I find the absence of focus on the US primary results even in the United States quite creepy, although what do I know about what’s newsy? Up until now, there would be quite a story across the page about Trump wins. Near as I can see, there is practically nothing at all. You would almost think there was a wish across the media to take the momentum out of Trump’s astonishing wins, to pull the wind from his sails.
It reminds me how The Australian decided that Turnbull should replace Abbott and from then on that was how the news and comment was bent. It has now been decided that the United States needs its own Malcolm Turnbull and Justin Trudeau, and that is how the news is being bent. Anyway, this is the best I could do, from USA Today:
Donald Trump went five-for-five in sweeping a set of northeastern primaries Tuesday and declared himself the “presumptive” Republican nominee for president in the face of allied opposition from rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” Trump said in claiming easy victories in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. He said, “this is a far bigger win than we even expected — all five.”
Citing a large number of delegates and votes in the face of Republican establishment opposition, the maverick businessman said “the best way to beat the system” is to have evenings like this.
Cruz and Kasich, who have formed a loose alliance to try to block Trump in some future contests, are hoping to pick up some delegates after Tuesday’s primaries, but their totals will likely be minimal in the wake of Trump’s landslide wins.
Somebody is voting for him but it’s apparently no longer big news.
I’ve already dealt with this delusional comment from Obama here but I come back to it because it is so repulsive and also because it has been raised in a different way by Tom Blumer, Obama Takes Credit For ‘Saving the World Economy From a Great Depression’. This is Obama laying down his legacy, his trail of achievements that the mendacious press and academic enablers can go on about in the future. You have to therefore fortify yourself against the legacy-intentions of this fantastically incompetent narcissistic buffoon who has ruined everything he has touched:
After setting up the conditions in February 2009 for an extended recession and historically weak recovery in the U.S., the idea Obama went to Europe two months later in April and then began “saving the world” is a sick joke only gullible, economics-ignorant reporters and leftists could possibly believe. Sadly, they’re the ones who still primarily control the news and other key institutions, so we’ll probably be hearing this crap for years on end — just like we’ve had to put up with the fiction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the country from the Great Depression in the 1930s. The truth is that he lengthened it by seven years.
And the seven years are only if we stop today. The Japanese “lost decade”, built out of the same policies, has continued for more than twenty years and shows no evidence of coming to an end any time soon. Obama’s taking credit for the achievements of others was also noted by Victor Davis Hanson in 2014:
Listen to the president and one would think that he was in office during the financial crisis that began on September 15, 2008. For the nth time, Obama reminded the nation on 60 Minutes of the financial meltdown he inherited. That is his usual way of suggesting to the American people that they could hardly hope for normal times after six years of his own governance. In truth, Obama entered office on January 20, 2009 — over four months after the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that precipitated a general financial meltdown.
One would not expect Obama to fault past liberal congressional intervention in the financial sector that in large part forced the issuance of subprime risky mortgages, much less the earlier deregulation of the financial industry under Bill Clinton that helped fueled the rampant speculation. The videos of the sad congressional banter about supposedly insensitive questioning of the duplicitous and corrupt Fannie head Franklin Raines, or the self-important bluster of former Rep. Barney Frank, make a good 10-minute tutorial on the meltdown — namely how Wall Street sharks, hand-in-glove with liberal congressional operatives and Clinton appointees, offered federally “guaranteed” mortgages to those who had no ability to pay them back, fueling a phony real estate boom and overvalued stock market.
Obama might at least admit that when he entered office the panic had largely passed. The tools needed to deal with it that he embraced had months earlier been implemented by someone else. Indeed, Obama was president for just a few months before the recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009 — well before the effect of any of the policies, good or bad, could have taken effect.
Our current economic mess — the worst post-recession recovery since World War II, more people out of work than when Obama took office, a steady decline in real family income, massive new debt — is largely a result of his own policies of five consecutive $1 trillion deficits, the Obamacare catastrophe, new burdensome and capricious regulations, near-zero interest rates, and the anti-business psychological climate brought on by constant hectoring of the “you did not build that” and “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” sort.
The thing about the lying, however, is that we have no corrective for policies that don’t work since the common view promoted across the media and by economists is that the stimulus has actually had a beneficial effect. So why not keep on keeping on? How big a crash does there have to be before we abandon the idea that government spending can lead us into recovery?
I never spoke about my financial travails, not even with my closest friends—that is, until I came to the realization that what was happening to me was also happening to millions of other Americans, and not just the poorest among us, who, by definition, struggle to make ends meet. It was, according to that Fed survey and other surveys, happening to middle-class professionals and even to those in the upper class. It was happening to the soon-to-retire as well as the soon-to-begin. It was happening to college grads as well as high-school dropouts. It was happening all across the country, including places where you might least expect to see such problems.
It’s not a money-tree you need but a production flow. Wealth is based on real saving and real investment and its dividend is the output of goods and services produced. But it will only work if the economic system is directed by entrepreneurs, with governments as far a way as possible doing only what is required to keep the machine running in good order. Ultimately, living standards fall because there is no structure in place to keep them up.
It’s the same here. Watching Malcolm in action – with the NBN a perfect example of economic illiteracy and ignorance, leaves me unable to identify what is required to make someone like him understand what is actually required to create prosperity and growth.
‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” Hitler complained to his pet architect Albert Speer. “Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?” Islam was a Männerreligion—a “religion of men”—and hygienic too. The “soldiers of Islam” received a warrior’s heaven, “a real earthly paradise” with “houris” and “wine flowing.” This, Hitler argued, was much more suited to the “Germanic temperament” than the “Jewish filth and priestly twaddle” of Christianity.
And how did it matter?
Muslims fought on both sides in World War II. But only Nazis and Islamists had a political-spiritual romance. Both groups hated Jews, Bolsheviks and liberal democracy. Both sought what Michel Foucault, praising the Iranian Revolution in 1979, would later call the spiritual-political “transfiguration of the world” by “combat.” The caliph, the Islamist Zaki Ali explained, was the “führer of the believers.” “Made by Jews, led by Jews—therewith Bolshevism is the natural enemy of Islam,” wrote Mahomed Sabry, a Berlin-based propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood in “Islam, Judaism, Bolshevism,” a book that the Reich’s propaganda ministry recommended to journalists.
Moreover, the tentacles from the 1940s reach into the present and the likely future.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the founder of Palestinian nationalism, is notorious for his efforts to persuade the Nazis to extend their genocide of the Jews to the Palestine Mandate. The Mufti met Hitler and Himmler in Berlin in 1941 and asked the Nazis to guarantee that when the Wehrmacht drove the British from Palestine, Germany would establish an Arab regime and assist in the “removal” of its Jews. Hitler replied that the Reich would not intervene in the Mufti’s kingdom, other than to pursue their shared goal: “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space.” The Mufti settled in Berlin, befriended Adolf Eichmann, and lobbied the governments of Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria to cancel a plan to transfer Jews to Palestine. Subsequently, some 400,000 Jews from these countries were sent to death camps. . . .
Fearing Muslim uprisings, the Allies did not try the Mufti as a war criminal; he died in Beirut in 1974, politically eclipsed by his young cousin, Mohammed Abdul Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile, at Munich, the surviving SS volunteers, joined by refugees from the Soviet Union, formed postwar Germany’s first Islamic community, its leaders an ex-Wehrmacht imam and the erstwhile chief imam of the Eastern Muslim SS Division. In the 1950s, some of Munich’s Muslim ex-Nazis worked for the intelligence services of the U.S., tightening the “green belt against Communism.”
The most important lesson from history is how unpredictable it is. The likelihood that Christianity will be the dominant religion of Europe a century from now is already looking very unlikely and becoming less likely by the day.
This is apparently an anti-Trump cartoon but looks exactly like reality to me. The question is why the #NeverTrump people have the belief that going over the cliff with Hillary is preferable to keeping to the path with Donald. But they do. Here we have this: Charles Koch: ‘It’s possible’ Clinton is preferable to a Republican for president.
Billionaire businessman Charles Koch said Sunday that “it’s possible” another Clinton in the White House could be better than having a Republican president.
Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, made the comment to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl during an interview that aired on ABC’s “This Week.”
The comment came after Karl asked about Bill Clinton’s presidency. Koch said Clinton was “in some ways” better than George W. Bush. “As far as the growth of government, the increase in spending, it was 2½ times under Bush than it was under Clinton,” he said.
Four years of Hillary does not sound like the answer to me, but since everyone is a political genius and sees more perfectly than anyone else into the nature of things, here we find one more answer among the many others.
Ignorant to an extent never seen before in a major world “leader”, we have this from Obama today:
President Barack Obama boasted of his legacy during a town hall in Britain, asserting that he single-handedly saved the world during his presidency.
“Saving the world economy from a Great Depression — that was pretty good,” Obama bragged when asked by a student in London what he wanted his legacy to be.
He recalled that when he visited London in 2009, the world economy was in a “freefall” because of irresponsible behavior of financial institutions around the world.
“For us to be able to mobilize the world’s community, to take rapid action, to stabilize the financial markets, and then in the United States to pass Wall Streets reforms that make it much less likely that a crisis like that can happen again, I’m proud of that,” he said.
What made the difference was the TARP that was put in place by his predecessor. A reminder since it is now so long ago even Obama seems to have forgotten:
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector that was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008. It was a component of the government’s measures in 2008 to address the subprime mortgage crisis.
Obama’s contribution was the stimulus that came immediately after, which has made America’s recovery for all practical purposes non-existent, along with everyone else’s. As if a law professor turned community organiser would have the slightest idea about how an economy works. But if he doesn’t even remember who put the TARP in place, it might be a consequence of his choom-gang youth, which from other news also today we learn:
Using marijuana earlier in life is linked to poorer psychological health, and that can contribute to more health problems down the road.
“It is well-established that if you begin using at an early age and use a lot then, there are significant negative outcomes particularly in terms of mental health. . . .
Earlier cannabis use is linked to cognitive problems. Hills said, “One 2012 study showed early, regular use of marijuana – the kind of level they describe in this study — led to an eight point decline in IQ over time.”
If Obama really thinks he had much if any involvement in stabilizing international financial markets after the GFC, he must have been somewhere else at the time to be so unaware of what was going on.
We have just had eight years of the worst ever president in relation to American foreign policy, someone who has happened to mangle every single international relationship the US has. With Hillary – the architect of the disaster in Libya – the likely winner in the coming election, we have the Lowy Institute, in the person of its executive director, arguing that electing Donald Trump would jeopardise the international order. This man needs to have a look at the world as it has progressed since 2009. The article is President Trump? We say no thanks to the Donald. This is how he characterises our future relationship with a Trump administration:
Our deepest strategic instinct has always been to make common cause with a like-minded global ally. For nearly 65 years, that ally has been the US. However, that was before The Donald came along.
And if Trump is president, then what? Who is that like-minded global ally you are planning to count on? If this is their version of deep thought, I’d hate to see what they would just sprout off the top of their heads.
The New York real estate mogul’s win Tuesday in his home state over rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich was an important milestone for RNC members, who said it could put him on a pathway to acquire the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination outright without a contested convention.
“There are a fair number of RNC members who were discounting his chances of success when we met in January and now see that he’s building a substantial lead and may in fact get to 1,237 before we get to the convention,” said Steve Duprey, an RNC member from New Hampshire.
“The New York results were such an overwhelming win,” Duprey said. “It’s impressive. That’s what I’ve heard people talking about.”
RNC members said Trump could help improve the climate by taking steps to end the bad blood that has developed between him and the committee’s leadership, including RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.
And why wouldn’t he move towards them. The most important re-alignment in politics since The New Deal is there for the asking.
Law of Markets 