Monday, February 17, 2020

Doug Collins A Stem Winder and Conservatives Still Do Not Know How To Market.


Some pictures my son-in-law took while vacationing in Sedona.
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https://cms.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/hiding-inherent-marxism-sen-bernie-sanders-joseph-hippolito
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Comment from a dear friend and fellow memo reader: "Bernie Sanders is polling at 31%, and Michael Bloomberg is at 19%. That means half of all Democrats prefer voting for someone who is NOT a Democrat over anyone running who is a Democrat. Mr. Sanders and Mr. Bloomberg are both allegedly “Independents.” J--"
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Canada: A Totalitarian State-in-Progress: By David Solway
It can’t happen here? Think again More
What Obama's Saying in Private About Dem Primary: Gabriel DeBenedetti, NY Magazine
And as I recently wrote: Presidency Can't Just Go Back to 'Normal' After Trump: Joshua Zeitz, Politico
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The one and only favorable thing I can say about Bernie is he is consistent in saying the same thing and, more importantly, believing it. However, h is wrong on both counts but, lie I say, he is consistent.

I do not believe America is ready to become Cuba, Venezuela etc. but the dumber we get as Yogi said: " it ain't over til it is over."

If America is willing to be bought for $6/pp then it is possible Bloomberg could win because he is willing to spend several billion spread over 300 million.

Last night we attended a dinner meeting at which Doug Collins spoke.  He is a stem winder and focused on why Republicans are dull and conservatives truly  care about people and values but we have allowed ourselves to be bitten by the bad mouth.

I have said for decades conservatives, like Israelis, are lousy at marketing. Lately even the Israelis have been doing a better job.  Many of my liberal friends love to repeat "tax cut for the rich" because they truly maintain that is factual.  They will never believe when you cut taxes and rich get richer they employ people who then have jobs and dignity. Trump understood it and that is what is happening but conservatives do not know how to articulate what they believe.
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Will Virginia decide our republic is better served by allowing New York and California to elect our presidents? (See 1 below.)
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Will Trump's Iranian policy push them over the edge? (See 2 below.)
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My friend Peter analyzes an infrastructure proposal and disagrees. More market intrusions. (See 3 below.)
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Obama keeps reminding us that he built Trump's recovery. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) The new Democratic state government moves for a popular vote Presidency.

Virginia has long been a presidential battleground, but with Democratic control in Richmond it’s moving swiftly to shed its swing-state status. Last week the House of Delegates passed a bill that aims to do an end run around the Electoral College.

Under the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, Virginia would award its 13 delegates to the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide no matter how he performed in Virginia. The compact goes into effect once states worth 270 electoral votes (a majority) have signed on. If Virginia ratifies the compact, that would bring the number to 209.

The remaining 61 would be a steep climb, but getting there isn’t out of the question as the legitimacy of the Electoral College becomes a partisan issue. A Democratic statehouse sweep in 2020 could put 270 within reach. Once the compact became active the lawsuits would rain down, and let’s hope the Supreme Court would provide clarity before the compact throws an election into chaos.

Our view is that the compact is likely unconstitutional, but that’s not the only reason to oppose it. Choosing Presidents by plebiscite could make the general election for President look like the Democrats’ Iowa caucuses. The winner-take-all Electoral College is a barrier to regional and third party bids. A national popular election would invite many more candidates, and the results might regularly not be known for days after Election Day. It could also deepen polarization as less populous regions are passed over because getting out the vote in large urban areas is more efficient.

Virginians might also heed self-interest. The state has turned blue in large part because of the growing number of gentry liberals surrounding Washington, D.C., but the socialist candidate currently leading the Democratic field doesn’t cater to that constituency. The Old Dominion could be competitive in a changed 2020 map, and a potentially decisive state may want to think twice about giving up its influence picking the President.
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Can Trump’s Iran policy succeed in the long run?

“Maximum pressure” has helped back Iran into a corner. But it will take political will, rather than a strategic or diplomatic move, to ensure its ultimate success.

The following was delivered in a speech to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ annual Leadership Mission in Jerusalem on Feb. 17, 2020:
Our focus today is on hot spots in the Middle East, and there is no focus of greater concern—both for Israel and the United States—than Iran. But I don’t intend to merely reiterate the evidence that Iran represents a clear and present danger to the security of the United States, Israel, the Arab states in the region, and indeed, to the stability of both the Middle East and the entire world. Instead, I specifically want to focus on whether the strategy being pursued by the United States and supported by Israel in order to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, restrain Iranian adventurism, halt its support for international terrorism and, in general, roll back the gains Tehran has made since it concluded the nuclear deal with the United States in 2015 can succeed. And if it does have a chance of success, is the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policy politically sustainable in the face of opposition from European allies, Russia, China and a Democratic Party that appears united behind the idea of returning to the nuclear deal if they win the White House in November.
President [Donald] Trump’s May 2018 announcement of his decision to withdraw the United States from the [2015] Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA] was widely derided by his critics as having blown up the best method yet devised for stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But his move was based on an accurate analysis that the pact was fatally flawed. Due to the sunset clauses that would eventually allow Iran a legal path to a bomb, the deal did not fulfill its purpose. And it failed to address Iran’s quest for regional hegemony, its support for terrorism and its construction of missiles. By enriching and empowering the Islamist regime, rather than allowing, in President [Barack] Obama’s words, a path for Iran to “get right with the world,” the JCPOA had helped further destabilize the region, while also helping to scare many Arab states so much that they began to look to Israel as a tacit ally against Tehran.
Sooner or later, the West was going to have to revisit the JCPOA and, at the very least, strengthen its terms with regard to nuclear restrictions, as well as expand its reach to roll back Iran’s post-2015 gains. But after a year of debate within his administration that was finally resolved following Mike Pompeo’s appointment as Secretary of State, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal.
During the initial debate about the JCPOA and then after Trump’s election in November 2016, Obama administration figures and other defenders of the pact derided the notion that the United States could effectively scuttle it or otherwise reimpose sanctions unilaterally. So long as America’s European allies, let alone Russia and China, remained committed to the JCPOA, the assumption was that an American withdrawal would fail to impact the Iranians.
Tough international sanctions, which the Obama administration had been reluctantly dragged into in the years prior to the start of negotiations, had forced Iran to come to the table. But desperate for a deal at any price, President Obama agreed to begin dropping the sanctions, rather than press his advantage and force Iran to give up its nuclear program as he had promised to do during his 2012 re-election campaign.
But the assumptions that opposition from the Europeans would prevent the United States from unilaterally reimposing sanctions that would duplicate the effect of the economic restrictions that had broad international support under Obama was mistaken. The expected Tehran gold rush of Europeans eager to enter the Iranian market never materialized, due to worries both about the perils of doing business under the thumb of the theocratic regime and becoming entangled in American sanctions that were still on the books, if not enforced.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s willingness to enforce or at least threaten to enforce to sanction any economic entity that did business with Iran and also wished to engage in commerce in the United States has had a devastating impact on the Iranian economy. It’s true that Iran has not completely collapsed, as a puff piece about Iranian stock traders published in The New York Times last Friday made clear. But faced with a choice of maintaining ties with the U.S. financial system and the dubious prospect of profiting from opportunities in a country where their investments could not—even under the best of circumstances—be considered safe, European businesses had little choice but to bend to America’s demands and stay out of Iran. And while Western European nations have combined to create INSTEX, a financial entity designed to help companies evade U.S. sanctions by the use of a barter system, serious economists don’t believe this is a viable alternative to the U.S financial system.
In that context, Trump’s talk of “maximum pressure” against Iran has proven to be more than mere rhetoric. The impact of American sanctions has proven to be devastating not only for the Iranian economy, but has had a clear impact on the regime’s ability to continue funding its terrorist auxiliaries throughout the Middle East. As even The New York Times reported last year, terrorist militias in Syria and Lebanon have felt the pinch as their subsidies from their Iranian masters have been impacted by belt-tightening in Tehran. And the unrest in Iran, as a protest movement took to the streets last fall—resulting in massive violence by the regime including the killings of hundreds of demonstrators—can arguably be considered a direct result of the Trump administration’s decision. That America’s European allies have been scheming to find ways to continue to fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC], which controls much of the Iranian economy at the same time this force has been murdering Iranian citizens in the streets of their cities, is both ironic and outrageous.
In response, Iran has attempted to orchestrate responses to the sanctions aimed primarily at scaring both Europeans and Americans into thinking that Trump’s policy was setting the region on an inevitable path to a war. Indeed, this strategy echoed the same excuses and talking points put forth by the Obama administration—and spread by what former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes aptly and candidly described as Obama’s “media echo chamber”—that the only alternative to their policy of appeasement of Iran was war.
To that end, Iran has staged a number of incidents over the past year in which it has threatened the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, as well as attacks against American and European targets in Iraq by its auxiliaries. But though it has been criticized for what has, at times, been described as a weak response to Iran’s provocations, the Trump administration has rightly discerned that Iran’s actions were largely a bluff rather than a credible threat of armed conflict unless, as Tehran continued to demand, the United States lifted sanctions.
That analysis of Iranian weakness was confirmed, rather than contradicted, by the targeted killing of IRGC and Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani after Iranian-inspired attacks on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Iran’s limited response illustrated that its talk of war was a feint, and that they were well aware that any armed conflict with the United States would be a catastrophe for the Islamist regime.
Seen from that perspective, “maximum pressure” has been a qualified success. The U.S. pressure, along with the administration’s refusal to be suckered into an escalated conflict, has set the stage for the possibility of a rerun of negotiations with Iran, albeit with the goal of producing a deal that would effectively neuter its ability to threaten other countries and to forestall its quest for regional hegemony.
While that would fall short of the desire of some in Israel, as well as foreign-policy hawks in the United States for regime change in Tehran, “maximum pressure” has, at least up until now, been a measured attempt to rectify Obama’s mistakes—not, as Trump’s critics have inaccurately charged, a politically motivated and incoherent lashing out without any real goals or strategy or merely a path to war. If it is faced with economic collapse and further damaging domestic unrest, it is not unreasonable to predict that ultimately, the Iranian regime will have to go back to the table without any U.S. concessions on sanctions to lure them there.
Iran’s threat to cease compliance with the nuclear deal has also proven to be empty, even as it has been trumpeted as a disaster for Trump by much of the mainstream press. Iran’s leaders know that any rush to a breakout to a nuclear weapon would force the Europeans to back American demands and expose them to the risk of a conflict they could not win or even afford to risk.
Given that the U.S. still has cards yet to play in this standoff with the possibility of further tightening sanctions and denying exemptions to the restrictions that would further seal off the Iranian economy from the world, the prospect of “maximum pressure” succeeding in forcing either negotiations or an internal shakeup in Tehran should not be discounted.
However, while the strategy pursued by the Trump administration has a reasonable chance of success if it continues to be carried out in a sustained manner and without the U.S. being lured into an actual military conflict that neither side wants, there is a greater obstacle to its ultimate success than the opposition of the Europeans or the obduracy of Iran’s theocratic rulers. And that is whether it is politically sustainable.
Think what you will of the president and his foreign-policy team, but Trump’s threading of the needle has succeeded to date and might yet bring about a desired end to the Iranian threat by one means or another.
Iran’s refusal to talk to the Americans despite their current difficulties is based on its hope that a Democrat who will return the U.S. to the nuclear deal will replace President Trump in the White House next January and to lift some if not all of the sanctions he has reimposed. Indeed, that was the advice former Secretary of State John Kerry gave Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. While Iran might have considered that Trump has a reasonable, if far from certain, chance of re-election, and that it could probably get better terms from the president now rather than during a potential second term, that is not the choice they seem to have made. And if there were any doubt that they are counting on domestic opposition to “maximum pressure” coming to their rescue, then the congressional pushback against Trump’s killing of Soleimani will only reinforce that conclusion.
Think what you will of the president and his foreign-policy team, but Trump’s threading of the needle—in which his accurate characterization of the Iran deal as a disaster is balanced against his unwillingness to be drawn into a war that neither he nor the American people want—has succeeded to date and might yet bring about a desired end to the Iranian threat by one means or another. But sustaining this strategy will require a political resolution, rather than a strategic or diplomatic determination. That means a second term for Trump, as well as the ability to pursue this approach with patience. And given Trump’s own disdain for the whole concept of military involvement in the Middle East, this is not the issue on which he will stake his political future.
While it remains to be seen whether or not a potential or theoretical Democratic successor will take advantage of what Trump has achieved and continue pressure against Iran rather than abandoning it next year, the fate of “maximum pressure” will be decided by American voters—and not European leaders or businessmen or the boasts of Iran’s tyrants.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
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3) MarketWatch  
Buttigieg's Infrastructure Plan Is Just More Democratic Socialism
Mayor Pete's Policy Prescriptions Are Chock Full of Unnecessary Intrusions into Free Markets
By Peter Morici     

Pete Buttigieg's sudden surge in Iowa and New Hampshire - and Joe Biden's quick fade - make him the Democrats' best hope to field a candidate in line with voters' more-moderate center-left leanings than Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren present.
At least that's what the media-and his well-honed campaign present-claim, but his $1 trillion infrastructure plan demonstrates he's a democratic socialist like the rest.
The Trump administration and campaign had better take note. The incumbent can't rely on the economy alone. He gets low marks from voters on health care, and Democrats did well in 2018 congressional elections promising to work for solutions to middle-class problems.
Few of those confront voters every day like nerve-racking commutes, flight delays and crowded trains and airports. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has not tabled a credible plan that challenges Democrats in Congress to act, and without concrete proposals on transportation and other middle-class issues, his justification for a second term is seriously impaired.
Decayed and crowded
Federal and state governments spend about $450 billion a year on roads, mass transit, waterways and the like, and at least another $200 billion is needed to fully repair and expand decayed and crowded facilities, address climate-change abatement, and build out 5G in underserved areas.
Congestion is costing the U.S. economy at least $400 billion a year, and outdated connectivity could hold back growth for many small towns and rural areas.
Climate change is increasing the incidence of violent storms and flooding, and Miami, New Orleans and other communities need costly mitigation projects to remain viable.
Free markets
To his credit Buttigieg's infrastructure proposal identifies these challenges but his prescriptions are chock full of unnecessary intrusions into free markets.
He wants to create a new entitlement by cutting in half water bills in many communities.
He wants to further steer infrastructure spending and employment in favor of African-American and Latino communities, increase Community Development Grants, retrain workers to move them from the oil and gas industries to sustainable energy and transportation, subsidize charging stations for electric vehicles, and create 6 million union jobs.
The Davis-Bacon Act requires excessively high union wages and cumbersome work rules on federally sponsored transportation projects. Requiring union and non-union contractors to compete on an equal basis and removing other unnecessary regulatory burdens could lower costs by about 20%.
With only 6% of private-sector employees now represented by unions, it is clear that Buttigieg wants to impose on workers something they have already rejected through their private decisions.
Paying for it
Last spring, congressional Democrats proposed a $2 trillion, multiyear package. That's more in line with what the country needs but paying for it all is the puzzle.
The federal gas tax was last adjusted in 1993 and bringing it in line with inflation - along with increased user fees for mass transit, bicycles and recreational vehicles which also benefit from the federal highway trust fund - could raise $50 billion a year.
Democrats won't consider those without repealing many benefits for high-income households in the 2017 tax cut.
In any case, the gas tax will have to be replaced as electric vehicles come on line and on that score Buttigieg has it right. The roads should be paid for by those that use them, and GPS technology would permit a vehicle-miles-traveled tax.
That raises privacy considerations but so does Google Maps and our cell phones - safeguards can be implemented.
Top down solutions
Instead of government engineering progress from the top down, let markets work.
As electric cars arrive, charging stations will be built the same way gas stations were - by entrepreneurs looking for business opportunities.
The Trump administration is already building out a comprehensive system of apprenticeship and training programs. There is no need for one solely focused on workers leaving the oil and gas sector as we decarbonize.
A casual look at any road project indicates minorities are well represented, and the Army Corps of Engineers and states already have a long backlog of projects needing funding.
It would be best to replace the gas tax with a VMT, impose more robust competition to lower costs, and take the rest of what is needed from general tax revenues. The additional tax receipts on $400 billion in gross domestic product would likely replace a good deal what is added to infrastructure spending from general revenues.
Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
Peter Morici
Professor
Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland
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4) The Morning Briefing: Idiot King Obama Tries to Take Credit for Trump's Economy
By Stephen Kruiser

President Momjeans decided to insert himself back into the conversation yesterday (which Megan wrote about here) and I have no doubt that he thought he was being brilliant. He does, after all, believe everything that he does is brilliant.

The Trump economy took off upward about an hour after he was sworn in three years ago and has been chugging along quite nicely ever since. Because every Democrat in America moved into an alternate reality in January, 2009, they have been insisting that all of this economic goodness is just really the magic touch of Obama reaching across time.
It isn’t surprising that the Lightbringer’s devotees need to tell themselves this story, because the economic reality when he was in office was pretty dismal:
On almost every measure examined, the 2009-15 recovery since the recession ended in June of 2009 has been the meekest in more than 50 years.
Obama’s tweet on Monday was extraordinarily arrogant, even for a guy whose entire career has been based on undeserved smugness. The only thing out of character was the fact that it may have been the first self-congratulatory picture that he’s ever shared on social media that didn’t have his face in it.

Here it is, complete with my rather indelicate reply:

Our sister site Twitchy used that response of mine to inspire the headline for this post, which features several more choice reactions to Obama’s nonsense.
Naturally, President Trump didn’t let this pass without comment.
Perhaps one day historians won’t merely be leftist hack academics and a truthful accounting will be given of the overwhelming economic and foreign policy failures of the Obama years. For the near future we are going to suffer through largely fictionalized accounts of his “accomplishments.”
Which he will no doubt keep sharing with us in that oblivious, irony-free way of his.
Awkward
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