Monthly Archives: March 2017

Bill Leak 1956-2017

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This is a terrible tragedy. Australia’s bravest, most forthright political cartoonist has passed away. From The Australian:

The Australian’s editorial cartoonist Bill Leak has died in hospital of a suspected heart attack. He was 61.

Editor in Chief Paul Whittaker announced the news to staff today, describing Leak as “a giant in his field of cartooning and portraiture and a towering figure for more than two decades” at the newspaper and said he was “simply irreplaceable”.

“We will miss him dreadfully and our hearts go out to his wife Goong, his stepdaughter Tasha and his sons Johannes and Jasper,” Whittaker said.

“I know that many people at The Australian will be inconsolable over this tragic loss of such a good man.”

Leak died this morning in Gosford Hospital.

He won nine Walkley awards and 19 Stanley awards for his work, and was twice awarded News Corp’s cartoonist of the year.

I met him just the other week at the launching of our collective book on Righting the Australian Economy for which he had drawn the cover. What I had not known was that he had been moved by the Federal Police to a safe location after one of his cartoons had drawn the wrong kind of attention. This is a terrible loss, and sincerest condolences to his wife and children.

Freezing in the dark

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This from SBS just last night: Warnings Australia at risk of gas and electricity shortages. There you may read at the end:

As the political debate over energy continues, the peak body representing the country’s biggest energy providers says changing and conflicting government energy policies are driving prices up.

Matthew Warren is from the Australian Energy Council.

“Inaction, policy inaction, is increasing power bills and it is increasing the risk of blackouts next summer. And these are serious and material risks to Australian consumers both at the household and business level.”

Experts say that’s because would-be investors are steering clear of the energy sector, unsure of the government’s policy intentions.

Ken Baldwin is a scientist specialising in energy at the Australian National University.

“Businesses are avoiding investment in the energy sector simply because of government policy uncertainty. They need to have an assurance that over the 50 year life time of the plant they’re investing in, that there will be a viable return based on known parameters.”

This inaction thing is right at the core of the way in which those who actually do know try to disguise what is happening. There’s plenty of action, from the deliberate closing of coal-fired power stations to the massive subsidies to solar and wind power. As we freeze in the dark come winter, contemplate the fact that we are not alone in our stupidity.

1) Germany’s “Silent Catastrophe” …330,000 Households See Power Turned Off In One Year
NoTricks Zone, 3 March 2017

2) Report: Germany’s Energyewende Threatens To Become An Economic Disaster
Die Welt, 6 March 2017

3) Germany’s Once Powerful Green Party Fears General Election Crash
Deutsche Wirtschafte Nachrichten, 6 March 2017

4) Budget 2017: British Solar Industry Faces Devastating 800% Tax Increase
The Independent, 8 March 2017

5) China Bans Wind Power Projects In 6 Regions
China Daily, 23 February 2017

6) John Constable: Industrial Strategy Or Political Tactics?
Global Warming Policy Forum, 6 March 2017

We just take our prosperity and wealth for granted, and the lessons are going to be very expensive. But the tide is turning.

The unassailable principles of a free society

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This is from The Wall Street Journal where, presumably, the editors and journalists agree with what they are reporting on. The report discusses a statement of principles issued by a number of academics following the incident described at the start of the story.

On Thursday roughly 100 of our 2,500 students prevented a controversial visiting speaker, Charles Murray, from communicating with his audience on the campus of Middlebury College. Mr. Murray was silenced by loud chants and foot-stomping; the commotion lasted nearly half an hour before college officials moved him to a private room to deliver his address into a camera. But even the simulcast to the auditorium was silenced by more protests and multiple fire alarms.

As Mr. Murray was leaving, a group of as-yet-unidentified assailants mobbed him and seriously injured one of our faculty colleagues. In view of these unacceptable acts, we have produced a document stating core principles that seem to us unassailable in the context of higher education within a free society. Many colleagues have joined us by signing their names to this document; the full list of signatories is available online.

***
The principles are as follows:

Genuine higher learning is possible only where free, reasoned, and civil speech and discussion are respected.

Only through the contest of clashing viewpoints do we have any hope of replacing mere opinion with knowledge.

The incivility and coarseness that characterize so much of American politics and culture cannot justify a response of incivility and coarseness on the college campus.

The impossibility of attaining a perfectly egalitarian sphere of free discourse can never justify efforts to silence speech and debate.

Exposure to controversial points of view does not constitute violence.

Students have the right to challenge and even to protest non-disruptively the views of their professors and guest speakers.

A protest that prevents campus speakers from communicating with their audience is a coercive act.

No group of professors or students has the right to act as final arbiter of the opinions that students may entertain.

No group of professors or students has the right to determine for the entire community that a question is closed for discussion.

The purpose of college is not to make faculty or students comfortable in their opinions and prejudices.

The purpose of education is not the promotion of any particular political or social agenda.

The primary purpose of higher education is the cultivation of the mind, thus allowing for intelligence to do the hard work of assimilating and sorting information and drawing rational conclusions.

A good education produces modesty with respect to our own intellectual powers and opinions as well as openness to considering contrary views.

All our students possess the strength, in head and in heart, to consider and evaluate challenging opinions from every quarter.

We are steadfast in our purpose to provide all current and future students an education on this model, and we encourage our colleagues at colleges across the country to do the same.

What is required to repeal Obamacare

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This article provides a genuine public service, an explanation of why repealing Obamacare is so very very difficult. As the title says Repealing and Replacing ObamaCare – Much Confusion is in “The Process”. Provided at the link is an explanation of just how intricate and immensely difficult the process is which is in large part a consequence of the way the legislation was first introduced. Repeal cannot be done by the President on his own. The undoing of Obamacare must go through the Congress. The Senate is 52-48 Republican so that a repeal, which requires 60 votes, can never occur. The need is to find a way to keep at least 50 of the 52 Republicans together so that they can piecemeal amend the existing legislation to modify its effects and change the nature of the system.

If this interests you, you should read the entire article, but the following gives you a summary of the summary you find at the link.

The Republicans are going to attempt to repeal that bill by modifying it; and have to also plan for a full unity road block of Democrats providing them no support. That means the Republican repeal/modification needs to pass the house and senate without a single Democrat vote. . . .

This process takes three phases. In phase #1 you are repealing a bill through modification knowing you need to use the Senate Reconciliation process (51 vote threshold). That means the repeal/modification bill itself cannot have any federal budgetary impact beyond 10-years. Any bill/modification that HAS budgetary impact, beyond ten years, cannot use reconciliation in the Senate and must reach the higher hurdle of 60 votes.

Additionally, phase #2 and phase #3 will take place over time, through the regular process, as the House and Senate debate their constituent provisions. This is how the law should have been written in the first place – but it wasn’t. Phase #2 and phase #3 mean compromise, because the higher vote thresholds will be required.

All of the changes that people want in a replaced ObamaCare bill (purchasing across state lines, etc.) can only come after the entanglement/modification of the law takes place.

Which brings us to the second major issue, why not just repeal the entire thing and start over? “The hand grenade approach”. As explained:

Firstly, a clean “repeal bill” would be “new legislation” that would require 60 votes of support in the Senate. That means 8 Democrat Senators would be needed to eliminate ObamaCare. They don’t exist. Secondly…

POLITICS! Repeal alone would mean 100% of Americans could immediately be thrown into a state of immediate loss of coverage, and tens of millions – especially those currently using medicaid- certainly would. And not a single Democrat would be in a hurry to create another construct with the 2018 election coming and their ability to say “republicans destroyed your healthcare” etc.

Thus, if repeal and replace is to happen at all, this is what must take place:

Phase #1 – Dismantle the underlying financial construct of the law through new law targeting the underlying financial architecture. This process allows reconciliation (lower vote threshold in the Senate).

Phase #2 – HHS Secretary Tom Price rewrites the rules and regulations to focus on patient centered care. Most of the tens of thousands of pages are rules and regulations. Secretary Price uses the new architecture created under phase #1 to rewrite the rules.

Phase #3 – The wholesale reforms and changes to the law: malpractice/tort reform, purchasing across state lines, etc. are additions – new bills – (higher vote thresholds) to add to the law that provide the changes most ObamaCare critics are demanding.

Maddening. But what you will now see unfold is whether Trump actually has the ability to guide this process through the various stages required, while the entire world of the left does everything they can to stop the process while half of those who are lining up on his own side have agendas of their own which will often not coincide with whatever is required to finally see this misshapen disaster finally discarded.

The one certainty I have is that Trump wants to see Obamacare gone but understands the care he needs to take.

Valerie Jarrett’s ideological roots

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You know, there are people who might actually believe that this doesn’t matter: Obama’s Top Adviser Valerie Jarrett: Her Dad, Maternal Grandpa, and Father-in-Law Were ‘Hardcore Communists’.

FBI files obtained by the government watchdog group Judicial Watch reveal that the father, maternal grandfather, and father-in-law of President Barack Obama’s closest adviser, Valerie Jarrett, “were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.”. . . .

According to Judicial Watch, Jarrett’s father, Dr. James E. Bowman, a pathologist and geneticist, “had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals.” The FBI files obtained by Judicial Watch show that “in 1950, Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage.”

As the New York Times reported, Alfred Stern and his wife, Martha Dodd Stern, “were indicted in absentia on espionage charges on Sept. 9, 1957.The indictment charged them with conspiring to act as Soviet agents, receiving American military, commercial and industrial information and transmitting it to the Soviet Union. The indictment charged that they used their house in Ridgefield, Conn., for meetings with Soviet agents.” . . .

Judicial Watch further stated that the Jarrett family Communist ties “also include a business partnership between Jarrett’s maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor (1899-1957) and [Alfred] Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.”

Valerie Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett (1917-2004), “was also another big-time Chicago Communist,” according to FBI files obtained by Judicial Watch. “For a period of time Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR),” reported Judicial Watch.

According to the FBI documents, Vernon Jarrett’s job was to “write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would ‘disseminate the Communist Party line among … the middle class.”

And for those who don’t know who Valerie Jarrett is, she was President of the United States from 2009 to 2017.

“When a woman says it, it doesn’t sound as crazy”

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This is from The Guardian no less, If Trump were a woman: play swaps presidential candidates’ genders in which the 2016 presidential debates were recast onstage in New York, with Trump as a woman and Clinton as a man.

Would we allow a female leader to speak like Donald Trump?

That question inspired a new play that restages parts of the three 2016 presidential debates word-for-word and gesture-for-gesture – but with a woman depicting Donald Trump and a man playing Hillary Clinton.

And this is what they found, with the following comment typical.

“When a woman says it, it doesn’t sound as crazy.”

In fact, it never sounded crazy at all but that’s just me and sixty million others. Read the story through.

Keeping an eye on you

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I don’t know whether this was what Trump intended but the stories about Russian hacking the election have gone absolutely dead, as have almost all stories related to Obama having placed some kind of phone surveillance on Donald Trump himself. Having become blindingly clear that the Obama White House had indeed initiated that surveillance, with the virtual certainty that none of it would have been done without Obama’s complicity, the entire episode seems to have vanished into air. Since there is nothing that can any longer be used in bringing Trump down, it has gone into hibernation across the media and will remain that way unless something happens that the left and the media believe can be used to undermine Trump.

This is part of what disturbs me about the blog support network on the right. It is entirely defensive. A story that was utterly preposterous, that Trump and his associates had collaborated with the Russians was, and is, treated as a genuine issue that needs to be sorted out, rather than as a pathetic and disgusting ploy by a bunch of leftist loons and their scribes to harm Trump and short circuit his election. Same for the story about electronic surveillance on Trump during the election. Now that it has been dropped by the media, it has been dropped almost across the board. Yet as had been said by many, this is a far worse crime than Watergate and if true, was a blatant attempt to subvert the democratic processes of the United States and steal the election. Spying by a president on political enemies is an evil, bringing us within close proximity of a police state. Had it been a Republican president involved, no other stories short of World War III would have made it to the top of a front page for the next six months until whoever it was had been hounded from office.

So let us have one final look at this surveillance story, old and stone cold news though it may now be. The table above comes from this: FISA Court: Whatever Obama Wanted Obama Got. This ought to be seen as a massive scandal:

FISA became a rubber stamp for the Obama administration. Between 2010 and 2015, FISA did not deny even one of the 9,400 applications submitted by the federal government. These applications sought “to conduct electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes,” according to reports filed by the U.S. Justice Department. . . .

The court denied a grand total of zero government FISA applications from 2010 through 2015. However, the court did modify some applications that it approved. And the government withdrew some of those it submitted.

That is to say:

9,391 of the 9,400 applications submitted were approved. The court modified 217 of those it approved. And the government withdrew 9.

But the story is dropping off the radar if it has not entirely disappeared since there is no glory in it for the left. To which we may add this: SAME NY Times Reporter Said Trump Team Was Wiretapped In Jan., But Said TRUMP Lacked Evidence In March. Go to the link for details, which will only confirm everything you already know.

And then, of course, there’s this: Obama v. Trump: Strictly Correct & Misleading v. Not Strictly Correct But Fundamentally True. Everything they say is dependent on how you parse the word “ordered”, as in whether Obama ordered the surveillance. The point:

What Obama and his minions (and the Democrats and many in the media) say is likely to be correct, strictly speaking, but fundamentally misleading. In contrast, what Trump says is often incorrect, strictly speaking, but captures the fundamental truth.

This is what almost certainly happened. The Obama White House via FISA or some other agency bugged Trump’s phones. To wait for definitive evidence – and I find it unimaginable what such evidence could be short of a taped conversation – in such a fluid area where you know nothing could have happened unless Obama had given his OK in one way or another – is to let them get away with their efforts to undermine the democratic process. The right side of politics are the worst political fighters I have ever seen, and it is not only a disgrace, but is putting all of us in deepest jeopardy.

“They’ve marched, they’ve bled, yes, some of them have died”

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You look at those words in the context of her entire 52 second statement. This is Loretta Lynch, Obama’s Attorney-General speaking just this weekend. She is calling for violence and pushing for fighting in the streets. It would have had to have been her who asked for the surveillance on Trump, after a nod, a wink or whatever it might have required for her to get the message. After hearing this, can there be any doubt that she would use whatever means were needed to achieve whatever ends she sought? What would a wiretap means to this woman after what she has just said.

The election of Trump was a necessary condition to preserve our way of life but by no means sufficient. It is part of the miracle in having seen Trump elected that he understands every bit of what is going on, and having seen what he’s seen, will not lie down and intends to fight. The most basic point is that if Obama did seek and undertake some kind of surveillance on the Republican nominee during the election, that we are at the edge of some kind of police state in the United States. You would think this is something everyone would like to know the answer to, but the divisions are entirely partisan. Meanwhile, at the centre of it all is Washington which voted 96% Clinton, a similar number to the American journalist community. How are you going to find out the truth from any of these?

And let me take you back to a headline that stayed up at Drudge for 24 hours: COMEY TURNS ON TRUMP. The notion that the FBI Director was or is anything other than a Democrat stooge is ridiculous, accepted only by the politically brain dead and deeply dishonest. Hillary breaks the law and he lets her off. They find masses of emails on Weiner’s computer and start the investigation again and then immediately call it off since the new investigation starts to give Trump additional momentum. From the start, the calls were with almost total certainty made inside the White House, by Obama via Loretta Lynch. When you read the start of the story below, and see the words “F.B.I Director”, or Comey’s name, just substitute the words “the former president” and “Obama” and you will understand everything you need to understand about what is being said.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.

It’s not a swamp it’s a sewer. For anyone appointed by Obama or who have worked for him, you cannot trust a thing they say or do.

Towergate one day on

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It’s not even possible to get consensus on whether it even matters whether Obama had done any of it. The thing about Watergate was that if Nixon really had been involved in a cover-up, this was a high crime and misdemeanour. No one had ever said Nixon had ordered the break-ins. On this, whether or not Obama can be shown to have ordered the bugs will be the lawyerly way this is conducted. And Obama is not, of course, the president any longer so it is only just an historical footnote. The issue of whether anyone anywhere near the Obama White House was involved in placing listening devices in Trump Tower while Trump ran for president is already being sidelined.

And for me, of all the issues that have been laid bare by Trump’s accusation, perhaps the most important is the lay of the media. One day later, this is the headline at Drudge:

DEMS SMELL BLOOD IN WATER

And these are the subsidiary posts:

WIRETAPS IN TRUMP TOWER?
PELOSI: ‘WE DON’T DO THAT’…
CLAPPER: ‘I CAN DENY IT’…
Flashback: Lawmakers Renew Calls for Clapper Perjury Charges…
Former Bush AG: Trump right there was surveillance…
Growing Furor…
Congress to probe…

This is Drudge which made the major difference in seeing Trump into the White House. It is now pursuing the Democrat line that even if there was surveillance, it hadn’t been ordered by Obama. And going further, as per Schumer, if there had been surveillance, then it’s even worse for Trump since it would mean there was credible evidence that Trump was a security risk. And you can see just how cool, as in frozen, Republicans are about pursuing this anywhere, as per the last story, which begins:

The Latest on President Donald Trump’s claim that then-President Barack Obama had Trump’s telephones tapped during last year’s election (all times EST):

12:45 p.m.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes says President Donald Trump’s allegations that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower last year will become part of his panel’s investigation.

Trump has offered no evidence or details to support his claim, and Obama’s spokesman has denied it.

The California Republican says in a statement his committee “will make inquiries into whether the government was conducting surveillance activities on any political party’s campaign officials or surrogates.”

The committee was already investigating Russian interference in the presidential election.

Without offering evidence, Trump claimed in a series of Saturday tweets that former President Barack Obama had telephones at Trump Tower wiretapped.

—

11:10 a.m.

A Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee says he believes President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations that his predecessor ordered wiretaps of Trump Tower will become part of the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

And etc. So the question will revolve around whether there is any evidence that whatever happened was ordered by Obama, not even whether it happened. As for the question of whether it had happened – and who would genuinely believe anything Obama says – there is nothing more frightening about the direction of American before us, with the establishment elites on both sides coming together. Trump may end up being done in by his belief that anyone within Washington or the media care about whether or not Obama tried to steal the election for the Democrats by finding and then leaking information using the national security surveillance apparatus. Some of us might care out here, but they do not.

This is Mark Levin laying out the case on Fox.

Ah, but did Obama order the wire taps? What a laugh! What a tragedy!

This is an American constitutional crisis

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Donald Trump accuses Obama of ‘wire-tapping’ his office before election.

If this is true, you are looking at a genuine effort by a sitting president to subvert not just the election but the Constitution. This is not, as Trump has declared it, “A NEW LOW!” This is beyond the farthest edge of any previous attempt to undermine the democratic process. This is how this should be judged.

Trump’s tweets follow claims made by conservative radio host Mark Levin on his Thursday night show about the alleged steps taken by the Obama administration to undermine the Republican candidate’s campaign to win the White House.

The presenter called the effort a “silent coup” by the Obama administration and called for a congressional investigation into the issue. That contrasts with demands from across the US political spectrum to examine Russian interference in the presidential election.

Levin’s comments were followed up by Breitbart News, the “alt-right” website founded by Steve Bannon, who ran the Trump campaign and is now the president’s chief strategist.

The article stated: “The Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorisation to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA [National Security Agency] rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.”

Russia “hacked the election” is known to be a lie. Meetings with Russians or even with Putin represent no issue of any kind about the governance of the United States. These are media lies that have been fostered by political deceit, and most treacherously, the ring leader of these efforts has been the former president. What can one make of this: Obama Officials Set Up Jeff Sessions’ Meeting With the Russian Ambassador. Do you get that? The meeting between Sessions and the Russian Ambassador was a casual meeting that had been arranged by Obama. Here are the two meetings that are at the centre of the controversy.

The first came at a conference on “Global Partners in Diplomacy,” where Sessions was the keynote speaker. Sponsored by the U.S. State Department, The Heritage Foundation, and several other organizations, it was held in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.
The conference was an educational program for ambassadors invited by the Obama State Department to observe the convention. The Obama State Department handled all of the coordination with ambassadors and their staff, of which there were about 100 at the conference.

Apparently, after Sessions finished speaking, a small group of ambassadors—including the Russian ambassador—approached the senator as he left the stage and thanked him for his remarks. That’s the first “meeting.” And it’s hardly an occasion—much less a venue—in when a conspiracy to “interfere” with the November election could be hatched.

Sessions also apparently met with the Russian ambassador in September. But on that occasion, Sessions was acting as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not as a surrogate for the Trump campaign. That’s why the meeting was held in his Senate office. His DOJ spokesperson, Sarah Isgur Flores, says they discussed relations between the two countries – not the election.

There was nothing unusual about this: Sessions met with more than two dozen ambassadors during 2016, including the Ukrainian ambassador the day before the meeting with the Russian ambassador.

Obama depends on the ignorance of his supporters and the duplicity of the press (and press ignorance as well), on which he can count to the fullest extent. The original story I found was at The Guardian while the story at Drudge is from The Sun, both British papers. This is how it is reported in The Sun:

‘THIS IS WATERGATE’ Barack Obama denies ‘ever ordering surveillance on any US citizen’ following bombshell accusations he tapped Donald Trump’s phone during US presidential election

The story is the denial. More interesting, if you look at the words, Obama doesn’t deny it may have happened, or even that he had known it was going on, only that he had not ordered it. There is no doubt that Trump has been sitting on this for a while but has finally realised that these attempts to rout his presidency are not going away and need to be dealt with head on. Couple all of this with the following which is already an old story: How Obama is scheming to sabotage Trump’s presidency:

When former President Barack Obama said he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval to his troops. Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.

In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.

He’s doing it through a network of leftist nonprofits led by Organizing for Action. Normally you’d expect an organization set up to support a politician and his agenda to close up shop after that candidate leaves office, but not Obama’s OFA. Rather, it’s gearing up for battle, with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country.

To say we are in uncharted waters is beyond understatement.