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Levin credited Trump for his Reaganesque national security strategy speech Monday afternoon, and commended him for what he has accomplished so far despite the relentless opposition. He then called on all Republicans to get behind the president’s agenda, or be dismissed:
Generally speaking, conspiracy theories form where there is a vacuum of verifiable facts associated with a controversial, usually tragic event. The concept has evolved over the years and is a part of our popular culture. There are legions of conspiracy theorists and “truthers” who have devoted their lives to certain theories, and there are legions of skeptics who have devoted their lives to debunking those theories. All the while, conspiracy theories of every stripe and variety festoon the footnotes of history. Even the origin of the phrase itself is subject to conspiracy theory, as some researchers have argued that the CIA invented and promulgated the term in order to marginalize fringe thinkers and neutralize investigations.
According to the U.N.'s top human rights body, Israel is the worst human rights violator in the world today. That’s the result of the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council which wrapped up in Geneva on Friday by adopting five times more resolutions condemning Israel than any other country on earth.
President Trump’s administration is currently a member of this reprehensible body. To borrow Elie Wiesel’s counsel to President Reagan not to pay his respects at a German graveyard containing Nazi SS remains: “That place, Mr. President, is not your place.”
Many experts, genuine or self-proclaimed, assert that the battle against radical Islam will be won, not so much by killing its adherents, but by discrediting the ideology.
That sounds profound indeed, yet, what exactly does it mean?
Former Trump National Security Advisor retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in his 2016 book "The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies," suggested using psychological operations and counter-propaganda, through federal government channels, schools, media and social networks to discredit the "evil (religious) doctrines" motivating jihadists.
The Trump media surrogates have a quandary. They're not sure whether to compare their man Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan, distinguish him from Reagan, or dismiss Reagan. It depends on the day and the subject. So they spin, and spin, and spin.
One area in which Trump can be nailed down is his overall view of trade. As I explained at Conservative Review, when it comes to Trump's own financial dealings, he is an unrepentant globalist, from which he has made a fortune. But these days, as he runs for president, the billionaire is a radical protectionist who has repeatedly declared his intention to impose massive tariffs aimed at the economies of other countries, such as Japan and Mexico, and a forty-five percent tariff on products from China. Such broad tariffs would most certainly result in retaliation by the targeted countries. This is a sure job-killer that would also drive up costs of everyday products to low- and middle-class Americans. The net result: economic misery, not just for those hard-working, tax-paying Americans who work in industries that rely on international commerce and trade, but mostly everyone.
“Except for Adolf Hitler's extermination of the Jewish people, the American bombardment of defenseless peasants in Indochina is the most barbaric act of modern times.”
That quote didn’t come from some Soviet hack coughing up copy for Moscow, but from Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern (some years later, McGovern would compare the Communist massacres in Cambodia to the Holocaust and call for some of that barbaric military intervention).
That plummeting sound you hear is the fall of the House of Bush. Unfortunately for the family, it is not falling silently into the woods and there are plenty of people to hear it and witness it and, in time, kick over the dead embers of Bushism.
With Jeb Bush’s dismal loss in South Carolina comes the end of the Bush dynasty, which given the rise of President George HW Bush in 1980 (and even before with Senator Prescott Bush) as Ronald Reagan’s running mate, and later two presidencies, it lasted well over 30 years. Only the Adams’s, the Roosevelts, and the Kennedys could make the same claim as goes political dynasties
At Monday’s Democrat Town Hall, an audience member asked Hillary Clinton how she would deal with the issue of the attack in Benghazi both in the campaign going forward and as president if she’s elected. Rather than actually answer the question, the Democratic presidential front-runner — you guessed it — danced around it.
“I am well aware that for partisan political purposes this continues, but let me tell you why this makes me — it makes me sad. It makes me sad because we’ve had, we’ve had terrorist attacks many times before in our country,” she said before waxing reminiscent. “When Ronald Reagan was president in 1983, our Marine barracks, our embassy were attacked in Beirut. More than 250 Americans were killed. The Democrats didn’t make that a partisan issue."
Meltzer, a best-selling thriller writer, wrote in the New York Daily News over the weekend that he was told about Reagan’s heat-packing ways while researching an upcoming novel. While touring the headquarters of the Secret Service, Meltzer says one of the agents there mentioned that Reagan carried a revolver in his briefcase during his years as president.
“Whatever you think of Reagan, you have to admit, he had a black belt in badassery,” Meltzer wrote.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Craig Shirley, a notable Reagan biographer, who said that Meltzer’s claim is completely true and independently confirmed by his own research.
Shirley told TheDCNF he learned about Reagan’s gun while researching his upcoming book Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan. He said Reagan’s secret gun was revealed to him by Stephen Colo, a retired Secret Service agent who led Reagan’s security detail after he left the White House.
Shirley offered a bounty of new information about Reagan’s gun that was absent from Meltzer’s original piece. While Meltzer didn’t say when Reagan started carrying, Shirley confirmed the practice began after Reagan was shot and nearly killed by John Hinckley Jr. on March 30, 1981.
CRUZ: Good to see you.
Thank you. (APPLAUSE)
Thank you so much, President Falwell. God bless Liberty University.
(APPLAUSE)
I am thrilled to join you today at the largest Christian university in the world.
(APPLAUSE)
Today I want to talk with you about the promise of America.
Imagine your parents when they were children. Imagine a little girl growing up in Wilmington, Delaware during World War II, the daughter of Irish and Italian Catholic family, working class. Her uncle ran numbers in Wilmington. She grew up with dozens of cousins because her mom was the second youngest of 17 kids. She had a difficult father, a man who drank far too much, and frankly didn’t think that women should be educated.
And yet this young girl, pretty and shy, was driven, was bright, was inquisitive, and she became the first person in her family ever to go to college. In 1956, my mom, Eleanor, graduated from Rice University with a degree in math and became a pioneering computer programmer in the 1950s and 1960s.
(APPLAUSE)
Imagine a teenage boy, not much younger than many of you here today, growing up in Cuba. Jet black hair, skinny as a rail.
(LAUGHTER)
Involved in student council, and yet Cuba was not at a peaceful time. The dictator, Batista, was corrupt, he was oppressive. And this teenage boy joins a revolution. He joins a revolution against Batista, he begins fighting with other teenagers to free Cuba from the dictator. This boy at age 17 finds himself thrown in prison, finds himself tortured, beaten. And then at age 18, he flees Cuba, he comes to America.
Sen. Ted Cruz’s political operation appears to be strongly encouraging attendance by the media at an event in Lynchburg, Va., Monday for what’s being billed as “an important speech.”
Aides to the Texas Republican, who has been contemplating a run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, were tight-lipped Friday about the details of the visit to the campus of Liberty University, but the timing of the speech would be right for getting somewhat ahead of the curve on announcing a White House run, at least among senators.
Cruz spoke previously at the private, Christian university in Virginia in April of 2014, where he delivered the convocation address [focusing] on a topic of significant interest to his audience, actions by the government that conservatives view as attacks on their religious liberty.
President Obama pushed hard his “middle class economics” message during a Cleveland speech yesterday. And in the process, offered his take on recent US economic history:
For the first eight years of this century, before I came into office, we tried trickle-down economics. We slashed taxes for folks at the top, stripped out regulations, didn’t make investments in the things we know we need to grow. At the end of those eight years, we had soaring deficits, record job losses, an economy in crippling recession. In the years since then we’ve tried middle-class economics. Today we’ve got dramatically lower deficits, a record streak of job creation, an economy that’s steadily growing.
The president modified his usual argument just a bit to frame the economic battle as middle-out Obamanomics vs. trickle-down Bushonomics, But in the past, he has subtlety lumped Bushonomics in with Clintonomics and Reaganomics. All part of the same tax-cutting, regulation-slashing, neoliberal wave from 1981 through 2008 that overall benefited the 1% at the expense of everyone else.
Yet despite the president’s critique, many voters probably recall the 1980s and 1990s with great fondness. For instance: A 2014 Quinnippiac survey founds American consider Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to be the best two postwar presidents.
What’s the matter with Kansas? What’s the matter with America?
Both Reagan and Clinton pushed deregulation. Both cut taxes for wealthier Americans. Yes, inequality rose. The share of market income going to the top 1% doubled from 1981 through 2001. But it was also a period when nonfarm payrolls increased by 42 million. The employment rate rose to 63% from 59%. Median incomes — when adjusted for transfers, taxes, benefits, and changing household size — rose by 30%. While the middle class shrank, it was “primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets,” the New York Times recently noted. A recent Brookings study found that through the 1980s and 1990s, “households of virtually every type experienced large, steady income gains, whether they were headed by men or women, by blacks, whites or Hispanics, or by people with high school diplomas or college degrees.” Clearly there was a lot happening during those decades other than just the rich getting richer.
#FAIL Obama's jobless economy… pic.twitter.com/aKcUQXx5tX @hankishtwit @Vbiii241 @HostileUrbanist @kyleraccio
— Kelly (@KLSouth) October 18, 2014In movies, handsome men and beautiful women speak eloquent words written by others and perform profound or heroic actions that they were never required to do in real life.
Obama is at his best on a stage set with human props in the background, reading from a teleprompter script to an audience of adoring fans.
Like the son of a Hollywood mogul, Obama breezed through life with an Affirmative Action wind at his back. He was made President of the Harvard Law Review having never written a legal article, was an unremarkable Illinois state senator and made no impact on national events in his brief tenure as a US senator. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize based on rhetoric rather than accomplishment.
Much like the intellectual vacuity of Hollywood, Obama's incompetence is camouflaged by the ignorant approval of naïve or ideological groupies and a fawning and uncritical media.
Imagine if you would a prayer breakfast in Washington attended by the leadership of the GOP — Messrs. Boehner, McConnell, Priebus, and their associates. They drop to their knees, bow their heads, and invoke divine intercession in the country’s troubled affairs, and in the party’s parlous condition. Would it be too much to ask Him to deliver unto them a mass political movement, self-financed and benignly led, God-fearing and well-mannered, almost all of whose members believed in the literal version of the Republican platform and almost none of whose members wanted anything from the federal government but constitutional restraint?
Yes, it would have been too much to ask, but, yes, it has been given unto them, anyway. The Tea Party arrived in vast, friendly numbers and said to the GOP, “We’re not from the federal government and we’re here to help.”
What happened next was not pretty. Or smart. The GOP brass responded with insults, attack ads, collaborative media trashing, and, finally, over the past six months, the charge of McConnell’s geezer brigade seeking to “crush” the Tea Party. And here we thought congressional Republicans were too prone to compromise, too quick to split the difference.
Our colleague M. Stanton Evans once said of the two-party system: “One is the evil party and the other is the stupid party. I’m proud to be a member of the stupid party.” I am as well, but sometimes party stupidity asks too much. Here we have before us an epochal opportunity to revive the national enterprise, and we are woefully (and smugly) ill prepared to realize it. As we look forward to 2016, where do we find ourselves? We find ourselves, in my estimate, with no candidate, no message, no coalitional unity, and a thoroughly rusted party machine. Only this question remains: Can we rally in time to save the country from a terminal identity politics that could over the next few cycles bring us not principled and experienced leaders, but (regardless of their qualifications) the first woman president, the first Hispanic president, the first gay president?
A world in which the word statist is never uttered and the consequences of statism are never discussed.Yes, the nonfarm payroll clocked in at 138.5 million jobs and thereby retraced for the first time the point at which it stood 77 months ago in December 2007. This predictably elicited another “milestone of progress” squeal from the mainstream media.
So you have to wonder. Did these people skip history class? Do they understand the vital idea of “context”? Are they so mesmerized by paint-by-the-numbers agit prop from Wall Street and Washington that they have come to mindlessly embrace the notion that any number that is better than the last “print” is all that it takes—regardless of composition, quality or longer-term trend?
Thus, consider the ancient days of the Reagan era. Back then there were actually 15.0 million new jobs by the time that 77 months had elapsed after the June 1982 bottom. And these were honest-to-goodness new jobs that had never before existed, not born again jobs of the type that CNBC has made a “jobs Friday” fetish out of ever since the Great Recession was officially declared over in June 2009.
So if you want to try a little “context” absurdity recall this. So far we have created a trifling 100k “new” jobs since the last cyclical peak. During the equivalent 77 months in the Reagan era the US economy actually generated 150 times more jobs!
6-years of ZIRP have left the world’s financial system booby-trapped with tottering pyramids of debt and rampant carry trades and financial speculations. Why would this be assumed to comprise the kind of stable and productive financial environment that would enable the current business cycle expansion to go on for years into the future, thereby eclipsing every record from far more stable times of decades past?
So a 77 month jobs drought is a big deal, yet search the financial press and you will find no mention. And not just because of the benchmark set in the Reagan era. During the 77 months after the 1990 peak nearly 10 million net jobs were created; the working age population expanded by 12.2 million; and the conversion rate was not zero, as during the recent go round, but actually more than 80%.
