RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s challenge Tuesday night was to look like he was up to the Presidency after a rocky start and set a clear direction for Congress. He succeeded more on the former than the latter, and the test now will be whether he can corral a fractious Congress to deliver in particular on tax reform and health care.

As a presidential rookie, Mr. Trump showed he could deliver a speech on this kind of stage in a calm and measured way. We haven’t seen enough of that in his first five weeks, and in that sense on Tuesday he rose to the occasion in democracy’s center ring. He was less tendentious than in his inaugural, and he began and ended with notes of unity and inclusiveness that have been too few in his early days.

Mr. Trump’s tone was also less combative than in his press conferences or TV appearances, and he didn’t sound like he was delivering a moral lecture as President Obama so often did. His blunt, plain language has been part of his political appeal, and for the most part he also avoided the defensiveness and self-focus that are unbecoming in the world’s most powerful political leader.

Even better was a tone of relative optimism. We say relative because his previous major speeches, including the inaugural, have included a parade of American horribles. On Tuesday he offered more than a few downbeats, including an overwrought picture of crime and a country besieged by foreign scoundrels. But he also pointed to better days and noted that Americans have always overcome their troubles.

The speech was less helpful in laying down clear markers for Congress on his signature reforms. The biggest miss was on taxes, where he barely developed his case for reform beyond what he has said in the campaign. He made only a tepid argument for the supply-side benefits of tax reform and instead cast corporate tax cuts mainly as a way to “create a level playing field for American companies and workers.”

This generality may reflect the indecision within his own economic team about how to proceed on tax reform. But with Republicans on Capitol Hill all over the place on taxes and spending, Mr. Trump missed an opportunity to make a better case and to set a firm timetable for action that can’t afford to go beyond 2017.

Also striking are the President’s contradictions on the wellsprings of economic growth. He understands that tax cuts and deregulation are essential to unleashing investment at home, but his capitalist instincts stop at the border. His invocation of the hoary old Lincoln quote about the virtues of “protective policy” couldn’t be less appropriate for the modern U.S. economy that needs global markets and world-class talent to succeed.

This is the “economic nationalism” promoted by his chief strategist Steve Bannon, and it is intended to show voters that Mr. Trump is on their side. But if it is ever put into practice it will undermine the rest of his growth agenda.

The President was better on health care, where he offered a set of sound principles. These included more competition and individual choice: “it must be the plan they want, not the plan forced on them by the government.”

Many years ago, when I was a brash young conservative lawyer working in a big law firm, I said something that could have ended my career (and almost certainly would have today). It was March Madness, and I was running one of the firm’s two bracket pools. As a basketball snob, I disliked the traditional pool because it was too dependent on sheer, dumb luck. As I recall, lawyers’ ten-year-old kids had won the previous two years, and I wanted a pool for serious fans only.

So, I created what I called the “conservative bracket,” a pool that put a premium on picking upsets. In a firm-wide e-mail, I said you could join the traditional, “liberal” bracket — where merit was irrelevant to outcome and even the most ignorant fan could win a trophy — or you could join the firm’s Republicans and test yourself against the best.

That wasn’t the offensive part. Just wait.

Once the tournament got rolling, I intended to start each Monday with a fun and highly politicized summary of the weekend’s results. The year was 1995, and the mighty Arizona Wildcats were upset by Miami of Ohio in the first round — a result I predicted. So, in the gleeful opening paragraph of my Monday morning firm-wide e-mail (sent to every lawyer, paralegal, and secretary), I explained at some length that Arizona lost because it played “like a bunch of girls.”

Okay, that was the offensive part.

The chairman of the firm’s management committee was a liberal feminist, and the firm’s female partners were by and large quite feminist. I was a lowly first-year associate. My job was of no consequence, and I immediately heard through the grapevine that the partners were not pleased. I braced myself for the consequences.

The next morning, I came to work and saw that my office door was closed. When I opened the door, my office was empty and the walls were covered with posters of women’s college-basketball teams. I turned around and every woman in the firm was standing behind me, triumphant smirks on their faces. My secretary grabbed my hand and led me down the hall to the women’s restroom, where they’d put my desk and chair and taped “David’s Office” on the door.

They responded to my ham-handed attempt at humor with some humor of their own — humor with a point.

I wasn’t called in to human resources. I wasn’t “counseled.” I didn’t have to attend diversity training. And I certainly wasn’t fined. I kept rolling with my conservative bracket (I came in last), and I kept sending firm-wide e-mails.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is proposing deep cuts in U.S. diplomatic and foreign-aid funding while dramatically increasing defense expenditures, a bid to fundamentally shift the emphasis of U.S. foreign policy that has sparked fierce criticism from lawmakers and international-affairs experts.

The White House has proposed a spending cut of 37% to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development budget said a person familiar with the budget deliberations. Those agencies now receive about $50.1 billion.

At the same time, President Donald Trump is developing a federal budget that officials said would add $54 billion to the base defense budget, funded by cuts elsewhere, including the State Department and its foreign-aid division. The addition would increase military spending to more than $600 billion.

Lawmakers opposed to the cuts say they will unavoidably devastate the State Department. People familiar with the deliberations said the Trump administration is examining the growth in spending by the State Department during the Obama administration, including through the addition of adding special envoys, they said, though that would not cover the proposed cuts.

One U.S. official said that the Trump administration also was eyeing U.S. development assistance to other countries as a significant source for the cuts.

Word of the proposed cuts met with swift objection from Republicans and Democrats, who said it would sharply curtail Washington’s ability to guide world events.

“That is definitely dead on arrival,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on state and foreign operations, told reporters Tuesday. He said the proposed budget “destroys soft power” and puts diplomats at risk.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said he didn’t believe that a 37% cut would make it through Congress. “The diplomatic portion of the federal budget is very important and you get results a lot cheaper frequently,” than through military spending, he said.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.), the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said cutting the State Department budget by more than a third would “have serious and detrimental effects on our national-security posture.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-navy-choice-1488317240

President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Navy, investor Philip Bilden, withdrew Sunday over difficulties separating himself from his business interests. This follows the withdrawal of Army nominee Vincent Viola, but the Navy job carries particular significance because the new Administration has promised a major naval buildup.

The last great U.S. Navy Secretary was John Lehman, who used a background in finance and a natural talent for bureaucratic warfare to enact Ronald Reagan’s vision of a 600-ship Navy and help drive the Soviet Union to exhaustion. Today, as the Navy and its industry contractors try to halt a string of acquisitions snafus involving aircraft carriers, surface combatants and fighter aircraft, a veteran businessman such as former Ford CEO Alan Mulally would be a strong choice.

The more obvious pick is former Congressman Randy Forbes. As chair of the House Armed Services subcommittees on readiness and seapower from 2011 through last year, he warned that the Navy is undersized and ill-equipped to address security challenges such as China’s emergence as a rival in the Pacific. Mr. Forbes helped conceive the goal of a 350-ship Navy embraced by Mr. Trump—today’s fleet is 273 deployable ships—and last year he led his House committee in passing a $20.6 billion shipbuilding budget, the largest since the Reagan-Lehman era.

Our sources say Mr. Forbes has backers at the White House, but Pentagon chief Jim Mattis may prefer a nonpolitician. Mr. Mattis shouldn’t hire anyone who doesn’t have his confidence, but many former politicians have served ably as service secretaries. Mr. Forbes has a record of subordinating political considerations to strategic ones, as when he backed the deployment of more U.S. Navy assets to Asia that otherwise could have been based in his home state of Virginia.

Reversing the U.S. Navy’s decline is an urgent strategic priority. A smart service secretary who can navigate the Pentagon bureaucracy and Congressional opponents will be an asset to Mr. Trump, and the country, in pursuing the 350-ship goal. CONTINUE AT SITE

Turns out the last full quarter of the Obama economy was just as lousy as we thought. This morning the government reported that GDP grew at the same sluggish 1.9% rate in the fourth quarter as previously estimated. Business investment was even worse than expected, and this news comes on the heels of Monday’s disappointing report on durable goods orders for January. This raises the hope that at least we won’t have to hear any more about the allegedly beautiful economy that President Obama has bequeathed to his successor. But it underlines the need for President Trump to show tonight that he’s going to deliver on his promises of economic growth.

Markets have been on a tear since Election Night, with the Dow up nearly 14% through Tuesday’s close. This is based on Mr. Trump’s promises to reduce the burden of taxes and rules imposed by Washington. For years prior to his election, markets were rising thanks in large part to historically low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve. But investors and businesspeople didn’t really believe Washington could manufacture prosperity. So big companies borrowed at low rates and then used the money to buy other companies or buy back their own stock or just sat on cash instead of investing in new equipment. This lack of investment meant we never got the productivity gains that make us all richer. Mr. Trump has made business operators more optimistic but it’s not clear he’s yet changed their behavior.

When he addresses a Joint Session of Congress tonight, job creators need to see Mr. Trump’s best-ever reality show—a plan to move from the unreality of Washington economic management to a real market where stocks rise because of robust growth in sales and profits. CONTINUE AT SITE

The call from the Left is to “resist” a “Fascist America,” which is supposedly the direction the United States is taking under President Trump. Among other things, leftists regularly accuse President Trump and members of his administration of anti-Semitism. Yet one of the leaders of the “resistance” movement, and a co-organizer of the next women’s protest on March 8th is Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted Palestinian terrorist. Odeh had participated in bombings in Israel nearly 50 years ago, one of which resulted in the killing of two Israeli students. Now she is advocating militant resistance in the streets of the United States. For Palestinians, “resistance” is often used as a rationalization for acts of terrorism. Odeh has not explicitly advocated the use of violence – at least not yet. However, Odeh and her co-organizers have called for the March 8th protest to include blocking roads, bridges, and squares. We have seen such uncivil acts of disobedience lead to violence in the past.

Odeh has joined with several other militants as co-authors of a manifesto for a new, more radical form of feminism. Odeh’s co-authors include Angela Davis, who supported the Black Panthers and was a former leader of the Communist Party USA, and Tithi Bhattacharya, a Maoist supporter. The manifesto heralded what its authors called an international “anti-capitalist” feminist movement that is “at once anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-heterosexist and anti-neoliberal.” So-called “lean-in” or “other variants of corporate feminism” are not “feminism for the 99%,” according to the manifesto’s co-authors.

Move over, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. Leftists have found new radical feminist heroines to embrace. According to Workers’ World, “Progressive women in the U.S. eagerly responded to the call. Posted on womenstrikeus.org is the strike platform: ‘In a spirit of solidarity and internationalism, in the United States, March 8 will be a day of action organized by and for women who have been marginalized and silenced by decades of neoliberalism directed toward working women, women of color, Native women, disabled women, immigrant women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women. … [We are organizing] resistance not just against Trump and his misogynist policies, but also against the conditions that produced Trump, namely the decades-long economic inequality, racial and sexual violence, and imperial wars abroad.’” In other words, a whole potpourri of favorite leftwing causes.

Rasmea Yousef Odeh is particularly beloved in Muslim and leftwing circles. “She’s an icon, actually, across the country amongst Arab and Muslim organizations, around civil liberties organizations, among women’s empowerment organizations,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, a member of Chicago’s Arab-American community where Odeh was active as an organizer.

Angela Davis participated in an event in 2015 with Odeh, co-organized by the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter, entitled “Freedom Beyond Occupation & Incarceration – An Afternoon with Angela Davis and Rasmea Odeh.” According to a report in Ebony, “Davis and Odeh discussed the importance of Black-Palestinian solidarity, political imprisonment in the US and Israel, as well as the need for the abolition of prisons and ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/guess_which_important_person_got_the_middle_finger_at_fashion_week.html

Apparently, it is Fashion Week, and Julie Tong relates that “Italian favorites from Gucci to Prada filled their collections with opulent color, excess, and maximalist style. While at Versace, powerful words like ‘unity,’ ‘courage,’ and ‘love’ were emblazoned on hats and sleeves and more.”

And, of course, “we can’t forget New York Fashion Week’s highly anticipated Raf Simons runway debut at Calvin Klein or the plethora of body-positive movements and political statements that took center stage on the runways.”

Those “political statements” included constant rebukes of President Trump in the Ashish shirt that nods to Trump’s comments in a leaked Access Hollywood tape, in which he boasted that a rich celebrity can “grab” enthusiastic women enamored of his wealth and status.

Then there was Prabal Gurung, whose shirt read “3 Million,” referencing “the number by which Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, despite President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.”

Not to be outdone, “[d]esigners Ramon Martin and Ryan Lobo pose with models from their show wearing Women’s March and Planned Parenthood T-shirts. On the runway, models wore Planned Parenthood pins.”

But I thought I would save the best for last: “aside from all the memorable moments and prettiest dresses, we want to make sure you are equally caught up on all the best shoes spotted on the catwalk thus far.”

One of the “best shoes” on display is called the “Jesus Printed Knee-High Boots, Jeremy Scott, Fall/Winter 2017.”

Would the fashion world depict the picture of Mohammad on a pair of boots? Would they make a statement about the lack of color worn by women in the Muslim world, whose native costumes have all but disappeared as they suffer under the lash of sharia law and dress codes?

Will the Christian world erupt with furious rage and start burning things? Or was I confusing that rage with visual depictions of another religion’s icon?

Just asking.

Jesus Printed Knee-High Boots, Jeremy Scott Fall/Winter 2017 Photo: ImaxTree

About 100 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia have been knocked over, police said on Sunday, in the latest apparent vandalism incident at a Jewish burial ground in the United States.

A Mount Carmel Cemetery visitor called police on Sunday morning to say the gravestones of three of his relatives had been toppled, police said in a statement. Officers found about 100 others knocked down. The incident apparently took place after dark on Saturday, police said.

ABC television affiliate WPVI said the damage was widespread and footage showed rows of headstones knocked down.

We variously read that Trump should be impeached, removed, neutralized — or worse. But until he is, are his appointments, executive orders, and impending legislative agenda equally abhorrent?

General acclamation followed the Trump appointments of retired Generals H. R. McMaster as national-security adviser, James Mattis as defense secretary, and John Kelly to head Homeland Security. The brief celebration of Trump’s selections was almost as loud as the otherwise daily denunciations of Trump himself. Trump’s equally inspired decisions, such as the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and Jeff Sessions as attorney general, presented the same ironies.

Most of these and other fine appointments came amid a near historic pushback against Trump, mostly over what he has said rather than what he’s done. But again, do the appointments create a dilemma for his existential critics who have gone beyond the traditional media audit of a public official and instead descended into calls for his removal — or worse? Indeed, removal chic is now widespread, as even conservatives ponder impeachment, invoking the 25th Amendment for mental unfitness, while the more radical (here and abroad and both Right and Left) either abstractly or concretely ponder a coup or some other road to his demise.

How do his opponents square such excellent appointments with Trump himself? Even bad people can occasionally do good?

Are his Cabinet secretaries patriotically (as I believe) serving their president, even if prepared at times to nudge him away from what they might feel are occasional unwise detours? Appointees of the caliber of a Mattis, McMaster, or Kelly do not go to work for any president with the likelihood of becoming undercover actors — undercutting his authority, or posing to the press that they are the moral superior to their boss, or leaking information to massage favorable accounts of their superior savvy or morality at the president’s expense. No, they serve the president because they want their country to prosper and think that it can if their commander in chief (whose agendas for the most part they share) is successful.

Or do critics argue that such fine men and women are “selling out” by putting careers before principled resistance to a president who will supposedly usher in unprecedented disasters? So far, even the most vehement Trump censors have not faulted these fine appointees for supposedly being soiled by association with Trump, whom they have otherwise accused, in varying degrees, of partaking of fascism, Stalinism, and Hitlerism.

Again, the point is, How do critics square the circle of damning Trump as singularly unfit while simultaneously praising his inspired appointees, who, if they were to adopt a similar mindset, would never set foot in a Trump White House? How does someone so unqualified still manage to listen to advice or follow his own instincts to appoint so many willing, gifted public servants — at a time, we are told, when nearly the entire diplomatic and security establishment in Washington refuses to work for such a reprobate?

The same disconnect holds true for Trump’s executive orders. Except for the rocky rollout of the temporary ban on immigration — since rectified and reformulated — his executive orders seem inspired and likely to restore the rule of law, curb endless and burdensome new regulations, address revolving-door ethics, enhance the economy, halt federal bloat, promote energy production, and create jobs. Without the Trump victory, the Paul Ryan agenda — radical tax reform and deregulation — that has been comatose for a decade would never have become viable. So, is the position of the conservative rejectionists something like the following: “I detest Trump because even his positive agendas are spoiled by his sponsorship?”