If Trump can get corporate tax reform done and otherwise stop harassing the economy the way Mr. Obama did, a judicious America might even decide it had a lucky election night. An improvement in the growth rate by itself would allow Mr. Trump rightly to say he left America better positioned to confront its long-term fiscal challenges. That’s not nothing.
A cartoon in the Eisenhower era had the president saying to his cabinet, “Gentlemen, what should we refrain from doing next?”
by Dan Henniger April 27
Back in 2016, Speaker Paul Ryan and the House leadership held public hearings, conducted negotiations inside the House conference, and published texts of the proposed legislation to repeal and reform ObamaCare. The American Health Care Act that emerged from this process had both a political and policy purpose.
Its political purpose was to create a bill that could survive the House, survive the Senate, survive a conference and make it to Mr. Trump’s desk to fulfill one of his and the party’s biggest political promises.
The policy purpose was to lay a foundation on which Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and his SWAT team of reformers, such as Indiana Medicaid specialist Seema Verma, could help Congress clean up the rest of ObamaCare over the next two years—moving away from the 2010 law’s 2,000 pages of legal babel and toward a market-based system.
With momentum from that accomplishment, the Trump White House and the Republican-controlled Congress would roll forward into the next item on the ambitious, first-year Trumpian agenda: a historic tax-reform bill to clean up the tax code and restore growth of the kind last seen in the 1980s and ’90s.
From there, Congress would move on to the other pieces—infrastructure, the funding needs of the military, and cleaning out the sludge in the financial system produced by Dodd-Frank.
And then came the Freedom Caucuses, the Tuesday Groups, the Ted Cruzes and Tom Cottons —all those who helped kill the health-care bill.
Victor Davis Hanson on April 24, 2017
Trump is a flawed individual, but he is hardly the near-sadistic womanizer as was JFK. Nor has he used coercion to force himself on women as did Bill Clinton on numerous occasions—still a feminist hero. I did read in the autobiographical Dreams From My Father and from other biographies, how Barack Obama habitually used “blow” and decided at one point not to date “white” women any longer.
I make a small prediction, When the present lengthy review is finished, the story will not be Trump’s purported collusion with Vladimir Putin, but rather the lengths to which the Obama administration went to reverse-target political opponents and to leak monitored conversations illegally to the public—an Obama administration trait of abusing constitutional rights unfortunately not confined to Trump alone, but apparent earlier also with the Holder/AP, Lois Lerner/IRS, and Brennan/Senate computer scandals.
Month: April 2017
Happiness Is…
Song Lyrics You Only Thought You Knew
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On a dark desert highway, cool whip in my hair
I’ve two chickens to paralyze
Hold me closer Tony Danzer
Count the head lice on the highway
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Theeer’s a bath room on the right
Cherry Ice Cream Anyone?
Another Week Has Gone By
We are in New Mexico star gazing this week. Hope you had a great week.
Trump continues to reverse the stifling rules and regulations imposed by that last guy. Way to go!
Some Bad News
Think again if you don’t think this concerns you. One of Obama’s legacies is a
debt bomb that has short fuse. Interest rates will be going up and all the debt that Obama took on is going to start really hurting the budget. The Treasury is particularly exposed to higher rates because its debt matures so quickly; half of its marketable securities must be refinanced within the next three years.
On Being Green
A green electric car isn’t as green as we’d like it to be – whether it’s the emissions used to create the car or the coal-produced electricity we’re adding into it – the ‘green’ measures can get a little murky.
“For example, a petrol-driven vehicle produces 119g CO2-e/km, of which most are on-road emissions. In comparison, an electric vehicle produces zero on-road emissions.”
“However, if electricity is generated from coal to charge an electric vehicle it produces 139g CO2-e/km well-to-wheel emissions, compared with only 9g CO2-e/km well-to-wheel emissions with electricity from renewable energy sources.”
Warping The Meaning Of Words
There are also lots of Orwellian nouns and adjectives to describe those from other countries who broke federal immigration laws to enter and reside in the United States. “Illegal alien” used to be a neutral and descriptive legal term — one still preferred by the Supreme Court — but is now seen as counterproductive to the agendas of the open-borders movement. Thus the more inexact “undocumented alien” followed, although few who entered illegally ever had immigration “documents” of any sort.
Next came the term “undocumented immigrant” — on the theory that the ancient word “alien” (from the Latin word alienus, meaning “belonging to another”) is offensive and also unhelpful to the open-borders project.
Finally, the ambiguous word “migrant” is being used to suggest that there is really no difference between entering and exiting a country under any circumstances.
How Do People Form Opinions?
From an interview with cognitive scientist Steven Sloman.
I really do believe that our attitudes are shaped much more by our social groups than they are by facts on the ground. We are not great reasoners. Most people don’t like to think at all or like to think as little as possible. And by most, I mean roughly 70 percent of the population. Even the rest seem to devote a lot of their resources to justifying beliefs that they want to hold, as opposed to forming credible beliefs based only on fact.
How Does One Become A Liberal?
A few ways come to mind
Their parents were liberal and they bought into it.
Their parents were conservative and they rebelled.
Four years at most any college.
Working for the government
Working in a Union job
Seeking to enforce order in a chaotic world
Why We Join Cults
Not just James Jones style of cults, but churches, and dare I say political groups.
My number one guess would be Finding Purpose in Life.
Year after year, the world becomes more a complex place to live. In times of confusion and uncertainty when people feel lost, extreme groups offer absolute answers to questions that people have. Many people find comfort in seeing the world in terms of good and evil, right and wrong. Cult leaders offer simple solutions in a way that makes sense, and they know how to motivate people to devote their life to the leader’s cause.
Other reasons for being drawn to a cult:
Post-Breakup Blues
Striving for Perfection
Low Self-Esteem
They Want Someone to Take Care of Them
Trying to Save the World
Fed Up with Society
They Have No Idea It’s a Cult
Paddles
Regular readers know that Bacall and I both like wooden paddles. I have always fixated on them. She moved from leather to wood a decade or so back. The ones I prefer are meaner than her favorites, but we share a few paddles.
Today’s post is about nothing more than paddles.
This one is from Devlion Oneill’s Blog. It looks like a lake in Glacier NP to me. She looks like perfection in a carbon based life form. I learned that Teeny’s (logo on the paddle) is brand of swim wear.
A man in Texas likes to have lasses to his home to taste his paddles. Seems he has plenty of takers.
Here is a classic Assume The Position pose. Only for the limber.
I have heard paddles called lot of things, but this is a new one to me.
Amusing
Well, the sexual posts are done and I find there are only two posts left in the Drafts folder. Guess I will have to get busy and create some new ones. Bacall was supposed to write one on a special spanking she got, but that’s been over two weeks and I am sure she could recall the details. Guess I will have to give another kind of special spanking.
Anywho, our paddlings continue and we hope your’s do also.
Ronnie, don’t put the eye chart over your husband’s desk.
The Weeks Musings
While Obama played golf and vacationed and lectured us…
North Korea increased its missile launches and loudly promised nuclear destruction of the West and its allies.
Russia violated its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and absorbed borderlands of former Soviet republics.
Iran harassed American ships in the Persian Gulf and issued serial threats against the U.S.
China built artificial island bases in the South China Sea to send a message about its imminent management of Asian commerce.
In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State killed thousands in medieval fashion and sponsored terrorist attacks inside Western countries.
And know it’s been confirmed that Obama knew that the weapons were being transferred from Bengazi to Syria were all too attractive to AQI and that they grabbed them and Obama knew of the attack 10 days in advance.
More will come out as Obama supporters are no longer controlling the release of documents.
And all that is just on the foreign side. I could make a longer list for the domestic side. Trump has a LOT reset work just to get back to even.
Obama left his successor many time bombs—think chemical weapons in Syria and the collapsing Affordable Care Act. But a burning fuse that gets less attention are the rising interest payments on the national debt. While Obama was doubling the national debt over eight years, the Fed’s monetary policies spared him from the fiscal consequences. The chickens are home now and it will make budget reform near impossible. Another Obama legacy.
Think of it this way. If your mortgage payment went up 20% this year, what would do? Ask for a raise to cover the increase or tighten spending?
I was listening to Billy Joel’s 40-year-old Captain Jack this last week and this line hit me as him being prescient of the current 20 year-olds.
Well you’re 21 and still your mother makes your bed
And that’s too long
Dan Henninger wrote:
There was only one Trump promise—Make America Great Again. If you type that phrase into Google Translate, this is what should appear: Get the American economic engine retuned or pack it in. Every other pet peeve or project is secondary.
There are two levers for achieving this goal: tax policy and deregulation. To get there, the Trump presidency just inserted two key players.
Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, an expert on what makes a tax code productive, becomes chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Neomi Rao, director of George Mason University’s gloriously named Center for the Study of the Administrative State, became the Trump White House’s czarina of regulation.
What Happened To Them
Anyone know what happened to this young couple. They appeared, then disappeared.
I’ll Bet You Have Not Tried This Position
Warning sex depicted
You would not have to be lazy to try this.
Just think of all the unused treadmills in the world.
Chasity – You Got To Shitting Me
I came across this blog on an FLR blog. I dropped my jaw. Simply amazed. We don’t begin to understand.
She begins:
I am not a big fan of penetrative sex so he has only been allowed to enter me twice since we married, three years ago. I allow him to masturbate, in the bathroom, once a month which seems to me to be more than enough.
If you want to read the whole post it’s here Dominant Wife
Maybe this will take your mind somewhere else. Excellent cardio/
We are happily eating our way through Louisana.
Our Bottoms Burn 