he become president despite the polls and press, and everyone knowing what a slime ball he is, so he believes in his gut instincts. You may hate that about him, but accept it, it is how he thinks, and it has worked well for him. He won. I assume there will be a temporary truce at the G20, and then new negotiations, but where it all ends, and when, is impossible to predict now.

Xi is just like Trump, and refuses to be the one who blinks. He needs to look tough in his own inner circle, or he could be out. Whoever thought the Soviet Union would collapse, but when you read the Gorbachev biography I am currently reading you learn what hidden rot there was at the top in Russia. With the US economy remaining very strong, and HK in turmoil, Trump is in a good position to hold out. If the Dems and US press were not screaming impeach, we would be in a far better negotiating position.  If Pelosi refuses to pass USMC, it weakens our position further. It is a real disservice to the country what the Dems and press are doing.

Meantime the US economy continues to grow, more slowly, but grow it does. The Atlanta Fed just raised their forecast for Q2 considerably.  Q2 may surprise a little on the upside. The Fed is not going to do anything until they see what happens with China and Iran. However, they have their finger on the button to lower quickly if needed. Market rates remain near historic lows, banks are very solid, and consumers remain in very good shape with very low cost mortgages and borrowing rates, and they continue to spend and save with prudence, unemployment is at record low rates, inflation is almost non-existent, oil prices remain very low, the US is now energy independent, and housing remains solid with lack of inventory and ultra-low mortgage rates. There is an enormous amount of cash and wealth sloshing around the world, and the US is still the safe haven, even over London with Brexit pending. As a result, if there is a real economic slowdown, there will not likely be a serious downturn in the US. There are almost none of the typical risks other than too much corporate debt, to create a real crisis. This is not 2008. No objective forecasters see a recession well into 2020. If there is a real deal with China in 2019, the economy will take off in 2020, right before the election.

The data points almost never reported, or considered, may be more important than the ones that everyone focuses on which is the Fed funds rate -the rate banks pay each other for loans overnight using excess reserves of the lending bank that are held by held by the Fed. Separately, the Fed pays a return on reserves banks keep with them. The reserve rate. Different than the Fed funds rate. The reserve rate  is the rate that really impacts money supply. The Fed funds market which is the overnight lending rate, market, has declined 80% since 2008, so it has very little real impact now. When that Fed reserves rate is above market rates for Treasuries, both short term and ten year, then banks put reserves with the Fed to earn a better return. It is now 25 basis points higher. That is a lot. Banks post reserves with the Fed to improve their risk adjusted returns when the reserve rate is higher than the market rate for Treasuries. and that reduces money supply available for lending.

Result is lending declines. Recently Treasury market rates are in major decline due to a flood of cash coming to the US due to negative rates paid in the EU, and economic and geopolitical uncertainty in much of the world. In addition, when the Fed sells off its QE bond holdings, as it has been doing, banks buy some, and that also takes liquidity away from banks, so lending is constrained. Both of these have been the case the past several months. Now we need the Fed to lower the reserves rate, and to slow selling their QE bond holdings which they are set to do in October. If banks have more cash on hand instead of sitting as reserves at the Fed, they make more loans, and that helps the economy. This possibly has more impact on Fed policy outcomes than the headline open market rate. There was a long time the Fed did not pay banks interest on reserves and then the Fed could manipulate money supply by buying and selling securities. That has all changed.  The Fed now has less control over the real market rate than it has ever had. QE has upset the traditional way the Fed dealt with money supply and rates.

As I have mentioned several times, fracking has changed everything. With the US now the biggest oil and gas producer, and soon to be the biggest exporter, events like Iran sanctions, Venezuela, and other former factors, have little negative impact on oil prices and on gas prices in the US. It means nobody can threaten us with oil ever again. Nobody can force consumers to pay high prices for gas.  Huge impact on consumer spending. It has completely changed the geopolitical balance in our favor. Keep this in mind when you think how Obama tried to prevent fracking and offshore drilling, and when you hear all the Dem candidates scream about climate change, and the desire by them to end fracking and oil discovery and pumping. They have zero understanding of the geopolitical, strategic importance of our ability to produce all this oil and gas, and the money and influence the US gets by oil and LNG exports it could never do under Obama. Remember gas lines in the seventies when the Arabs had huge control over us. We could  never crush Iran through sanctions without fracking. The biggest impact on cap ex is also oil industry expenditure. Elect a Dem president and Congress, and all this ends. It would be disastrous to foreign policy and the economy.

Despite the polls, which are meaningless at this point, note that well over 100,000 people signed up voluntarily, and many waited two days in the rain to see him in Orlando. Compare that to a small room of supporters for the Dems. That is real, vs polls that have Bernie, Pocahontas and the gay small town mayor in the lead over Trump. They showed up voluntarily, not because their union or their local political club pushed them to do so. Also note that all the press and Dem rhetoric claiming Trump is dangerous, is countered by reality, with his careful, well thought out, actions in close conjunction with allies, in Venezuela and the Iran Gulf attacks. Also the foolish rhetoric about tariffs misses the strategy completely. It is working so far, and there would be no chance to do a deal if Germany or the EU were having any say in negotiations with China. They had their chance over the last 30 years, and got it all wrong by thinking China would play nice if it got into WTO. The press and pollsters learned nothing from 2016, and they are again not understanding the deplorables turning out. If the economy stays strong, and if there is a real deal with China, Trump is unbeatable. That is what all the election computer models run by non-partisan experts say.

Don’t be misled.  Libre is not crypto currency as we know it as in Bitcoin. Libre is simply a money transfer system based on block chain technology made easy. You use your credit card to make a deposit at Libre and then you tell Libre to whom to transfer that deposit. That is really all it is. Since you have to make a cash deposit to transfer, it has substance which Bitcoin has none. It really is no different than making a deposit in your local bank and then wiring the money to someone else.  The big difference is ease of the transaction, and the ability of criminals to launder money easily with no trace. For DEA, CIA and FBI it is a disaster. You cannot follow the money with this.

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3)

Biden’s problem with Democrats is that he doesn’t hate Republicans | Marc Thiessen

Marc Thiessen, for the Washington Post

Let’s get this straight: Joe Biden is leading in the polls for the Democratic presidential nomination because he’s the most “electable” candidate in the Democratic field? A guy who doesn’t realize that I worked with segregationists isn’t a winning message with Democrats in 2020?

This is what you get when you turn to a candidate who has been in Washington for 46 years. Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, when the Democratic Party was very different than it is today. As a freshman senator, he had to get along with the senior leadership of his party — which included segregationists James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.

You may be thinking: Who in the world are James Eastland and Herman Talmadge? You're not alone. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of living Americans had either forgotten their names or never heard of them in the first place, until Biden decided to dredge them up from the fever swamps of the Democratic Party's sordid racial past.

Why, you ask, would he do such a thing? Because that's what Joe Biden does. He is a walking, talking gaffe machine. His point didn't even make sense. He was trying to argue that he can work across the aisle with people with whom he fundamentally disagrees. But Eastland and Talmadge sat on the same side of the aisle as Biden in the Senate; they were Democrats.

So now his younger, less popular Democratic opponents are pouncing on Biden’s mistake. California Sen. Kamala Harris (averaging 7.1 percent in the polls) declared that for Biden “to coddle the reputations of segregationists, of people who if they had their way I would literally not be standing here as a member of the United States Senate, is, I think, it’s just misinformed and it’s wrong.” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (2.3 percent) declared, “Vice President Biden’s relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (0.3 percent) tweeted, “It’s 2019 & JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility’ typified by James Eastland. Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal.”

Give me a break. No reasonable person thinks Biden was defending or even sympathetic to segregation. What Biden was trying to do — in his own, Bideny way — was to defend not segregation but civility and compromise. But sadly, in today’s Democratic Party, those ideas are just as controversial.

Recall that in February, Biden was forced to apologize for declaring — brace yourself — that Vice President Pence was a “decent guy.” Then, a few months later, Biden had to backtrack on his effort to craft a middle-ground approach to climate change that would be embraced by both environmentalists and blue-collar voters. After Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders thundered, “There is no ‘middle ground’ when it comes to climate policy,” Biden soon embraced the Green New Deal.

And this month, Biden was forced to flip-flop and abandon his four-decade-long support for the Hyde Amendment — bipartisan legislation that bars public funding for abortions — after his Democratic opponents attacked him for reaffirming what he once proudly called his “middle-of-the-road” policy on abortion. Biden has also been forced to apologize for his support for the bipartisan 1994 crime bill, which was signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton but which Democrats now blame for the mass incarceration of African Americans. “I haven’t always been right” on criminal justice, he declared earlier this year.

In today’s Democratic Party, compromise and consensus are dirty words. Biden’s problem is not that he is a closet racist; it’s that he does not hate Republicans and other political opponents. As he put it Tuesday: “Today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.” That is the point he was trying to make in his ham-handed way. And that is what his Democratic opponents are really upset about.

In a January speech, Biden said: “I read in the New York Times today that one of my problems if I were to run for president, I like Republicans. OK, well, bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Apparently, for many on the left, that sin is unforgivable.

Marc Thiessen writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post on foreign and domestic policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. @marcthiessen

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