Wednesday, December 20, 2017
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #111
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
4 Big Signs of a Trump Economic Recovery
“Economic growth has topped 3 percent,” Trump said Thursday at a White House event while addressing his administration’s reduction in regulations. “Two quarters in a row, except for the hurricanes, we would have almost hit 4 percent, and you remember how we were doing when I first took office.”
Trump also noted a difference between President Barack Obama’s eight years in office and the current outlook.
“This country was going economically down,” he said. “Small business optimism is at its highest point in 34 years, and we are just getting started.”
Trump touted the coming benefits of tax reform, as Republican lawmakers iron out final details of their bill, and noted that his administration so far has killed 22 regulations for every one added. The president’s original executive order called for elimination of two regulations for every new one.
The debate with any president comes with how much credit or blame his policies deserve for the economy’s performance, and how big a factor his immediate predecessor’s policies are.
Some experts are more cautious than others in giving Trump credit.
The National Association of Manufacturers’ survey of members found that 94.6 percent of respondents had a positive outlook for their companies for 2018. That is the best result in the survey’s 20-year history, and up significantly from the survey done in late 2016, when positive outlook hit 63 percent.
This rosy attitude can be in part attributed to Trump’s policies, said Jay Timmons, president of the manufacturers association.
“Most of our respondents were talking about pro-growth tax policies and getting around the regulatory morass, and those are the two big priorities for manufacturers,” Timmons told The Daily Signal in an in-person interview. “The third priority [for manufacturers] is infrastructure. Those are three big priorities for the administration. This will encourage hiring and investment.”
Consumers are spending more money, but expanding companies’ physical investments—buying a major tool, a truck, a facility—will be the real measurement, said Salim Furth, a research fellow in macroeconomics at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis.
“The good direction of the economy in 2017 is largely a continuation of the strong economy that started in 2014, when we’ve had a huge decrease in energy prices because of fracking and low inflation,” Furth told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
Attributing economic growth to one president is difficult, but the benefits of fracking—the extraction of fossil fuels from rocks—are clear and provable, Furth said.
“Anticipation of tax policies and regulatory policies can drive the economic outlook, but an administration that lives by the economic numbers dies by the economic numbers,” he said. “Politicians will always put their spin on numbers.”
But Trump should be credited as the “fountainhead of the current economic boom,” said Alfredo Ortiz, president of Job Creators Network, a pro-business advocacy group.
“His long and deeply held commitment to tax cuts and deregulation, among other policies, has given small businesses—and for that matter, all businesses—the confidence and ability to invest, hire, and expand, generating the current economic boom,” Ortiz told The Daily Signal in a written statement. “Now President Trump must continue to leverage his leadership skills to get his policies across the goal line and consolidate these gains.”
Here are four key categories of economic indicators and improvements since Trump took office.
1. Growth Gets Closer to 4 Percent
The gross domestic product grew by 3.3 percent for the third quarter of 2017, as the Trump administration touted the goal of achieving 4 percent growth.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimates that ...
Who Has Time For Roundabouts Anyways...
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The Kid Lived But Who Died?
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How Venezuela Became A Communist Totalitarian State
Years later, on consolidating total power in his own hands, Chávez again emulated Fidel and confessed to being “a convinced follower of Marxist-Leninist ideology.”
During his 14-year rule in Venezuela, Chávez followed a strategy of introducing socialism in stages. The first stage entailed obtaining total control of all institutions of the Venezuelan state. Thus, during the first four years, he concentrated his efforts in changing the Constitution, packing the Supreme Court, installing soviet-style political commissars in army units, and changing the national identity card and the electoral system to ensure his reelection through manipulation of voter-rolls. During this stage, Chávez was not interested in antagonizing the private sector or the business community. He had enough on his plate, and knew he could not tackle all enemies at once.
Just as Hitler’s final destruction of the Jewish middle class during Kristallnacht did not occur until five years after his ascension to power in Germany, in Venezuela, Chávez reassured the business community that he was not really interested in their demise. Throughout this period, “Chavismo” seemed very similar to Argentina’s “Peronismo.”
In September 2001, Chávez began his offensive for the “Second Stage of the Process for the Revolution,” as he called his march towards a totalitarian state. That month, he openly broke with the United States by calling the US bombing of Afghan targets “an act of terrorism equal to 9/11.” He then proceeded to pass 49 laws directed against the private sector. These laws eliminated private participation in the oil business, allowed for confiscation without payment of private lands, suspended constitutional guarantees for business owners, and established “military security zones” in major metropolitan areas — a de facto confiscation of prime real estate in Venezuela’s major cities. At the same time, he launched an all out attack against the country’s independent labor unions, persecuting and even imprisoning several prominent leaders.
These actions galvanized the opposition, as Chávez expected, and resulted in mass protests and two national general strikes. He expected these reactions and was prepared for the challenge.
However, he miscalculated while he panicked during the mass protest and march of April 11, 2002. His order to members of his civilian armed militias to fire on unarmed demonstrators disgusted the officer corps that he had handpicked to run the Army. His own generals deposed him.
These same generals, though, quickly brought him back only three days later when the opposition’s chosen leader bungled in every imaginable way. As a result, the Second Stage of the Process succeeded. By the end of 2004, Chavez had embarked on an unstoppable march to acquire the “commanding heights” of the Venezuelan economy, destroyed the independent labor movement — its leaders were mostly imprisoned or...
Former White House Insider Sebastian Gorka, Explains What Trump Did to Devastate ISIS
“Our troops have been unleashed,” Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to President Donald Trump and counterterrorism adviser, said Friday at The Heritage Foundation.
“I had a tier one operator, meaning a top of the top special operations guy on detail from the National Security Council … come up to me in maybe week five of the administration and say, ‘Sir, you have no idea, no idea how the morale amongst our forces have skyrocketed because we are no longer micromanaged … and we are allowed to do our job, and it is clear the president trusts us,” he said.
The contrast in strategy has made all the difference, Gorka said.
“We have been told by the last administration that ISIS is a generational threat … [that] our children, our grandchildren will be fighting ISIS jihadis decades from now,” Gorka said. “Well, I guess the Trump administration has defined generations to last just a few months.”
While President Barack Obama called ISIS a “J.V. team” in a January 2014 interview in The New Yorker, Gorka said Trump and his administration did what the Obama administration said would take years.
“There is no ISIS caliphate any longer,” Gorka said. “We have liberated Mosul, we have have taken back Raqqa, the operational headquarters of ISIS, and just three weeks ago, the last ISIS stronghold in Syria has fallen as well.”
Trump has been successful, Gorka said, by evaluating threats and responding to threats strategically.
Trump “looked at the threat we faced clearly as a war, not as some problem to be managed, but as a war, and not only that, he wants to win that war, and that is exactly what we have been doing as a nation,” Gorka said.
U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis has also been key in Trump’s successes in defeating terrorism.
“We have gone under Secretary Mattis from a strategy of attrition, he has said this openly, a strategy of attrition to a strategy of annihilation,” Gorka said.
Trump has also made gains on winning the war on terrorism by acknowledging that there is ...
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