Monthly Archives: June 2017

Another “Leak,” Another Rumor

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President Donald Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey is now a subject of the federal probe being headed by special counsel Robert Mueller, which has expanded to include whether the president obstructed justice, a person familiar with the matter said.

The rest of the article continued in that vein: no real-world sources cited, only this deliberately unidentified one.  The Wall Street Journal‘s article at the link also cited a Washington Post article on the same subject; that bit also only cited “sources”—five of them in WaPo‘s case—whose identities were carefully withheld.

“…a person familiar….”  “…five officials….”  The WaPo piece even said their “five officials” demanded anonymity because they were speaking without authorization.

This raises two questions and a concern. The questions are these. First, with no substantiation, how are we to know these sources even exist?  How can we do our own checking?

Second, these sources—if they exist—begin as liars: they’re speaking without authorization, and so they have broken the terms of their employment and possibly their oaths of office.  How can we believe the claims of liars? Why would WaPo or WSJ take such claims seriously?

And this, at the end of the WSJ piece, with no trace of irony on the part of the authors:

At a June 13 hearing at a House of Representatives panel, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein declined to say who asked him to write a memo justifying Mr Comey’s firing.  …  Mr Rosenstein said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss the matter.

“The reason for that is that if it is within the scope of Director Mueller’s investigation, and I’ve been a prosecutor for 27 years, we don’t want people talking publicly about the subjects of ongoing investigations,” Mr Rosenstein said.

So much for that.

The concern is this: why WaPo and especially WSJ have walked away from basic, foundational journalist standards—that allow for anonymous sources but require them to be substantiated by two or more on-the-record sources—and descended themselves to rumor-mongering.

Rhetoric

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There has been on Wednesday a deliberate, carefully targeted attack against a collection of Republican Congressmen practicing for a Congressional baseball game that was intended to be a bipartisan fund-raiser (the Progressive-Democrats were practicing their own team at another venue) that injured five, including the Republican House Whip who is the third most powerful House Republican, who was seriously injured.

In the aftermath we got Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) making a tendentious speech on the Senate floor proclaiming his regret over this shooting, and we got the House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) making a similarly overwrought speech on the House floor.  Both called for bipartisanship and expressed their sympathy for the shooting victims.

Other current Progressive-Democrats also say they decry this violence.

These people are at the pinnacle of their careers; they’ve reached the top echelons of the political life and career: they’re enormously intelligent.  As politicians, too, words are their stock in trade: they choose the words and phrases they use to make their points extremely carefully.

These people also have routinely held themselves and their party out as knowing better than the rest of us—that’s what underlies their position that Government will solve our problems and must do so because we cannot handle our own lives and situations.

Now: Progressive-Democrats in Congress past and present have for years openly called Republicans unpatriotic, hostage-takers, terrorists.  They say Republicans are racist, xenophobic, homophobic, irredeemably deplorable.

The physical impact of their rhetoric has become clear over the last couple of years: their followers have physically assaulted Republicans at their political campaign rallies, including one charging onto the stage to attack then-candidate Donald Trump.  Their student followers routinely attack speakers—even fellow students and professors—who disagree with them.

Now this deliberate, carefully targeted shooting attack against a large gathering of Republican Congressmen.

Can anyone really believe these politicians didn’t—and don’t—know what they were and are saying?  Can anyone truly think that these politicians didn’t and don’t know beforehand that their carefully incendiary rhetoric would lead to violence of the murderous type that occurred Wednesday?

It’s certainly true that incitement to riot or murder is no excuse for the riot or the murder (thankfully only attempted, Wednesday).

But it’s also true that there’s no excuse for the incitement to the riot or the murder.  And the Progressive-Democrats have been doing exactly that.

Saudi Oil Embargo Against the US?

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Saudi Arabia is cutting its oil exports to the US for the express purpose of directing our use of our own oil to Saudi purposes—to make us use up our existing “excess” supplies.

Saudi Arabia is slashing its US oil exports to a near three-decade low for this time of the year, intensifying its efforts to reduce a global supply glut that has been pummeling crude prices.

Not just the global gut—our supply in particular.  Saudi Arabian Oil Co is cutting its exports to the US to the lowest level since the late ’80s.  Saudi Aramco is cutting its exports to us to the lowest level since 2009, the end-game of the Panic of 2008.

[S]ome analysts say these reductions in Saudi exports to the US could be a step toward ensuring that OPEC’s cuts have the intended effect of reducing bloated inventories of oil around the world, and particularly in the US.

[Emphasis added.]

This is a prickly ally; however, the embargo (which is what this amounts to, even if not intended and even if not complete) will have little deleterious effect on us, and it’s likely to backfire on the Saudis and their OPEC compatriots.  The reduced sales, whether to us or to the world generally, only opens the world market to us: we’ll increase our market share, to the benefit of our economy.  Furthermore, we can handle lower prices than can the OPEC members and their oil allies (vis., Russia and Iran), producing profitably at those lower prices; that encourages our continued production even as the Saudis and OPEC try to manipulate price with their doomed-to-fail attempt to manipulate supply.

And the American consumer, far from the more serious embargoes of the last century, will benefit from the largely unaffected supply and the lower prices of oil (and of natural gas, which aside from being inherently cheaper also is under price pressure to the extent that oil and gas are substitutes for each other), both directly and through the ripple of those lower prices throughout our economy.

The Fed and the Markets

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The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases aren’t having the desired effect of cooling off Wall Street’s hot streak.

Well, NSS.  There’s a hint there.

The Fed needs to stop trying to manipulate the market and go back to doing its job, maintaining stable price levels (controlling inflation to low levels) and achieving full employment (whatever that means.  And, the latter is wholly dependent on the former and so need not be an independent goal, but that’s a different story).

Manipulating the markets as a primary means of helping the underlying economy is a fool’s errand.  While the markets are very strongly tied to the underlying economy, they are not the underlying economy, and the lags between economic performance and market behavior are both too long and too variable for Fed market shenanigans to be useful for anything other than letting the Fed pretend it’s doing something useful.

In theory, financial conditions should serve as the conduit between the Fed’s monetary policy and the real economy. When the Fed lifts short-term rates, long-term rates should rise also and financial conditions should tighten.

This is misguided; see above.  Financial conditions should be set by the free market behaviors of market participants.  The Fed’s role, to properly execute theory, needs to stay within its mandate: set the framework within which the free market operates by controlling longer-term price level.  That’s the sum and total of the purpose of the Fed’s monetary policy and its relationship with the underlying economy.

The Fed should set its benchmark interest rates to levels historically consistent with 2% inflation (the Fed’s oft-stated target inflation rate), and then it should sit down and be quiet.

Censorship

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The Chinese Communist Party’s powerful disciplinary wing is taking aim at the country’s internet censors for not pushing a party-line agenda, saying they were “irresolute” in implementing the policies of President Xi Jinping and “not trying hard enough to ensure political security.”

Read: political purity.

…authorities now want people to become absorbed by politics as defined by the party.

“If you let people get too sucked into entertainment, no one will care about what the leaders are saying. If you don’t do this [crackdown], no one will watch the ‘Network News,'” he said, referring to the staid evening news program of the official state broadcaster, China Central Television.

This is the People’s Republic of China’s version of “freedom” and of “free” speech.  The PRC’s presence on the world stage needs to be watched with a careful and jaundiced eye, given how the government so disrespects its own people.

“You clap when they ban entertainment. What will you do when they ban you from clapping?” one user asked on Weibo.

Indeed.