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Furniture legs are there to hold up objects and in the dark to provide something to stub your toe on.
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Jim Robinson died suddenly and there will be a memorial service at the Skidaway Methodist Church at 2PM, Friday followed by a reception in the Azalea Room at Plantation.
Jim was a close friend, a devoted tennis player who played with our group for well over 10 years. He had a wicked cross court backhand and always gave fair line calls. What more can you ask for. Jim will be sorely missed as our tennis ranks continue to shrink. May he RIP!
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To right the ship often endures temporary pain.Will the world stand still and endure?
Trump is correct to recognize previous trade deals benefited others, particularly China, at America's expense . Factories closed, the middle class suffered and Hillary referred to the American laborer as deplorables. This is why Trump was elected and he kept his word and is doing something about it.
And for this, radical Democrats want to impeach him because he also is committed to reducing the power of the establishment who live in The Swamp.
Personally, I doubt N Korea will amend and bend. They have no economy, to speak of, and their people have been paying the price of militancy for decades.
China might relent a bit because they have a developed economy that is suffering and might believe Trump is going to win re-election though they certainly would prefer one of the Democrats because they could manipulate them to their will more than they can Trump.
I would like to think America remains the home of the brave. Time will tell. (See 1 below.)
And:
This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader. (See 1a below.)
Finally:
After battering Trump through a Gulag, closed door, basement process for 10 rounds the Trump haters are ready for rounds 11-15 where, I have no doubt, they will create the appearance of fairness but will still do what they can to put the nation through more hell. The one who really should be impeached is Schiff face. He is an unmitigated liar and was chosen by Pelosi because she knew she could manipulate him and could depend upon him to be the corrupt politician he is and has shown himself to be.
It is all about politics and getting rid of a duly elected president because radical Democrats hate him, fear he will clip their wings, ie. power, and drain the swamp.
Alas, it became evident to over 62 million frustrated deplorables it would take a Trump type to change D.C and that should now be abundantly evident. So, 62 plus millions decided to vote for this political novice because, unlike traditional Republicans, he was a fighter and counter puncher and they concluded , considering the pitiful opposition in the guise of Hillary, they would go with what Trump said to the black community - "What have you got to lose?"
As it turned out, Trump won, subsequently kept his word, passed some rational policies and turned a moribund economy around and you know the rest.
Yesterday's vote is another opportunity for petulant Democrats to continue their fishing expedition because they still do not have the basis for an impeachment that is convincing.
These renegade Democrats claim yesterday's vote will offer fairness yet Republicans cannot call their choice of witnesses if the chair objects, nor can the president be represented by his choice of counsel if the chair objects and so it goes in la la land.
Just another sham to overturn the decision of 62 plus Americans through the legislative process instead of through the ballot box.
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I constantly note Republicans are wusses and also do a terrible job of effective marketing.
Sec. Carson and Trump have created opportunity zones which states designate and the federal government offers huge tax credit incentives to encourage the wealthy, who have enormous capital gains, to invest for the purpose of improving living conditions for the under privileged and forgotten in our society.
Trump should be telling the story but remains mute. He also should have been visiting black and Latino neighborhoods from the beginning in conjunction with building walls and taking action against illegal immigration and not just at election time.
How dumb - a missed opportunity.
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Most polls, and particularly early ones, have turned out to be more like rope than informative information and insights.
I know if someone asked me and I did not like the questions,I would lie and I suspect many deplorables would do the same. (See 2 below.)
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At least one college president has guts: http://conservativematrix.com/
We have gone from independence to dependency, we have gone from tough and active to weak and passive.We have gone from confident and assertive to confused and tentative. We have gone from the ability to reason to being desperate and confused.
We have gone from being a red blooded American to being a wimpy petulant shadow.
We have lost our lust for patriotism to preferring to kneel.
We have lost our zest for life because we are frightened by future's uncertainty
We have embraced political correctness to such a degree hat I no longer recognize my country.
We owe these miraculous changes by allowing government to wreck our way of life.
Our republic is at risk and the radicals who have taken over the Democrat Party are smug and joyous.
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Dick
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1)
The Price of Righteousness
Fewer tourists these days are reserving hotel rooms, enjoying the nightlife, riding elephants and scuba diving in Phuket, the seaside resort in Thailand.
“I’ve never seen anything as bad as what it is at the moment,” Paul Scott, an Australian who has been visiting Thailand for years, told Agence France-Presse.
The drop-off stems from economic woes in China, the origin of more than 25 percent of tourists in Thailand. Those woes, in turn, stem from the US-Chinese trade war.
Around the globe, from Japan’s automobile assembly lines to the fjords of Iceland, where tourism has also plummeted, the trade war is taking a toll on the world economy.
At recent meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Reuters wrote recently, central bankers lamented how American policy had shifted from promoting globalization and interwoven economies in the wake of World War II to challenging those same bonds.
Global growth this year will fall to 3 percent, the slowest in a decade, according to the IMF.
Top economists have sounded alarm bells about global financial security. The former leaders of Australia, New Zealand and Sweden penned an extraordinary op-ed in the New York Times warning American and Chinese leaders to reconcile before the damage worsens.
Some countries, like Vietnam and Argentina, might benefit from the conflict as American manufacturers seek out cheaper Asian factories and Chinese companies order foodstuffs from farmers in South America, US News & World Report wrote, citing a study from the financial services group Nomura.
But that study also suggested that Malaysia would profit from the trade war.
Instead, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad might hike spending to compensate for losses amid an economic downturn, reported CNBC. After his 2018 defeat of the governing coalition that had run the country for more than 60 years, Mahathir had pledged to reduce the country’s debt.
Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are also feeling the pinch. Companies headquartered in those developed economies often depend on Chinese labor and American markets, the BBC explained. “We are very disappointed, and in a lot of discomfort in not knowing what lies ahead,” said Joyce Seow, who runs a speaker maker in Singapore.
Seow won’t likely find certainty anytime soon.
The PBS NewsHour investigated the origins of the trade war, speaking to a merchant in Shenzhen’s enormous Seg-e-Market. The merchant blamed US President Donald Trump for starting the conflict, yet he was also selling a Chinese brand video camera that was clearly a GoPro knockoff. GoPro is based in California.
President Trump might be right to finally get tough with China over knockoffs and other practices the way Europeans have tried to for years. But the cost of getting tough is high — how high it will go, no one is sure.
But when critics say everyone loses from a trade war, they mean everyone
1a)THIS IS A VERY INTERESTING ARTICLE WHICH EXPLAINS THE VERY SUBTLE CHANGES OCCURRING ACROSS AMERICA DUE TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRATIONS. IT SPEAKS OF FAIRFAX COUNTY IN VA, BUT ADDS OTHER STATES I.E.TEXAS AND YOU CAN ADD GA. AND OTHER RED STATES WHICH ARE NOW FALLING INTO THE SAME TRAP. MY FEAR OF WHICH YOU MAY NOT AGREE IS THIS: THE PROGRESSIVE LIBERALS HAVE DESTROYED OUR HEALTH CARE SYSTEM,WANT TO CANCEL THE SECOND AMENDMENT, AND NOW ARE QUIETLY BUT STRONGLY AND UNOPPOSED TAKING OVER THE ELECTORATE FROM THE LOCAL POLITICAL GROUND UP. IF YOU STUDY HISTORY YOU KNOW HOW THIS LEADS TO THE LOSS OF FREE NATIONS AND TO TOTALITARIANISM. IT IS A SLOW PROCESS BUT A CANCER ON SOCIETY THAT KILLS WITHOUT THE SYMPTOMS BEING NOTICED UNTIL THEY ARE TERMINAL. THERE IS ONE OTHER FEAR I WOULD STATE & THAT IS THE RAPID GROWTH OF ANTI-SEMITISM AND PROSECUTION OF JEWS IN AMERICA. JEWS HAVE NEVER FARED WELL IN A TOTALITARIAN REGIME AND THIS COUNTRY WILL NOT BE AN EXCEPTION WHEN THE ABOVE PLAYS OUT. SOME MAY THINK THIS THEORY IS NUTS BUT WHEN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM ALONG WITH THE OTHER LIBERTIES ARE WITHDRAWN FOR A FREE SOCIETY THERE IS LITTLE TO RESIST THE WORST TO US. WE ARE THE CANARY IN THE COAL MINE.SADLY FEW OF US UNDERSTAND THIS. I WILL BE CURIOUS OF ANY OF YOUR RESPONSES WHO READ THIS.
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2)
Can Democrats Sell Impeachment?
More than two months into their latest campaign to remove Donald Trump from office, it’s hard to detect much change in public opinion.
Are Democrats making any progress in their latest attempt to remove America’s duly-elected President from office? Several new polls suggest that Donald Trump remains just about as unpopular as ever. And Americans don’t much care for his opponents, either.
The USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll out today finds that Mr. Trump is enjoying a more or less typical underwater rating, with 46% of respondents approving of the job he’s doing and 52% disapproving. This is better than his August rating in the same survey but worse than his June results.
Looking across the various public opinion polls, what’s remarkable is how little they’ve changed since Democrats launched the current removal project, likely sometime in August. It’s difficult to date the precise moment when House Democrats began their latest campaign to nullify the results of the 2016 election—in part due to shifting explanations from lead investigator Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.)—but it’s possible that it hasn’t moved Mr. Trump’s approval ratings at all.
The latest USA Today results show some modest recent improvement for Mr. Trump on some key measures of political health. The newspaper’s Susan Page, Savannah Behrmann and Jeanine Santucci report:
In a match-up between President Trump and an unnamed Democratic nominee, Trump narrowly led, 41%-39%, with 10% supporting an unnamed third-party candidate. Another 10% were undecided. That was a shift, albeit one within the margin of error, from the August survey, when the unnamed Democrat held a narrow lead over Trump, 41%-39%.
In the new poll, Republicans expressed overwhelming confidence about the outcome of the election, with 86% predicting the president would win. Seventy-five percent of Democrats said their nominee would win. But independents by a double-digit margin expected Trump to prevail.
Despite the cloud of impeachment, overall those surveyed predicted by 50%-40% that the president in the end would claim a second term.
“Trump has done a lot of the things he has set out to do,” said John Siefkas, 52, a farmer and political independent from Osceola, Iowa, who was called in the poll. “He needs to keep his hands off Twitter, (but) he is doing some stuff that is needing done that people haven’t had the guts to do.”
Mr. Siefkas is no doubt speaking for many Americans. Another new survey, presented by the Economist magazine and YouGov, finds that respondents overwhelmingly think the way Mr. Trump uses Twitter is inappropriate, by a margin of 57% to 26%.
As for the overall judgment on Mr. Trump’s job, the Economist/YouGov poll finds a majority disapproving. Like many other polls, this one finds disapproval of the President on most issues but continues to show an edge for Mr. Trump on the economy— an issue that frequently ranks at the top in voting criteria.
The Economist/YouGov poll finds a plurality supporting impeachment by a margin of 46% to 39%. The poll also finds that 38% of respondents regard the impeachment effort as “a type of coup,” while just 44% say it is not.
This brings us to the latest Morning Consult/Politico survey, which finds another weak overall rating for the job Mr. Trump is doing. Disapprovers outnumber approvers by 11 percentage points. This poll finds a plurality saying they would support the House impeaching President Trump, by 49% to 42%. But it also finds a 48% plurality disapproving of the way House Democrats are handling the impeachment inquiry, with just 39% approving.
And despite the fact that close to a majority favor impeachment in this poll, Mr. Trump is still competitive in hypothetical one-on-one contests with leading Democratic presidential contenders. The survey finds him five points behind former Vice President Joe Biden, two behind Sen. Bernie Sanders, one point ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, five points ahead of Sen. Kamala Harris, and six points ahead of South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
As usual, Mr. Trump’s polling looks awful—until voters are asked about his opponents.
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3) Is California becoming premodern?
By Victor Davis Hanson
More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric -- which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year -- preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.
Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so over-regulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.
Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.
Taxpayers in California , whose basket of sales, gasoline and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous and under nonstop makeshift repair.
Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon -- the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation and green mandates -- add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state's failing high-speed rail project.
Residents shrug that the state's public schools are among weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools but often put their own kids in private academies.
Californians know that to venture into a typical municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante's Inferno. Medical facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an injured or sick child.
No one would dare to connect the crumbling infrastructure, poor schools and failing public health care with the non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive without fluency in English or a high-school education.
Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that such "misdemeanors" do not warrant police attention. California's permissive laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.
Has California become premodern?
Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About one-third of the nation's welfare recipients live in California . Millions of poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal and law-enforcement services.
Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade and academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves. The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay exorbitant power bills and deal with shoddy infrastructure -- all of which resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.
The state's elite took revolving-door entries and exits for granted. They assumed that California was so naturally rich, beautiful and well-endowed that there would always be thousands of newcomers who would queue up for the weather, the shore, the mountains and the hip culture.
Yet California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics.
Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if they were ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable nation.
Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are viewed by the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries seeking bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.
Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness into California . Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been turning California into a wilderness.
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