Day: December 14, 2016

Closing Thought–14Dec16

Benghazi–Is it finally over?

For what seems like a lifetime the American people have been head about the head and shoulders with the Congressional Benghazi investigation……and yesterday it was announced without fanfare that the investigation was over and the report submitted….

The special congressional investigation into the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi is officially over now that the panel filed its final report the day before the House adjourned for the year.

The Select Committee on Benghazi initially released its findings in June but remained in place for months afterward trying to declassify supporting documents like emails and interview transcripts for public release.

The final report, not including dissenting views from committee Democrats, clocks in at more than 322,000 words. It was added to the official House record without fanfare on Dec. 7 by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the panel’s chairman.

The panel, which spent more than $7.8 million over two and a half years, disbanded at the end of the 114th Congress, before a new Congress begins in January.

Interesting how fast the “investigation” was terminated after a GOP win at the polls….I am sure that it was just a coincidence, right?

What the Libertarian Party Wants on Foreign Policy

Let me begin by say  that I am not now or ever been a Libertarian…..but that does not preclude me from appreciating some of their issues.

I especially like their stand on American intervention around the world……most of which I can support…..

During my daily search for the news I came across an article in the National Interest website……

Let us not be hostage to how things have been done in the past.

This year, record numbers of Americans voted for Libertarian candidates. The Libertarian presidential nominee, Gov. Gary Johnson, received over four million votes, three times the previous record. For perspective, four million votes is about the voter turnout in a state the size of Virginia. He did this without the tremendous funding and free media attention that Clinton and Trump received.

Notably, Johnson was very popular in multiple polls of active-duty military. One can reasonably theorize that this is because of Gov. Johnson’s stance on the use of military force. Gov. Johnson advocates limiting the use of our military by withdrawing from regional conflicts and focusing purely on defense.

Source: What the Libertarian Party Wants on Foreign Policy | The National Interest

These are issue that I also think important but I do not foresee Mr. Trump really giving a shit about right or wrong…..

The Dangerous Folly of Provoking China

It seems like a year or mores since the phone call heard around the world was reported…..the Trump call with the leader of Taiwan……

Of course some on the Right say it is NO big deal….and then on the Dem side they are concerned what effect that it will have on our international dealings with China after the Trump gang takes control.

Personally, I do not watch the Asia desk very closely,…I do look for situations that could possibly lead to some sort of confrontation that will inevitably involve our military…..and this is the possibility to become more hot than some want to admit…..

While doing my daily task of reading the news from all angles I came across a piece written the American Conservative…..

Trump added to his earlier Taiwan blunder with more ill-considered comments on China policy yesterday:

“I fully understand the One China policy, but I don’t know why we have to be bound by a One China policy [bold mine-DL] unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade,” he said.

“I mean, look,” he continued, “we’re being hurt very badly by China with devaluation; with taxing us heavy at the borders when we don’t tax them; with building a massive fortress in the middle of the South China Sea, which they shouldn’t be doing; and, frankly, with not helping us at all with North Korea.”

“I don’t want China dictating to me,” he said.

Source: The Dangerous Folly of Provoking China | The American Conservative

I ask…does he truly understand the “One China” policy?

I may not agree with much written in TAC but on this they made some excellent points….. not many of Trump’s supporters care about our foreign policy and that will be the death of us (a figure of speech…do not read more into it than that)….

Is Trump A Socialist?

Did you hear that?  That was the sound of millions of Trump supporters asses slamming shut!

Please read the post and not just the title like so many do…..

Ever read something that makes sit back and have a good chuckle?  Well I found one over the weekend……

Surely you have heard about the deal the Trump made with Carrier (UTC)…..the one about the jobs….ring a bell yet?

Don’t strain that sleeping brain……

With his deal to keep Carrier’s factory in Indianapolis open, Donald Trump has fulfilled a big campaign promise, saved 1,100 highly paid American jobs—and, once again, created an enormous controversy. Carrier, which had planned to shift production to Mexico, will receive at least $7 million in financial incentives from Indiana. Critics say this sets a dangerous precedent, and wonder whether Trump is planning to make deals with every company that threatens to move jobs overseas. A round-up of coverage:

  • Trump praised the deal in a visit to the factory Thursday, CBS reports. “Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences. It’s not gonna happen,” he said.
  • United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, “took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country,” Bernie Sanders writes in a Washington Post op-ed. With the deal, he writes Trump has endangered previously safe jobs by signaling “to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives.”
  • White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters the deal is “obviously good news,” but hardly comparable to the 804,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector he said President Obama created, the Guardian reports. Trump would need to “make 804 more announcements just like that” to equal what Obama did, Earnest said.
  • Trump revealed to Carrier workers that despite his promise to keep jobs there, he hadn’t really been talking about that particular factory. “I said Carrier will never leave,” he said. “But that was a euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all the other companies from here on in.” He said he decided to get on the phone to execs anyway “because of the love affair I’ve had—this has been a very special state to us.”
  • Jimmy Pethokoukis, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, didn’t pull his punches in an interview with CNBC. He said Trump’s remarks were the worst economic speech since Walter Mondale’s attack on Reaganomics in 1984. He says it is “absolutely chilling” that American corporations will now have to make business decisions based on “fear of punitive actions based on who knows what criteria exactly from a presidential administration.”
  • NPR notes that United Technologies makes a lot of money from government contracts, suggesting “strong-arm” tactics played a role in the deal. Analysts including George Mason University professor of economics Tyler Cowen, a libertarian, warns that “crony capitalism” could prevail under Trump, with plenty of rewards flowing to companies that please the president.
  • But at the Carrier plant itself, the mood is unsurprisingly jubilant—and pro-Trump. The announcement was a “Christmas miracle,” Jeffery Blackford, who was worked for the company for 25 years, tells the Indianapolis Star, which reports that under the deal, the average wage will be $30.91 an hour. “Hopefully this right here will be a start of a new beginning, where we can stop manufacturing from leaving this country.”

That should catch you up…..

A leading conservative writer has stepped up and given what Trump has done a name……

GEORGE WILL: So far Donald Trump’s style is personal, not to say visceral, and ad hoc. And what that adds up to is a kind of use of presidential power absolutely unconstrained by law and statute and all those other niceties. The problem is when you have, in the Carrier case, political power used to bring pressure upon a privately held corporation that has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value and drive them off with political pressure from making economic decisions about economic assets, you are, in effect, at the end of the day, getting the federal government involved in capital allocation. There is a name for that, it’s called socialism.

This ought to put the conservative writer on the shit list of all those slobbering Trump supporters……

After accusing the Left for decades of being a socialist group and plotting to somehow install a socialist government….we find the Trump is more socialist than the Left…..according to Will.

I cannot wait for the mindless dribble that should come my way…..but…….

Please before you slugs on the Right have anything to say….leave me out of it…..your point of contention is with George Will, a fellow conservative….all I did was show that not all conservatives are willing to kiss his ass like you.

Yet Another Undeclared US War

Have ever noticed how many wars we are fighting that has not been authorized by Congress?  Do you even care?

The thing is that there are Americans dying in these conflicts….conflicts that have NOT been authorized….does that make them illegal?

What is it about America and its twenty-first-century wars? They spread continually – there are now seven of them; they never end; and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, most of the time it would be easy enough to believe that, except for the struggle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there were no conflicts underway. Take the Afghan War, for an example. Now 15 years old and heating up again as the Taliban takes more territory and U.S. operations there grow, it was missing in action in the 2016 election campaign. Neither presidential candidate debated or discussed that war, despite the close to 10,000 U.S. troops (and more private contractors) still based there, the fact that U.S. air power has again been unleashed in that country, and the way those in the Pentagon are talking about it as a conflict that will extend well into the 2020s. It makes no difference. Here, it’s simply the war that time forgot. Similar things might be said, even if on a lesser scale, about expanding American operations in Somalia and ongoing ones in Libya. Nor is the intensity of the air war in Syria or Iraq much emphasized or grasped by the American public

Source: Yet Another Undeclared US War – Antiwar.com Original by — Antiwar.com

The conflict raging in the small Middle East country of Yemen is one of these so-called “undeclared wars”……

Yes Saudi is an ally….but we really need to draw a line somewhere that keeps us out of these things and protects American troops from dying for NO other reason than someone has a hard on…..and others see a profit making opportunity.