26 Reply by Memphis Trace (edited by Memphis Trace 2018-01-31 08:31:43)

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

Others disagree.  I'll chase down an analysis from a different source, who believes that the changes in business climate are only beginning to be felt.

I would appreciate that.

njc wrote:

Amywsy, we'll see what happens in a year.  I remind you, though, that conservatives have a much better track record on predictions.

Do you have a source to show conservatives' acumen in predicting the future? Most of the prophesying I see coming from Trump's base is of the imminent onset of The Rapture. If your "conservatives have a much better track record on predictions" is true, will you be relaying your year-end data from heaven?

Or will it be from Kansas, where Governor Brownback, the Wizard of Kansas, predicted for 5 years that his tax cuts were going to take Kansans to heaven?:
In 2012, Kansas lawmakers, led by Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, enacted a tax cut that eliminated state income taxes entirely for pass-through entities—such as sole proprietorships and limited liability partnerships—which are taxed at the owner’s individual income tax rate. The law also lowered individual income tax rates, cutting the top rate to 4.9 percent from 6.4 percent.

The tax package reduced state revenue by nearly $700 million a year, a drop of about 8 percent, from 2013 through 2016, according to the Kansas Legislative Research Department, forcing officials to shorten school calendars, delay highway repairs and reduce aid to the poor. Research suggests the package did not stimulate the economy, certainly not enough to pay for the tax cut. This year, legislators passed a bill to largely rescind the law, saying it had not worked as intended.

“It caused a lot of budget instability,” said State Senator Jim Denning, a Republican who led the effort to repeal the pass-through exemption this year. Mr. Denning, who earns pass-through income from his interest in a commercial real estate firm, said he had personally benefited from the exemption, but the state’s economy had not.

njc wrote:

Oh, and on money spent on refugees, you're neglecting perverse incentives, which law, economics, and the insurance business term 'moral hazard'.

If one includes immigrants as part of the total population, crime rates for the country would decrease.
Contrary to Trump’s Claims, Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit Crimes:
A central point of an executive order President Trump signed on Wednesday—and a mainstay of his campaign speeches—is the view that undocumented immigrants pose a threat to public safety.

But several studies, over many years, have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. And experts say the available evidence does not support the idea that undocumented immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime.

“There’s no way I can mess with the numbers to get a different conclusion,” said Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, which advocates more liberal immigration laws.

Mr. Trump often cites specific cases of undocumented immigrants committing or being charged with crimes, like the 2015 killing in San Francisco of Kathryn Steinle, whose accused killer had repeatedly been convicted of crimes and deported, yet slipped back into the United States.

His executive order states that many people who enter the country illegally “present a significant threat to national security and public safety.” It directs the Department of Homeland Security to publish a weekly “comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens.”

Analyses of census data from 1980 through 2010 show that among men ages 18 to 49, immigrants were one-half to one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated as those born in the United States. Across all ages and sexes, about 7 percent of the nation’s population are noncitizens, while figures from the Justice Department show that about 5 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons are noncitizens.

And hard work being done would increase.

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 26

27 Reply by njc (edited by njc 2018-01-31 10:48:29)

Re: Much to be thankful for

Legal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes.  But those who broke the law to be here have already shown a willingness to break the law.  And at least some of them belong to Mexican or international gangs--a definite marker for likely further crimes.  You need to separate legal and illegal immigration, especially since only one of the categories is at issue.

Here's an instapundit item with two links: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/trumps- … ing-an-ex/  .  The first link is to a reasoned argument; the second is to a study with numbers.

Conservatives predicted the benefits of Reagan's tax cuts and other policy changes.  Liberals predicted disaster.  The only disaster was on the side of the poverty pimps.  We had a recovery that lasted into the Clinton years, with scarce labor forcing wages so high that minimum wage ceased, for a time, to be an issue.

Conseratives predicted the negative consequences of the social changes beginning in the '60s.  Those predictions have largely been airbrushed from history, even as they came true.  Even the liberal icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan concluded that liberal policies had been a disaster for working class black families--but once he broke with liberal orthodoxy, he lost the respect of the liberal establishment.

Why are the cities with the worst crime the ones that have been longest in the hands of liberals?  Why does Democrat-ruled California have the worst gap of all the states between rich and poor?  And why is that gap widening?

So, let's check predictions around mid-October, shall we?  A few weeks before the elections?

Quote Post 27

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

Legal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes.  But those who broke the law to be here have already shown a willingness to break the law.  And at least some of them belong to Mexican or international gangs--a definite marker for likely further crimes.  You need to separate legal and illegal immigration, especially since only one of the categories is at issue.

"Undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than the native born."
— Antonio Villaraigosa on Monday, July 31st, 2017 in an interview on MSNBC

MOSTLY TRUE: Undocumented immigrants less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens
By Chris Nichols on Thursday, August 3rd, 2017 at 4:04 p.m.

Candidate for California governor Antonio Villaraigosa jumped into the nation’s heated debate on immigration reform during a recent interview on MSNBC.

The Democrat and former Los Angeles mayor rejected the idea that deporting undocumented immigrants was a sound strategy for reducing crime.

His statement followed President Trump’s speech about combatting MS-13 gang members. The gang started in poor Los Angeles neighborhoods where many refugees from civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua lived in the 1980s. It’s grown into an international criminal organization with more than 30,000.

Trump campaigned on the promise to deport millions of undocumented residents, often describing them as threats to public safety.

Here’s what Villaraigosa said on July 31, 2017 on MSNBC.

"I think we all agree that people that commit violent crimes ought to be deported. But going after the undocumented is not a crime strategy, when you look at the fact that the National Academy of Sciences in, I think it was November of 2015, the undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than the native born. That’s just a fact."

We decided to examine this last point as part of our Tracking The Truth series, which fact-checks claims in the 2018 California governor's race.

We interpreted Villaraigosa’s statement to mean undocumented people commit crimes at a lower rate than the native born.

But we wondered whether this was really a settled matter.

We set out on a fact check.

Our research

We started by checking out the 2015 National Academy of Sciences study Villaraigosa cited.

Emphasis mine
It found: "Immigrants are in fact much less likely to commit crime than natives, and the presence of large numbers of immigrants seems to lower crime rates." The study added that "This disparity also holds for young men most likely to be undocumented immigrants: Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan men."

It continued: "Today, the belief that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes is perpetuated by ‘issue entrepreneurs’ who promote the immigrant-crime connection in order to drive restrictionist immigration policy."

The academy is a nonprofit research organization charged with providing independent advice to the nation. It is funded largely by the federal government.

Findings in a March 2017 study by the libertarian Cato Institute also support Villaraigosa's statement:

"Illegal immigrants are 44 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives. Legal immigrants are 69 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives. Legal and illegal immigrants are underrepresented in the incarcerated population while natives are overrepresented."

The Cato study used information from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey for immigrants aged 18 to 54 who are incarcerated in the United States.

To examine Villaraigosa's claim, we also relied on research into similar claims by our partner national PolitiFact. In July 2016, it rated Mostly True a statement by Libertarian candidate for president Gary Johnson that Mexican immigrants "are more law-abiding than U.S. citizens and that is a statistic."

PolitiFact found several studies that back up this claim by citing incarceration rates. It also found groups that challenged those studies or said more research is needed.

PolitiFact’s findings

PolitiFact pointed to a July 2015 report by the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant nonprofit in Washington. The council analyzed data from the Census’ 2010 American Community Survey and found that about 1.6 percent of all immigrant males (Census does not specify legal status) between 18 and 39 years old were incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of the native-born population.

Looking at California prisons, immigrants are also underrepresented. U.S.-born men are incarcerated in the state at a rate of more than two-and-a-half times greater than that of foreign-born men, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The American Immigration Council also reported that 2010 Census data shows incarceration rates of young, less educated Mexican, Salvadoran and Guatemalan men — which comprise the bulk of the unauthorized population — are "significantly lower" than incarceration rates of native-born young men without a high-school diploma.

Specifically for Mexican men ages 18 to 39, the incarceration rate in 2010 was 2.8 percent, compared to 10.7 percent for native-born men in the same age group, the council’s report said.

Immigrants come to the United States to build better lives for themselves and their children, said Walter A. Ewing, a senior researcher at the American Immigration Council and one of the report’s authors.

"They are very motivated to not blow that opportunity by getting in trouble with the police," he told PolitiFact. "This is especially so for unauthorized immigrants, who can be deported at any time for unlawful presence."

Crime trends

PolitiFact also noted that as the immigrant population has increased, crime has gone down, citing Ewing’s report.

Between 1990 and 2013, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population increased from 7.9 percent to 13.1 percent, and the number of unauthorized immigrants went up from 3.5 million to 11.2 million. At the same time, the violent crime rate (murder, rape and aggravated assault) decreased 48 percent and property crime rate fell 41 percent, the report said, citing FBI data.

Bianca E. Bersani, an assistant professor and director of the Criminology and Criminal Justice Program at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, says her research also shows that crime involvement among foreign-born residents is lower than that of U.S.-born citizens.

"The rhetoric of the ‘criminal immigrant’ does not align with the bulk of empirical research," Bersani said.

According to Bersani’s research, while first-generation immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born population, the second generation (individuals born in the United States to at least one foreign-born parent) more closely resemble patterns of their native-born peers (three or more U.S.-born generations).

"This does not suggest that the second generation is uniquely crime prone, but instead that they are acting in ways that are no different from the rest of the U.S.-born population," Bersani said.

Datasets with information on both crime and immigrant status are rare, Bersani said, though more research and data are becoming available.

More research needed?

The Center for Immigration Studies, which supports stricter immigration policies, in a 2009 study said that overall understanding of immigrants and crime "remains confused" due to lack of data and contrary information.

Unless inmates are identified as immigrant or native-born, incarceration rates are a poor way to measure links between immigrants and crime, the study said.

As PolitiFact reported in 2015, there isn’t exact data on how many undocumented immigrants are currently incarcerated.

PolitiFact California spoke about this critique with Ewing of the American Immigration Council, whose research supports Villaraigosa’s claim. He said he’s confident in the work that’s been done and said critics have used anecdotes, rather than full-blown research, to try to make their points.

Ewing added that the studies backing up Villaraigosa’s statement are "from such a wide range of researchers using so many different methodologies and sources of data -- not everyone can be wrong."

Our ruling

Villaraigosa said "undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than the native born."

He cited a 2015 study by the National Academy of Sciences that backs up this claim.

In a fact check last year, PolitiFact rated a similar claim Mostly True. It cited additional studies by scholars and partisan groups that show that the foreign-born population is less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.

It also found that researchers agree more data is needed to get a better understanding of immigration and crime. It said this was a needed clarification.

PolitiFact California agrees with these findings.

We rated Villaraigosa’s claim Mostly True.

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 28

29 Reply by Memphis Trace (edited by Memphis Trace 2018-02-01 12:12:13)

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

Here's an instapundit item with two links: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/trumps- … ing-an-ex/  .  The first link is to a reasoned argument; the second is to a study with numbers.

Conservatives predicted the benefits of Reagan's tax cuts and other policy changes.  Liberals predicted disaster.  The only disaster was on the side of the poverty pimps.

Who are the poverty pimps you refer to? 

njc wrote:

We had a recovery that lasted into the Clinton years, with scarce labor forcing wages so high that minimum wage ceased, for a time, to be an issue.

How much of this long-lasting recovery do you attribute to the several tax increases forced upon Reagan by Congress?
An excerpt:
Even before the 1981 tax cut took full effect, under pressure from Congress, Reagan boosted taxes several times: in 1982 with the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, again in 1983 with the Social Security Amendments, and in 1984 with the Deficit Reduction Act. Many of these tax increases aimed to increase federal tax revenue, after it declined following initial cuts.

Or

How about George H. W. Bush's 1990 Omnibus Reconciliation Act shepherded through a Democratic Congress to prevent the collapse of the S & L industry?

An excerpt:
When Bush took office in 1989, the federal budget debt stood at $2.8 trillion, three times larger than it had been in 1980. This financial situation severely limited the President's ability to enact major domestic programs. The federal government did not have the revenues for any large, new domestic ventures, nor did the political climate lend itself to enacting them. To compensate for these constraints, Bush stressed "a limited agenda," that included volunteerism, education reform, and anti-drug efforts. President Bush did not come into office promising to preside over an era of great change; he won the presidency basically vowing to maintain the status quo and preserve the legacy of his predecessor.

Having pledged during the campaign not to raise taxes, the President found himself in the difficult position of trying to balance the budget and reduce the deficit without imposing additional taxes on the American people. He also faced a Congress controlled by the Democrats. Although Republicans thought that the government should approach the budget deficit by drastically cutting domestic spending, the Democrats wanted to raise taxes on the richest Americans.

Budget negotiations for the 1991 fiscal year proved especially contentious and problematic. Bush had no choice but to compromise with Congress, and his administration entered into lengthy talks with congressional leaders. The President had Chief of Staff John Sununu, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Richard Darman, and Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady lead the discussions. In June 1990, Bush issued a written statement to the press, reneging on his "no taxes" pledge made during the campaign, noting that tax increases might be necessary to solve the deficit problem. In October, after a brief government shutdown that occurred when Bush vetoed the budget Congress delivered to him, the President and Congress reached a compromise with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990. The budget included measures to reduce the deficit by cutting government expenditures and raising taxes. Many conservative Republicans felt betrayed when Bush agreed to raise taxes, or to include "revenue increases" as he called them in his statement after signing the bill.

On top of the budget crisis, Bush started his presidential tenure as the Savings and Loans industry was collapsing. The federal and state governments had deregulated the industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the S&L industry ventured into riskier investments that destabilized it. In February 1989, with many S&Ls failing, Bush proposed a plan to help bail out the industry. The President reached a compromise with Congress that ended up costing taxpayers more than $100 billion. The collapse of the Savings and Loans and the subsequent government bailout only added to the difficult financial environment that Bush confronted during his presidency.

How'd supply-side, trickle-down tax policy work out for Conservative prognosticators in Kansas? Too bad Kansas couldn't print money or borrow from China to stave off its economic woes, huh?
An excerpt:
Earlier this year, Kansas' GOP-controlled legislature voted to effectively end a five-year push to slash taxes on individuals and businesses after revenues plummeted and forced deep cuts and tax hikes elsewhere. In doing so, they overturned a veto by Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican who drew national attention in conservative circles when he launched his ambitious tax-cut program in 2012.

For Democrats, Kansas has become Exhibit A in their prosecution of the Trump tax cuts. It's routinely cited as evidence the new GOP proposal won’t grow the economy or pay for itself, and that proposed business tax reduction similar to Brownback’s will create a new loophole for wealthy individuals to exploit.

"It was a real-life experiment in a Republican state, similar to what President Trump announced," Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor. "It added so much money to their deficit over four years that they have had to figure out ways to raise taxes now, just as Ronald Reagan did in 1986." 

njc wrote:

Conseratives predicted the negative consequences of the social changes beginning in the '60s.  Those predictions have largely been airbrushed from history, even as they came true.

What were the social changes in the '60s about which Conservatives predicted negative consequences? 

njc wrote:

Even the liberal icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan concluded that liberal policies had been a disaster for working class black families--but once he broke with liberal orthodoxy, he lost the respect of the liberal establishment.

Which liberal policies did Moynihan conclude were a disaster for working class black families? And which liberals among the liberal establishment stopped respecting Moynihan?

njc wrote:

Why are the cities with the worst crime the ones that have been longest in the hands of liberals?

Where do you get this information?

Here is an October 2016 article that belies your conclusion

njc wrote:

Why does Democrat-ruled California have the worst gap of all the states between rich and poor?  And why is that gap widening?

It doesn't. California ranks 7th, one slot above Texas, 2 slots below Florida, 3 slots below Nevada, and 4 slots below Wyoming.

njc wrote:

So, let's check predictions around mid-October, shall we?

Of which predictions do you speak? Are you saying that 20 months into Trump's administration, that crime in liberal bastions will be down? That the gap between rich and poor in liberal bastions will be smaller?

njc wrote:

A few weeks before the elections?

I think there will be an abundance of studies about that time that should shed some light on how well Trump's legislative accomplishments have benefited the rich vs how well they have benefited the poor.

Bring studies that support your position—whatever that may be at the time—back here to TNBW's forum.

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 29

30 Reply by njc

Re: Much to be thankful for

Poverty pimps: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ … 788630001/   See the paragraph beginning 'In the famous Goldberg v. Kelly case'.  Who benefitted from the extra welfare costs?  The lawers and social workers who turned poverty ino an industry.

Quote Post 30

31 Reply by njc

Re: Much to be thankful for

As far as studies in the fall: the only ones that matter are those that lead individuals to decide that Trump's policies--GOP policies similar to Reagan's--are providing better lives.

Oh, thanks to increases in the GDP over the past few months, our GDP to national debt ratio has gotten a tick better.  (I'll find the reference if you want.)

Oh, did you read?  =Mother Jones='s David Corn is facing some pretty stiff sexual charges of his own.

Quote Post 31

32 Reply by njc (edited by njc 2018-02-02 01:43:54)

Re: Much to be thankful for

California's wealth/poverty ratio: I haven't run across the article with the claim.  But see this one: https://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgo … 5?amp=true

According to the standard poverty measure, Mississippi ranks first in the nation with a rate of 20.8 percent. California ranks 16th. The Census Bureau's "Supplemental Poverty Measure" places California first in the nation with a poverty rate of 20.4, and Mississippi falls to fifth.

To be clear, California spends an enormous amount of money fighting poverty. The problem, as Kerry Jackson explains in the winter issue of City Journal, is that California remains stuck in the past. While the rest of the country embraced welfare reforms that emphasized work, California's bloated and heavily unionized welfare bureaucracies -- with nearly 900,000 state and municipal employees -- clung to the old model of relying on policies that encourage dependency, not self-sufficiency.

A cynical interpretation holds that this is a feature, not a bug. Just as California's prison guard unions have fought reforms that might reduce the prison population -- fewer prisoners, fewer prison guard jobs -- California's poverty bureaucrats have a similar incentive. "In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its 'customer' base -- to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing," Jackson writes.

In my experience, a cynic is an optimist by nature and a realist by sad experience.  I'm told that this is a cynical definition.  I think it a realistic one.

Cui bono?  The word 'underserved' from the mouths of bureaucrats is a flamimg red flag.

Quote Post 32

33 Reply by njc (edited by njc 2018-02-02 02:33:51)

Re: Much to be thankful for

https://townhall.com/columnists/victord … 6?amp=true   See especially the end of the twelfth paragraph.

Quote Post 33

34 Reply by Memphis Trace (edited by Memphis Trace 2018-02-02 11:36:07)

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

Poverty pimps: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ … 788630001/   See the paragraph beginning 'In the famous Goldberg v. Kelly case'.  Who benefitted from the extra welfare costs?  The lawers and social workers who turned poverty ino an industry.

That paragraph reads:

USA Today wrote:

In the famous Goldberg v. Kelly case granting due-process hearings before the termination of welfare benefits, the Supreme Court looks to have been holding on behalf of poor and uneducated people. Yet it turns out that the actual beneficiaries are the highly educated: social workers and lawyers who are paid out of welfare agency budgets. Likewise, the court’s treatment of everything from reproductive rights to legislative apportionment has reflected Front Row priorities.

Since Glenn Harlan Reynolds didn't, can you link me up with the evidence that the actual beneficiaries of the welfare agency budgets have been the highly-educated social workers and lawyers?

I note well that almost everything you cite comes directly or indirectly from Instapundit, described in a 2007 memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee as one of the five best-read national conservative blogs.

If in our free range Democrat v. Republican discussion, you intend to rely on Glenn Harlan Reynolds to support your Republican gospel, please support Reynolds' raw opinions with links to a modicum of evidence to support those opinions.

Now that we are exposing pimps, how hot is the air Reynolds blows onto the Naval officer pimps??
The article:
Twenty-five thousand dollar watches? Six hundred dollar a night hotel rooms? “A rotating carousel of prostitutes”? No one told us that joining the Navy and seeing the world was so decadent, but then again, no one told the Navy or the Department of Justice either. That could be why the DoJ rounded up eight officers yesterday., including the admiral who served as director of intelligence operations, and indicted them for corruption in the infamous “Fat Leonard” scandal:
The Justice Department unsealed a fresh indictment Tuesday charging eight Navy officials — including an admiral — with corruption and other crimes in the “Fat Leonard” bribery case, escalating an epic scandal that has dogged the Navy for four years.

Among those charged were Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, a senior Navy intelligence officer who recently retired from a key job at the Pentagon, as well as four retired Navy captains and a retired Marine colonel. The charges cover a period of eight years, from 2006 through 2014.

The Navy personnel are accused of taking bribes in the form of lavish gifts, prostitutes and luxury hotel stays courtesy of Leonard Glenn “Fat Leonard” Francis, a Singapore-based defense contractor who has pleaded guilty to defrauding the Navy of tens of millions of dollars.

It’s not just corruption, either. The eight, including the man who ran intelligence operations for the Navy, are accused of passing along classified information to Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), the DoJ said in its statement yesterday (received by e-mail):
According to the indictment, the Navy officers allegedly participated in a bribery scheme with Leonard Francis, in which the officers accepted travel and entertainment expenses, the services of prostitutes and lavish gifts in exchange for helping to steep lucrative contracts to Francis and GDMA and to sabotage competing defense contractors. The defendants allegedly violated many of their sworn official naval duties, including duties related to the handling of classified information and duties related to the identification and reporting of foreign intelligence threats.  According to the indictment, the defendants allegedly worked in concert to recruit new members for the conspiracy, and to keep the conspiracy secret by using fake names and foreign email service providers. According to the indictment, the bribery scheme allegedly cost the Navy – and U.S. taxpayers – tens of millions of dollars.

The indictment can be found here. Bear in mind that indictments are not convictions, and that these men will have a chance to answer these charges in court. However, the DoJ already has guilty pleas from ten other Navy personnel indicted earlier in the scandal, as well as three GDMA officials. Based on what appears in the indictment, some of them may have been cooperating with investigators, as the allegations appear detailed and, er … intimate, especially when it comes to Douglas MacArthur memorabilia (page 23, lines 5-7). Yecch.

This solves an earlier mystery from almost fourteen months ago, too. The Washington Post reported in January 2016 that the Navy’s top man in intelligence, Admiral Ted “Twig” Branch, had his clearances revoked in 2013 and could no longer access any classified information — but yet remained in his post in intelligence work. Loveless was one of his deputies at that time and included in the same report. Craig Whitlock reported that the three-year probe into “Fat Leonard” had not yet been completed, and so the Navy was “frozen” on Branch and Loveless. Branch finally retired later in 2016, after getting passed up for promotion, and in July the Navy finally had an intelligence chief that could access intelligence again.

Perhaps this round of indictments spells an end to the scandal, and Branch can enjoy his retirement. It still leaves lots of questions about why the Navy left him in that position for years while being prevented from performing the vital job assigned to him, and how Branch somehow missed his own deputy’s corruption.

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 34

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

As far as studies in the fall: the only ones that matter are those that lead individuals to decide that Trump's policies--GOP policies similar to Reagan's--are providing better lives.

¿Better lives for the Trump family? For the poor? For the sick? For Dreamers?

njc wrote:

Oh, thanks to increases in the GDP over the past few months, our GDP to national debt ratio has gotten a tick better.  (I'll find the reference if you want.)

Please do. Does the article tell us who benefits from this tick? Is this tick sucking the blood of the poor to fund the military-industrial complex and its officers' pursuit of prostitutes?

njc wrote:

Oh, did you read?  =Mother Jones='s David Corn is facing some pretty stiff sexual charges of his own.

How is David Corn's sex life, or lack thereof, relevant to our discussion(s)? Do we want to compare Corn to "Small Hands" Donald?

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 35

36 Reply by Memphis Trace (edited by Memphis Trace 2018-02-02 10:13:39)

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

California's wealth/poverty ratio: I haven't run across the article with the claim.  But see this one: https://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgo … 5?amp=true

According to the standard poverty measure, Mississippi ranks first in the nation with a rate of 20.8 percent. California ranks 16th. The Census Bureau's "Supplemental Poverty Measure" places California first in the nation with a poverty rate of 20.4, and Mississippi falls to fifth.

To be clear, California spends an enormous amount of money fighting poverty. The problem, as Kerry Jackson explains in the winter issue of City Journal, is that California remains stuck in the past. While the rest of the country embraced welfare reforms that emphasized work, California's bloated and heavily unionized welfare bureaucracies -- with nearly 900,000 state and municipal employees -- clung to the old model of relying on policies that encourage dependency, not self-sufficiency.

A cynical interpretation holds that this is a feature, not a bug. Just as California's prison guard unions have fought reforms that might reduce the prison population -- fewer prisoners, fewer prison guard jobs -- California's poverty bureaucrats have a similar incentive. "In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its 'customer' base -- to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing," Jackson writes.

In my experience, a cynic is an optimist by nature and a realist by sad experience.  I'm told that this is a cynical definition.  I think it a realistic one.

Cui bono?  The word 'underserved' from the mouths of bureaucrats is a flamimg red flag.

I am puzzled by what you purport to show by citing Jonah Goldberg's article showing that it costs almost 60% more to rise to the level of poor in California than it does in Mississippi?

Are we still talking about

njc wrote:

Why does Democrat-ruled California have the worst gap of all the states between rich and poor?  And why is that gap widening?

A cursory look at the median income of households in California and Mississippi show that  shows that the median family income of Mississippi households in an almost identical 60% of median family incomes in California?

The question we should be trying to answer is how efficiently the taxes paid by the wealthy are being used help those in poverty.

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 36

37 Reply by Memphis Trace (edited by Memphis Trace 2018-02-02 10:20:02)

Re: Much to be thankful for

Memphis Trace wrote:
njc wrote:

California's wealth/poverty ratio: I haven't run across the article with the claim.  But see this one: https://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgo … 5?amp=true

According to the standard poverty measure, Mississippi ranks first in the nation with a rate of 20.8 percent. California ranks 16th. The Census Bureau's "Supplemental Poverty Measure" places California first in the nation with a poverty rate of 20.4, and Mississippi falls to fifth.

To be clear, California spends an enormous amount of money fighting poverty. The problem, as Kerry Jackson explains in the winter issue of City Journal, is that California remains stuck in the past. While the rest of the country embraced welfare reforms that emphasized work, California's bloated and heavily unionized welfare bureaucracies -- with nearly 900,000 state and municipal employees -- clung to the old model of relying on policies that encourage dependency, not self-sufficiency.

A cynical interpretation holds that this is a feature, not a bug. Just as California's prison guard unions have fought reforms that might reduce the prison population -- fewer prisoners, fewer prison guard jobs -- California's poverty bureaucrats have a similar incentive. "In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its 'customer' base -- to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing," Jackson writes.

In my experience, a cynic is an optimist by nature and a realist by sad experience.  I'm told that this is a cynical definition.  I think it a realistic one.

Cui bono?  The word 'underserved' from the mouths of bureaucrats is a flamimg red flag.

I am puzzled by what you purport to show by citing Jonah Goldberg's article showing that it costs almost 60% more to rise to the level of poor in California than it does in Mississippi?

Are we still talking about

njc wrote:

Why does Democrat-ruled California have the worst gap of all the states between rich and poor?  And why is that gap widening?

A cursory glance at the median income of households in California and Mississippi shows the median family income of Mississippi households is an almost identical 60% of median family incomes in California as the cost-of-living gap Goldberg claimed?

If we are still trying to see whether Democrat attacks on poverty are better than Republican attacks on poverty, the question we should be trying to answer is how efficiently the taxes paid by the wealthy are being used help those in poverty.

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 37

38 Reply by Memphis Trace (edited by Memphis Trace 2018-02-03 07:16:37)

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

https://townhall.com/columnists/victord … 6?amp=true   See especially the end of the twelfth paragraph.

Is this

the end of the twelfth paragraph wrote:

Given California's exorbitant taxes and property assessments, high-end earners will soon learn that what they owe the IRS has skyrocketed.

to what you refer?

How do you believe punishing the wealthy political foes of Republicans by taking money from middle class Californians who moved to Silicon Valley—to give it to the wealthy scions of  Donald Trump with his pass through real estate income building up the estate his heirs will no longer have to pay taxes on—helps the country?

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 38

39 Reply by njc (edited by njc 2018-02-02 12:12:08)

Re: Much to be thankful for

Yes, most of the articles come to my attention off instapundit, which has a staff of contributors.  Glenn Harlan Reynolds is better described as libertarian than conservative, though the various editors are more conservative.  Oh, and he's a professor of law.

It's a little hard to be sure of the paragraph breaks when the text is interrupted by pictures.  Here's the quote: "California has the nation's highest percentage of impoverished residents when factoring in cost of living. One in three welfare recipients in the U.S. lives in the state. One in four California residents was not born in the United States."

If you're tired of instapundit, how about ricochet.com? https://ricochet.com/491590/trump-growth-machine/

Quote Post 39

40 Reply by Memphis Trace (edited by Memphis Trace 2018-02-03 08:28:38)

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

Yes, most of the articles come to my attention off instapundit, which has a staff of contributors.  Glenn Harlan Reynolds is better described as libertarian than conservative, though the various editors are more conservative.  Oh, and he's a professor of law.

¿Those who can, do; those who can't, teach?

njc wrote:

It's a little hard to be sure of the paragraph breaks when the text is interrupted by pictures.  Here's the quote: "California has the nation's highest percentage of impoverished residents when factoring in cost of living. One in three welfare recipients in the U.S. lives in the state.

This causes a quantum jump in my already high respect for California. Sounds like a reprise of The Grapes of Wrath.

As Alabamans, West Virginians, and Mississippians flee the conservative state governments of their birthplaces, it's good to know there is a warm home for them. California taxes its wealthy residents to make a home for them. And all the while California also contributes an outsized portion to the US Treasury.

njc wrote:

"One in four California residents was not born in the United States."

Lucky for California that immigrants are less prone than US citizens to crime and are as a group a net positive for the GDP, huh? To allay some of the burden of desperate Southerners looking to live the American dream, I mean.

¿Good thing California has more than a goodly share of the undocumented among the immigrants picking their grapes for them? The undocumented are not eligible for Federal assistance.

njc wrote:

If you're tired of instapundit, how about ricochet.com? https://ricochet.com/491590/trump-growth-machine/

I am interested in all your fake news outlets that gorge conservatives on alternative facts and conspiracy theories.

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 40

41 Reply by Memphis Trace (edited by Memphis Trace 2018-02-13 12:54:22)

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

As far as studies in the fall: the only ones that matter are those that lead individuals to decide that Trump's policies--GOP policies similar to Reagan's--are providing better lives.

Oh, thanks to increases in the GDP over the past few months, our GDP to national debt ratio has gotten a tick better.  (I'll find the reference if you want.)

Here are some early returns that will help individuals decide whether Trump's policies—GOP policies similar to Reagan's—will provide them with better lives:

President Trump has finally released his comic book

By Dana Milbank

In a Republican presidential debate in the fall of 2015, moderator John Harwood of CNBC asked Donald Trump about some of his more outlandish claims, such as making another country pay for a border wall and enacting huge tax cuts that wouldn’t increase the deficit.

“Let’s be honest,” Harwood memorably said. “Is this a comic-book version of a presidential campaign?”

Harwood got a lot of grief for that from Trump and his supporters, but—Great Caesar’s ghost! —would you look at this? President Trump’s comic book came out on Monday, in the form of his budget proposal. It is quite a marvel. In fact, we haven’t seen a comic like this in D.C. in ages.

Remember Trump’s boast that he would “get rid of the $19 trillion in debt ... over a period of eight years”?

Odin’s beard! He just hammered that promise to pieces. His budget would add $7 trillion to the debt over a decade—$2 trillion in the next two years alone—and even those numbers are based on the peculiar assumption that the economy will never again go into recession.

Remember Trump’s promise that “I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid” and his boast about being “the first and only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid”?

That promise has gone up, up and away. Trump proposes to cut more than $500 billion together from Medicare—health care for old folks—and Medicaid, which provides health care to the poor.

Remember Trump’s constant “Mexico will pay for the wall” vows?

Cowabunga! His budget made quick work of that promise, requesting 18 billion American dollars for that wall.

And remember just two months ago when the administration said the tax cut would pay for itself and the Treasury Department said it would actually increase tax receipts by $300 billion over 10 years?

Shazam! Quick as a flash, the administration now says tax receipts will be $314 billion lower in 2018, $400 billion lower in 2019 and even $200 billion lower in 2027 when the plan was supposed to be paying for itself.

But the really comic part is the way Trump would offset the big tax cuts for the wealthy and the huge increase for the Pentagon. These range from the villainous—billions of dollars taken from food stamps, college tuition assistance for poor kids and clean-air and clean-water protection—to the absurd—selling off airports and roads and magically saving $139 billion by reducing “improper payments.” Few if any of these will ever happen, so the actual increase in debt will be even greater.

It is, all in all, a super-heroic achievement, proving that the government can cut taxes and spend freely on whatever it wants, nobody will ever have to pay for it and nobody will suffer adverse consequences (except those unlucky fools who happen to be old, or poor, or consumers of, say, air and water).

This is a comic-book budget—but not a terribly good one. If the president is going to promise the stars and pay with peanuts, couldn’t he at least make it more interesting? If wild promises and unrealistic offsets are the stuff of a good budget, he could do much better:

All Americans of driving age shall be given a Tesla, and all Americans shall be entitled to elite status in a frequent-flier program of their choosing. The cost of this shall be offset by grounding EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for one month.

To improve access to affordable housing, HUD shall subsidize stays at Trump hotel properties at the rack rate. If funds remain unspent after Trump hotels reach capacity, the secretary shall subsidize rounds of golf. The cost of this program will be offset by the elimination of prosecutions at the Justice Department against all who, in the president’s view, are not guilty.

All U.S. citizens shall be given 60-inch ultra-HD TVs. All Americans shall also be granted free subscriptions to Hulu, Netflix and HBO. The cost of this program shall be offset by the sales of organs harvested from those in the lowest quintile of wage earners.

All American families shall be provided with an armed Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile, as well as a launchpad, for the purpose of displaying them on homemade floats in military parades across the country. The cost of this program will be offset by eliminating the president’s intelligence briefings.

In addition to their obvious merits, these proposals have another thing going for them: They have exactly as much chance of becoming law as the Trump budget.

Already Trump is preparing the country yobs for a hard landing from all this winning he promised, and for making America Great Again.

njc wrote:

Oh, did you read?  =Mother Jones='s David Corn is facing some pretty stiff sexual charges of his own.

Oh, did you read Trump is defending another serial sex abuser =Rob Porter= to go along with his defense of Roy Moore, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilley, and himself?

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 41

42 Reply by Memphis Trace (edited by Memphis Trace 2018-02-14 08:09:01)

Re: Much to be thankful for

njc wrote:

As far as studies in the fall: the only ones that matter are those that lead individuals to decide that Trump's policies--GOP policies similar to Reagan's--are providing better lives.

In Trump country, patriotic American voters aren't waiting until the fall to decide that they have been duped. Looks like the rats are abandoning ship before they get the good news you think is coming in the fall.

In third bellwether contest, Florida Democrats again carry the day and hope for a blue wave (Emphasis mine)

By MARC CAPUTO 02/13/2018 07:58 PM EST Updated 02/13/2018 08:33 PM EST

Strike three.

For the third Florida bellwether election in a row, the Republican candidate lost to the Democrat, giving activists and elites in both parties a sense that the GOP’s political grip is slipping in the nation’s largest swing state heading into President Donald Trump’s first midterm election.


Aside from her big 7.4 percentage-point win, what made Margaret Good’s victory Tuesday night over Republican James Buchanan so significant was that it took place in Florida’s 72nd House District. It had been held by a Republican in Sarasota County, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by 12,000, or about 10 percentage points. Buchanan, the son of local Congressman Vern Buchanan, also had an advantage in name ID.

And Trump had carried the district by 4.6 percentage points in a state that he won by just 1.2 points in November.

But now Trump is too toxic even for Sarasota, say Democrats, who made sure to figuratively hang the unpopular president around the neck of Buchanan as well as the Republicans who lost in the two other recent bellwether contests: Florida’s 40th Senate District in Miami-Dade and St. Petersburg’s mayoral race. Both of those elections had Democratic-leaning electorates with significant minority populations, unlike the 72nd in Sarasota.

In all of the races, Democrats made sure to use Vice President Joe Biden as a surrogate.

“This is beyond a trend. The results are in. Republicans have a real problem in this state,” said Tom Eldon, a Democratic pollster who surveyed the race.

“This is the bellwether seat,” Eldon said. “This seat in Sarasota is the Republicans’ backyard. Anytime Democrats win a seat like this it’s great for Democrats. It happened in 1992. It happened in 2006. And it happened in this seat. This is a bellwether for bad Republican years.”

And it’s not just in Florida. Good’s win was the 36th Republican legislative seat in the nation that a Democrat has won since 2016, a feat partly attributable to Trump’s toxicity and to the reinvigorated Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which helped in Good’s race and the Florida Senate contest in Miami-Dade.

Though Democrats have seen successes throughout the nation, including Virginia’s governor’s race and Alabama’s U.S. Senate race, Eldon cautioned against extrapolating too much from those races.

In a state notorious for close election results, Democrats and Republicans alike said there’s only so much this race means heading into the November elections, when Floridians decide whether to keep Sen. Bill Nelson as they vote on open seats for governor, attorney general, agriculture commissioner and chief financial officer.

Republicans hope that the worst of Trump’s bad approval ratings are over and that Floridians will continue to see the state on the right track under Republicans. Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Cabinet are all Republican and the GOP controls the state Legislature as well. Scott’s approval rating is higher than ever and he’s widely expected to challenge Nelson.

For all of the contested Democratic victories, though, Republicans point out that there has been no overwhelming “blue wave.” Republicans came out to vote. But there was a catch. Many voted for Good in the district, which has a reputation as a bastion for environmentally conscious establishment Republicans with Midwest sensibilities.

“This was less a blue wave than a red revolt,” said Anthony Pedicini, a top Republican consultant for Buchanan. “Republicans turned out on Election Day, and looks like there was little benefit to our campaign.”

One Republican, who didn’t want to speak publicly against his party’s candidate, said earlier Tuesday that Democrats had another advantage in the Sarasota House seat: “Buchanan was a terrible candidate. And candidates matter.”

Republicans were also bitter that two of their candidates for governor, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam and Rep. Ron DeSantis, did little to help Buchanan. Meanwhile, the leading Democratic candidates for governor put aside their differences and pitched in for Good.

The only major national figure to help Buchanan: Trump’s former campaign manager, lobbyist Corey Lewandowski, who was kicked out of Trump’s inner circle before he even seized the GOP nomination for president in 2016.

Republicans fretted about the size of Good’s win in Sarasota. It was far larger than state Sen. Annette Taddeo’s win in Miami-Dade and St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman’s victory. Republicans believed that Good was more of an outlier and noted that they won two other recent special elections for state House seats in the Orlando and Tampa areas, though Democrats didn’t contest them seriously.

And because Republicans dominate the levers of power in Florida, they have greater financial resources that can be brought to bear in statewide races and in the multiple contested legislative seats in November. Democrats acknowledge that they’ve been able to win these recent contested elections because they’re able to concentrate their limited fire on one race at a time.

Midterm elections have cursed Florida Democrats as well. Regardless of who’s in office, they’ve consistently lost them statewide for more than two decades. Nelson has been the lone exception.

But, Eldon said, there’s only so much happy talk Republicans can engage in. Eldon said he remembered how, in 2010 and 2014, Democrats were losing in special elections as a prelude to being crushed during the midterm general elections.

“Republicans were saying in 2010 what we’re saying now in special elections. We’re seeing the same thing,” Eldon said. “If Republicans can’t win in Sarasota, it says a lot about the party’s chances.”

njc wrote:

Oh, thanks to increases in the GDP over the past few months, our GDP to national debt ratio has gotten a tick better.  (I'll find the reference if you want.)

Still waiting for the reference that paints a rosy picture of the national debt. How does it comport with the picture Trump's budget paints of the national debt?
 
Opinions
Trump’s reverse merger with the GOP is complete

By David Von Drehle Columnist February 13 at 7:50 PM Email the author

There was a lot of talk in 2016 about Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party, but I wrote at the time that in business terms, the transaction was more like a reverse merger.

Maybe you’re unfamiliar with this particular bit of legal, yet slightly sketchy, legerdemain. A privately owned business wants to sell shares to the public but for whatever reason wishes to avoid the close scrutiny of an initial public offering.

So the business owner finds a near-dead company that is already public, buys it for a song, grafts the private enterprise into the hollow public shell and — voila! — the deed is done. One of my favorite examples involved CoolBrands, which once gave the world such frozen treats as Eskimo Pies and the Chipwich. After the yummy product lines were sold to other companies, only the shell remained on the stock market. A private maker of cleaning products snapped it up, and in a twinkling it was public, selling grill degreasers instead of ice cream.

The George W. Bush presidency left the GOP as hollow as CoolBrands minus the sweets. Botched nation-building projects in Afghanistan and Iraq shook the party’s faith in its Reaganesque freedom agenda. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression rattled its self-image as the party of fiscal competence. Republicans found an identity during the Obama years as the Party of No, but when something more elaborate was needed for the 2016 campaign, the lack of ideas became painfully clear. Sixteen other candidates tried out for the job of chief sales rep, and none could close the deal.

Instead, Trump snapped up the shell of the Republican Party and made it his public vehicle. This reverse merger has been finalized in recent days with a spending bill and proposed budget that no true conservative could love — or even tolerate — given the massive debt they will incur.

But don’t take my word for it. President Trump’s own budget director, the erstwhile tea party conservative Mick Mulvaney, allowed on “Face the Nation” that these Trump-branded debt bombs don’t square with his mothballed former principles. He was asked, were he still in Congress, would he vote in favor?

“Probably not,” Mulvaney replied.

He could drop the modifier, because there is not a chance in the world that the same Mulvaney who used the issue of President Barack Obama’s deficit spending to become the first Republican elected from South Carolina’s 5th District in more than a century would vote for Trump’s trillion-dollar debt debacle.

That Mulvaney is long gone, though, a casualty of the reverse merger. Gone, too, is the fiscal discipline once espoused by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who made a career selling the ice cream of a balanced budget but now peddles Trump’s soft soap. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had plenty of partners in denouncing reckless spending when Obama was minding the store. Now that Trump owns the party, however, Paul is a lonely voice in the night.

Budget discipline is not the only concept Republicans no longer sell. Trump has replaced the free-trade GOP with a protectionist outfit. He’s pushing isolationism and nativism instead of global engagement. Remember how Republicans used to pitch virtue and personal accountability? They’ve become the party of alleged wife-beaters and hush money to porn stars.

But nothing illustrates the reverse merger with Trump more clearly than the Republican-led House of Representatives cheerfully passing tax-cut and spending bills that together will drive the annual deficit past $1 trillion, without the slightest prospect of a balanced budget in their plans. Deficit spending in a slump can be necessary stimulus. To do it on this staggering scale in a period of steady growth and low unemployment is fiscal malpractice.

Republicans used to run on promises that they would make government more efficient by cutting “waste, fraud and abuse.” Forget that, too. Phase one of the first-ever audit of Pentagon budgets recently found the Defense Department is unable to account for some $800 million in spending — by a single agency! Many more defense agencies remain to be audited. Yet the GOP insisted on adding $165billion over two years in new funding for a department that can’t adequately account for the $700 billion per year it already receives.

Lack of transparency is business as usual for Trump, and bankruptcy a familiar harbor. He’s a promoter, a tout, a shill — not a manager. It’s not at all surprising that he would funny up some budget numbers to create an annual fund of about $200 billion and call it a $1.5trillion infrastructure plan. Trump doesn’t compare himself to P.T. Barnum for nothing.

To those of us who value a two-party system, though, it’s a shame to see the conservative party sell itself for scrap. The ticker symbol GOP is now POT: Party of Trump.

njc wrote:

Oh, did you read?  =Mother Jones='s David Corn is facing some pretty stiff sexual charges of his own.

Oh, did you read? =Trump's= General Kelly has some splaining to do about covering up for giving access to classified materials to Rob Porter who didn't have security clearance.

Right Turn Opinion
Kelly needs to come clean(Emphasis mine)
By Jennifer Rubin February 13 at 1:50 PM Email the author

The Post reports:

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray on Tuesday contradicted the White House’s account of when the bureau informed officials about the status of a senior aide’s security-clearance investigation.

White House officials said that they were first contacted in the summer by the FBI about senior aide Rob Porter’s clearance. They also said that the investigation was never completed and that they did not know the extent of the allegations against Porter. He stepped down last week after accusations of spousal abuse by his two ex-wives.

But Wray, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the FBI submitted a partial report on his clearance in March and that the investigation was completed in July.

In other words, it looks like the cover story the White House has concocted is false.

We, along with most of the media, have observed an unusual degree of incoherence and inconsistency in the White House explanation for Rob Porter’s continued access to confidential material and his eventual termination. Now it appears that for days Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and his subordinates misled the American people, and perhaps the president, in making it appear that Porter still had the potential to be granted a final clearance. This is false, raising the question as to why, knowing that he could not qualify for such a clearance, Porter would be kept on and given continued access (we presume) to top classified material.

If not outright lying, Kelly’s handling of this smacks of sheer incompetence. Was he covering up for his unwise decision to keep around an accused wife abuser? Did Kelly defy the normal security clearance process to protect not only Porter but also Jared Kushner and others who cannot qualify for the necessary clearance? We don’t know, but it is hard to argue that Kelly at this point, particularly if he intentionally misled the country, should be permitted to remain.

In a normal administration, Kelly likely would have been fired by now. In this White House, we don’t know if Trump had approved Porter remaining on and therefore consented to the Kelly cover-up or whether the president was bamboozled along with the rest of the country. If Kelly remains, the former explanation becomes more plausible — and more reprehensible.

At this point, Congress should take the unusual step of requiring Kelly to come testify, whether or not Trump fires him. He needs to answer, behind closed doors if need be:

How did Porter keep his job without the appropriate clearance?
Did they understand the security risk (e.g., blackmail) in allowing Porter to remain?
How many others denied permanent clearance in the White House have closed files but retain access to classified material?
Did Trump approve these security arrangements?
Why was Kushner denied clearance? Was it related to his inexplicable failures to disclose Russia-related financial material and meetings?

Hillary Clinton sure has reason to wonder why her home email server was such a to-do while this White House allows, presumably, a slew of characters with questionable backgrounds access to our nation’s secrets. Isn’t it time for Trump to come clean and then justify why his White House plays fast and loose with our nation’s secrets?

Memphis Trace

Quote Post 42