The upcoming Supreme Court nomination approval will certainly prove important. SCOTUS should likely hear any number of cases involving whether Republican and Democratic presidents must abide by the same laws, immigration and spying not the least.
The cat is out of the bag and it looks like it’s about to have kittens. Obamagate is here.
Multiple sources claim Obama used British Intelligence to spy on Donald Trump. While British surveillance is certainly ahead—with their soon-to-be-released drone ‘robo-cops’—why does the US president need British help? He’s not just attempting to flatter James Bond fans. When a president enters through the back door, too many questions come up. Why would the most powerful politician in the world need to have someone else do his work? Is he not allowed to? Does he want to keep his fingerprints off a smoking gun? Does Obama know something we don’t?
Trump supporters and Trump dissidents will both honker down on their positions. Some former Trump dissidents will flip to support him when they see what he was up against. Obama fans will view Obama as having been in such a desperate predicament that drastic means were necessary. Trump fans will view Trump just the same, in a desperate predicament. No arguments will persuade anyone. Only events will sway a few late bloomers.Read More
After the rains, flowers in the Southwest are in full bloom. One highlight is purple, the color for The People’s Party. As for the east coast, things are frozen, both in weather and in politics. Lowering taxes could take time. Getting health care laws to lower health care prices and unshackle employers could take more time. The leading political party’s interests are divided and their opposition has no tactic beneath them. Democrats are filibustering every political appointee as Obama appointees persist; Trump fired 46 Obama-appointed prosecutors. Of course, opposition filibusters and firing federal prosecutors for any new, incoming president are both standard practice. Conservatives expected as much and don’t demonstrate any shock, yet Liberals usually think their loss deserves exception. Everything suggests that Republicans will gain ground in the Senate come 2018, thanks to the Democrats refusal on cloture. Therein lies the real danger: supermajority.
A group of professors had a wild idea: What if Trump had been a woman and Hillary had been a man? Surely that would have flipped election results. Actually, after a carefully-rehearsed reenactment of the presidential debates by one skilled actor and one skilled actress, Liberal supporters were in for another surprise. Hillary supporters adored Trump’s words when they came from a woman and hated Hillary’s words when they came from a man. After learning the truth, they didn’t change their political preferences, of course.
People rarely change their opinions, given new information, no matter what political party they are from. While Conservatives will tout the results of this little theatrical-political experiment, they reacted with much of the same blindness over news about Bush family dealings. Note, the term “Trump dissident” is important in describing this presidential term. Most of the people who voted for Hillary didn’t like her, supported Bernie Sanders, and liked Trump least of all, to say the least.
Hillary’s team met with the Russians before the election, according to the Kremlin. That will make the upcoming hearings even more interesting. The game of chairs keeps revolving. No political victory is final. No enemy is ultimate. And no pettiness evades anyone.
Corruption reports are in and still coming. Some include the EPA functioning as a laundering screen and Obama organizing post-presidential politics. It’s a machine, as much as reports go.
Now the public has multiple reports, just coming in, that six agencies under presidential control wire tapped Donald Trump as a candidate and president-elect. This has two important ramifications, among others. Firstly, with so many court orders that Obama’s subordinates pushed for even after warrant requests were rejected, few stones have been left unturned, still with no evidence of fowl play and clearly that Russians did not decide America’s election outcome. While this begs the question as to why six agencies went after the president’s political opposition leader without finding any inditing evidence, the stronger implication is vindicating: the accused is best proven innocent when proven innocent by his own accusers. The second ramification is that Obama must have either known what was going on or was too incompetent to know what every president should know—six agencies under his control were going after the same political opponent.
Now, we have reports of the Obama administration continuing to grasp for political influence, something that ex-presidents just don’t do.
Weigh the game of powers. If Obama didn’t have the controls to remain in office, efforts to control after leaving office won’t work either. Supporters secretly adore the idea of an Obama coup. But, it can’t happen. History’s uprisings favor the small and new, not the old and retired. Take Hillary for example. Making her Secretary of State was the perfect way to make sure she would tire and fumble and make herself susceptible, whether Obama intended that or not.
Like Jesse Jackson and those who trailed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once a movement peaks it can’t return. Obama’s best days in America are over. But, he’s still kicking and squirming. He didn’t quit while he was ahead. People will tire of him as they did of Napoleon. And, that means more political power will shift to the Republican establishment; then, pray that Heaven may help us all. Few things are more dangerous than one-party power. While we may not get there, the country is headed for Republican tyranny, thanks to the Obama years of over-reach.
For the first time since 2012, Chicago went six days without a shooting that results in a death. Shootings continue, but almost a week with no “homicides” is a record. Some people will care; other people won’t.
Americans love flags. The over-sized flag, the “Star Spangled Banner”, was a strategic tool of Fort McHenry at the Battle of Baltimore and the US national anthem itself is named after the flag. If the United States ever truly intended to communicate that it believes Beijing seats the rightful government over the island of Taiwan, then Washington DC would have demanded that Taiwan fly the Chinese Communist flag over its own flag, like Hong Kong does. But, it didn’t and they didn’t ask. The test of what Donald Trump thinks about China is not a question of how many times he sees the word “China” on his globe at home, but what flags he accepts flown where.
Is China wise to what’s going on? Perhaps money is making all the difference. China’s PLA Navy is headed for an increased budget. If money was China’s answer, perhaps money tipped-off Beijing in the first place.
According to Obama Treasury rules, China is only 1/3 of a “currency manipulator”, exceeding a $20B trade deficit with the States. The other two rules relate inflation to GDP and official currency purchases to GDP—two things where China plays by a different set of rules than American economics. China “declares” its own currency value, it is not determined by the markets, making what the US refers to as “inflation” irrelevant to China. The second irrelevant Obama rule relates to “official” currency purchases. If only economics were only affected by “official” purchases, many other economic problems would be solved. But, economies are affected by “actual” purchasing, not merely whatever we happen to label as “official” this decade. The Chinese, especially, are experts at looking good “officially” while doing the bulk of their work under the table. Why else would Asians be so focused on cram schools and testing?
Then, there is the task of calculating “GDP” in a heavy back-and-forth trade economy. In 2011, the US slapped tariffs on China-made solar panels, which were made with materials imported from the US, which China also slapped a tariff on. Not only is actual “domestic” product difficult to measure in a “Venn diagram” of overlapping markets, there is also the problem that China’s government behaves like a company itself—benefiting from tariff revenue, thereby triggering another slew of investing and purchasing opportunities. If economics were a pair of glasses, China operates in ultraviolet light that no pair of US lenses can detect.
So, not only were the Obama Treasury “currency manipulator” rules an attempt to measure the light with a wind sensor, Trump gets what Trump wants. If China is destined for the “currency manipulator” list, it will get on that list one way or another, and there is a laundry list of ways that can happen.
But, then, there is North Korea.
While the “experts” lecture the world about how “trade wars” always backfire, China harbors its own trade war with the government in Northern Korea. Kim Jong Un isn’t happy with Beijing and Beijing wants to talk about it with the US.
After three weeks, President Trump finally had his phone call with Chinese President Xi. The report is that Trump will uphold the United States’ long-standing “One China” policy, in which China proper and the island of Taiwan are one country and that country’s government seat is in Beijing. The effect is that the United States does not have an “embassy” with Taiwan, but the US has an “institute” and Taiwan an “economic and cultural” office; both are still considered envoys and consulates, offering passport and visa services. While self-important voices in news and politics view the phone call as a phone call, much more is happening beneath the surface, and Beijing may only be partially aware of what all is going on.
Being a Socialist State, China’s government is itself in business, both cooperative and competitive. China’s Communist Party can directly compete with social companies like Facebook, news networks like CNN, web service companies like Google, almost any manufacturer, and, of course not in the least, construction. China’s former business associate and new “boss”, as it were, of America calls all the “important” countries in the world, except China. The delay itself is a message to China like a father telling the disobedient son to wait his turn while everyone else at the dinner table has first choice. To China’s “indirect-implication” culture, it was no less than a smack in the face, no matter how friendly and reportedly positive the phone call was. No doubt China feels this somewhat, though President Xi probably doesn’t take the snub as seriously as he should.
Even allowing State-controlled newspapers, such as Xinhua news, to let three weeks of silence be known merely by reporting the phone call shows that Trump knows how to cut through promulgated gate keeping. Knowing how his old trading partner thinks, Trump knew that Beijing would jump to report the phone call to give President Xi notoriety, forgetting the deeper implication that the phone call didn’t happen for three weeks into Trump’s term. Now, the Chinese people know that Trump didn’t talk to their president until three weeks after taking office, yet he received a phone call from Taipei only days after he was elected—Beijing made sure the people knew that. When trying to control information in one’s own country, that was an oversight. If Beijing were wise to the three-week snub, no newspaper in China would be allowed to report the phone call until two months later, with the comment, “Oh, they are presidents. They talk when it suits them.”
In social battles of implication and indirection, the Chinese have endurance and mastery, but the West has a less frequent and even more subtle way of implication that often eludes the East. It is difficult to recognize deep implication when implication is used on a daily basis for routine communication. Americans trust Trump with China more, now, knowing that he can snub them for three weeks and State-run Xinhua news will consider it a “good first step”.
There are other problems—not being able to quit while so far ahead and declare victory after 70 years of war on the books, the US selling weapons to Taiwan—but the three week snub “trumps” them all. American people have often asked themselves who China thinks they are fooling. After this three-week snub thoroughly reported under the title of a “phone call”, the American people, Democrats and Republicans alike, certainly know who is successfully fooling China.
Upheaval continues to take from in both protests and weather. Houston immigrants are in near panic and, now, the Oroville Dam in California is in trouble and 188k people are evacuating.
Trump’s executive actions have a long history of basis, including Congress having given the president indefinite power concerning national security, Presidents Lincoln and Jackson having arrested dissident judges—more extreme than anything Trump has done so far. Trump is complying with the rulings of the courts, even though he presses on.
The Senate has the “Constitutional Option”, often called the “Nuclear Option”, where the president of the Senate, the Vice President, can call the Senate to vote without the Senate’s consent where “matters of the Constitution” are concerned. This means that the standing majority of Senators will be able to approve judges. Problems of Senate rules have come up, seemingly that the Senate has made rules that tie its own hands. That itself is a Constitutional question: Can the Senate write its own rules making itself unable to function?
In the end, all objection and opposition to Trump will make the Republican case stronger, including the protests from dissident constituents in Republican Congressional districts. Even if Trump did not have the majority support of the country, the Republicans in the House and Senate do. It seems clear that the minority is loud and the silent majority is busy at work, having finished their project in November. Still, dissidents have the evidence they need to encourage themselves to carry on. Difficult times remain ahead.Read More
