RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tax-cut-working-better-than-advertised-1543446448

Despite concerns over trade disputes and a slowing global economy, the corporate tax rate cut enacted in December of 2017 continues to encourage the business investment that leads to higher productivity and higher wages for American workers. Today the government reported that such investment was higher than it initially reported for the third quarter of the year.

Last month your humble correspondent noted:

The country has lately been so prosperous that we’ve had the luxury of being disappointed in some of the underlying data in Friday’s report of robust 3.5% economic growth for the third quarter. This column was as disappointed as anyone that business investment didn’t show another sharp increase after the stellar numbers posted in previous quarters.

But the overall growth reported by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis was strong. And former Bush economist Larry Lindsey’s consulting firm Lindsey Group argues in a recent note to clients that it’s bound to look even stronger as the data becomes more refined…

In that note Mr. Lindsay told his clients that it “seems quite reasonable that there will be an upward revision in equipment investment (and possibly other investment as well) in the post-election report for the third quarter.”

This column observed “it is extremely reasonable to assume that America’s new competitive corporate tax system will continue to attract investment to the United States.”

That assumption looks even better today, now that the Commerce Department has reported that non-residential fixed investment rose 2.5% at an annual rate in the three months ending in September, up from 0.8% in the earlier estimate. Within this overall category of business investment, spending on equipment was revised to estimated growth of 3.5%, up sharply from an earlier 0.4% estimate.

As for the overall economy, it is on track to hit the White House target of 3% growth for the year. And Mr. Lindsey sees more of the same on the horizon, telling this column via email, “My guess is high twos for fourth quarter and an average of 3 for 2019.”

Get ready for more speeches featuring America’s 44th President asserting ownership of the growth breakout that never managed to arrive during his eight years in the White House. Today Jack Crowe at National Review writes:

Former President Barack Obama claimed credit Tuesday for the recent boom in U.S. oil production immediately after praising the Paris Climate Accords, which committed the U.S. to dramatically reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

“I was extraordinarily proud of the Paris accords because — you know, I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy, and by the way, American energy production,” Obama told the audience gathered at Rice University’s Baker Institute on Tuesday night. “You wouldn’t always know it but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas — that was me, people.”

While U.S. oil production surged by nearly 100 percent over the course of Obama’s two-term presidency, the vast majority of that oil was extracted from state and private lands as the Obama administration took steps to curtail oil production on federal lands.

This column thinks that America’s prosperity revival has room to run, but prudent investors should always be on the lookout for the end of the Trump bump. We’ll know it’s really over when the former President stops pretending it’s his economy. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fake-news-obama-tries-to-take-credit-for-americas-oil-boom/

Ever since Trump turned our country around, his predecessor, Barack Obama, has been trying to take credit for Trump’s successes. The economy, unemployment, the stock market… you name it, he’s been going around the country and the world telling whoever will listen that he deserves the thanks for all the economic progress that failed to occur while he was in office.

Yesterday, his “you didn’t build that, I did” approach to rewriting his legacy continued at a gala at Rice University in Houston, where he tried to claim credit for America becoming the world’s number one oil producing country.

“I was extraordinarily proud of the Paris accords because… I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy and, by the way, American energy production—you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas — that was me, people.”

Actually, it wasn’t.

While it’s true that oil production increased on his watch, that was in spite of Obama, not because of him. Here’s the real story.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/evaluating-paul-manaforts-alleged-violation-of-his-plea-agreement/

Keep your eye on the pardon dynamic.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has informed a federal court that Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement by repeatedly lying to investigators. Prosecutors thus consider the agreement null and void and have asked the court to set a sentencing date immediately.

The alleged breach was outlined in a brief submission to district judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, and reported by the New York Times Monday evening. The submission by Andrew Weissmann and other lawyers on Mueller’s team does not describe Manafort’s allegedly false statements, other than to say that they involve “a variety of subject matters.” Prosecutors are planning to file a sentencing memorandum “that sets forth the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies, including those after signing the plea agreement.”

In the submission, prosecutors acknowledge that Manafort “believes he has provided truthful information and does not agree with the government’s characterization or that he has breached the agreement.”

On the surface, it doesn’t seem that Manafort’s dispute can get him very far. But when we look closer, we realize that this is about more than a plea; it is about a pardon.

When it comes to claimed breaches of a plea agreement, the prosecutor holds the dominant position. Defendants who plead guilty and agree to cooperate, as Manafort did on the day before his Washington trial was to begin, do so with the understanding that the value of the cooperation is the prosecutor’s call. If the prosecutor decides the information provided is not useful — or, worse, that the defendant has lied — the defendant does not get to withdraw his guilty plea. Further, if the prosecutor decides the defendant has breached the agreement, the government is under no obligation to support reductions in sentence that the defendant hoped to achieve by entering the agreement.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/26/john-roberts-wrong-americas-courts-obviously-politicized/
FROM AUSTRALIA—-UPFRONT FROM DOWN UNDER

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ attempt to defend the independence of the judiciary, in light of President Trump’s comments that courts are politicized, did more harm than good.

Last week, after San Francisco-based federal judge Jon Tigar blocked enforcement of the administration’s recently updated asylum regulations, President Donald Trump condemned the decision, calling Tigar an “Obama judge.” “It’s a disgrace what happens in the Ninth Circuit,” Trump complained to reporters, adding that in practically every case plaintiffs file in the Ninth Circuit “we get beaten and have to go to the Supreme Court and we win.”

Chief Justice John Roberts responded to the president’s criticism with his own: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said in a statement issued Wednesday by the Supreme Court. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for,” Roberts concluded, in a nod to the then-upcoming national holiday.

As is his wont, Trump took to Twitter, telling the chief justice we “do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” The next day Trump hit the theme again in a pair of tweets that began, “Justice Roberts can say what he wants, but the 9th Circuit is a complete & total disaster.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/monica-lewinsky-bill-clinton-told-me-to-lie-about-affair-in-sworn-affidavit/

Then-president Bill Clinton urged Monica Lewinsky to lie to investigators about their affair while under oath, Lewinsky revealed in the final episode of the new A&E docuseries The Clinton Affair.

Lewinsky, 45, described in the episode how Clinton called her at 2:30 a.m. one morning to inform her that she was on the witness list in the Paula Jones case and urged her to submit a sworn affidavit denying their affair in order to avoid being deposed.

“I was petrified. I was frantic about my family and this becoming public,” Lewinsky said through tears. “Thankfully, Bill helped me lock myself back from that and he said I could probably sign an affidavit to get out of it, and he didn’t even know if 100 percent I would be subpoenaed.”

Lewinsky, then a 24-year-old White House intern, was subpoenaed days later and, in response, reached out to Clinton’s friend, attorney Vernon Jordan, who introduced her to another attorney and Clinton associate, Frank Carter.

“Frank Carter explained to me if I’d signed an affidavit denying having had an intimate relationship with the president it might mean I wouldn’t have to be deposed in the Paula Jones case,” she said. “I did feel uncomfortable about it but I felt it was the right thing to do, ironically, right? So, the right thing to do, to break the law.”

Lewinsky then speculated that Clinton still trusted her to lie to investigators at that point because he returned from vacation on Martha’s Vineyard with a number of gifts for her.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/first-step-criminal-justice-reform-bill-whats-in-it/The bad outweighs the good.

It remains to be seen whether the lame-duck 115th Congress will debate a sweeping overhaul of our federal criminal-justice system before we adjourn for the year. You may have heard about the legislation at hand, the FIRST STEP Act. I oppose it. I urge my fellow conservatives to take the time to read and understand the bill before signing on in support of this flawed legislation.

The 103-page bill that was released the Friday before Thanksgiving has some good parts, and I don’t question the intentions of the bill’s proponents. But you may have noticed that they talk more about their intentions than about the consequences of the bill. As conservatives, we know that good intentions say little about actual consequences. And to paraphrase Thomas Sowell, intellectuals who generate ideas with good intentions rarely have to face the consequences of those ideas personally.

When proponents of the bill discuss the substance, they claim that “nothing in the FIRST STEP Act gives inmates early release.” Instead of early release, proponents say, it merely provides incentives for inmates to participate in programs. This is nothing but a euphemism. Let there be no doubt: If the bill is passed, thousands of federal offenders, including violent felons and sex offenders, will be released earlier than they would be under current law. Whatever word games the bill’s proponents use will make no difference to the future victims of these felons.

Proponents also claim that only “low-level, non-violent” offenders will benefit, and that there are adequate safeguards to protect the public. If I believed these assertions, I would support the FIRST STEP Act. But a careful reading of the bill’s text, as opposed to the talking points used to promote it, shows that violent felons are eligible for early release, and that many of the bill’s provisions go against core conservative principles.

For background, according to the Department of Justice, the Senate version of the FIRST STEP Act creates a new “time credit” system that allows federal prisoners to accrue credits by participating in “evidence-based recidivism reduction programming or productive activities.” These new credits are in addition to existing “good time” credits and are worth up to one-third of the offender’s sentence.

The first problem with this new system is that “productive activities” is defined so vaguely that, according to the Bureau of Prisons, playing softball, watching movies, or doing activities that the prisoners are already doing today will result in new time credits. The whole idea behind these incentives is that prisoners will be less likely to recidivate upon release. But if the credits are this easy to get, how will this change the behavior of serious felons?

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/25/the-costs-of-presidential

Predictably, Donald Trump was attacked both by the establishment and the media as “crude,” “unpresidential,” and “gratuitous” for a recent series of blunt and graphic statements on a variety of current policies. Oddly, the implied charge this time around was not that Trump makes up stuff, but that he said things that were factual but should not be spoken.

Trump’s tweets and ex tempore editorials may have been indiscreet and politically unwise, but they were also mostly accurate assessments. That paradox revisits the perennial question that is the hallmark of the Trump presidency of what exactly is presidential crudity and what are the liabilities of presidential candor?

Concerning the catastrophic California Camp Fire (150,000 acres) and the Woolsey conflagration (100,000 acres), which in turn followed prior devastating California fires in spring and summer of 2018 (perhaps charring 1 million acres in all), Trump tweeted: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Certainly, while flames were devouring homes and lives, it was unwise and crass to talk of withholding federal disaster assistance funding in the future—a realization apparently soon known to Trump himself. In short order, he began signaling his admiration for the rare courage of California response teams and visited the fires promising full federal cooperation with state officials.

No matter. A chorus of critics claimed that Trump was ignoring the human tragedy to score points, whether about reviving the logging industry to salvage dead trees or punishing blue California. Perhaps, but he did not quite serially milk the catastrophe in the manner of California Governor Jerry Brown, who repeatedly warned that the disaster was a result of global warming rather than his own disastrous green agendas that have led to such destruction: “Managing all the forests in everywhere we can does not stop climate change. And tragedies that we’re now witnessing, and will continue to witness in the coming years.”

Both statements—Trump’s and Brown’s—may well have sounded crass in the midst of such lethal disasters, but there were a few differences. The likeliest immediate cause of the 2018 serial fires was the Brown administration’s continual failure on state lands to allow removal of millions of dead trees, lost in mountain and foothill forests during the four-year California drought, and to petition the federal government to do the same in national forests.

Instead, Brown throughout years of increasingly deadly forest fires has stayed wedded to the unyielding green orthodoxy that decaying trees were nearly sacrosanct and essential to the forest ecosystem (true perhaps in the long run, but absolutely a catastrophic short-term policy in a state of 40 million). Moreover, despite Brown’s diagnosis that that the fires rage because of a new normal era of hot and dry weather, 2016 had seen one of the wettest and snowiest years in California history, while 2017 had been a near normal year of temperature and precipitation. The point then was that Trump’s ill-timed admonishment was truthful, while Brown’s own politicking was either irrelevant, misleading—or abjectly dangerous for millions. And yet Trump’s candor was precisely the sort of bluntness that turns off suburban voters.

https://reason.com/archives/2018/11/02/zombie-statistics

Linda Goudsmit responds to this very powerful column: “Zombie statistics are used in the marketing campaigns that sell leftist policies to unsuspecting Americans including global warming, gun control, open borders, population shifting, and the “safety” of opioids to doctors. Corrupt and falsified data in “scientific” studies used to support political science is a threat to freedom everywhere. Zombie statistics are used because society still naively believes in the credibility and integrity of the studies. They have not understood the malevolence and purposefulness of zombie statistics.” (http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21767/the-problem-with-capitalism)

“You’re about to be untricked,” boasted the opening line of a groundbreaking 1981 Reason investigation about high-profile chemical leaks in upstate New York. In the early ’80s, Love Canal had already become synonymous with corporate willingness to destroy the environment and human health in the name of profit. But careful reporting revealed the anti-corporate narrative was wrong; the primary malefactor wasn’t the greedy businessmen at Hooker Chemical but the Niagara Falls Board of Education, which developed a plot of land despite many warnings from Hooker about the presence of dangerous chemicals. Unfortunately, Reason’s story did little to change the anti-market tenor of the environmental reforms that followed.

That’s because when a narrative is powerful and useful to highly motivated activists, it can be fiendishly difficult to roll it back. Zombie statistics, in particular, are tough to defeat. These undead tidbits can sustain incredible blows and yet continue to crawl forward, like the plodding, inexorable zombies in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead—a film that debuted in 1968, the same year as Reason. These raggedy facts terrorize the debates over important issues for years after they have been definitively debunked.

At a time when #MeToo and Title IX are dominating the headlines, for instance, it can seem like sexual assault is everywhere. But one of the central statistics responsible for that perception rests on an astonishingly weak foundation. You’ve probably heard this shocking figure: One in five women has been sexually assaulted while in college.

One of the sources of support for that number is a 2002 study by David Lisak, who concluded that what had previously been referred to as “date rape” was actually the result of repeated infractions by serial campus predators. Lisak urged administrators to view every accusation “as an opportunity to identify a serial rapist,” a way of thinking that in turn validates harsh treatment for accused students and justifies funding a massive bureaucracy for adjudication. The Obama White House cited Lisak in memoranda, anti-rape activists promoted his work in movies and books, and university administrators invited him to give lectures and sit on panels.

But as Davidson College administrator Linda M. LeFauve explained in our pages three years ago, Lisak’s study was based on survey data cobbled together from his students’ dissertations and masters’ theses. The central data set drew from interviews with just 76 nontraditional, nonresidential students whose offenses “may or may not have happened on or near a college campus, may or may not have been perpetrated on other students, and may have happened at any time in the survey respondents’ adult lives.” Despite all these problems, the figure is still widely used and widely believed.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/23/republicans-and-trump

Pause for a moment and imagine you are so gullible that you believe one of the biggest political stunts of all time—that your mind is so incurious and facile that you’ve fallen for a crackpot conspiracy theory force-fed to you by fabulists in the media for two solid years. Still bitter about the defeat of your presidential candidate, you hallucinate about why your side lost, and convince yourself that the current occupant of the Oval Office is there as a result of some illegitimate or nefarious scheme.

That isn’t an imaginary scenario. Sadly—or laughably, take your pick—it’s a state of mind shared by tens of millions of your countrymen.

According to a recent poll, nearly 70 percent of Democrats actually admitted out loud they think the Russians helped sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

When asked if it was true that “Russians tampered with vote tallies to in order to get Donald Trump elected,” 67 percent of Democrats replied that yes, it was true. Eighty-five percent of Democrats think Russia hacked the emails of Democrats to help Trump; nearly 90 percent of Democrats think Russia “created and spread fake news stories to help Donald Trump win the election.”

Whoa.

The active imaginations of those on the Left are guided by one overriding delusion: That the Trump presidential campaign conspired with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. No villain is too improbable, no CNN-sourced story is too far fetched for this crowd to believe. “Without evidence!” they wail at Trump as they cling to an evidence-free Trump-Russia chimera that pollutes their thoughts and consumes their time.