While I’m a little disappointed to hear Ethan isn’t planning to collaborate with anyone in a future Freestartr, it was certainly cool to hear him give a shout out to Arkhaven. Especially the way he laughed about it afterwards.
Author: VD
Totally not a crisis actor
There is something familiar about this guy, though. I’m sure I’ve seen him in something before.
What really happened
Or so we are told. But it sounds credible enough. Notice who rushed to convince Trump not to veto it: Pence, Short, Mattis, Ryan, and McConnell. Remember that when things start getting interesting.
Immigration seemed to frustrate Trump the most. He secured $1.6 billion for some fencing and levees on the border; it comes with strings attached and the amount fell far short of the $25 billion requested for a wall. He was also eager to blame Democrats for the failure to reach a deal to protect dreamers by coming up with an alternative to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that he ended last year.
Even Friday morning, Trump asked aides how he could still get more money for the border wall and whether some of the items that Democrats celebrated were in the bill — such as money for what are known as sanctuary cities and Planned Parenthood — were really included in the package, according to people familiar with the discussions who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity.
He was told that it was unlikely he could get more wall funding and that Democrats did secure the items they were touting. He grew angry. So, shortly before 9 a.m., Trump took to Twitter.
“I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded,” Trump tweeted.
Inside the White House, senior officials such as Vice President Pence, legislative director Marc Short and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis were summoned to persuade the president to sign the bill and avoid a shutdown.
Mattis stressed that the Pentagon desperately needed the funding boost — a $66 billion increase over last year’s levels — that the bill would provide. Aides told Trump it would be “historic” funding, a word that he likes to hear.
Short argued that the funding package would give the president money for immigration and infrastructure programs and that the White House had already committed to signing the bill. Trump was given a list of all the planes, submarines and other military equipment the bill would fund, a list the president would rattle off later in his hastily organized appearance in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) made his own pitch, calling the president about 30 minutes after the veto threat. Trump continued to say the bill was terrible, but Ryan again touted benefits for the military. McConnell (R-Ky.) called Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, two White House aides said, to keep tabs on the situation.
Woe is us
For future reference. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are not. Only time will tell. But at least we will have a public record of whose analysis was correct and whose was not.
The day the Trump presidency died
So bye, bye MAGA dream in the sky:
This is probably the beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency. The midterms are shaping up to be a bloodbath. The markets now put the odds of Democrats re-taking the House at 68{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}. The odds of Democrats gaining control of the Senate is 40{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}, an astoundingly high figure given Democrats are defending 25 of their seats–more than half–while Republicans are defending just eight of their own.
The last two years of Trump’s term will be one of perpetual Russia, Russia!, RUSSIA!! and impeachment proceedings initiated by a Democrat congress riding its “blue wave”, while pusillanimous Republicans meekly position themselves in various ways in opposition to the isolated president.
This budget bill is, in short, a middle finger to President Trump. Its larger message: populism is no match for the Deep State. The contest is an unequal one. It’s almost cruel the way the congresscritters—Chuck Ryan and Paul Schumer, Nancy McConnell and Mitch Pelosi—it’s almost cruel the way they are grinning and chuckling and high-fiving among themselves over how easy it’s been to kick sand in the President’s face.
I’m afraid we can now see that the populist victories of two years ago that filled us with so much hope were in fact a false dawn, a mirage. For all its spirit and vigor and successes, the populist movement is amateurish and uncoordinated. It’s no match for the seasoned, hardened operatives of the Deep State, with their decades of experience at gaming Western democratic systems.
Who else merits quoting? There is no need to quote Never Trumpers like Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro. And the Z-man already publicly abandoned the Trump Train and disowned the God-Emperor, so quoting him would be redundant.
Catch rule revision
The NFL’s new catch rule guidelines look promising:
The NFL’s competition committee has recommended changing the language of the league’s catch rule in an effort to avoid future controversial calls.
The proposal seeks to define a catch as:
1. Control of the ball.
2. Two feet down or another body part.
3. A football move such as:
• A third step;
• Reaching/extending for the line-to-gain
• Or the ability to perform such an act.
The recommendation, revealed Wednesday by NFL senior vice president of officiating Al Riveron, will be voted on by owners next week, perhaps as early as Tuesday. The new rule will get rid of provisions pertaining to the slight movement of the football once it hits the receiver’s hands and the going-to-the-ground requirement.
It’s interesting to see that despite the SJW-convergence of the league office and all the promises to fund this or that SJW-inspired initiative, no team has signed either of the two architects of the anthem protests. It appears the NFL’s general managers are less committed to the self-destruction of their sport than the league or its owners.
The God-Emperor’s 300
I’m half-amused and half-appalled by all the people declaring themselves off the Trump Train over the signing of the omnibus bill and the bump stock ban. What part of “two steps forward, one step back” do you not understand? What part of “lose the battle but win the war” escapes you? Are you Spartan or potter?
No one has claimed the God-Emperor is perfect. Indeed, as I have repeatedly pointed out, one of his best traits is his ability to admit his mistakes and learn from them. No one is claiming that these moves were intentional 12D underwater chess tactics, as he is clearly dealing with a frontal attack from the Democrat-Republicans in both the House and Senate as well as a number of hidden attacks to his flanks and rear from the Deep State.
Do you really think it is a coincidence that the Playboy and porn star stories are front and center on every media outlet while his daughter-in-law is divorcing his son, Theresa May is trying to start a war with Russia, and the stock market is undergoing daily 400-point swings? Do you seriously believe these things are not related to the God-Emperor taking the scalps of the #1 and #2 at the FBI, firing his Secretary of State, and the recent revelations about Facebook?
And do you not understand what these things represent on the Deep State’s part? They represent desperation. They represent fear. They represent real change and they are the early signs of something important. I thought James Woods put it well in response to ex-CIA director John Brennan’s open threats to the President.
You couldn’t get a toothpick up this guy’s ass with a pound of Vaseline right now. You’re next, swamp rat.
Ask yourself this: why are they behaving in this fashion? It isn’t because they control the God-Emperor. It isn’t because they have broken him. It is because they are afraid of him and what he is in the process of doing.
If you’re off the Trump Train, so be it. Supporting the man is psychologically arduous, because it requires constantly resisting the social pressure to submit to the media narrative. I had my own moment of doubt, not about the God-Emperor, but his Grand Inquisitor, back in July because I could not see what Jeff Sessions was doing or understand why he seemed to be focused entirely on something that I thought was irrelevant. It subsequently turned out that he was not. Of course, the human mind being the self-deceiving instrument that it is, I actually had to look up whatever it was that had me so frustrated with the guy who has methodically taken out one after another of the Deep State’s most strategically situated tools.
In my opinion, the God-Emperor has more than earned our continued confidence, even if he makes mistakes and missteps that are much bigger than simply signing an inevitable bill or allowing an enemy Congress its head. If you don’t have that confidence in the man any longer, then you don’t. So be it; these things are what they are. I’m certainly not going to criticize anyone for it, just as I refused to criticize Scott Adams when he lost his confidence in October 2016. You are free to disembark the train at any time and quietly despair. The rest of us, the God-Emperor’s 300, will fight in the shade.
Democrats to the left. Republicans to the other left.
No friends, no allies, and the Deep State rising.
The God-Emperor stands alone but for his 300.
We may win. We may not.
We will not despair and we will not stop.
Trumpslide 2020!
Spartans, what is your profession?
Mailvox: trade and capital flows
Peter Thiel raised some questions about trade, capital flows, and tariffs at a recent talk at the Economic Club of New York. Specifically, why does capital flow in the opposite direction now than it did in 1900, when slow growing economies like the UK invested in fast growing economies like Russia and Argentina?
There is something really odd going on in the trade relations… The way you’d expect things to be working in a healthily globalizing world is that capital would flow from the slow growing to the fast growing economies, from the developed to the developing world. This was the way trade patterns looked in 1900, which was a relatively open, free trade world, where the UK had a current account surplus of 4{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} of GDP and the capital got exported to invest in Russian railroads or Argentina, or all sorts of other countries that had higher growth rates and promised a higher return on capital. That’s the way globalization is supposed to look.
Today, it’s quite the opposite, where capital is flowing uphill from China to the US and is the other side of these enormous current account and trade deficits that the United States has. And so, we are exporting $100 billion a year to China, importing $450 billion a year from China. And China, an economy that’s growing at, say, 6.5{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} a year is investing in an economy that is maybe growing at 3{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} a year, when the flows should be the other way around.
And so I think that tells you that something is incredibly off. It pushes you to have to ask questions, why it is off? Why does nobody in China want to buy anything from the US? Why are our goods so undesirable? Or, are there policies that skew things too much towards consumption in the US and more to investment in other places, and should we be rethinking that? Or, are there intellectual property things that are not being enforced? There are a lot of very granular questions that we need to be asking.
Even if free trade is good in theory, and that’s what you want to get to, I think the way you get there is, perhaps, by not being too dogmatic and too doctrinaire. And if you have people negotiate trade treaties who are doctrinaire about free trade, I always get the sense they won’t do that much work because if you negotiate a good trade treaty, that’s a good thing, and if you negotiate a bad trade treaty that still a good thing because we know that all trade is always good for everybody, in all times, in all places. And so we have to always be careful that free trade orthodoxy not become just a euphemism for the sloppiness or the laziness of the people negotiating these treaties.
Capital chases profit. There is more profit to be made in the US financial sector, which eats up about one-third of all profit in the USA, than there is in the non-financial sectors of other, faster-growing economies. That’s my initial thought, anyhow.
The end of the Republican Party
What, exactly, is the point of it anyhow?
President Donald Trump said he signed the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill into law Friday, despite a veto threat and provisions he says he is “unhappy” about.
The president approved the legislation to fund the government through September for national security reasons, as it authorizes a major increase in military spending that the president supports. Trump criticized the rushed process to pass the more than 2,200-page bill released only Wednesday, saying he would “never sign another bill like this again.”
“As a matter of national security, I’ve signed this omnibus bill,” Trump said at the White House on Friday.
I’m not going to even pretend to try to understand this one. No one cares about politicians or presidents professing to be “unhappy” or vowing that they won’t do what they literally just did again again. Hearing a president say he’ll never sign another spending bill is like hearing a crack addict vow that he’ll never smoke another rock or a serial adulterer promising future faithfulness.
Now, I don’t blame Trump for the spending bill. He didn’t push it. This is on the House Republicans and Paul Ryan, not him. But I will blame him for not forcing Congress to override his veto. Apparently not even President Trump understands that no one buys the “a matter of national security” bullshit anymore.
I’ve never been more proud to not be a Republican.
UPDATE: Look, it’s a mistake. It’s not a betrayal. The winning was NEVER going to be unanimous or uninterrupted. Don’t be like the conservatives and leap to embrace defeat as inevitable simply because ONE battle was unnecessarily lost. Or in this case, unnecessarily lost sooner than it would have been; Trump may have known that the Democrat-Republicans had the necessary votes to override his veto and decided not to waste his time fighting an unwinnable battle.
I think he should have for the sake of morale, but it’s not my call. Regardless, this is not the primary front. That’s my take on it. Be frustrated, be angry, but do not despair and do not give up.
Everyone knows now
The media is affecting shock-horror that the American people are beginning to figure out that even their limited form of democracy is a sham and that the Deep State controls both of their political alternatives. And they should, since it was the media’s job to conceal that fact from everyone.
On Monday, the Monmouth University Polling Institute released the results of a survey that found that “a large bipartisan majority… feel that national policy is being manipulated or directed by a ‘Deep State’ of unelected government officials….
According to the survey:”…6-in-10 Americans (60{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) feel that unelected or appointed government officials have too much influence in determining federal policy. Just 26{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} say the right balance of power exists between elected and unelected officials in determining policy. Democrats (59{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}), Republicans (59{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) and independents (62{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) agree that appointed officials hold too much sway in the federal government. (“Public Troubled by ‘Deep State”, Monmouth.edu)
The survey appears to confirm that democracy in the United States is largely a sham. Our elected representatives are not the agents of political change, but cogs in a vast bureaucratic machine that operates mainly in the interests of the behemoth corporations and banks. Surprisingly, most Americans have not been taken in by the media’s promotional hoopla about elections and democracy. They have a fairly-decent grasp of how the system works and who ultimately benefits from it. Check it out:
“Few Americans (13{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) are very familiar with the term “Deep State;” another 24{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} are somewhat familiar, while 63{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} say they are not familiar with this term. However, when the term is described as a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy, nearly 3-in-4 (74{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) say they believe this type of apparatus exists in Washington.…Only 1-in-5 say it does not exist.” Belief in the probable existence of a Deep State comes from more than 7-in-10 Americans in each partisan group…”
So while the cable news channels dismiss anyone who believes in the “Deep State” as a conspiracy theorist, it’s clear that the majority of people think that’s how the system really works, that is, “a group of unelected government and military officials…secretly manipulate or direct national policy.”
It’s impossible to overstate the significance of the survey. The data suggest that representative democracy is a largely a fraud, that congressmen and senators are mostly sock-puppets who do the bidding of wealthy powerbrokers, and that the entire system is impervious to the will of the people. These are pretty damning results and a clear indication of how corrupt the system really is.
I’ve known about the Deep State for about 30 years. It used to be that no one believed me, or at least would not admit to believing me, which was one factor in my decision to get out of Dodge. I decided that I would rather live where the corruption was out in the open and well known to everyone than where it was secret, systemic, and operating with complete impunity in the dark. The gap between reality and superficiality was simply more than I could stand to be around, and I suspected that things were eventually going to get pretty damn ugly once hundreds of millions of people discovered that not only their government, but their very way of life, was a sham.
Of course, people have turned out to be both more resilient and more complacent than I ever would have imagined. But it is certainly interesting to have observed one “conspiracy theory” after another go from being mocked to tacitly admitted to common knowledge. I can still remember when believe in the surveillance state and its infrastructure was enough to cause people to label you paranoid.
What the American people will do with this knowledge is still unknown. But whether they choose to stand up for their violated rights or choose technoslavery, at least they will be making an informed decision now.
Conservatives have HAD IT
It’s always so cute when conservatives discover the existence of the bi-factional ruling party and threaten to stop voting for Republicans. Jesse Kelly is very upset about the passage of the omnibus spending bill on Twitter:
This is the first time I’ve thought the GOP will lose the House in the midterms. If Trump signs this #omnibus bill, we’re through. I suspect Trump does not realize how many people have tolerated his antics solely because he was doing conservative things.
Think about this: Obama gets elected in 08. Embarrasses himself and scares the American public into going HEAVY Republican for 6 straight years. We own everything.
Annnnnnd the GOP responds by doing all the same things Obama did. There is one party in DC. It’s the “screw the peasants” party. And I’ve had about enough of it. That’s all.
First, who cares? Since Republicans are part of the bifactional ruling party, as I repeatedly observed more than 10 years ago, why be at all concerned about them retaining power? I’m not. They are part of the problem, not the solution.
Second, perhaps Trump will veto the bill. He certainly should, although he may have more pressing concerns on his agenda at the moment.
Third, this is a conventional political analysis. It doesn’t even begin to account for the possible fallout from the God-Emperor’s ongoing war against the Deep State, which is the most significant factor by far. Due to the potential for tremendous and unexpected consequences from that, don’t put too much credence in the conventional analyses of the midterm elections.
Stay cool, stay calm, have confidence in the God-Emperor, and wait to see what happens. The Deep State is trying to break him. They may, but at this point, I think it is more likely that he will break them.
Consider. To cut through the Russophobia rampant here, Trump decided to make a direct phone call to Vladimir Putin. And in that call, Trump, like Angela Merkel, congratulated Putin on his re-election victory.
Instantly, the briefing paper for the president’s call was leaked to the Post. In bold letters it read, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.”
Whereupon, the Beltway went ballistic.
How could Trump congratulate Putin, whose election was a sham? Why did he not charge Putin with the Salisbury poisoning? Why did Trump not denounce Putin for interfering with “our democracy”?
Amazing. A disloyal White House staffer betrays his trust and leaks a confidential paper to sabotage the foreign policy of a duly elected president, and he is celebrated in this capital city.
If you wish to see the deep state at work, this is it: anti-Trump journalists using First Amendment immunities to collude with and cover up the identities of bureaucratic snakes out to damage or destroy a president they despise.
UPDATE: There we go. Don’t consider, DO IT! This is not that hard. Build the Wall and Drain the Swamp. If it doesn’t do either of those things, veto it.
I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded.
– Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump