Will Savannah Be Plundered? Zito Predicts. Read Doug Wead's Book. Farmer Bloomberg.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jabC1joa9ts?fbclid=IwAR16PKkkZ_rlwTzYkAU5gTpQyeCITms7ZRWyHI0hFz3PELy0An5cVWI_Uco

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https://www.savannahnow.com/news/20200217/mayor-council-agreed-to-updated-rules-at-retreat


With the new crowd will it all be about power over the purse ?If so, no doubt Savannah will be skimmed. 
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You can criticize Trump for a lot but when it comes to being practical and determining 
whether a government agency is functioning he is generally spot on.

Bloat is one of the biggest problems when dealing with government.  Like "Topsy" government only grows, becomes unwieldy and eventually fails because it eventually takes the form of a Rube Goldberg design.  Government reminds me of  a wedding cake. It simply tiers until it causes tearing. (See 1 below.)
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Zito was one of the few to correctly predict Trump's 2016 victory and for the right reasons. (See 2 below.)
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Peek calls on you to take a peak at Trump's gutsy call. (See 3 below.)
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Farmer Bloomberg. (See 4 below.)
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A dear friend and fellow memo reader urged me to read: " Inside Trump's White House"by Doug Wead. I have just begun it and several things come to mind.

First of all, it is amazing how generous and insightful "deplorables" are. Those in the middle class seem happy for those who make it regardless of wealth and social status. They see  through the biases of the mas media and truly want our nation to succeed because they have so much invested in our republic. They have fought our wars, they have worked in our factories, they have been good citizens and cherish what it means to be an Americans.

Liberals, on the other hand, seem complex and embrace more negativity.  Their hatred of Trump says a lot about their misplaced judgement. Trump is not just a builder. He is a very astute reader of humans and truly is the working man's billionaire.  He feels totally comfortable around the working class who construct his buildings. He is a pragmatist who seeks solutions and is accomplished in at least four disparate fields: real estate, television, branding and now politics.  Those who hate him miss seeing him for who he is and thus underestimate him at their own peril.  Their jealousy and fixed viewpoints blind them.

Stacey Abrams was heard today to say she wants to run for president.  The fact that Trump is president does not mean thinking'frustrated Americans have cheapened what it means to be president. Yet, Stacey and those running for the president obviously think they possess the qualifications.  Bloomberg even believes the presidency is for sale and all it takes is money,  a record of being mayor of New York City and against large sugar drinks.

Second, Wead was given total freedom to interview everyone in The White House, including Trump and his entire family. I have only read 75 pages but my friend was correct, it is a very insightful book. Wead devoted much of his career to writing about presidents, children of presidents and even spent some time working in The White House. He approached this opportunity with no hidden agenda and his style is very readable.

Trump, obviously is a devoted and proud father and, based on Wead's interviews,  is loved by Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr.  All are accomplished in their own right and are very down to earth considering they had the opportunity of wealth from birth.

Third, what I found particularly interesting is Wead was given unfettered access to the correspondence between Trump and Kim with the understanding he could not take or photograph it. Wead came away thinking Kim admires Trump and actually might look upon him in a somewhat fatherly manner. Kim sees his association with Trump could be a path to being respected if not revered if they can jointly pull off an altered N Korea.  To accomplish this "dream" Kim would have to renounce his nuclear status and that has been his protective armor to date.  Is Trump overselling his ability? Time will tell.

At least he has moved the ball and no rockets are flying and that is more than president's accomplished before him.

The other thing Wead revealed is how close Obama thought we were  actually going  to war with N Korea and warned Trump, Kim would be his greatest problem. Eventually Kim backed down because he became convinced Trump was unlike any American President he had dealt with in the past. Trump asked Obama had he ever spoken with Kim and Obama replied; "No, he hadn't called him because he's a dictator."

To someone who thinks outside the box and is not hidebound by restrictive  political rope that was very revealing.
I look forward to finishing Wead's book. I have many liberal friends I would like to encourage to read it but I doubt they would even consider doing so because it might threaten the hate cocoon in which they live.

A liberal Atlanta friend of mine asked me to read the first book Obama wrote and I did.  I concluded he was full of himself and if he ever became president he would be a threat to our nation. You never know what insights you gain or have re-inforced by getting to know your theoretical adversary.
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Dick
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1)A Campaign Against 

Bureaucratic Bloat in U.S. 

Foreign Policy

Trump’s national security adviser has a plan of attack for a problem decades in the making.

By John Lehman

The press has been focused recently on Lt. Col Alexander Vindman’s departure from the National Security Council. But less noticed is the substantive overhaul of the council’s staffing practices, announced last fall by national security adviser Robert O’Brien. President Trump’s renovation of the White House’s top advisory body could help streamline American security for years to come.

The problems that plague the NSC trace to before its founding in 1947. The White House has long sought to centralize decision-making to overcome the political jockeying that often takes place within the national-security establishment. I have lived half of my professional life in the policy world of Washington and half in the financial world of New York. The former is much more Hobbesian and bitter than the latter—and always has been.

After securing victory in World War II, for example, federal policy makers were at each other’s throats over whether to share nuclear technology with the Soviet Union through the Baruch Plan. The branches of the armed services feuded over roles, missions and funding. President Truman and congressional leaders nonetheless produced a few lasting achievements, including the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But the bitter postwar years also featured terrible blunders in China and Korea. Truman’s radical strategy to shrink the Navy, while declaring Korea outside America’s vital interest, led almost immediately to the Korean War. Journalist John Osborne told me that during those years he was run ragged between the White House and the Pentagon. Both were leaking classified information aimed at opponents in government.

One good result from that strife was the NSC. Defense Secretary James Forrestal conceived of it as a way to corral the dovish White House advisers around Truman. The NSC was established in the 1947 National Security Act, which named the members of the council: president, vice president and secretaries of state and defense. The function of the council “shall be to advise the president with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security.” The law required regular meetings.

Truman resented and opposed the NSC. But when it became law, he made it his own White House staff for national security. The State and Defense departments were thus brought into presidential decision-making.

The council’s power and influence reached its apogee under President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger agreed completely on strategy and intended to run national security from the White House. Predecessors borrowed career staffers from other agencies, but Nixon and Mr. Kissinger recruited a far more diverse and notable policy staff. Candidates were handpicked by Mr. Kissinger and his deputy, Richard Allen.

Mr. Kissinger grew the council to include one deputy, 32 policy professionals and 60 administrators. By my count, alumni of his NSC include two secretaries of state, four national security advisers, a director of national intelligence, a secretary of the Navy, and numerous high-ranking officials in the State, Defense and Treasury departments as well as the Central Intelligence Agency.

But the NSC has only continued to expand. By the end of the Obama administration, 34 policy professionals supported by 60 administrators had exploded to three deputies, more than 400 policy professionals and 1,300 administrators.

The council lost the ability to make fast decisions informed by the best intelligence. The NSC became one more layer in the wedding cake of government agencies. It became difficult to recruit top talent. Mr. Kissinger assembled his 34 from the most elite and prestigious corners of government and industry. The Bush-Obama 400—not so much. It is no coincidence that the NSC declined in usefulness as American foreign policy deteriorated into “endless wars” and so on.

President Trump inherited this system, and it wasn’t functional. It is conceivable that the episodic nature of the administration’s foreign policy is due as much to NSC paralysis, bloat and turnover as to Mr. Trump’s style. The churn of national security advisers hasn’t helped. Michael Flynn, Keith Kellogg (acting), H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Charles Kupperman (acting) and Mr. O’Brien have all held the job in a little over three years.

But Mr. O’Brien said last fall that he will trim the staff, “making it more effective by reaffirming its mission to coordinate policy and ensure policy implementation. The NSC staff should not, as it has in the past, duplicate the work of military officers, diplomats or intelligence officers.” Since then the policy staff has been reduced by more than 50. There’s more to come.

Since October there have been major improvements in trade, NATO and Mideast policy. There is evidence of a new coherence and direction in White House national security decision-making such as the rapid and effective decision to deal with Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Perhaps this is a sign of a more nimble and functional security council.

Mr. Lehman served as Navy secretary, 1981-87. His latest book is “Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea.”

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2)

A Pittsburgh Suburb Is the 2020 Bellwether

If this state House district is leaning GOP on Nov. 3, it’ll be a good night for President Trump. 

By Salena Zito

Marshall Township, Pa.

As many pundits learned in 2016, it can be hard to predict presidential elections. But if there’s one solid indicator of which way 2020 will split, it’ll be who’s leading in the race for the 28th District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Mike Turzai has held the seat since 2001 and became House speaker in 2015. He announced his retirement last month. Voters here will select his replacement in November on the same day they choose a president.

Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs are doing well. Many towns feature tidy midcentury postwar ranch homes built to accommodate returning soldiers and their families, a sprinkling of farms that haven’t been gobbled up for development, and a boom of McMansions built since 2000 for couples who’ve made it and want to flaunt it. The area’s public schools are the best in the state. Parks are beautiful and plentiful, crime is low, and the sense you can earn your way up is prevalent.

The political mood here is complex, and demographic changes over the past decade have turned northern Allegheny County into a national political bellwether. Over the past two decades, what was a healthy mix of blue- and white-collar residents became predominantly upper-middle-class and affluent. The area was reliable GOP territory through 2016, when Donald Trump won by 9 percentage points. But two years later almost every Republican on the ballot took a severe beating—just as Republicans got walloped in right-leaning suburban districts across the country.

One Republican who withstood the onslaught: Mike Turzai. He won re-election over Democrat Emily Skopov by almost 9 points. Now the 60-year-old attorney is headed for the private sector, and Ms. Skopov, a 53-year-old television writer and nonprofit founder, is running again. This time her opponent will be Republican Rob Mercuri, 38, a West Point graduate and Iraq war veteran who headed a military intelligence unit and was awarded a Bronze Star. He’s now a vice president and financial risk manager for Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank.
“If you were looking for one race to watch to gauge where the presidential elections in 2020 are heading in the entire country, this is the one,” says Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald, a Democrat respected for his pragmatism and managerial style. If Ms. Skopov is winning as November draws near, then Mr. Trump is heading for defeat, Mr. Fitzgerald says. If Mr. Mercuri is in the lead, Democrats are likely to lose not only Pennsylvania, but Michigan, Wisconsin and even Ohio. “Everything you need to understand about which party uneasy suburban Republican voters align with is located right here,” Mr. Fitzgerald says

A lot rides on which candidate the Democrats put at the top of the ticket in November. If they pick someone who fails to accommodate centrists in the party, they can forget about winning down-ballot races like the one between Ms. Skopov and Mr. Mercuri.

Ms. Skopov, who is perhaps best known for her work on “Xena: Warrior Princess,” has a warm, outsize personality. She says she is “running on improved infrastructure, health-care accessibility and mass-transit access for the elderly.” Mr. Fitzgerald calls her “the perfect candidate to run in this district.” That wouldn’t have been true 10 years ago, he says, but concentration of affluence and density have shifted the political landscape.

If there is a Republican who could possibly convince his neighbors he’s more old guard than populist, it’s Mr. Mercuri. A calm, measured and witty millennial, the political newcomer has spent the past few weeks going door to door. His personality offers a contrast with the combative Mr. Trump. Mr. Mercuri says his focus is on infrastructure and health care, but also on economic growth. “I think the question is, do the people in our district want to continue the policies of economic growth and low taxation,” he says. They want their children and grandchildren to have the same opportunities they had.

In 2016, political analysts focused too heavily on how the Philadelphia suburbs voted and ignored less-populated areas like Erie and Wilkes-Barre, which swung from Barack Obama to Mr. Trump, as well as the Pittsburgh suburbs, which supported Mr. Trump more than Mitt Romney.

These areas are set to decide the election again. We’ll find out for whom.

Ms. Zito is a reporter for the Washington Examiner, a columnist for the New York Post and a co-author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.”
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3)

Liz Peek: Trump's biggest legacy is risking reelection to expose corrupt China

 By Liz Peek 

How bad is China? So bad that they are “disappearing” those telling the truth about the coronavirus. So bad that their leader, President Xi Jinping, apparently knew about the disease weeks before he fessed up to the public, possibly delaying the creation of treatments and jeopardizing millions.

So bad that President Trump chose to risk his own reelection by confronting Beijing.

Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy may not be a more secure southern border or lower taxes. Those accomplishments will be thrown over in a jiffy once Democrats retake the White House, as they one day will.

No, history will best remember Donald Trump as the president who forced the world to acknowledge that China’s government is a criminal enterprise.

As the coronavirus rolls on, sickening and killing thousands, we are reminded anew of the threat posed by China’s corruption. It has become clear that Beijing lied about the extent and the contagious nature of the disease, allowing hundreds of thousands of travelers to spread the virus well after it had been diagnosed.

More recently, it has emerged that citizen journalists bold enough to expose horrifying scenes of dead bodies stacked in vans or desperate lines of patients seeking treatment have vanished.

Governments trying to protect their citizens are attempting to sort Chinese fact from fiction. Thankfully, the blinders are off, in part because of Trump’s willingness to call out Beijing’s duplicity on trade and other activities, including their breathtaking theft of America’s creative output.

He has confronted not only China’s unfair trade practices, but also their cyber espionage, their infiltration of American research universities, their multiple breaches of international agreements (WTO, North Korea sanctions etc.) and so much more.

Trump has revealed China’s profound dishonesty, which other world leaders, hungry to access China’s huge market, have been reluctant to do. His campaign has resulted in a marked change in Americans’ attitudes towards Beijing. Last year, according to Pew research, some 60 percent of the country had an unfavorable view of China, up from roughly 38 percent a decade ago, and 47 percent in 2018.

This is no small feat. As the president took on China, he risked his most compelling reelection advantage: a strong economy. For the past three years, he came under widespread attack for placing tariffs on Chinese imports, with Corporate America and the media warning that the trade war would hurt consumers and throw the United States into recession.

Indeed, the president’s efforts to right the wrongs of decades have caused some slowing in our growth, especially in manufacturing. This has been expensive, not only to the country, but also to the president.

Immediately following his election in 2016, the United States enjoyed a surge in optimism – among consumers and business leaders. Buoyed by lower taxes and less onerous regulation, CEOs hiked spending and hiring. Business investment increased at a rate not seen in years, leading overall GDP growth to exceed 3 percent by the middle of 2018.

Since then, the rate of economic expansion slowed, thanks to unwarranted rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, and to a slowdown in business spending. CEOs grew nervous about the impact of the trade war and cut back.

Notwithstanding the damage that the trade challenge inflicted on the economy,  Trump and his negotiators persevered, finally inking a “phase one” deal late last year. The agreement contains new protections of patents and trade secrets and prohibits forced technology transfers, with clear enforcement mechanisms. The deal addressed many of China’s misdeeds; it was a victory.

It was perhaps Trump’s most consequential victory to date. With the emergence of the Mao-like President Xi, the growth of China’s economy, its giant military spending, its increasing aggression and its vast ambition, outlined in its Belt and Road initiative, the United States had, eventually, to set limits on Beijing.

It is not as though Trump had no choice. His predecessors simply ignored China’s transgressions; he chose not to. China did not suddenly become a rogue state; it has been lying, stealing us blind and attacking us for decades.

After all, it was well known that China orchestrated the hack of the Office of Personnel Management in 2014, the single biggest theft of personal data in our country’s history. Information on millions of Americans was siphoned off, including many with high-level security clearances.

In that same year, a grand jury in Pennsylvania indicted five Chinese members of a military-linked cybercrime unit for stealing trade secrets from Westinghouse and other American companies.

In 2013, Dennis Blair and Jon Huntsman were charged with reviewing widespread stealing of American intellectual property; their report cited China as the principal bad actor and estimated the annual cost of IP theft at more than $300 billion annually.

In a 2017 update, the two noted that, notwithstanding ongoing losses of some $225 billion to $600 billion each year, “the executive branch took a limited number of actions” and American businesses did little more than play defense.

Why were U.S. leaders so ready to ignore China’s misdeeds? As globalization spread, Big Business depended on supply chains in China to lower costs and compete with international rivals. Also, President Barack Obama desperately wanted their participation in the Paris Climate Accord. Even though Beijing’s promises were practically meaningless, Obama could hail the agreement as a diplomatic breakthrough, claims that were magnified by a compliant media.

Our business and political leaders were happy to deal with the devil.

Today, as the coronavirus wreaks havoc on businesses overly dependent on Chinese supply chains, the cost of that naivete is becoming clear. Companies are scrambling to diversify their manufacturing sources, moving operations to Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere. Some made the move in response to Trump’s trade war; some are just now pursuing alternative sources to escape the virus-linked lockdown of Chinese factories.

This is a welcome turn of events and will have long-lasting repercussions, including slowing China’s ascent. The world can thank President Trump.

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4) The Farming Wit and Wisdom of Mike Bloomberg

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSO

Here is what Democratic candidate for president Michael Bloomberg said in 2016 at Oxford, in what he apparently offered up as an ad hoc history of labor, agriculture, and industry, leading up to his own sophisticated era, as reported in the New York Post:

“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg told the audience at the Distinguished Speakers Series at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School. “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”

The former three-term New York City mayor also addressed workers’ skills during the Industrial Revolution.

“You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture, today it’s 2 percent in the United States,” Bloomberg said.

He then pointed out the difference between the economy then and today’s information economy.

“It’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter”…

Both President Trump and Bloomberg’s Democratic rivals jumped on him for obvious reasons. And here is what Bloomberg’s campaign staff offered the public in Bloomberg’s defense:

“The Trump team is tweeting out a video that cuts off the first part of Mike’s sentence where he said ‘if you think about the agrarian society [that] lasted 3000 years, we could teach processes.’ Mike wasn’t talking about today’s farmers at all, and Team Trump is deliberately misleading Americans because Donald Trump’s erratic policies have devastated American farms, including a 20 percent increase in US Farm bankruptcies last year,” Stu Loeser, a senior adviser on the Bloomberg campaign, said in a statement…

“Donald Trump inherited his wealth yet bankrupted businesses in cities around the world. As President, he’s hurting American farms, and he knows that Mike Bloomberg has the skills to fix the problem,” Loeser added.

Where to start with such a mess?

As is his wont, what Bloomberg now says he once wished to say, what came out of his mouth, and what he postfacto claims he meant are, as we have seen with his commentaries on race, women, and redlining, often three quite different things.

Yes, Bloomberg was talking in part about the last 3,000 years of transition from a primarily agricultural society to one that was industrial to one now dominated by the so-called informational skills.

But he did not leave it there. First, he switched back into the present tense. (“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.”) Did he mean the Manhattan whizz kid could teach sophisticated Oxonians to be modern farming simpletons, or that he, the student of history, could teach them to be preindustrial simpletons? And then he added that the present information age emphasized skill sets of thinking and analyzing, as apparently does not occur in contemporary farming or manufacturing work.

In truth, Bloomberg could not teach anyone in that Oxford hall or any other room how to farm, in either ancient times or modern. If he really thinks that farming is, or was, a mere “process” of digging holes, dropping in seeds, covering them with dirt, adding water, and, presto!, up comes the corn, then he is as dense as is he is arrogant.

The preindustrial history of farming was a nonstop life-and-death struggle to survive one more day, in constant war against nature (weather, insects, disease, soil chemistry, species variations) and man (labor, markets, government, war, security, etc.) to produce food. And it took a great deal of science, skill, patience, and physical courage to pull it off. Read the classical empirical and scientific treatises on farming and agronomy by Theophrastus, Columella, or Varro, and you’ll find that the degree of their contemporaries’ ancient farming expertise and science is extraordinary. No one would conclude from these that ancient agriculture was anything like Bloomberg’s caricatures.

As we are witnessing currently in Africa with its locust storms, no one ever just drops seeds in the ground and allows the process to continue on autopilot. Bloomberg confirmed that he neither knew what he was talking about nor was hesitant about blanket judgments on the relative intelligence of various professions, when, again in the present tense, he pontificated: “You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter.”

I don’t think that family farmers of the 1940s pre-informational age were any more or less deficient in “gray matter” than are today’s techies and coders. And today’s farmers are some of the few people in society who still marry sophisticated high-tech skills, from GPS planting and harvesting to computer analyses of market futures, and precise calibrations of complex machines to plant, spray, and fertilize, while still dealing with the world of raw muscle and those often tough customers who inhabit it—which is to say, apparently a world away from Mike Bloomberg’s Manhattan habitat.

Bloomberg’s staff claims that his opponents selectively edited the transcript of the four-year-old quote. And his Democratic and Republican rivals did indeed truncate it, but the full quote that his staff also themselves conveniently edited out in their press release is even more damning. They omitted the arrogant riff of “I could teach anybody…” and his nonsense about “gray matter”—and for good reason, because the full quote confirms at best that Bloomberg is insidiously arrogant, and at worse that he harbors some creepy fixations about calibrating innate intelligence.

Moreover, I seriously doubt whether farmers are going to vote against Trump should Bloomberg or anyone else be the Democratic nominee. The latest poll shows a record 83 percent of them approve of Trump’s tenure. Most farmers so far have stuck with the president in his trade stand-off with China in the belief that past asymmetries with Europe and Japan, but especially with China, on matters of food importation and export had to be addressed. And they seem willing to endure short-term hardship for long-term parity, and with it, greater profitability.

Bloomberg’s candidacy is supposed to appeal to suburbanites, and perhaps moderate Republican women and independents in particular, while drawing minorities to a supposedly seasoned, big-city mayor whose past constituencies were heavily non-white. Most concede that Bloomberg would not steal anyone from Trump’s base, and likely not from the working classes of either party. And we can see why.

But as the prior wit and wisdom of Bloomberg keep emerging, and as his campaign, fueled by a billion dollars, blankets the airwaves, it is hard to see what advantages he brings, either over his own rivals or over incumbent Trump.

Bloomberg has only been a candidate for a few days, and already he seems in the past to have insulted, as a group, professional women, minority youth, poor would-be homeowners, and unthinking farmers and factory workers.

All that is in addition to the general paradox of a party that rails about racism, toxic masculinity, and white privilege, with anti-rich overtones, looking now at a rich, white, male multibillionaire to buy an election and thus save the party from itself.

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