When President Donald Trump announced that he was raising tariffs in an attempt to force other countries to lower trade barriers to American goods, All The Best People scoffed. That simply wasn’t the way the trade game was played, old bean. Other countries wouldn’t lower tariffs, they’d raise them on American goods and start a trade war, plunging the world into recession.
President Trump announced during a Wednesday press conference that his meeting with European officials yielded key trade concessions, including an increase in American soybean and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe, and a commitment to work toward eliminating non-auto tariffs entirely.
“We have agreed today to work toward zero tariffs, zero tariff barriers and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods,” Trump said, reciting a joint statement crafted with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. “We will also work to reduce barriers and increase trade in services, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, medical products, as well as soybeans. The European Union is going to start almost immediately to but a lot of soybeans, they’re a tremendous market, to buy a lot of soybeans from our famers in the midwest primarily.”
“The European Union wants to import more liquefied natural gas from the United States and they’re going to be a very big buyer. We’re going to make it much easier for them but they will be massive buyers, so that they will be able to diversify their energy supply,” he added.
Trump pledged to “not go against the spirit” of ongoing negotiations, presumably by refraining from implementing further tariffs, and said he would “resolve” existing “retaliatory tariffs.”
Juncker also vowed to work toward reducing existing tariffs, which were first implemented last month in tit-for-tat fashion after the Trump administration slapped 10 and 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum respectively and the EU retaliated by placing tariffs on just over $3 billion in American goods. The E.U. trade chief also confirmed that he had in fact committed to importing more soy-beans and natural gas from the U.S.
The agreement comes after a series of reports Wednesday morning that indicated Trump is advocating the implementation of 25 percent tariffs on foreign-made cars, against the advice of his trade advisers. The specifics regarding auto tariffs were reportedly still being developed as Trump’s meeting with Juncker came to a close.
As always with trade agreements, the devil is in the details. If the EU does drop all the tariffs Juncker has promised, then this will be a big win for President Trump’s unorthodox negotiating style. His immediate presidential predecessors seemed to mostly leave the issue of achieving lower trade barriers to underlings negotiating multilateral agreements like TPP or GATT. President Trump is the first to pursue a policy of personally negotiating from strength to lower trade barriers to American commerce. This was a risky strategy that most (myself included) believed would not work. But right now it appears to be working.
There’s no doubt that if President Trump’s trade strategy does work, those decrying it now will still sniff at Trump “winning the wrong way” by “alienating allies…”
Democrats should also understand that these public tantrums and other slights are simply bad politics. Voters don’t respond well to angry chanting losers harassing people, or to vulgar celebrities, or to threats verging on intimidation and violence. There is nothing inspirational about it, and it makes the targets of the anger look that much more reasonable. If Democrats think this crazed behavior will generate a “blue wave” in November, they are mistaken.
How did we get here? Two tracks converged to deliver us this dysfunction. The first is narrowly political. The Democrats, confident that they were on the right side of history, thought there was no harm in accelerating the rush to total victory. For years, Democrats practiced the rule that all is fair in judicial-confirmation battles, starting with the war on Judge Robert Bork in 1987. Then, under the leadership of Barack Obama and then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid, they did away with the filibuster on judicial appointments short of the Supreme Court, opening the door for Republicans to nudge it slightly more wide open.
The second track is longer. Starting over a century ago, progressives began emphasizing ends over means. If the Supreme Court could deliver wins unattainable at the ballot box and unsupported by the Constitution, so be it. Thus was born the “living Constitution” — the doctrine that holds that the magical parchment should mean whatever progressives need it to mean at any moment. This was how Anthony Kennedy became an (apparently temporary) gay-rights hero. After consulting his feelings, he found a constitutional right no one had found in the text before.
This idea that the Supreme Court is there to serve as a Praetorian Guard around progressive policies was on full display this week. Prior to Kennedy’s retirement announcement, the court issued a 5–4 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that public-sector unions can’t compel nonunion members to pay fees for union representation, thus violating the First Amendment.
Justice Elena Kagan caustically disagreed. For her, the problem with the decision was that “public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support.”
“The First Amendment was meant for better things,” Kagan concluded in her dissent. “It was meant not to undermine but to protect democratic governance — including over the role of public-sector unions.”
In short: The Supreme Court isn’t there to protect the meaning of the First Amendment; the Supreme Court is there to protect a secure source of financial support for public-sector unions. If the First Amendment gets in the way, that’s okay.
The panic unfolding across the progressive landscape stems from the creeping fear that the Supreme Court might start doing its job — and not the job progressives have assigned it.
What will the #NeverTrump coalition in the Beltway (with an annex in New York) say now?
For a while, before tax cuts and regulatory reform boosted the economy, before defense spending increased, before Jerusalem was recognized as Israel’s capital, and before a “maximum pressure” campaign led to a detente with North Korea, #NeverTrumpers were fond of mockingly summarizing Trump supporters’ arguments as “But Gorsuch.”
This bit of childish taunting always struck me as an unknowing admission of ignorance about the role assumed by the Supreme Court in modern American governance. Even when 21 appeals court judges took their seats — orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues — still the one-note pundits played on, only louder: President Trump was so awful and evil, and conservatives who supported him had done so for one lousy seat on the Supreme Court.
The implication from all the noise and a thousands posts was that “Gorsuch” wasn’t worth it. Now, after Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s first year on the court, it will be impossible to overstate what his confirmation has meant.
While Justice Kennedy was usually a moderate conservative, there were areas of the law in which Justice Kennedy was not particularly moderate and others in which he was not particularly conservative. Particularly in areas touching on the freedom of speech and personal liberty, Justice Kennedy would swing for the fences. Justice Kennedy was easily the most speech-protective Justice on what was a quite speech-protective Court. Whether the speech at issue concerned political campaigns or product pricing, “offensive” messages or dishonest claims about military service, Justice Kennedy believed in uncompromising First Amendment protection. By some accounts it was Justice Kennedy who pushed the Court (and a reluctant Chief Justice) to invalidate the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and this would be entirely consistent with what we saw in his First Amendment opinions.
Speech was not the only freedom that mattered to Justice Kennedy. He had a deep concern for Due Process, as shown in his embrace of habeas rights for alleged enemy combatants, his concerns about the application of capital punishment to some classes of criminal defendants, and his embrace of constitutional limits on punitive damages. He also, perhaps most famously, believed that due regard for individual liberty barred the government from adopting laws prohibiting or disregarding same-sex relationships, as in Lawrence, Romer, Windsor, and Obergefell. In these areas, there was nothing modest, moderate, or minimalist about Justice Kennedy’s views or the doctrinal rules he would embrace.
Given the makeup of the Roberts Court, as went Justice Kennedy, so went the Court. Where Kennedy was a moderate conservative favoring a minimalist approach, the Roberts court would tend to adopt a moderate conservative opinion. Where Justice Kennedy favored a more muscular approach, on the other hand, there were almost always at least four votes to go along. (NFIB v. Sebelius being a notable exception.) If Justice Kennedy wanted to recognize same-sex marriage or preclude the use of the death penalty for those convicted of non-lethal crimes, the liberals would agree. If Justice Kennedy wanted to protect campaign-related or commercial speech, the conservatives were there. so the Roberts Court was generally as conservative and as moderate as Justice Kennedy wanted to be.
Kurt Schlichter on the insanity gripping the Democratic Party:
There’s no sign of sanity. This week they turned the hate up to “11,” then cranked it to “17.” There are not many places to go once you reach “You are real live Nazis murdering children by not letting aspiring Democrat voters flow into the country at will!” At some point, instead of a few wild-eyed randos with crummy aim trying to off libs’ political/cultural opponents, they are going to start collectively going to go for the throat.
Our collective throat. Which I do not anticipate us Normals responding to in a huggy, loving kind of way.
Snip.
We’re already seeing it play out. The mainstream media quit even pretending to be honest – it’s in full scale fib mode. Look at the Time magazine cover of the little girl whose scumbag mom dragged her across the desert to help her break our laws (apparently without daddy’s permission and not for the first time). That Time cover is a lie, but it’s no surprise. The only surprise is that Time magazine is still a thing.
In fact, the whole manufactured outrage over Democrat-preferred criminals being treated like every other criminal was a lie. And the media not only doesn’t care but actively and consciously supports lying to you to support its liberal allies. But no one cares anymore. They can lie and lie and lie, and do, and we just smile and buy more guns and ammo.
So the leftists attempt to intimidate us into submission, showing up at people’s houses and screaming at them in restaurants. Take that, Sarah! The idea is since the leftists can’t convince Normals with the power of their ideas – because leftists’ ideas inevitably involve Normals ceding more of their rights and money to leftists – the left wants to make submission and obedience the price for being able to participate in the culture. But what’s inevitable is that us newly militant Normals, whose power is political rather than cultural, are going to respond pursuant to the New Rules and demand that leftists bake us a cake.
The craziness among Democrats can be explained by the behavior of cultists after a prophecy fails: the moderates, the ones who were the biggest brake on untrammeled lunacy, are the ones out the door first.
The more lukewarm Democrats are either keeping their mouths shut or are disappearing from the Party. The ones who remain are the ones who are more committed (translation: barking mad moonbats) who are the ones we hear talking about impeachment, banishing Trump supporters from the public square, protesting at Republican’s houses, etc.
It also explains why Democratic Party big wigs are losing primary challenges to candidates of the more barking mad persuasion (e.g. Joe Crowley, one of the biggest of the Democratic House big wigs who lost to someone who can only be described as a commie).
Speaking of which, the House’s fourth-ranking Democrat just got knocked off by a woman who wants to abolish ICE. “The objection of the hard Left is not to the current style or kind of immigration enforcement; their objection is to the existence of immigration enforcement.”
Mega Turbo Democrat Dumbass: “I’m going to find the Congressman’s kids and kill them. If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids. Don’t try to find me because you won’t.” Yeah, that last bit turned out to not be the case: The FBI arrested him within hours.
A judge ordered a do-over of a contested Democratic primary runoff race in South Texas after invalidating the runoff results due to voter fraud. The runoff was decided by six votes.
Ofelia “Ofie” Gutierrez contested the results of the May 22 Democratic primary runoff for Kleberg County Justice of the Peace Precinct 4 after losing to incumbent Esequiel “Cheque” De La Paz by a vote of 318 to 312.
Gutierrez alleged that more than six illegal votes were counted, cast by people who didn’t reside within Precinct 4 and therefore weren’t eligible to vote in the election.
On Tuesday, visiting Judge Joel Johnson threw out seven of the 16 ballots Gutierrez challenged in court. All seven were cast by voters related in some way to De La Paz.
Speaking of Iran, protests there continued for a sixth day following a currency collapse. “On Sunday, the rial plunged 15 percent to IRR 89,000 against the dollar on the black market. Since the U.S. withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal on May 8, the rial has lost more than 40 percent of its value.”
The dumbasses at the Austin City Council approved building a soccer stadium. Because subsidizing a popular sport just wasn’t insulting enough to taxpayers…
What it’s like to service an SR-71. “Our last structural integrity review was in 1987, and it declared that the aircraft was about 180 percent stronger than the day it was made. The higher and faster you flew it, the stronger the titanium became.”
Black man being arrested for shoplifting calls police Nazis. So they charged him with a hate crime. All hate crime laws are stupid, but those that criminalize free speech are an order of magnitude stupider. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A Tweet with some numbers from the latest Harris poll:
Wow! Even after last week's fever pitch smear of the Trump administration, 70 percent say we need STRICTER enforcement of our immigration laws. Only 30 percent say looser.
When I realized that the left was trying to convince me that all my non-left family members were hateful, racist, sexist xenophobic bigots, I had to #WalkAway
Multiculturalism Watch: Excavating the Aztec’s ceremonial skull rack, which the Spanish conquistadors estimated as holding 130,000 skulls from human sacrifices. “Gomoz Valdas found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children. Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed.”
Beijing is set to announce a new fund of about 300 billion yuan ($47.4 billion) for the development of China’s semiconductor industry, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter.
The government-backed China Integrated Circuit Investment Fund is heading up the new investment vehicle, the report said. The fund was not available for comment outside of Beijing business hours.
The 300 billion yuan fund would go toward improving China’s ability to design and manufacture advanced microprocessors and graphic-processing units, among other initiatives, the Journal said, citing one source. The size of the fund and other details could change, another source told the newspaper.
Last week, Chen Yin, spokesman and chief engineer of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said the fund welcomes foreign investment.
“The second phase of fundraising is underway, and we welcome foreign companies to participate in this round of financing,” Chen said at a news conference in Beijing, according to a report from state-run English-language newspaper China Daily.
Beijing is seeking to develop domestic technological innovation in areas such as robotics and semiconductors through an initiative called “Made in China 2025.” One of the U.S. trade delegation’s aims in talks with China this week was to ask Beijing to stop subsidies of that program. The visit ended Friday with little apparent progress in resolving a trade dispute between the two countries.
Should we worry? About that, no. Semiconductors are a very complex and expensive game to play. China is already in the game, and goodly portion of any semiconductor spending in China goes into the pockets of American and Japanese fab equipment suppliers like Applied Materials, LAM Research and Tokyo Electron. China has a native semiconductor equipment industry, but it’s hardly setting the world afire.
Tsinghua Unigroup is already in the process of building three fabs at a cost of $70 billion, focused on the memory business. Samsung is currently the top player in this space, followed by Hynix and Micron, and right now that space is pretty profitable.
In China the question is always how much of that investment is real, and how much is illusion. A lot of those “under construction” fabs never materialize, either unable to attract investors or having their funds magically siphoned off to some other enterprise. Also, memory chips are an extremely volatile business: In boom times (like now), they make money hand-over-fist. During busts (which are always around the corner), memory fabs barely break even, which is a big problem if you’re trying to earn back your $10 billion investment in a cutting edge 300mm fab.
Three weeks ago, Micron and South Korean chipmakers Samsung and SK Hynix all reported that the Chinese government had launched antitrust probes into their firms, and accused them of setting artificially high prices for memory chips.
Yes, but: American companies and the U.S. government have long been suspicious about the link between China’s anti-monopoly policies and its industrial goals.
“They want access to the intellectual property. They need us to teach them how to do it. Once they have the industry, they want to push us out,” an industry source familiar with China’s investigation into Micron tells Axios.
The price hikes, the source says, are largely due to a boom in demand for memory chips in everything from smartphones to autonomous vehicles. China’s investigation is “a clear indication that they’re not ready to make [semiconductors] work,” says the source.
Micron’s fight to protect its IP is not new. Other U.S. firms have run up against the same Chinese antitrust policies or regulations and have been forced to strike deals with Beijing.
The New York Times’ Paul Mozur dove into the story a heist of Micron’s crown jewel — its chip design — in Taiwan, where the company keeps its trade secrets.
Qualcomm tangled with China: “To get back in Beijing’s good graces, the company agreed to lower its prices in China, promised to shift more of its high-end manufacturing to partners in China, and pledged to upgrade the country’s technology capabilities,” the New York Times’ David Barboza reports.
The same thing has happened to IBM and Apple and others.
“‘I’m not sure who’s fought China and won, just like I’m not sure who’s fought a casino and won in the long run,” says Bruce Mehlman, who was an assistant secretary of commerce for technology policy under the Bush administration and now lobbies for several tech companies.
Worth noting: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all have thriving semiconductor industries, too. The difference is, these countries accept competition, whereas Beijing wants to give its national champions the advantage, Jimmy Goodrich, vice president of global policy at the Semiconductor Industry Association, says.
The bottom line, per the industry source: “We’re all dependent on China because everything is assembled there.”
This is a bigger problem, and will remain a bigger problem until American companies commit to building the infrastructure for a full-blown American flexible manufacturing supply chain to rival China’s.
All that said, IP theft only gets you so far in semiconductors. By the time you’ve stolen all the IP you need for a current generation chip, chances are good your rivals have already started to fab the next generation of product. And it’s not just the chip design you need to steal; you also need to steal the hundreds, if not thousands, of process step tweaks you need to properly fab 50 layer, 7nm node chips at acceptable uniformity across 300mm wafers. Screw up any one of those steps and your wafer yields crash and you’re making really large, expensive coasters.
Equally challenging for China is hiring qualified semiconductor engineers in China, people with the knowledge and experience to correct process steps to improve yields. There aren’t nearly enough being produced domestically, so China has recently started setting up satellite offices in America and Japan.
Tawain, on the other hand, has all the pieces to the puzzle (save, once again, semiconductor equipment manufacturing), with TSMC dominating the global foundry market. Foundries don’t design their own chips, they manufacture chips designed by others, and TSMC’s mastery of process control is probably second only to Intel’s. This is one reason defending Taiwan is in America’s national interest.
The Trump Administration should continue to push China on the intellectual property issue, and if the cost of doing business in China is giving away your intellectual property, foreign companies should refrain from manufacturing in China. (Alas, a resolution that’s easier said than done…)
Today’s locus of instability is Italy, where two Euroskeptic parties, one left (Five Star Movement) and one right (the League, AKA the Northern League), were prevented from forming a coalition government by the country’s Europhilic President Sergio Mattarella, who vetoed their pick of Paolo Savona for finance minister because he advocates leaving the Euro. Like Spain, Italy found out that if they went too strongly against the EU’s wishes, they’d simply be required to keep voting until they got it “right.”
Accepting Italy as one of the eurozone’s founding members was a decision only made possible by ignoring common sense, by twisting statistics, and by making a mockery of the rules. But it was a Pyrrhic victory: Italy was allowed to trick its way onto a voyage that damned it. The euro simply did not fit the realities of Italy’s economy or its politics. By dramatically cutting the country’s financing costs (borrowing lire would have carried a significantly higher nominal cost) adopting the single currency allowed Rome to avoid tackling the country’s high debt load, a debt load that was made all the more dangerous now that it was all denominated in a ‘foreign’ currency. Italy could no longer print lire to pay off its creditors.
When the eurozone crisis hit, Italy was one of the victims, and so, in some respects was its democracy. In something that came uncomfortably close to a coup, the eurozone leadership essentially used Italy’s financial fragility as a lever to secure the replacement in 2011 of Prime Minister Berlusconi by a Brussels man, Mario Monti, a pliable, unelected proconsul. Next time you hear Brussels lecturing Eastern Europeans on democracy remember that.
Italy weathered the crisis in a ‘just a flesh wound’ sort of way. Its problems became chronic, rather than acute, if that’s the correct adjective to describe the consequences of staying stuck in the euro’s deflationary trap: High rates of unemployment and anemic economic growth.
The Independent:
Per capita GDP in Italy is still more than 8 per cent lower than it was when Lehman Brothers went bust in 2008. Quite incredibly, it is even lower than it was when the country joined the eurozone back at the turn of the millennium. Unemployment stands at 11 per cent, down from a peak of 13.1 per cent in 2014, but still double the 5.8 per cent low seen in 2007.
As the largest of the PIIGS and the third largest economy in the Eurozone, Italy’s participation in the Euro is a lot more vital than Greece’s, which is why the EU has actively been trying to crush any hint of (pick your neologism) Quitaly or Italeave.
Never mind the fact that, as in Spain, Italian voters want to have their cake and eat it too, advocating polices (in the form of “rolling back pension reforms and government subsidies to the unemployed”) that would only pile on further debt in a country that already has a national debt running at over 130% of GDP, secondly only to Greece in the Eurozone. That doesn’t change the fact that Italy has “ceded its sovereignty to the European Union and international financial markets.”
Nancy Pelosi says she wants to be Speaker again. How nice of her to fire up the Republican base for midterms…
Democratic advantage on generic congressional ballots down to 1.2%. And that’s from Reuters, which is not known to be particularly Republican or Trump friendly…
I’m thinking that the Democrats who are making such a big deal out of these ads really don’t themselves believe in democracy. They have been going on and on for a year and a half about how Donald Trump shouldn’t be President. Personally, I want to believe in democracy, and what I saw back in November 2016 is that the American people voted Donald Trump into office. I accept that he is rightfully President because he won the election. It bothers me tremendously that so many people won’t do that. I think they do not believe in democracy. And I know they are leaning very hard into the argument that what happened wasn’t real democracy. Look at those stupid ads they’ve made such a big deal about!
AND: Please don’t tell me about Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. What if Donald Trump had held rallies in upstate New York and various places in California, etc. etc.? He won the election that was held. She won an imaginary election that he wasn’t competing in.
Baghdad now has thriving night life and bars again. Plus men sport hairstyles that look like they’re auditioning to play the next alien race on Star Trek. Also this: “As the war against ISIS wound down, [Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-]Abadi began removing the drab, ugly concrete blast walls that once divided neighborhoods. The government is moving many of these barriers to the Syrian border, where it is creating a wall to keep out ISIS militants.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Bret Easton Ellis on Kayne West’s redpilling: “As someone who considers themselves a disillusioned Gen-X’er, I think there IS a backlash brewing against leftist hysteria…What I used to semi-align myself with has no answers for anything right now, just constant bitching and finding ways to delegitimize an election.” And if you can’t trust the author of American Psycho to offer unbiased political commentary, who can you trust?
“Cultural appropriation is not a glitch of American life. It’s a feature. It’s part of what makes the country great. We take your culture, we get rid of the oppression, the mass murder, the slavery, the intransigent poverty and the endless internecine wars. We keep the pasta and the funny hats.”
Uber software decided pedestrian was a false positive. Result: Dead pedestrian.
Since Dick’s Sporting Goods has decided to lobby for gun control (just how does that increase shareholder value for a sporting goods company?), Springfield Armory has cut ties with them.
Now some links from the “Old News Is So Exciting!” file:
Since I was distracted primary week by a dying dog, this bit of news slipped under the radar and I only recently realized I forgot to report it: Democratic State Rep. Dawnna Dukes went down in flames back in March, along with fellow Democratic state reps Roberto Alonzo of Dallas, Tomas Uresti (brother of convicted felon and former state senator Carlos Uresti) of San Antonio, and Diana Arevalo of San Antonio.
From 2015: “Police find 3,700 knives, satanic shrine in mobile home of Florida woman who tried stabbing an officer.” I think that’s taking your cosplay too far. Also, unless your ID card says “Sarah Kerrigan,” you don’t get to be the Queen of Blades…
This Penny Arcade post is actually from several years ago. I thought it was a swell piece of writing then, and since Tycho relinked to it recently, I read it again, and still think it’s a swell piece of writing. I commend it to your attention.
Milton Friedman once joked that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert in five years there would be a shortage of sand. He could have been talking about Venezuela and its oil wealth. But it is no joke.
On Monday Caracas missed interest payments due on two government bonds and one bond issued by the state-owned oil monopoly known by its Spanish initials PdVSA. Venezuela owed creditors $280 million, which it couldn’t manage even after a 30-day grace period.
Venezuela is broke, which takes some doing. For much of the second half of the 20th century, a gusher of oil exports made dollars abundant in Venezuela and the country imported the finest of everything. There were rough patches in the 1980s and 1990s, but by 2001 Venezuela was the richest country in South America.
Then in 2005 the socialist Hugo Chávez declared that the central bank had “excessive reserves.” He mandated that the executive take the excess from the bank without compensation. Today the central bank has at best $1 billion in reserves.
Falling oil prices are partly to blame, but the main problem is that chavismo has strangled entrepreneurship. Faced with expropriation, hyperinflation, price controls and rampant corruption, human and monetary capital has fled Venezuela.
As of Tuesday evening, the Investment Swaps and Derivatives Association still had not declared Venezuela in default. That matters because this will trigger the insurance obligations inherent in the credit default swaps. But S&P Global Ratings declared the country in default Monday. On Tuesday morning the Luxembourg Stock Exchange issued a suspension notice for the bonds with missed payments.
Let’s take a break from talking about Hillary Clinton’s scandals so we can talk about Barack Obama’s scandals. At the end of the day, though, there’s a significant chance they all tie up together in one giant knotted scandal tangle…
While Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general, the Justice Department allowed prosecutors to strike agreements compelling big companies to give money to outside groups not connected to their cases to meet settlement burdens. Republican lawmakers long have decried those payments as a “slush fund” that boosted liberal groups, and the Trump DOJ ended the practice earlier this year.
But internal Justice Department emails released Tuesday by Goodlatte indicated that not only were officials involved in determining what organizations would get the money, but also Justice Department officials may have intervened to make sure the settlements didn’t go to conservative groups.
In one such email in July 2014, a senior Justice Department official expressed “concerns” about what groups would receive settlement money from Citigroup — saying they didn’t want money going to a group that does “conservative property-rights legal services.”
In an unprecedented victorious conclusion to our years-long legal battle against the IRS, the bureaucratic agency has just admitted in federal court that it wrongfully targeted Tea Party and conservative groups during the Obama Administration and issued an apology to our clients for doing so. In addition, the IRS is consenting to a court order that would prohibit it from ever engaging in this form of unconstitutional discrimination in the future.
In a proposed Consent Order filed with the Court yesterday, the IRS has apologized for its treatment of our clients (36 Tea Party and other conservative organizations from 20 states that applied for 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) tax-exempt status with the IRS between 2009 and 2012) during the tax-exempt determinations process. Crucially, following years of denial by the IRS and blame-shifting by IRS officials, the agency now expressly admits that its treatment of our clients was wrong.
House Republicans manage to pass something resembling a budget. Is it a good or bad budget? “Answer cloudy, ask again later.”
“So mostly everybody is like jumping for joy. And I’m walking around like a zombie. But nobody really gave a damn what my feelings were. So I went back to the office and I got a call from Congressman [Jack] Brooks who is the congressman from Texas and Chairman of [the Judiciary] committee and he said, ‘Well you just lost me my seat.’ And he and I had a good relationship. I said, ‘Well, you voted against it. The president doesn’t want you to do anything going forward that would jeopardize you. And if we come back from the conference and all that stuff…’ And he was just really down, down, down… He said, ‘my seat is done.’”
Snip.
In all, eight Democratic Senators lost their races and 54 Democratic House members too. The list included those who opposed the assault weapons ban but reluctantly voted for it (like Speaker Tom Foley) and those who had tried to strip the crime bill of the assault weapons ban, like Brooks.
Left-wing heroes that treat women like garbage. In addition to Harvey and Teddy, there’s Bill Clinton, Andreas Baader, several Black Panthers, and assorted “male feminists,” though it occasionally veers into the weeds.
Harvey Weinstein seemed to fit right in. This is a form of liberalism that routinely blends self-righteousness with upper-class entitlement. That makes its great pronouncements from Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons. That routinely understands the relationship between the common people and showbiz celebrities to be one of trust and intimacy.
Countless people who should have known better are proclaiming their surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abuses. But in truth, their blindness is even more sweeping than that. They are lost these days in a hall of moral mirrors, weeping tears of admiration for their own virtue and good taste.
You know what’s really shocking? That piece is from liberal commentator Thomas What’s the Matter With Kansas Frank…
Besides Hollywood, you know what other powerful liberal establishment is full of sexual harassers? The EU Parliament.
One of the cruelest things we do to prisoners is pump them up with the idea that, if they educate themselves in prison and learn a trade, they will be able to work when they get out. This is a lie. They probably won’t be able to work, because, aside from typical job-interview demerits like too many nasty facial tattoos, that felony conviction automatically eliminates them on most application forms. As late as the ’70s, in Arkansas, it was considered a badge of civic pride if you hired a couple of convicts and a couple of blind, deaf, or wheelchair-bound citizens at your business—which is why we didn’t use the term “hardcore” for any of the unemployed.
Would it be a stretch to say all these convicts have been replaced by young able-bodied illegals? I don’t think so.
Snip.
“Get rid of the illegal Mexicans and see how fast that wage goes up to $15 on its own, no government intervention needed.”
Back in 2014, a scandal erupted when media reports confirmed what many had previously speculated about China’s banking system: namely that much of China’s staggering loan issuance had been built (literally) upon air and that billions (or trillions) in loan collateral had been “rehypothecated” between two, three or many more debtors – or never even existed – forcing banks to accept that they would never recover much if any of the pledged collateral – in most cases various commodities – if the economy were to suffer a hard-landing resulting in mass defaults. The most famous example involved collateral fraud at China’s 3rd largest port, Qingdao, where numerous borrowers were found to have “pledged” the same collateral of steel and copper to obtain funding from various banks.
So how extensive is the problem?
At risk of spoiling the surprise, what has been going on in China, either in conventional asset-backed lending, as well as among the more esoteric, complex commodity-funded deals, which we discussed extensively in the early part of 2013 is nothing less than pure fraud: in some cases, collateral that has been pledged simply doesn’t exist. In others, it disappears as borrowers in financial distress sell the assets. There are also instances in which the same collateral has been pledged to multiple lenders, i.e. rehypothecated. “One lawyer said he discovered that the same pile of steel was used to secure loans from 10 different lenders” Reuters reports.
And while China was able to brush off its “ghost collateral” problems three years ago when it still had substantial debt incurrence capacity, and debt/GDP was about 100% lower, now that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the Ponzi scheme – by definition – running, especially with the recent crackdown on shadow banking, the pervasive collateral problems are about to become a huge headache for Beijing again: with the mainland facing its slowest growth in over a quarter of a century, defaults are mounting as borrowers struggle to repay their loans.
It’s long been known that China’s economy is built, to some extent, on smoke and mirrors (even more so than our own economy). But it looks like it might be smoke and mirrors all the way down…
It’s been a week, so enjoy an extra-late Friday LinkSwarm
There’s lots of meat in President Trump’s tax reform proposal:
Individual Reform
Tax relief for American families, especially middle-income families:
Reducing the 7 tax brackets to 3 tax brackets of to%, 25% and 35%
Doubling the standard deduction
Providing tax relief for families with child and dependent care expenses
Simplification:
Eliminate targeted tax breaks that mainly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers
Protect the home ownership and charitable gift tax deductions
Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax
Repeal the death tax
Repeal the 3.8% Obamacare tax that hits small businesses and investment income
Business Reform
15% business tax rate
Territorial tax system to level the playing field for American companies
One-time tax on trillions of dollars held overseas
Eliminate tax breaks for special interests
Texas House passes anti-Santuary City bill that fines officials for violating federal immigration laws.
North Korean ballistic missile test fails. Cue the sad trombone.
Obama’s Iran deal was even worse than we thought. “By dropping charges against major arms targets, the administration infuriated Justice Department officials — and undermined its own counterproliferation task forces.”
The highest-profile Democratic-party supporters are increasingly smug Hollywood actors, rich Wall Street and Silicon Valley elitists, and embittered members of the media, along with careerist identity groups and assorted protest movements — a fossilized 1972 echo chamber.
Democrats’ politically correct messaging derides opponents as deplorable racists, sexists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes, and nativists. That shrill invective only further turns off Middle America. Being merely anti-Trump is no more a successful Democratic agenda than being anti-Nixon was in 1972.
Dishonest medical equipment startup Theranos used a shell company to secretly buy outside lab equipment to actually run the lab tests they were faking as coming from their own equipment. And check out that picture caption: “[CEO] Elizabeth Holmes speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.” Because of course she did.
Liberals love denouncing the imaginary Christian theocracy of The Handmaid’s Tale (now a miniseries) because it keeps them from having to think about the real Islamic ones oppressing women all over the world right at this very moment.
