Tag Archives: politics

The Decision

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After President Donald Trump announced that the US would officially recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital—a long-standing fact away from which US administrations had been ducking away for over 20 years—global (or at least European and Middle Eastern) expressions of angst have been loud.

Out come the pop psychology analyses.

Martin Indyk, former US Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, former US Ambassador to Israel, and current Executive Vice President of the Brookings Institution:

It was an appeal to his evangelical Christian base, pure and simple[.]

Of course it was.

No, wait.  Steven Spiegel, UCLA’s Center for Middle East Development Director [paraphrased by Deutsche Welle]:

Trump’s inclination to shake things up….

That must be it.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

It couldn’t possibly be simply because it was a right thing to do, especially after decades of failure to achieve peace while using Jerusalem as a bargaining chip.  Nor could it matter that the Palestinians aren’t interested in peace with Israel, and they’ll object—violently—to anything an American administration might do.

Mm, mm.

Feelz, especially feelz of European nations and those of the Middle East, must take precedence, must be obeyed.  Oh, the ego-driven horror of not being listened to on this.

When I Get Around to It

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Senator Al Franken (D, MN) announced on the Senate floor—where, among other things, nothing he said would be actionable in a court of law—that he would resign from the Senate as a result of the plethora of women’s accusations of him sexually abusing and assaulting them.

When will he resign?  When he feels like it (my words).  In the coming weeks (his words).

Franken also said he appreciated the

irony that I am leaving while a man who bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who preyed on young girls runs for Senate with the full support of his party

With a couple minor details that give the lie to everything Franken says.  We have hard evidence of Franken’s assaults, and we have his confessions, and we have in his own words what he thinks about his own apologies.  What we have on Franken’s tape is Trump’s bragging about the ability to assault women, not about any actual assaults.  Franken knows this.  Franken also knows full well that Ray Moore, the candidate he was afraid to name, has been accused, but there’s no evidence of wrong-doing—only the unseemliness of a 30-year-old man dating teenaged girls, after first asking and receiving the parents’ permission.

The Progressive-Democratic Party members of the Senate (and of the House, come to that) know this, full well, too.  We’ll see in short order how soon or far away that Party’s leadership thinks “in the coming weeks” should really be.

The Fed’s Interest Rates

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In a Letter to the Editor in a recent Wall Street Journal, was this remark:

[A] major reason for doing this [artificially suppressing interest rates] is an attempt to raise inflation to their sacrosanct 2% level.

Interest rates are inherently inflationary, since they raise the cost of money. If the Fed were serious, they’d set their benchmark rates at levels historically consistent with 2% inflation, and then they’d sit down and shut up.

One factor keeping the Fed interfering, though, is universal to all bureaucracies—the bureaucrats can’t sit down and shut up, they think they have to be constantly doing or yapping.

Sometimes it’s necessary to clean out the whole rat’s nest, not just go through the motions with scheduled rotations of the political appointees at the top.

Minimum Wage in San Francisco

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City Supervisor Jane Kim, in a recent Letter to the Wall Street Journal Editor sang huzzahs for the city’s $15/hr minimum wage and touted a tax on robots that were replacing those low-skilled workers priced out of the labor market by that minimum wage.

The minimum wage isn’t a pathway to the middle class; it is a safety net to prevent destitution.

And

[A] “robot tax” is a practical way to smooth the transitions caused by automation….

She’s wrong.

I’m sure the robots and kiosks that are replacing those low-skilled workers appreciate being saved from destitution.

However, a true safety net would be a vasty reduction in San Francisco’s runaway regulatory regime and usurious tax scheme.  Then one of the most expensive cities in the nation could become affordable for the low-skilled and other poor.

Instead, the Supervisor wants to tax those robots and reduce them to similar jobless poverty.

Confirmation

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…of Palestinian lack of interest in peace with Israel.  Here’s Hamas Politburo Chief, Ismail Haniyeh:

We should call for and we should work on launching an intifada in the face of the Zionist enemy. …  We want the uprising to last and continue to let Trump and the occupation regret this decision.

And

…10 Palestinians were arrested in East Jerusalem overnight after Molotov cocktails were thrown.

Notice that: this isn’t just protestation of a decision with which the Palestinians disagree.  This is deliberately violent protest.  The decision with which these terrorists disagree is nothing more, in their minds, than an excuse to murder Israelis.