Monthly Archives: September 2019

Some Numbers

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…on President Donald Trump’s war on women.  Here they are for women-led households.  The latest Census Bureau report says

  • the share of workers in female-led households who worked full-time year-round increased by 4.2 percentage points among blacks
  • 6 percentage points among Hispanics.

Notice that.  Not 4.2 percent—4.2 percentage points.

Then there’re these numbers:

  • real median earnings for female households with no spouse present jumped 7.6% last year.
  • poverty rate among female households declined 2.7 percentage points for blacks
  • declined 4 percentage points for Hispanics
  • declined 7.1 percentage points for their children

And

  • jobless rate for black women in August fell to a historic low of 4.4%
  • jobless rate for Hispanic women was 4.2%

Trump sure is doing a lousy job in his war on women. Right up there with his poor performance as a racist.

“Trump Repeatedly Pressured Ukraine President”

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…regarding Biden’s intervention with Ukraine’s law enforcement in favor of his son.  At least that’s how The Wall Street Journal has characterized a phone call between heads of state.

Except that’s not what happened, and to call it “pressure” is to insult, grievously, the mettle and courage of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.  In that phone call, Trump did ask Zelensky to investigate Biden’s role in getting Ukraine’s Prosecutor Generall, Viktor Shokin fired in order to get a billion dollars in already promised aid to Ukraine.

No one serious, though, sees requests as pressure.  There were no or elses; not even the WSJ alleges that. Nor have the tabloids that have taken up the cry, The Washington Post or The New York Times.  Nor is there any reason to believe Zelensky is such a Milquetoast as to feel pressured because someone merely asked him to do something.  Indeed, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko was blunt and clear:

I know what the conversation was about, and I think there was no pressure.  There was talk, conversations are different, leaders have the right to discuss any problems that exist. This conversation was long, friendly, and it touched on many questions, sometimes requiring serious answers.

And

President Trump is interested, his advisor, Giuliani, newspapers, Democrats, Republicans are interested in whether pressure had been put on Ukraine.  I want to say that we are an independent state, we have our own secrets.

No pressure.  Except, perhaps in the minds of Progressive-Democrats who are projecting their own responses to such questions.

Which brings me to Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and ex-Vice President (during the time of his threat vis-à-vis that Prosecutor Genera) Joe Biden and his distortion of the current situation.

He is violating every basic norm of a president. He’s using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me.

Because the truth is smearing.

On the contrary, the abuse of power and the misuse of every element of the presidency is Biden’s own interference with that Ukrainian investigation into his son’s role in what the Ukrainians were investigating as an illegal, if not criminal, activity.  He demanded Shokin be fired so the investigation couldn’t go forward, or he would withhold all that foreign aid.

And then Biden bragged about his successful interference at a US Council on Foreign Relations event.

I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. … He got fired.

That’s pressure, and it was successfully applied by a badly misbehaving American Vice President.

One more thing.  Progressive-Democrats and their communications facility, the press, all have the vapors because Trump is insisting misbehavior be investigated.  As though it’s OK to misbehave, so long as it’s a Progressive-Democrat government official doing the misbehavior.  It puts me in mind of a remark reported to have been made by then-President Richard Nixon (R), that “if the President does it, that means it’s legal.”  I’ll paraphrase, slightly. It seems to be the position of the Left that “if a Progressive-Democrat mucky-muck does it, that means it’s legal.”

No.  Wrong-doing should be investigated, thoroughly, regardless of who’s suspected of doing it.  And that’s what Trump is insisting on.

Liars Lying

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…for the fun of it. My wife yells at me over elephant jokes, so here are these, instead.

Anansi the spider had a run in with a mosquito, a fly, and a moth.  To determine a winner, Anansi challenged them to a liar’s contest.
Mosquito tells a story of how he plants and harvests his father’s crops because he was very ill.  And to think he did all of this work before he was even born.  Anansi believed the story.
Fly’s story was he attacked a tiger, turning him inside out, freeing a sheep that the tiger swallowed whole.  Anansi believed fly’s story.
Moth told of his hunting expedition where he killed, then cooked an antelope in a high tree.  He was so full he could not climb down the tree to go home. So he got a rope from his house and lowered himself down from the tree and went home.  Again, Anansi believed the story.
Now Anansi told this story. He found a coconut and planted it. Overnight, the plant produced a tree with three coconuts. Chopping open the coconuts, from each flew a mosquito, a fly, and a moth.  Because the coconuts belonged to him its treasure belonged to him. So he decided to each them, but they flew away.
Anansi told them it was his lucky day because they were his mosquito, fly, and moth.  Knowing they had lost the contest, the three flew away in different directions.
Now if Anansi catches them in his web, he eats them as a reward for winning the liar’s contest.

 

I worked all morning building the best ground blind of my life. When I went out in the afternoon to go bow hunting I couldn’t find it.

 

I grew up in a family with 16 children. I never got to sleep alone until I got married.

 

I almost had a psychic girlfriend, but she left me before we met.

 

My grandson is the most persuasive liar I gave ever met. By the time he was 2 years old he could dirty his diaper and make his mother believe someone else had done it.

 

Recently I bought a new car. As usual, they filled the gas tank. My wife and I decided to take a trip to California, so we took off heading west. Our first stop was St Louis where I thought of filling up with gas. Checking the gas gauge, I saw it showed full so we went on. We continued west and at all points along the way the gas gauge continued to indicate full, so I didn’t buy any gas. We spent ten days in Los Angeles and then returned home. I was bewildered as to why I could go so many miles without adding gas.
Upon getting home I took the car back to the dealership where a mechanic soon found the problem. The gauge was stuck on full. He fixed it, and now the gauge drops toward empty when I drive, like everyone else’s.

 

My grandfather could hone a kitchen knife so sharp that grandma could slice off a piece of bread so thin it only had one side. To put butter on, you had to fold it first.

 

Your sister is so thin, she plays hula hoop with a Cheerio.

Powell and Trump

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Nick Timiraos, writing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, is concerned with messaging from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to President Donald Trump—is Powell being too subtle, or does he need to answer more explicitly, Trump’s often heated admonishments?  Timiraos is concerned particularly against the backdrop of the often deprecatory nature of Trump’s opprobrium.

This is headed into a cul-de-sac, though.

The question of Fed messaging—to Trump or anyone else—shouldn’t even come up. The Fed’s role is to maintain stable pricing, full employment, and low interest rates.

Full stop.

Accordingly, the Fed Chairman and members of the BoG should stay out of politics. The Fed does its job by setting its benchmark rates at levels historically consistent with its target annual inflation rate of 2%—two of its mandated tasks. Full employment falls out of that.

Having done that much, the men of Fed governance need to sit down and be quiet, accepting that free market forces will cause all three of those goals to fluctuate—and self-correct—except in the most extreme conditions.

All of that precludes, or should preclude, the Fed members from chasing stock/bond markets—and international trade activity, which is much more about foreign policy—politics—than it is about economics.

Powell also is on the wrong path, though, when he says,

The thing we can’t address, really, is what businesses would like, which is a settled road map for international trade. We can’t do that. We don’t have that tool[.]

It’s a tool the Fed doesn’t need.  What businesses need is a stable domestic economic environment. A stable political environment, both domestic and international, would certainly be useful, too, but that’s a…political…environment and up to the political arms of government to generate. It’s outside the purview of the Fed.

It’s especially not the Fed’s job to counteract the foreign policy moves of the Executive Branch.

Government vs Charity

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Which is to say, Government welfare/wealth redistribution vs private charity.  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator (I, VT) Bernie Sanders has given the Progressive-Democrats’ game away.  The subject is private donors giving hundreds of millions of their own money to fund scholarships at colleges and universities.  Sanders tweeted that

Mr Smith’s gift was “extremely generous” but added that the “student crisis will not be solved by charity. It must be addressed by governmental action.”

Robert Smith is Vista Equity Partners CEO, and his gift was directly to Morehouse College class of 2019: he’s covering 100% of their college debt.  Other private donor gifts include

  • the Starr Foundation and Sanford Weill’s funding a $160 million scholarship program at New York City’s Weill Cornell Medicine to “eliminate education debt for all of its students with financial need”
  • $450 million from private donors to New York University for all tuition costs for all its medical students
  • $150 million scholarship fund for Columbia University endowed by former Merck CEO Roy Vagelos and his wife to mitigate medical students’ debt
  • $1.8 billion for Johns Hopkins from Michael Bloomberg for undergraduate financial aid

But Progressive-Democrats want government to do it all.  The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board has the right of that:

[P]rivate generosity has an advantage in that it is more accountable than public policy.

Aside from government’s subsidies inflating costs, though, there’s much more.  Private charity is much more flexible than government’s necessarily one-size-fits-all, it’s better targeted, it goes to the recipients the donors—whether private individual or private charitable organization—choose, and it goes in the form of the donors’ choosing.

And that gives private charity much broader and much deeper reach than anything government can achieve.

But that’s also outside the control of Government, and that’s anathema to Progressive-Democrats.