The stock market is up. There are more jobs in this country than people seeking jobs. Employees are getting raises. Small business confidence is at an all time high.
Despite all the back and forth between the parties, in the end people usually vote their pocketbooks. Midterm elections are different, but it’s hard to believe that the average voter is not going to close the curtain in the voting booth and think about how good the economy is under President Donald Trump and how dismal it was under President Barack Obama – with high unemployment, wage stagnation and low consumer confidence – and decide to vote for the current economy.
I think the Democrats and the mainstream media are going to be surprised on Nov. 6. Perhaps not as surprised as they were on Nov. 8, 2016, but still surprised because I don’t believe that most Americans want to kill the goose. They may not like Trump and they may not even like what he has done, but they have to like the results of what he has done.
Reading about what the Democrats plan to do if they win a majority in the House is entertaining, but it seems premature three weeks out from the election, and it’s also silly.
If the Democrats do win the House, as some are predicting, they can’t do anything unless they also win the Senate; and almost no one is predicting that the Democrats will win the Senate. So they can pass anything they want in the House and it will die when it reaches the Senate.
But even if the Democrats win the House and the Senate, for a bill to become law it has to be signed by the president, and the president until 2021 is Trump. It is hard to imagine Trump being shy about vetoing bills that he doesn’t like.
Even the most ardent Democratic operatives are not predicting that the Democrats are going to win a veto-proof majority in the House or over 60 seats in the Senate, which is what is required to get bills past a cloture vote.
So the Democrats can talk all they want about the bills they are going to pass if they get elected, and if they win a majority they can pass those bills – but the bills will never become law.
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I read the entire special section The New York Times wrote about the tax returns of Trump’s father, Fred Trump. The Timesclaims to have looked through 100,000 pages of documents.
It should be difficult to summarize a 10-page newspaper article in a few sentences, but it isn’t. Boiled down to its essence, the article states that Trump’s father was extremely successful and he gave his children a bunch of money while he was alive. When he died his children inherited his entire estate, which was several hundred million for each of them. Rather than pay the 55 percent inheritance tax, the children used every legal means possible to reduce that tax bill. Oh, and over the years Fred Trump loaned his son Donald millions of dollars.
One thing that particularly riled the yellow journalists at The New York Times was that when the Trump children had their father’s property appraised, the values came in much lower than what The Times thought the true values were.
Are the editors at The Times really that naive that the fact that the real estate appraisal business is a racket is big news to them?
What the Trump children did was hired a licensed appraiser to do all the appraisals. The IRS accepted those appraisals, but The Times doesn’t.
It would make more sense for The Times to go after the appraisal business rather than Trump. The Trumps followed the laws of the land. The IRS, in fact, quibbled with the appraisals and raised it 20 percent or so, which would indicate the IRS did some of its own appraisals and found their numbers much closer to the Trumps’ numbers than to the numbers of The Times.
I have never been in the real estate business, but I have bought and sold property. What I have found is that the appraisal means nothing. The price of a piece of property is whatever a buyer will pay for it and whatever a seller will accept.
Since, at the time, the property was not being bought or sold, the estimates of The New York Times have no validity. In fact, since the IRS accepted the appraisals the Trump heirs had done, they have the validity of an independent government organization accepting them as valid – unless The Times believes that the Trump heirs conspired with the IRS, but they didn’t go there.
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California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is complaining that Trump didn’t nominate any of the people she suggested to fill the empty seats on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Thank goodness. Can you imagine Trump nominating any far-left liberal whackos that Feinstein would propose?
It was nice of Trump to let Feinstein and California Sen. Kamala Harris make suggestions, but to pay any attention to them would have been political suicide.
Also, as Obama said, elections have consequences, and being complete and utter jerks about Supreme Court nominees has consequences also. Perhaps if Feinstein had not held the letter from Christine Blasey Ford until the last possible second and tried to waylay the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump might have been a little more inclined to work with her. But after the way Feinstein and Harris behaved on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Trump should treat them with the same respect they treated his nominee. But Trump is nicer than that.
What Trump needs to do now is make certain those nominees get pushed through the Senate. The Ninth Circuit is one of the most liberal in the country and it would be good for the nation to have some appointees on there who actually believed their job was to interpret the laws and the Constitution and not make decisions based on their own personal beliefs.
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Some pundits say that the Kavanaugh nomination fight has energized Democrats. I don’t agree. But it did give some energized Democrats an opportunity to behave badly on and off the air.
Republicans didn’t like the Obama Supreme Court nominees, but some Republicans voted for them because they were well qualified and the standard is not supposed to be whether or not a senator agrees with the nominees politically, but whether or not the nominees are qualified.
Republicans didn’t try to tear down the doors to the Supreme Court when Justice Elena Kagan or Justice Sonia Sotomayor were being sworn into office. It appears that the Democrats, including big-wig (pun intended) Democrats like Hillary Clinton, believe in mob rule. If the Democrats don’t like your political opinions, they will harass you at restaurants or while you are walking to your office in the Capitol building.
I think the Kavanaugh nomination energized Republicans, big time. Republicans saw that with Trump as their leader they can win. They saw that their president refuses to buckle under and is going to fight the mob right up until the end.
They also should see that because they voted for a Republican president and Republican senators, the Supreme Court was shifted to the right in a big way. Conservatives haven’t had a working majority on the Supreme Court in over 80 years. The Supreme Court has always been there to put a stop to conservative ideals becoming the law of the land.
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The Harvard admissions discrimination case is before the Supreme Court and the outcome is likely to be very different from the last time an affirmative action case came before the Supreme Court.
Harvard can’t even be honest about what it has been doing and its arguments from a factual standpoint are absurd. There is no way that, year after year, it just happens that right at 20 percent of the students accepted are Asian. Or that it is just an accident that Asians accepted at Harvard have an SAT score about 140 points higher than a similar white student, and 450 points higher than a similar black student. How is it fair for Asians to be punished because they are overall better students and score better on tests than white and black students?
It’s wrong and Harvard knows its wrong or it wouldn’t be denying it.
In the top California universities, which have race neutral admission policies, the percentage of Asian students is about double what it is at Harvard.
Shouldn’t admissions be race neutral with students judged on what they have done, not the color of their skin? Asians are without question a minority that has been discriminated against in the past. Is it right in 2018 to continue that discrimination? The Supreme Court is going to make that decision.
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I read a great editorial column by Paul Krugman last week that blamed Trump for the political assassinations that have taken place since he became president, in particular Jamal Khashoggi, who the Turks say was killed by the Saudis.
But if the US president is responsible for the renegade behavior of every other nation while he is president, Krugman, to be fair, should note that while there have been assassinations while Trump has been president, Russia has not taken territory from any other country.
While Obama was president Russia took Crimea by force from Ukraine and tried to take more or all of Ukraine.
While Obama was president Syrian President Bashar al-Assad assassinated many people and he also used chemical weapons to assassinate his own people, including women and children. Obama’s response was to force Assad to put some barrels of chemical weapons on ships. Since there were plenty more chemical weapons to be had, it cost Assad what ever the cost of manufacture was – not much of a punishment for indiscriminately killing thousands.
Also on Obama’s watch, ISIS took over huge chunks of Syria and Iraq and ISIS was within striking distance of the Baghdad airport before Obama realized that they might not be the jayvee team he said they were. Obama was so meek that he wouldn’t even allow the US military to destroy the oil production facilities that were funding ISIS.
According to Krugman’s rules, all that blood is on Obama’s hands including the blood of thousands of Kurdish fighters who did what the US should have been doing, fighting ISIS. Krugman might want to take a look at how long ISIS held out when Trump unleashed the US military on them. It was weeks, not years. If Obama had done, that tens of thousands of lives, including those of innocent men, women and children who were tortured and killed by ISIS – many on videotape – could have been saved.
If Trump is to be held responsible for a few political assassinations then Obama has be held responsible for the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives because of his refusal to do the right thing.
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The truth about Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test is that she has less Native American blood than the average American of European ancestry. What the DNA test proves, if anything, is that Warren doesn’t actually have enough Native American ancestry to claim anything. The actual percent for Warren is about 0.1 percent. The average among European Americans is 0.18 percent.
And Warren was claiming to be a Native American on official documents.
Trump said he thought he had more Native American blood than Warren, and if Trump is average that is true.
It’s also been revealed that the expert who analyzed Warren’s DNA didn’t have a Native American sample to compare it to. He used DNA from South Americans, figuring that North American and South American Indians had the same DNA. It seems odd since Warren’s whole argument is that she is part Cherokee Indian.
It’s hard to know what 0.1 percent means, but according to Warren it means she was correct and somewhere in her ancestry there was a Native American. If it was the 10th generation back, which is likely, that was 200 years before she was born, or in the 1700s. It’s hard to believe that anyone in her family was ostracized as she said because there was a native American ancestor that far back, and also bizarre that Warren claimed to be a Native American because she is 0.1 percent Native American.
Politics is nothing if not silly.
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People comment that all this animosity in Washington is going to get out of hand and could result in real violence, where Republican lawmakers are not attacked verbally by angry liberals, but attacked physically.
We know that’s true because it happened in 2017. The Republican congressional baseball team was attacked by a liberal man angry about health care. House Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise was seriously wounded and, if it had not been for the fact that Scalise because of his position had an armed Capitol Police escort that took swift action, all the members of the baseball team could have been shot. They were armed with baseballs and baseball bats, which is not what you want to bring to a gun fight.
But it happened. One mentally deranged man took all the angry rhetoric he heard on television to heart and decided to do something about it.
The amazing thing is that if he had killed or disabled the Republican baseball team, as he planned, it would have had an effect on legislation. It might have made the Republicans more stalwart in their efforts to change the path the country had been taking, or it might have scared them into moving slower. But removing that many Republican representatives from Congress would have had an effect.
What’s amazing is that the angry mobs yelling hateful slogans have gotten worse. And James Hodgkinson, the shooter, is not the only person out there who believes violence is the answer.
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First Lady Melania Trump doesn’t get credit for her wry sense of humor. When she went with the president to view the damage from Hurricane Harvey in Houston, the mainstream media ridiculed her for getting on Air Force One in spike heels, as if a woman can’t change her shoes on Air Force One. Melania Trump did change her shoes on the plane and had on a pair of sneakers when she deplaned in Houston.
This time going to visit Florida to view the devastation from Hurricane Michael she wore combat boots. Come on, that’s funny. From spike heels to combat boots, you can’t get any further apart than that.
One problem the media has with Melania Trump is that she is a former model who looks and dresses like a former model. At least in modern times we have not had a first lady who is in her league as far as attractiveness goes.
I also don’t believe we have ever had a first lady who spoke six languages.
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I was looking at some of the political messages from the Democratic Party. One is “Elect More Women.” This isn’t the least bit true. The Democratic Party is not in favor of electing more women, or more minorities for that matter. The Democratic Party is in favor of electing more Democrats. And if those Democrats happen to be men running against Republican women, then they are all for the man and against the women.
At least in this one area Republicans are more honest. Not that any political party is entirely honest, but the message of Democrats to elect more women and minorities is a lie, pure and simple.
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Federal District Court Judge James Otero didn’t simply rule against Stormy Daniels in her defamation lawsuit against Trump, he ordered Daniels to pay Trump’s legal fees, which means he ruled that her lawsuit was completely bogus.
It’s not easy to get legal fees in a lawsuit. The judge has to believe that the lawsuit is completely without merit and more in the line of harassment.
The mainstream media continue to report that Daniels had an affair with Trump – something that she claims and he denies.
It is not a fact that Daniels and Trump had an affair; it is a belief. The mainstream media believe Daniels and don’t believe Trump. They continue to state their opinion as fact.
The fact that Trump’s attorney agreed to pay Daniels to keep her from coming forward claiming they had an affair in the weeks before the 2016 election was smart politics. It doesn’t matter whether there was any validity to the claim or not, it would have hurt Trump for the claim to have been made publicly.
One can argue that it would have hurt Trump whether or not he was running for president. For Trump, who even the liberal mainstream media admits is a multi-billionaire, $130,000 is not a lot of money. To most Americans it is quite a bit of money and evidently Daniels thought it was a good deal for her.
The payment may have been made, not because of the campaign, but simply to protect his marriage. Regardless, the payment doesn’t prove that they had an affair, simply that it was worth $130,000 to Trump not to have that accusation out there. Of course, in that the payment failed miserably.
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With Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, it seems like a good idea to look at how the Democrats tried to stop him with an allegation of sexual assault when he was a teenager.
Why did Sen. Feinstein hold Ford’s letter until the very last second? Why didn’t she give it to the committee to investigate along with everything else? The FBI investigations of Supreme Court nominees are extensive. Adding some additional people to interview would not have delayed the nomination or, as it turned out, changed the report much. So if Feinstein had turned the letter over, nobody outside the Senate Judiciary Committee members who read the report would have known about Ford or her accusations because they would have gone into the stack of unverified accusations against Kavanaugh.
Once Feinstein released the information, but not the letter or Ford’s name, the Judiciary Committee offered to send investigators to meet with her. Ford says that she wasn’t told about the offer or doesn’t remember being told about the offer.
At this time she was being advised by attorneys recommended by Feinstein and perhaps paid by Feinstein. Ford testified that she didn’t know who was paying her attorneys. If she had received the bill it is doubtful she would have not remembered it because those lawyers were not cheap.
But if Ford had accepted the offer to have the investigators come to her, there would have been no need to have her name released and the public spectacle of her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on national television would have never happened.
Perhaps Ford is one of the most naive adult humans on the planet and had no idea what she was getting herself into when she contacted her congresswoman and The Washington Post tip line. Maybe she didn’t understand that by not allowing the investigators to come to her that she would become a celebrity for the left. Maybe she has a terrible memory and really can’t remember people and places.
But it certainly appears to have been a plan that played out exactly the way Feinstein wanted it to play out, except she misjudged the courage of Kavanaugh and Trump. It would have been much easier for one of them to fold, but they stayed the course and won.
Feinstein is going to have to up her game if she is going to get the best of this president.
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The media have gone nuts over Kanye West supporting Trump because they know that if Kanye supports Trump that gives a lot of other black conservatives some cover to come out of the closet, and that is terrifying to Democrats because they can’t get elected without the overwhelming support of black voters.
In Guilford County, in predominantly white districts you have some that vote 60 and 70 percent for Democrats or Republicans. In most predominantly black precincts the percentages are in the 90 percent range, and some nearly 100 percent, for Democrats. It’s not unusual in predominantly black districts to see precincts that are 250 for the Democrat and 5 for the Republican. If those figures change just in the range of 80 percent Democrat and 20 percent Republican, then a lot more Republicans are going to be elected.
Currently, the black political leadership in Guilford County is so heavily in favor of Democrats that they support white Democrats over black Republicans, as in the case of District 57 state Rep. candidate Troy Lawson, who is not running against a well established Democrat, but a newcomer Ashton Clemmons.
The black leadership in Guilford County would prefer to have a white Democrat over a black Republican, which in this case is particularly bad for the community. If Clemmons is elected she will simply be another Democrat down in Raleigh who can’t get any of her bills passed because she is in the minority party.
Lawson, by contrast, would be a rare black Republican who could get a lot done for his district. If the black leadership in Greensboro actually wanted more black elected officials they would be supporting Lawson, but what they actual want is to get more Democrats elected.
Taking race out of it, if the black leadership wanted more development in east Greensboro, they would be supporting Lawson because he could bring state money to east Greensboro that no Democrat has a chance of getting. If Lawson doesn’t win that money will go to some community represented by a Republican.
Of course, it isn’t the black leadership who decides who will represent District 57, but the voters. Maybe Kanye will resonate with enough of the voters to consider whether the black leaders are working for the community or for their own political gain.
