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Category Archives: Politics – international
My blog history of the election
My “blog history” of the American election is being published which consists of all of the posts I did on the election starting in July 2015 when I actually saw Donald Trump in Las Vegas. I call it a blog history since it follows the election almost on a daily basis by someone who was blogging with the focus almost entirely on Donald Trump. I also think it is the first of its kind. There have been books put together that began as blog posts for things like a collection of recipes. This is the first, so far as I know, that is a narrative that is entirely constructed of blog posts that were written contemporaneously with the events described. If you know of any other, I would be interested if you could let me know.
I also wonder whether I am the first – I am certainly among the first – to use readers’ comments on newspaper articles as the basis for criticising the authors of the articles. Better than going after these views myself is using the views of others who have read these articles and had the same reaction.
I truly do commend the book to you. If you would like to understand the political world in which we live, this book really does make what is going on much easier to follow. It of course pleases me, but also amazes me, how well this hangs together as a narrative.
If you would like to order a copy of the book you can go here. It comes in at 400 pages and brings back to life the entire contours of the election period. And it does more. It gives you an almost perfect Donald Trump view of the issues and the campaign and helps clarify the events that are going on even to this very moment.
The kind of thing they do in police states
We are dealing with a potential American constitutional crisis of the most intense kind: Former CIA Analyst Says Barack Obama Is Behind the White House Leaks.
Former CIA analyst and retired U.S. Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer in an appearance on Fox Business said the leaks coming out of the White House will lead directly back to Barack Obama.
The Democrats and some anti-Trump Republicans want an investigation.
Schaeffer said, “be careful what you wish for”.
“I would put this right at the feet of John Brennan and Jim Clapper and I would go so far as to say the Obama White House was directly involved before they left,” Schaeffer said. “Ben Rhodes and those folks… The Democrats are behind this and some of the Republicans are involved with the leaks. So I say ‘Bring it on!’
This is the kind of thing they do in police states.
Bringing in the name Ben Rhodes takes us to what I had described as The single most important story of the Obama years. This may now become the single most important story of the Trump years. One of the comments on the video states very clearly what’s at stake:
This is a violation of the Espionage Act. Those Obama staffers should face criminal prosecution and 35 years in federal prison, especially because the intercepts focus on private Presidential Communications with foreign leaders (Australia)– spying on the President of the United States. Secondly, it’s clear Obama insiders tipped off Al Qaeda forces in Yemen about plans for the Navy Seal assault. One Navy Seal died. That’s absolutely Treason. These Obama staffers need to go to prison.
There is no reason to leave the former president out of this either.
A wilderness of mirrors
I find all of this truly ominous. Start with the headlines at Drudge:
Defiant Flynn Insists He Crossed No Lines, Leakers Must Be Prosecuted…
Obama Loyalists Waged Secret Campaign to Oust…
MAG: Anonymous Spooks Engineer ‘Soft Coup’…
INTEL CHAIR: FBI Needs To Explain Recorded Calls, Leaks…
SIGINT content revealed…
KREMLIN DOWNPLAYS…
Fears Trump Assassination…
Then there’s this from Ace of Spades: “The Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo: Obama Stay-Behinds Executed the Political Hit on Michael Flynn to Preemptively Defend Their Corrupt Iran Deal”. He quotes:
Multiple sources closely involved in the situation pointed to a larger, more secretive campaign aimed at discrediting Flynn and undermining the Trump White House.
“It’s undeniable that the campaign to discredit Flynn was well underway before Inauguration Day, with a very troublesome and politicized series of leaks designed to undermine him,” said one veteran national security adviser with close ties to the White House team. “This pattern reminds me of the lead up to the Iran deal, and probably features the same cast of characters.”The Free Beacon first reported in January that, until its final days in office, the Obama administration hosted several pro-Iran voices who were critical in helping to mislead the American public about the terms of the nuclear agreement. This included a former Iranian government official and the head of the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, which has been accused of serving as Iran’s mouthpiece in Washington, D.C.
Since then, top members of the Obama administration’s national security team have launched a communications infrastructure after they left the White House, and have told reporters they are using that infrastructure to undermine Trump’s foreign policy.
“It’s actually Ben Rhodes, NIAC, and the Iranian mullahs who are celebrating today,” said one veteran foreign policy insider who is close to Flynn and the White House. “They know that the number one target is Iran … [and] they all knew their little sacred agreement with Iran was going to go off the books. So they got rid of Flynn before any of the [secret] agreements even surfaced.”
Flynn had been preparing to publicize many of the details about the nuclear deal that had been intentionally hidden by the Obama administration as part of its effort to garner support for the deal, these sources said.
And this by Mike Walsh via Instapundit:
Mike Flynn, a good man who saw the enemy clearly, and had the courage to name it, saw Russia not as an enemy but a geopolitical adversary with whom we could make common cause against Islam — and who also vowed to shake up a complacent and malfeasant IC — was its first scalp, and an object lesson to new CIA Director Mike Pompeo should he have any reformist notions. As for the media, having previously failed to take down Trump aides Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Flynn was the next best thing; their joy today is unbounded.
Is this what you thought you voted for in November? Is this how you thought American democracy worked? Is this the country you want to live in?
Welcome to the Deep State, the democracy-sapping embeds at the heart of our democracy who have not taken the expulsion of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party lightly. They realize that the Trump administration poses a mortal threat to their hegemony, and so have enlisted an army of Democrats, some Republicans, the “neverTrumpumpkin” conservative die-hards, leftist thugs, Black Lives Matter and anybody else they can blackmail, browbeat or enlist. They mean business.
A RUSH LIMBAUGH UPDATE: From The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn.
So what we have here, we have a political assassination that’s taken place here, a political assassination, Mike Flynn, who, do you know he worked for Obama four different times? You didn’t know that? Let me find the details. In September 2011, Mike Flynn was promoted to lieutenant general assigned to the office of the Director of National Intelligence by Barack Obama. On April 17th, 2012, President Barack Obama nominated Michael Flynn to be the 18th director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The defense department has its own intel operation and he ran it, as opposed to the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s called the DIA, and it’s big, and it’s relevant, and it’s important, and it does great work, and Flynn ran it after having been promoted to lead it by Obama in 2012. He took command of the DIA in July of 2012. He is a member of the Democrat Party, according to Wikipedia. Michael Flynn is a member of the Democrat Party.
Aside from all of this, he has a reputation as a great man. He’s also a hawk. And that’s something the left just can’t abide. Hawks like Michael Flynn, they may as well be Dr. Strangelove. They want to run around, they want to start nuclear war, they want to destroy the planet, they’re deranged, they’re unhinged, they love blood and guts, and they love the sound of gunfire and napalm in the morning, and they just love it, and this is totally unacceptable.
So we have a resignation over a phone call, a freaking phone call. The Democrats don’t resign when they’re caught red-handed with their hand in the till or in bed with an intern or whatever else transgression the Democrats engage in. There are no resignations and there are no demands for resignations. And if you want to compare the Trump administration to the Obama administration, you just need to ask yourself one question: Why did you vote for Trump?
Did you know the EU has a tariff wall?
I suppose I am being bated by LIQ’s reference to J.-B. Say but the world is as it is. The point really about free trade is that the country that does not enter into it is depriving itself of the possibilities of a higher standard of living. So it is nice to see such concern for the future economic prosperity of the US but since Keynes at least, the issue has not been wealth creation as such but jobs. As Say so rightly pointed out:
A country, in one way or other, direct or indirect, always consumes the values it produces, and can consume nothing more. If it cannot exchange its products with its neighbors, it is compelled to produce values of such kinds only as it can consume at home. This is the utmost effect of prohibitions; both parties are worse provided, and neither is at all the richer.
But it’s not a jobs thing in and of itself. And the US is a very large country so that the division of labour is widely extended. If they want to make their own fridges and cars, well that’s their own business. The EU, for example, I might note has tariffs, just not between its member states. This refers to the EU: What is the Common Customs Tariff?:
Since the completion of the internal market, goods can circulate freely between Member States. The ‘Common Customs Tariff’ (CCT) therefore applies to the import of goods across the external borders of the EU.
The tariff is common to all EU members, but the rates of duty differ from one kind of import to another depending on what they are and where they come from. The rates depend on the economic sensitivity of products.
The tariff is therefore the name given to the combination of the nomenclature (or classification of goods) and the duty rates which apply to each class of goods. In addition the tariff contains all other Community legislation that has an effect on the level of customs duty payable on a particular import, for example country of origin.
The tariff is a concept, a collection of laws as opposed to a single codified law in itself. There is however a kind of working tariff, called TARIC, which is not actually a piece of legislation.
Through the tariff, the Community applies the principle that domestic producers should be able to compete fairly and equally on the internal market with manufacturers exporting from other countries.
If you want to worry about economic policies under Trump, I have a number of my own but these are hardly the central reason he ended up president. The 1930s were defaced by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the retaliations to the largest American increase in history. Whatever else Trump may be about to do, this is not it:
The Tariff Act of 1930 (codified at 19 U.S.C. ch. 4), otherwise known as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff or Hawley–Smoot Tariff, was an act sponsored by Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley and signed into law on June 17, 1930. The act raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods.
Meanwhile, the question is whether the US should let its trade partners do anything they like to manipulate their trade to the disadvantage of America or should there be some rules in place? Even Hillary ended up campaigning against the TPP.
Donald Trump and conservative values
What would they know about the meaning of conservative? First we have Paul Kelly writing his column with the heading Conservative principles and values are being trashed. And then there’s Brian Loughnane with this as the highlighted quote from his article, also in The Oz, “Trump is the most serious challenge to conservatism since World War II”. Really, what would then know? Michael Anton, on the other hand, does know.
And the question asked in this column, naturally not at The Australian, is this: Why did so many conservative intellectuals become Trumpists. And here is the conservative answer: there was and is no other way to save our civilisation from collapse. Even with the election, there is hardly any certainty we have turned the corner, but at least there is now the possibility. This, apparently, is the part of the conservative world in which I belong. The Anton referred to in the passage below is Michael Anton who wrote, under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, the much-discussed article, “The Flight 93 Election” which I blogged on at length on three separate occasions during the election. Since he and I see things almost identically, this is how we are described:
The crux of Anton’s case for supporting Trump was that if he didn’t win, it would mean the effective end of self-government in the United States. For eight years Obama expanded the administrative state more radically than any president since Lyndon Johnson, injecting intrusive regulations much further than ever before into the health-care sector, the energy sector, marriage, religion, even bathroom use in public schools. If Hillary Clinton prevailed, it would mean that those innovations would become the new baseline for even more acts of administrative overreach. After four to eight more years of that, the century-long progressive transformation of the American regime would be complete, rendering constitutional government and the conservative movement lost causes once and for all.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Anton (as Decius) came out in favor of Trump, in part, because he hoped the real-estate mogul would serve as a blunt instrument to bring down key elements of the administrative state, including those outposts of the conservative movement (which he memorably dubbed “Conservative, Inc.”) that live like parasites off of the federal government even while criticizing it and waiting for the next election that gives them an opportunity to trim it at the margins and change nothing fundamental about it at all. But Anton also hoped that Trump’s full-throated defense of the nation, borders, and citizenship would catch fire among the American people, who would at long last rise up to demand that the administrative state be put back in its place — to make room once again for constitutionalism, statesmanship, and republican government of free and equal citizens.
I remain mystified by anyone who does not see things this way. And if you do not, you cannot call yourself a conservative. And if you don’t understand his point, you have no idea what being a conservative is or what conservative principles are.
In defence of the nation state, borders, and citizenship
There is an easy answer to the question Why so many conservative intellectuals became Trumpists. There was and is no other way to save our civilisation from collapse. Even with the election, there is hardly any certainty we have turned the corner, but at least there is now the possibility. This, apparently, is the part of the conservative world in which I belong. The Anton referred to in the passage below is Michael Anton who wrote, under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, the much-discussed article, “The Flight 93 Election” which I blogged on on three separate occasions during the election. Since he and I see things identically, this is how we are described:
The crux of Anton’s case for supporting Trump was that if he didn’t win, it would mean the effective end of self-government in the United States. For eight years Obama expanded the administrative state more radically than any president since Lyndon Johnson, injecting intrusive regulations much further than ever before into the health-care sector, the energy sector, marriage, religion, even bathroom use in public schools. If Hillary Clinton prevailed, it would mean that those innovations would become the new baseline for even more acts of administrative overreach. After four to eight more years of that, the century-long progressive transformation of the American regime would be complete, rendering constitutional government and the conservative movement lost causes once and for all.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Anton (as Decius) came out in favor of Trump, in part, because he hoped the real-estate mogul would serve as a blunt instrument to bring down key elements of the administrative state, including those outposts of the conservative movement (which he memorably dubbed “Conservative, Inc.”) that live like parasites off of the federal government even while criticizing it and waiting for the next election that gives them an opportunity to trim it at the margins and change nothing fundamental about it at all. But Anton also hoped that Trump’s full-throated defense of the nation, borders, and citizenship would catch fire among the American people, who would at long last rise up to demand that the administrative state be put back in its place — to make room once again for constitutionalism, statesmanship, and republican government of free and equal citizens.
I remain mystified by anyone who does not see things this way.
How is it playing out in the US?
I sent my article “How is it Playing out in Australia?” to Powerline which has reprinted it here with the following text:
Writing from down under, Steve Kates responds to the question “How is it playing out in Australia?” Not surprisingly, Professor Kates provides a perspective that is nowhere to be found in the news up here: “For [Australian Prime Minister] Malcolm [Turnbull] apparently to have tried to push Trump, by telling him that as a fellow businessman that a deal is a deal, must rank as politically incompetent as anything I have ever seen. That Trump now thinks of Malcolm as a flea-weight no-account fool only means he has the same assessment of the PM as the rest of us.” Professor Kates has pulled the top comments from an inaccessible article in The Australian to elaborate.
Professor Kates notes in an email message to us that the comments on his post at Catallaxy Files are all of a piece and adds: “I just think it might be interesting and valuable if the underlying sentiment in Australia was more widely understood, especially in America.” Indeed, and the same may well be true of the underlying sentiment in the United States as well.
PAUL ADDS: It seems that if anyone was “badgering” during this phone call, it was the Australian PM as he tried to get Trump to say he would comply with Obama’s deal.
It was then listed at Lucianne.com and now Sarah Hoyt has put it up at Instapundit. That Malcolm Turnbull leads the conservative party in Australia is a disgrace, but at least there is now a possibility that the White House will have a better understanding of the lay of the land down under. Let me quote BJ from the Instapundit comments thread:
Turnbull is a leftie buffoon and an embarrassment to Australia. Please don’t judge us by the actions of this usurper, who brought down an elected Prime Minister who was a true conservative, and then alienated and drove away the conservative voter base to the point that he barely survived the last election. Most conservatives in Australia can’t stand Turnbull, and he is almost single-handedly responsible for the rise of a number of new conservative parties who are soaking up the real conservative vote. If Turnbull was in the USA he would be a Democrat for certain.
This is universally understood on the right side of politics in Australia. We have our own LINOs, Liberals in Name Only. I tend to think that sitting in Parliament all day long listening to leftist arguments weakens the fibre of those who we send to represent us. Everyone has a sentimentality that will let them down and open themselves up to arguments about hurt and harm, and that is a good thing. But not to be able to go past the first moment and see how this kind of sentimentality plays out in the longer run is a stupidity that may yet be the end of us.
We are all one election away from a Venezuelan future
I sent my article “How’s it Playing out in Australia?” to Powerline which has reprinted it here with the following text:
Writing from down under, Steve Kates responds to the question “How is it playing out in Australia?” Not surprisingly, Professor Kates provides a perspective that is nowhere to be found in the news up here: “For [Australian Prime Minister] Malcolm [Turnbull] apparently to have tried to push Trump, by telling him that as a fellow businessman that a deal is a deal, must rank as politically incompetent as anything I have ever seen. That Trump now thinks of Malcolm as a flea-weight no-account fool only means he has the same assessment of the PM as the rest of us.” Professor Kates has pulled the top comments from an inaccessible article in The Australian to elaborate.
Professor Kates notes in an email message to us that the comments on his post at Catallaxy Files are all of a piece and adds: “I just think it might be interesting and valuable if the underlying sentiment in Australia was more widely understood, especially in America.” Indeed, and the same may well be true of the underlying sentiment in the United States as well.
PAUL ADDS: It seems that if anyone was “badgering” during this phone call, it was the Australian PM as he tried to get Trump to say he would comply with Obama’s deal.
All of our countries are one election away from a Venezuelan future. The left is bereft of any idea how things work, and their numbers continue to grow. I was reminded how hard it is to keep things on the productive straight and narrow by these headlines today at Drudge:
BUSH JUDGE BLOCKS TRUMP TRAVEL BAN
MIDDLE EAST CITIZENS RUSH IN
IMMIGRATION ORDERS UNRAVEL:
TRUMP SLAMS DECISION…
VOWS FIGHT…
JUDGE USED BROAD POWER…
COURT SHOWDOWN…
AIRLINES RESUME FLIGHTS…
‘HOMELAND’ NOT FLAGGING…
STATE DEPT REVERSES VISA BAN…
One judge and the entire policy of the American government unravels. It’s just time that more refugees were settled in Washington and the ACT.
How’s it playing out in Canada?
The differences between the Dominion I left and Australia today are, as ever, not that great. We are one election way from a descent from which we will never thereafter ascend. I get stories from home all the time and they are generally how things are moving sharply to the left. Interestingly for me, most of those I hear from are quite OK with this. So here’s an article on the effects of Justin Trudeau on Canada’s fair domain: Is Justin Trudeau ‘Trumpable’?. That is, could someone like Trump become Prime Minister in Canada? Reading this is a reminder how easily someone like Justin could become PM in Australia.
Well, let’s see how Liberal poster boy Justin Trudeau is doing in the Canadian compassion trade, how well he is shepherding Canadians through good times and bad, and how he is caring for the vulnerable:
The budget is no longer balanced. The deficit is approaching the $6 billion mark and, under current fiscal policies, Canada Finance projects a 1.5 trillion dollar debt over the next thirty years. Trudeau is creating a debtor nation in perpetuity. This is a shepherd happy to mortgage his flock to the fiscal butcher.
Trudeau is now under investigation by the federal ethics commissioner for traveling in a private aircraft, a violation of the Conflict of Interest Act and the first-ever investigation into a sitting prime minister for political wrongdoing. He is also on the hook for illegal party fundraising practices and for selling influence to foreign businessmen who donate to his foundation—his cash-for-access version of the Clintonian pay-for-play scheme. How this will benefit Canadians, as Trudeau claims, is a mystery.
Trudeau is set to impose a carbon tax on those provinces that have not yet done so, raising gasoline prices, heating costs, transportation and delivery expenses, food prices and more. These are significant hikes for most consumers, especially as the GST (value-added tax) sits atop the carbon tax, piling layer upon layer of mulct on hard-pressed people. Some I know are cutting back on driving their children to sports events and fitness centers. A weeping Ontario woman complained at a Trudeau Town Hall forum that her hydro bill was now higher than her mortgage. Others are being forced to choose groceries over utilities. Of course, the cap-and-trade policy is just another tax grab, justified by Trudeau’s desire to “phase out” fossil fuels, the mainstay of the Canadian economy. Adding injury to injury, he has pledged 2.65 billion of taxpayer dollars to developing countries as part of his “Global Climate Change Action.” Yet there has been no global warming for 21 years; indeed, APG is the greatest scam of the modern era.
Liberal cabinet ministers have been scandalously billing the public for their personal and whimsical expenses, some outrageous—private limousine service, office redecorating, staff relocation totalling more than $1 million, and so on. Trudeau has taken ten vacations during his first year as PM, partied with rock stars, and enjoyed down time with family and friends on the Aga Khan’s private island known as the “Hamptons of the Bahamas”—the Aga Khan’s helicopter was the “private aircraft” in question. During the last parliamentary session, he skipped 58 per cent of parliamentary question periods. He has clearly learned much from his mentor, Barack Obama.
Trudeau’s Liberals want to bring back the per-vote subsidy, cancelled by the Conservatives, which forces taxpayers to underwrite the partisan activities of political parties.The economy is seriously ailing. Over 30,000 jobs have been lost in July 2016 alone, a severe drop for a small country.
Trudeau has signed an extradition treaty with China, among the world’s worst human rights abusers, whose “basic dictatorship” Trudeau has publicly admired. He has sympathized with the Boston bombers and mourned the death of Fidel Castro, a “remarkable leader.” This is the trendy millennial Canadians have elected to lead them to tomorrow.
Trudeau has made a habit of ostentatiously visiting mosques around the country, one in particular known as a “terror mosque.” Islamic immigration vigorously promoted by Trudeau, to the tune of 300,000 immigrants, mainly “Syrians,” in 2016, will strain the country’s failing resources and promise cultural dissolution in the coming years.
Malcolm is easily the equivalent of Justin but is held in check by the party he is the nominal head of. There is plenty of political stupidity out there. We remain the lucky country for the while, but how long our luck will hold out is anyone’s guess. They have five year Parliaments in Canada as well so Justin’s going to be there for a very long time. It’s become a sinkhole of bad economics built on political correctness gone mad and is only able to sustain itself because of it’s huge capital inheritance and resource base. But these are being run through at a startling rate and when the country finally wakes up to the wreck it has become, much too late it will be.
Law of Markets 