RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose above 22,000 for the first time on Wednesday. “ Donald Trump is loving the stock market these days,” observes the Journal, which adds that Wednesday’s milestone “marks a rise of precisely 20% since Mr. Trump was elected in November. Assuming the blue-chip index closes above 22000, it will have taken just 183 days to do that, the fastest jump of 20% after a new president was elected since George H.W. Bush in 1988, according to WSJ’s Market Data Group.” But how much credit does Mr. Trump deserve?

The investor euphoria after Mr. Trump’s election has bumped up against the reluctance of Republican legislators to enact significant reform. After several GOP senators broke their promises last week to repeal ObamaCare, now the Washington Post says, “The White House’s push to quickly pass a major package of tax cuts through Congress is facing a fall calendar full of legislative land mines, potentially delaying a key part of President Trump’s agenda into at least 2018.”

These days many investors argue whether the rising market is still being driven by optimism about the Trump agenda or simply by rising corporate sales and profits thanks to improving global growth. Monetary policy has also left the financial system awash in cash looking for assets to buy. And then there’s the thesis from Brian Reynolds of Canaccord Genuity that as long as pension funds continue to buy huge volumes of corporate bonds, those corporations will continue to have the cash to buy back their own stock and keep markets grinding higher. He points out that credit investors “bought a record amount of corporate bonds in July.”

Whether the stock market boom is largely driven by one of these factors or some combination, it’s clear that investors continue to be much more optimistic about the United States than most journalists, who write daily on the latest alleged signal from Washington that civilization is heading into an abyss.

Mr. Trump certainly runs a risk in pointing to the markets as an arbiter of his performance. The Journal notes:

Stock-market strategists have warned that hitching his administration to the market may be dangerous. After all, big gains in the Dow during the early months of a presidency don’t always equate to big gains during the rest of the presidency. The fastest 20% rise following the election of a new president was the 63 days it took after President Herbert Hoover’s win in 1928.

But Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics thinks Mr. Trump has every right to take credit for rising markets. In a note to clients this week he acknowledges the view of many investors that “all of the pro-growth hopes and dreams that flourished right after Trump’s surprise election have now been crushed by the swamp, and Trump’s own seeming self-destructiveness.”

Mr. Luskin has a different view and writes that booming U.S. stock markets probably represent a “rational recognition that, since Trump took office, many pro-growth hopes and dreams have already become reality.” Mr. Luskin continues, “We’re not trying to be either cheerleaders or partisans here. But it’s a reality that a great deal of pro-growth progress has been made.” He ticks off a list that includes pipeline approvals, the rollback of various Obama-era rules, and the hiring of deregulators to run the EPA, the FCC and other federal agencies. CONTINUE AT SITE

A top official of the National Security Council was fired last month after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda.

His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking.

Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in the NSC’s strategic-planning office as a director for strategic planning, was let go on July 21. Higgins’s memo describes supposed domestic and international threats to Trump’s presidency, including globalists, bankers, the “deep state,” and Islamists. The memo characterizes the Russia story as a plot to sabotage Trump’s nationalist agenda. It asserts that globalists and Islamists are seeking to destroy America. The memo also includes a set of recommendations, arguing that the problem constitutes a national-security priority.

“Globalists and Islamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be destroyed,” the memo warns. It argues that this has led “Islamists [to] ally with cultural Marxists,” but that in the long run, “Islamists will co-opt the movement in its entirety.”

Higgins wrote the memo in late May, and at some point afterwards it began circulating among people outside the White House associated with the Trump campaign to whom Higgins had given it.

Higgins, according to another source with direct knowledge of the incident, was called into the White House Counsel’s office the week before last and asked about the memo. On July 21, the Friday of that week, he was informed by McMaster’s deputy Ricky Waddell that he was losing his job.

NSC spokesman Michael Anton declined to comment on Higgins’s firing, saying that the White House does not comment on internal personnel matters.

“In Maoist insurgencies, the formation of a counter-state is essential to seizing state power,” the memo reads. “Functioning as a hostile complete state acting within an existing state, it has an alternate infrastructure. Political warfare operates as one of the activities of the ‘counter-state.’” I was able to review large portions of the memo, and to secure extracts for publication.

“Because the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels, recognition should be given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate through coordinated synchronized interactive narratives … These attack narratives are pervasive, full spectrum, and institutionalized at all levels. They operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies.”

Sources offered conflicting accounts of how the memo came to McMaster’s attention. Several sources with knowledge of the events said they believed the memo made its way to Trump’s desk, a version that others disputed.

Higgins’s bosses at the NSC were not pleased with the memo, sources say, the creation of which was not part of Higgins’s job. Higgins, seen as an ally of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, had only served on the council for a couple months.

Imagine, if you will, that there is a shadow government.

The actual government, the administration of Donald Trump, is coming off the worst week of his presidency, although there haven’t been any smooth weeks. Trump’s top legislative priority, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, seems dead for the moment. (Tax reform? Forget it.) His administration has set a new standard for chaos and dysfunction, rolling through staffers the way other administrations run through, well, legislative initiatives. Trump’s foreign policy remains inchoate and ineffective. Meanwhile, a special counsel investigation looms over the entire administration, threatening both its legitimacy and legal jeopardy for some of its members.

Things are going considerably better for the shadow government. With the Trump administration’s chaos sucking up all the attention, it’s been able to move forward on a range of its priorities, which tend to be more focused on regulatory matters anyway. It is remaking the justice system, rewriting environmental rules, overhauling public-lands administration, and greenlighting major infrastructure projects. It is appointing figures who will guarantee the triumph of its ideological vision for decades to come.

The trick here is that the administration and this shadow government are one and the same. Even as the public government sputters, other elements of the Trump administration are quietly remaking the nation’s regulatory landscape, especially on the environment and criminal justice.

There is so much attention paid to the chaos in the executive branch that it’s easy to come to believe that Trump is getting nothing whatsoever accomplished. Even for people who don’t support the president’s agenda—especially for them, in fact—it is useful to step back occasionally and take stock of what this presidency is doing to work toward its goals.

Trump’s complaints that the press is ignoring his victories in favor of covering controversies ring hollow. You can’t very well go around setting things on fire and then asking why the press keeps covering the fires. But warnings that the Trump administration is doing X to distract from Y seem misguided for a couple of reasons—one being that they ascribe a greater organization that the White House evinces in any other sphere, and another being that the supposedly distracting stories are often just as catastrophic. But the large-scale disasters do keep attention focused away from what smaller agencies are doing, as Ben Carson acknowledged recently.

“Let me put it this way,” the secretary of housing and urban development told the Washington Examiner. “I’m glad that Trump is drawing all the fire so I can get stuff done.”

Meanwhile, Trump continues to make preposterous claims. His assertion, at the six-month mark of his presidency last month, that he’d signed more bills than any other president over that stretch earned a snarky rejoinder even from The New York Times. But that is small consolation for progressive environmentalists, public-lands advocates, LGBT activists, and criminal-justice reformers. The list of accomplishments fall short of what Trump promised, but many of them are still quite consequential, with effects to be felt for decades to come. That’s one reason this sort of devil’s advocate exercise is important, although when I tried it in January it was not well received (except by the White House). Still, in the spirit of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who intends to establish a “red-team blue-team” exercise to investigate whether climate change is actually happening, let’s consider the Trump administration’s accomplishments. Spoiler alert: like climate change, they’re real.

One of the two biggest victories has come on border security, which was one of Trump’s top campaign priorities. Border crossings have already plummeted, suggesting that rhetoric making it clear to immigrants that they are not welcome is effective in its own right. Customs and Border Protections report that apprehensions of unauthorized people are down nearly 20 percent from the same time in 2016. (Trump continues to radically exaggerate these figures, though.) This decline has occurred despite Trump being foiled on his actual policy proposals at the border. Construction hasn’t begun on his border wall yet, and federal courts have repeatedly smacked down his Muslim travel ban.

That said, he did get one good result in courts—and that points to a second area of success. The Supreme Court allowed parts of the travel ban to go forward, in a victory that would not have happened without Neil Gorsuch on the court, filling a seat that under all previous customs would have been filled by Barack Obama’s appointee Merrick Garland. Given his legislative struggles, the most enduring Trump victories are likely to come in the judicial branch.

Trump may get to appoint several more justices to the high court. And in the meantime, he’s filling up lower courts with lifetime appointees. As the veteran Democratic official Ron Klain wrote recently, “A massive transformation is underway in how our fundamental rights are defined by the federal judiciary. For while President Trump is incompetent at countless aspects of his job, he is proving wildly successful in one respect: naming youthful conservative nominees to the federal bench in record-setting numbers.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/ishmael-jones-phoniness-of-the-trump-dossier.php

Ishmael Jones writes to comment on the infamous Trump “dossier.” It is one of the keys to the “collusion” hysteria and related “fake news” with which we have been inundated since the 2016 election. Mr. Jones is the pseudonymous former CIA officer and author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. He notes that his comments here are based upon his experience in writing “lots of intelligence reports” and that they have been approved by the CIA for publication. Mr. Jones writes:

The media continue to produce smoke in their efforts to accuse President Trump of collusion with the Russian government. But the founding document – the core set of beliefs – of the collusion story remains the infamous Russian Dossier, which is a fabrication.

I have written before on the nothingness of the reporting on Russian collusion and I want to make it clear how phony this Dossier is from the point of view of an intelligence officer.

I do not have a magical espionage sixth sense. Rather, it is the same instinct that we all have. If you know how to fly a plane, or plant roses, or collect stamps, or play the saxophone, you have an instinctive and visceral awareness when you encounter false information involving your specialty.

For fun, you can click on these photographs, which will instinctively make you think something’s not right here. That’s the same feeling I get when I watch CNN’s reporting on intelligence issues.

Spies don’t even use the word “dossier.” They keep information in “files,” just like everybody else. English is such a rich language that we can use different words for the same object when we want to gussy things up. We don’t “eat raw cow,” we “dine upon steak tartare.” “Dossier” makes this fabrication sound better.

The heading on the Dossier says CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE SOURCE which sounds official except I’ve never seen such a heading.

The first page of the Dossier gets right down to business with the golden showers accusation, that Donald Trump had women urinate upon him for his personal enjoyment. Sure, crazy things can happen, but the professional’s first instinct is skepticism. Crazy accusations with no details, no proof, no names, and no sourcing mean it didn’t happen.

The CIA has professional reports officers who review intelligence reporting. It’s as if they carry rulers, ready to rap the knuckles of any CIA case officer who writes a report like the Dossier. They demand details and the who, what, when, why, and where.

Fabrications are everywhere in both espionage and journalism. Fabricators create this stuff relentlessly for profit. Even before Al Gore invented the Internet, fabricated stories were everywhere.

Many journalists have the same standards as CIA reports officers, which is why so many journalists had already seen and dismissed the Dossier, before CNN finally took the bait.

The Dossier occasionally uses the passive voice such as “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones …” or “there had been talk in the Kremlin…” The passive voice makes CIA reports officers howl, “Who knew it, why did they know it, how did they know it!” Reports officers hate the passive voice because it is misleading and weaselly. No professional spy writes in the passive voice.

The Dossier is sprinkled with words like “kompromat” and “plausible deniability” which sound like spy words but spies don’t write this way.

Fabricators try to include a bit of truth in their reporting to make the false reporting appear true. Some of the Dossier’s observations, such as that the Russians spy on other nations, are true but add nothing. Those few details that the Dossier contains have been disproven. Trump’s lawyer did not travel to Prague for a meeting with Russians, for example. Trump associates and acquaintances mentioned in the Dossier turned out to have no connection to the described events.

Donald Trump campaigned on the promise to “drain the swamp” ––the D.C. establishment made up of most Congressmen from both parties, employees of executive agencies and bureaus, the political appointees who head up those agencies, and the hordes of lobbyists, fundraisers, Congressional staffers, “consultants,” “journalists,” and pundits. These are the “Beltway insiders” or the “political establishment” whose natural habitat is the swamp. These are the alligators Trump needs to get rid of.

Of course, many of these D.C. denizens of the establishment are permanent dwellers in the swamp, beyond the reach of the president or even Congress. Besides, monitoring Congressmen should be the business of their constituents, who should hold them accountable. But too often voters like the pork their alligators bring back to their states or districts. As for pundits, consultants, lobbyists, fundraisers, and journos, they are employees of private businesses, with the right of political free speech and association. Keeping them in line is the responsibility of citizens trading in the market-place of ideas, and imposing ballot-box accountability to punish the office-holders corrupted by these parasites.

Then there are 2.1 million federal employees. They manage the federal government’s agencies, execute the laws that they, not Congressmen, actually write, and judge whether the rest of us comply––collapsing together and usurping the separation of powers central to our Constitutional order. And they do so without any accountability to the voters who pay their handsome salaries and Cadillac benefits (85% higher in value than private employees’). They are, no surprise, stalwart supporters of big-government Democrats, to whom this last election they gave 95% of their political donations. And don’t forget the 3.7 million federal contract-workers who also do the federal Leviathan’s bidding.

Something could be done about reducing the size and intrusive scope of this bureaucratic behemoth. Trump has made a good start. He has left many vacancies open with a hiring freeze, and has proposed reducing some agency budgets in order to starve the beast and prune the regulations that empower it. In his 2018 budget proposal he also called for eliminating cost of living raises for employees in the Federal Employee Retirement System, cutting the Civil Service Retirement System’s COLAs by 0.5%, and making employees contribute more to their retirement annuities. If Congress approves, of course. Good luck with that. But he has not yet tackled reducing the more shadowy contract workers, although some are a legitimate resource for the military. When it comes to domestic affairs, however, they carry out the bidding of the federal agencies while most of us citizens have no clue who they are or what they’re up to.

As for Congress, it could pass legislation changing the laws that make federal employees almost untouchable. Like unionized teachers and professors, federal employees benefit from both union protections and virtual tenure––the civil service regulations that make disciplining or firing federal workers time-consuming and costly. There’s nothing to keep Congress from abolishing unions for federal employees, which were created 55 years ago by John Kennedy through an executive order. One of Ronald Reagan’s boldest and most consequential domestic actions came in 1981 when he fired nearly 12,000 air traffic controllers and decertified their union. A Republican Congress should likewise defang this reliably Democrat voting bloc.

Political appointees are another matter, since they’re easier to get rid of. They serve at the pleasure of the Chief Executive. There is no law that keeps the president from firing political appointees. There may be political costs, as Richard Nixon found out, but there are no Constitutional limits, outside of criminal behavior, on the reasons why he fires a political appointee. This is where Trump has been remiss.

Start with former FBI director James Comey, who immediately after the inauguration should have heard Trump’s trademark “You’re fired!” Comey’s careerism and arrogance made him mishandle the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s patent violations of the laws governing classified material, and her probable obstructions of justice. An indictment could have been justified based simply on the information already made public. Indeed, Comey himself laid out the predicates for indictment in his infamous July 2016 announcement. Then he rewrote the relevant statute to let Clinton off the hook, simply to spare AG Loretta Lynch, who had met with Bill Clinton in a private confab in an airplane, the pretext Comey used for usurping the prosecutor’s role. Along the way he violated the foundation of any free government––equality before the law.

There are times when watching progressives try to grapple with their own conceptual contradictions is like watching a blind man with Crisco on his hands trying to juggle chainsaws. Broadway theater, an aggressively leftist institution, is today presenting the following spectacle: A white actor has been shamed out of playing a white character in a Broadway show because it would have been hurtful to black actors.

Mandy Patinkin, a reliable box-office attraction on Broadway going back to the 1970s (Evita) and a star of television (Criminal Minds, Homeland) and film (The Princess Bride), was set to take over the lead male role in the musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, replacing Josh Groban, whose popularity is widely credited with making the oddball show a success. Great Comet, with original songs and a story based on (a small slice of) War and Peace, wasn’t an obvious candidate for box-office glory, but Groban’s huge fan base filled the seats. “It wasn’t Leo Tolstoy who turned out the crowds,” notes New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel, the definitive Broadway observer. “It was Josh Groban.” Post-Groban, advance ticket sales for late summer and fall were “catastrophically low,” the show’s composer, Dave Malloy, said.

When Groban left the show on the expiration of his contract on July 2, the boyish baritone was temporarily replaced by an unknown, Okieriete “Oak” Onaodowan, whom Patinkin would have replaced. Onaodowan is black. Patinkin isn’t. So an utterly routine fact of Broadway life — star replaces non-star — was dressed up in racial outrage. Social media seethed. The Daily News headline read “‘Great Comet’ actor Okieriete Onaodowan shoved aside for Mandy Patinkin, causing outcry.” One actor, Rafael Casal, tweeted, “Telling lead actors of color to #makeroom? Really? @greatcometbway #makeroom is the new code for ‘still not your turn.’” Actress Cynthia Erivo, who won a Tony in 2015 for The Color Purple, also took exception, tweeting, “This has been handled badly. Ticket sales shouldn’t override a person doing his job” and “Oak worked extremely hard for this. Which makes this occurrence distasteful and uncouth.”

Patinkin withdrew from the show, groveling. The producers who hired him also scraped and begged forgiveness, as did the composer. All did much agonizing about how they should have better understood the “optics.” Then Onaodowan himself quit, announcing that August 13 would bring his last performance.

So Great Comet, which now doesn’t have a big-name star in either lead role, is in even more severe danger of closing soon. “Ticket sales shouldn’t override a person doing his job?” Soon, everyone associated with The Great Comet will be out of a job if the show can’t find a way to boost ticket sales. Onaodowan, by the way, would have received full pay for the lead role after yielding to the bigger star. So no one would have suffered any economic loss in the event that Patinkin had taken the stage. A major social-justice win in this instance amounts to probably throwing a bunch of left-wing showbiz people of color out of work.