RUTHFULLY YOURS

Under the title “Rotting-Flesh Reaganism,” R. R. Reno argues that Reagan’s campaign for economic freedom “made sense in 1980, a great deal of sense. But we’re in 2016 now, and we’re no longer suffering under suffocating collectivism and clotted, complacent capitalism. . . . The politics of freedom is losing its salience.”

It surely is the case that the old Reagan message has less purchase now than it did a quarter-century ago. The word “entrepreneurship” hardly was spoken during the recent Republican primaries. That is disturbing, because the empirical evidence argues strongly that today’s capitalism is more “clotted” and more “complacent” than at any time for which we have data.

Here are some parameters that show just how cartelized the American economy has become:

First, and most alarming, startup businesses contributed virtually zero new jobs during the post-2009 employment recovery. Nearly all the employment growth since the depth of the Great Depression came among the 1,500 largest American public companies by market capitalization. In a February study for Asia Times, I showed that the reported employment growth of the S&P 1,500 companies was nearly identical to the total increase in payroll employment reported by the Bureau of Labor statistics during the past seven years.

That is a drastic and unprecedented reversal of historic patterns. As I observed in the Asia Timesstudy, “Economists from the US Census Bureau and the University of Maryland showed in a 2014 study that startup firms created an average of 2.9 million jobs a year between 1980 and 2010—twice the 1.4 million average increase in employment. In other words, startups created 2.9 million jobs a year while established firms lost 1.5 million jobs a year.”

A former NASA climate scientist has put out a new report criticizing the argument that global warming is settled science.

“It should be clear that the science of global warming is far from settled,” said Dr. Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist who now co-runs a major satellite temperature dataset at the University of Alabama-Huntsville.

“Uncertainties in the adjustments to our global temperature datasets, the Daily Caller New Foundationsmall amount of warming those datasets have measured compared to what climate models expect, and uncertainties over the possible role of Mother Nature in recent warming, all combine to make climate change beliefs as much faith-based as science-based,” Spencer wrote in a report published by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.

“Until climate science is funded independent of desired energy policy outcomes, we can continue to expect climate research results to be heavily biased in the direction of catastrophic outcomes,” Spencer wrote.
Spencer’s report covers a wide swath of climate science topics from the factors behind global warming, to how scientists make adjustments to climate data, to the “97 percent” consensus figure often cited by politicians and environmentalists.

At least two people were killed and more than a dozen others injured after a shooting outside a Florida nightclub hosting an event for teens, officials said early Monday.

The gunfire rang out just as family members were picking up their kids from Club Blu in Fort Myers, where the “no ID required” party had just finished.

Some of the victims were aged as young as 12, according to authorities.

Image: Club Blu
Club Blu Google

“We are deeply sorry for all involved,” Club Blu said in a Facebook post. “We tried to give the teens what we thought was a safe place to have a good time.”

The club said there was “armed security” at the event for children between the ages of 12 and 17, adding there “was nothing more we could have done.” Although police did not immediately give information about the identity of the suspects, the club said that “it was not kids at the party that did this despicable act.”

Police said that officers responded to the parking lot of Club Blu at around 12:30 a.m. to find multiple people suffering gunshot wounds ranging from minor to life-threatening

Of the 16 people taken to Lee Memorial Hospital, one died after being admitted and two others were in the intensive-care unit as of early Monday.
One other person was confirmed killed in the incident, according to police.

The victims were aged between 12 and 27, hospital spokeswoman Cheryl Garn said in a statement.

NBC station WBBH reported that both of those killed were male.

“It is a comfort that Trump will have some solid people around him, but the truth remains that he is uninformed on many topics, ill-informed on others, untrustworthy, and pathologically vindictive. I will never be able to say I want him to win — only that I’m certain I want Hillary Clinton to lose.”

You reap what you sow. For a generation since Ronald Reagan left Washington — that would be the Ronald Reagan who knew that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” was a punch line — the “conservative” Republican party has sown an incoherent statism that has trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys. On Thursday night came the harvest: The party was formally taken over by an incoherent statist whose “conservatism” is not done justice by scare quotes. Oh . . . and he has trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys.

Of course, you wouldn’t get that from his acceptance speech. Donald Trump doesn’t know much, but he has a genius for self-promotion and marketing. The conservative intellectuals and Washington political class so dismissive of his bravura 72-minute performance for its high-decibel staccato and occasional rambling repetitiveness are missing the point, as they have throughout Trump’s ascent.

From 30,000 feet, which is as close as most Americans get to government policy in all its intricacies, Trump gave a great speech. If you knew nothing of Trump, if your only impression was the Donald bestriding the Manichaean world he portrayed Thursday night, you wanted to be with him.

He’s with the cops against the thugs who shoot them down. He’s with peace-loving Americans (and don’t forget the “Q” after “LGBT”) against the barbaric Islamic terrorists who besiege them. He’s with wall-deprived communities preyed upon by illegal aliens. He’s now with the upright American middle class screwed over by the cabal of Beltway insiders and crony capitalists (of which he was, until moments ago, a member in good standing). He is the embodiment of law and order, pitted against Hillary Clinton, a recidivist felon in the court of public opinion — one the throng in Cleveland wants “locked up,” pronto.

You can see why it would drive an informed person nuts. But a note to all eggheads: Save your dissertation on why free trade does not actually undermine the dignity of work. Forget the stubborn facts that manufacturing is thriving in America, that a trade war with China is a moronic idea, and that Trump has forsworn any action on the entitlement spending that drives the ruinous $19 trillion national debt he decries. And don’t dare mention the bombshell Trump conveniently omitted in his stemwinder: his commitment to give legal status (pssst– that means amnesty) to millions of the illegal aliens he risibly promises to deport.

Hillary Clinton settled on Virginia Senator Tim Kaine to be her running mate. Senator Kaine’s self-effacing description of himself is “boring,” a trait that Hillary appears to relish. “I love that about him,” she told CBS News. Hillary also was looking for someone with knowledge of national security issues. Senator Kaine serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Arms Services Committee. What she really found in Senator Kaine is a running mate who epitomizes the Democratic Party’s increased willingness to turn on our close ally Israel and give the benefit of the doubt to Iran and the Islamists.

“Boring” is not the first trait that comes to mind when describing Senator Kaine. His moral cowardice and faulty judgment were on full display as he supported the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. Kaine obsequiously followed the direction of President Obama and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in supporting a filibuster to block the Senate majority opposed to the deal from conducting an up-or-down vote on Obama’s appeasement pact. Bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress opposed the deal. Senator Kaine himself admitted to having reservations in light of Iran’s past record of cheating and state sponsorship of terrorism. Yet he gave the thuggish Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously accepted an invitation to address a joint session of Congress regarding his concerns about the path the negotiations leading to the final deal was taking, Senator Kaine joined seven other Senate Democrats in boycotting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech.

During an interview with the Forward in March 2015, Kaine claimed that “I’m a strongly pro-Israel Democrat.” If Kaine were such a “strongly pro-Israel Democrat,” he would not have been one of only 12 senators whom, as the New York Sun recounted, “refused to sign a letter to President Obama warning of legislated legal constraints on funding the Palestinian Arab authority after it struck its alliance with Hamas.”

By elevating Senator Kaine as her choice for vice president, Hillary Clinton demonstrated how the Democratic Party she aspires to lead is moving towards breaking the decades-long bipartisan support for the Jewish State of Israel. However, it gets even worse than that. Hillary’s running mate exemplifies the Democratic Party’s willingness to risk the security of the American people by opening the door to admit large numbers of Islamist “refugees” from Syria. Hillary Clinton herself has called for a 500 percent increase of admissions over Obama’s irresponsible target of 10,000 Syrians to be admitted by the end of this fiscal year. Kaine appears to agree with those who do not think that the Obama administration has been processing the applications for asylum fast enough. And he opposed a bill passed by the House of Representatives that would have required more careful vetting of Syrians and Iraqis before they can be admitted to the United States as “refugees.”

“These refugees are people who are terrorized, not terrorists,” Kaine said in an interview conducted by Vox Media following the ISIS attack in Paris last November. Kaine made this statement even though he has no way of knowing whom the “refugees” from jihadi terrorist-plagued parts of the Middle East seeking to enter our country really are. Top U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have acknowledged that they have no real way of determining whether jihadist groups are infiltrating their fighters into the flow of refugees, as ISIS indicated it had every intention of doing. In particular, there is no reliable database to use in vetting Syrian refugees. Yet Kaine thinks he knows better, just like the top of his ticket thinks she does. He claimed that “the refugee vetting process is one of the safest areas that we have.” And he is willing to put American lives at risk to test his unfounded assumption.

Trump accused Hillary Clinton of being the beneficiary of a rigged system. Then the DNC leaks proved it by showing just how aggressively the Democratic National Committee was working to push Hillary and suppress any of her rivals to the crown. Not only was the process rigged with the superdelegates, but the DNC functioned like an arm of the Clinton campaign.

The Sanders campaign demanded someone’s head. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’ frizzy scalp was delivered to Bernie’s door. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose last original idea was trying to score a block of Hamilton tickets from an RNC official, certainly didn’t do any of this on her own.

Hillary Clinton lost her last bid for the White House inside her own party. And she wasn’t about to allow that to happen twice. So the Clintons just took over the DNC. They bought it and it sold out to them.

Sergeant Schultz is a patsy. Another disposable Clintonite in a long line of them from Susan McDougal, who spent 18 months in jail for covering for the Clintons before getting a presidential pardon from Bill, to Sandy Berger, who ducked in to stuff some classified documents about Bill’s terror policies into his socks and got 100 hours of community service for building his own “sock server” full of classified documents. If Hillary wins, then Debbie will become Chief of Staff Schultz, Defense Secretary Schultz or, since we already know she’s willing to do anything for Hillary, Attorney General Schultz.

Top DNC officials targeted Bernie Sanders, raising questions about his religion, testing anti-Bernie narratives, slamming him and cheerleading their candidate. They vetted media pieces about Hillary, suppressed material featuring Bernie Sanders and spied on the Sanders campaign from the inside.

The Democratic National Committee functioned like an arm of the Clinton campaign. The primaries were a fiction whose only purpose and only possible outcome was the coronation of Queen Hillary.

Wiser candidates knew that and stayed away. Those who did show up were really applying to be her second banana, a spot that none of them managed to pick up despite their refusal to hit her hard on any of her glaringly ultraviolet vulnerabilities. Only Bernie Sanders proved to be as deluded in his ambitions as he was in his politics. Only he thought that he could actually win a rigged race against Hillary.

The DNC taught him better. Eventually. It took lawsuits, voter fraud and every dirty trick in the book.