MEDIA Comments turned off

Who Elected You, Steady State? By Angelo Codevilla

Posted By on September 8th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/07/who-elected

“That is why, for the past decade, Americans have been doing all that can be done at the ballot box to shake this class off their backs. In 2016, Donald Trump was the likeliest instrument available for this. Today, we see this class rejecting the election’s outcome. The “resistance” has done so in practice. Anonymous’ idea of the “steady state” has now done so in theory as well. The Times’ and the Journal’s approbation of that theory attest to the sad fact that the revolution now ongoing among us has passed the point of no return.”

The New York Times’ Anonymous, proud to be saving the country from the president he is sworn to serve, dismisses fears of an unaccountable “deep state.” Rather, he argues, Americans should appreciate that, as he and other officials surreptitiously thwart President Trump’s inappropriate impulses, they are supplying a beneficent, steadying effect. He and other officials who share right thinking people’s judgments on Donald Trump are not the bad “deep state.” They are the good “steady state.”

Essentially that is the position of the Wall Street Journal as well. Without explicitly crediting Anonymous’s (un)specific claims of successful subversion or the specific ones that Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, Fear, makes on behalf of Gary Cohn and Generals James Mattis and H. R. McMaster, the Journal’s lead editorial praised as “heroes” “the Mattises and McMasters, the Kudlows and Cohns, the McConnells and Ryans, who’ve worked for the good of the country amid the tumultuous personality in the Oval Office.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Banality of Barack By Julie Kelly

Posted By on September 8th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/07/

Capping off a week where Senate Democrats embarrassed themselves at what should have been the semi-serious vetting of a Supreme Court justice, along comes our foot-stomping former president to remind Americans of who, ultimately, is responsible for infantilizing national politics.

While lecturing college students assembled in an auditorium in central Illinois—the adopted home state he rarely visits—Barack Obama engaged in the type of vacuous, preening, pretentious, and meaningless soliloquy that once upon a time was accepted as thoughtful political discourse. But it was a temper tantrum disguised as a sermon. He might as well as gone on stage in Champaign and said, “Trump is a big fat meanie!”

Listening to Obama speak is the auditory equivalent of eating cotton candy. It looks sweet and pretty at first, and momentarily it tickles your tongue with the first taste. But it quickly dissolves in your mouth, leaving behind an odd aftertaste. Your hunger isn’t satisfied; you kick yourself for wasting the calories, and you move on to the carnival hot dog. (Yes, these metaphors are intentional.)

Friday’s speech was yet another reminder of why Donald Trump won in 2016: Voters rejected Barack Obama as much as they rejected Hillary Clinton. After a decade of binging on this skilled politician’s oratory cocktail of empty platitudes, self-puffery, and finger-wagging scoldings, we were burned out. Americans started to notice that the soaring rhetoric did not match the accomplishments. There was a creeping sense the same man who once promised his vision was “not red states or blue states, just the United States” had done more damage to the body politic than any other president in recent memory.

And he wasn’t even a good tactician for his own side. In fact, while this political mastermind was in the Oval Office, his party lost more than 1,000 seats to Republicans across the country.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. adds 201,000 jobs as worker wages accelerate to nine-year high Unemployment stays at 18-year low Jeffry Bartash

Posted By on September 8th, 2018

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-adds-201000-jobs-as-wage-growth-accelerates-to-nine-year-high-2018-09-07

They have not been this low since 1969 rsk

The numbers: The United States created 201,000 new jobs in August, keeping the unemployment rate at an 18-year low and generating the fastest increase in worker pay since the end of the Great Recession.

Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 200,000 increase in new nonfarm jobs.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, was unchanged at 3.9%, the Labor Department said Friday.

The increase in hiring in August was another solid gain that reflects broad strength in an economy that accelerated in the spring and showed little sign of slowing down toward the end of summer.

Read: Don’t believe stats showing zero gains for workers, Trump White House says

The biggest news in the August employment report was a sharp increase in pay.

The average wage paid to American workers rose by 10 cents to $27.16 an hour. What’s more, the yearly rate of pay increases climbed to 2.9% from 2.7%, marking the highest level since June 2009.

What happened: White-collar professional firms filled 53,000 positions, bringing the total created over the past 12 months to more than half a million. These are the fastest growing jobs in the country.

Health-care providers hired 33,000 people, transport firms added 20,000 jobs and construction companies hired 23,000 workers.

Employment fell by 3,000 in manufacturing, the first decline in 13 months. U.S. tariffs and a scarcity of skilled laborers may finally be taking their toll.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sunday’s Vote Could Snap Swedes out of Their Stockholm Syndrome By Charles Ortel

Posted By on September 8th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/sundays_vote_could_snap_swedes_out_of_their_stockholm_syndrome.html

Swedes are set to vote Sunday, and soon the world may view another example of citizens frustrated by arrogant politicians and bureaucrats upending the status quo and changing the landscape of a rich country whose leaders manifestly have failed the working class. For in truth, Sweden is burning, physically and figuratively. This reality is known better outside that country, because pro-globalist elites in Sweden work so hard to obscure brutal crimes and dislocations that occur as too many unvetted immigrants sweep into their generous nation.

But it is not simply burning cars, and savage assaults that capture the concern of Swedish citizens and international observers. An expensive, thirty year experiment in Sweden promoting global governance and attacking world problems has certainly helped Swedish elites, but many voters see more financial harm than benefit for themselves.

So, in mere days, the Swedish electorate will speak, and rumblings emanating various ways suggest that parties and politicians long in control of the government will suffer erosion in their influence. How much power will a right-leaning party – Sweden Democrats – win at the ballot box, and what roles might candidates in this party play either supporting or obstructing the coalition government destined to emerge after September 9, 2018?

How closely will voters examine the qualifications and backgrounds of candidates for office, including their criminal records, if any, and the stated goals of their political parties concerning Sweden and regarding the wider world?

These major questions and looming answers must be seen in context.

Sparks Igniting Political Changes

In February 2017, when newly inaugurated President Trump drew attention to Tucker Carlson’s Fox News special on Sweden’s mounting problems with immigration policies, most critics around the world scoffed.

So, who was correct?

POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: NORTH DAKOTA-REP. KEVIN CRAMER (R) VS. SEN. HEIDI HEITKAMP (D)

Posted By on September 8th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-senate-barnburner-in-farm-country-1536356011
A Senate Barnburner in Farm Country North Dakota’s tossup election may turn on trade, conservative values, and how much the state wants to embrace Donald Trump. By Kyle Peterson

Standing on a shop floor between two 1,000-barrel steel tanks destined for the oil fields out west, Rep. Kevin Cramer insists that President Trump cares about North Dakota. “This is no longer flyover country, if you hadn’t noticed,” he tells a group of steelworkers in coveralls and hard hats on a late-August morning. “The secretary of transportation has been here twice. The secretary of homeland security. The secretary of energy. The secretary of agriculture. Of course, the president himself twice, and the vice president three times, just since they took office.”

For a red-state Republican in a tight election, these rolling visits are the arrival of the cavalry. Mr. Cramer is asking voters to promote him to the Senate this fall, and his success will be pivotal if the GOP is to keep majority control. The incumbent Democrat, Heidi Heitkamp, is so personally popular that Mr. Cramer confesses in one TV ad that “we all like Heidi.”

Yet North Dakotans also backed Mr. Trump in 2016 by nearly 36 points. “They are very supportive of this president,” Mr. Cramer tells me. He tilts his head and grins a little: “I mean very supportive.” Hence, Mr. Trump’s third official visit to the state, touching down Air Force One in Fargo this Friday to talk up Mr. Cramer at a $500-a-person fundraiser. “He’s gonna vote with me. He’s going to vote on Making America Great Again,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. If that doesn’t convince, the president is expected back in North Dakota for another rally before the election, and there’s Donald Trump Jr.’s planned speech on Sept. 25, not to mention . . .

One potential hang-up is Mr. Trump’s trade war, which could soon cost North Dakota farmers hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2012 Ms. Heitkamp won election by 0.9 percentage point, or 2,936 votes. Since the state has 30,000 farms, even a small tariff revolt could swing the balance. So far there hasn’t been much reliable polling. A June 13-15 survey gave Mr. Cramer a 4-point lead, within the margin of error, but that was before China put a 25% tariff on U.S. soybeans.

Typically, more than two-thirds of North Dakota’s soybean crop goes to China, shipped via ports in the Pacific Northwest: 60 pounds a bushel; 400,000 bushels carried by a 110-car train; just over five trainloads to fill a Panamax bulk ship. But since July there have been zero orders from the Pacific Northwest, industry data show. Soybean futures on the Chicago Board of Trade have fallen 20%, from highs near $10.50 a bushel to below $8.50. Meanwhile, the bite taken at the local elevator, which reflects demand and shipping costs, has grown. Instead of something like 85 cents, it’s hitting $1.50, as the market contemplates the difficulty of having to send soybeans east to St. Louis or Duluth, Minn.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Real Wages Are Rising More evidence that faster growth is flowing to workers.

Posted By on September 8th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/real-wages-are-rising-1536359667

Most headlines from Friday’s August jobs report concerned the 2.9% increase in wages over the last 12 months, the healthiest raise in some time. That figure was probably overstated due to a weak August 2017 falling off the 12-month comparison, but other data are showing that wages after inflation are finally rising as you’d expect in a tight labor market.

The August numbers reinforced the tightening trend. The unemployment rate stayed at 3.9%, and the rate for black Americans fell to a record low 6.3%; a year earlier the rate for blacks was 7.6%. The number of employed Americans fell, but much of that is explained by students returning to school. The same applies to the August dip in the labor participation rate. Overall the August snapshot shows a labor market in excellent shape, with nearly everyone who wants a job able to get one.

Which brings us to the wages debate. The economists who presided over the historically slow wage growth of the Obama years have been arguing that the Trump-era economic growth spurt is no big deal because wages after inflation aren’t rising. Their evidence is the average hourly earning increase, which at 2.7% in July wasn’t much above recent inflation that through July was 2.9%.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The University Is Ripe for Replacement By David Solway ****

Posted By on September 7th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-university-is-ripe-for-replacement/

“Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down.” — Stalin, interview with H.G. Wells

Beginning in early K-12 and continuing to the highest levels of university education, Leftist indoctrination is the gravest dilemma that afflicts education in North America, rendering it perhaps the most powerful instrument of anti-Western bias and socialist propaganda of the modern era.

Here my concern is with the abandonment of genuine scholarship, fact-based historical research, familiarity with the “Great Books” and the development of critical thinking habits, particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The curriculum now in place is one of intellectual dysphoria promoting the circulation of false or unprovable narratives — Anthropogenic Global Warming, Islam as a religion of peace, the campus rape epidemic, toxic masculinity, the scandal of American history, the glories of “diversity and inclusion,” the benefits of socialism, to cite just a few among a veritable encyclopedia — and furthering the revolutionary project of social and political deconstruction. Education has been transformed into a grooming operation for social justice warriors, radical feminists, anti-white vigilantes and budding socialists.

Moreover, to compound the septic plunge into calamitous absurdity, the self-contradictory adoption as a kind of state religion of postmodern thought and doctrine — briefly, the suspicion of reason, the belief that reality is a conceptual construct, the rejection of fixed or objective truth — has served to turn the university into a parody of its original purpose, the pursuit of genuine knowledge.

Defenders of the status quo need to be taken not with a grain of salt but an entire salt mine. Case in point: Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders, a rabid anti-conservative, an apologist for Islam, a believer in rampant immigration, and one of the shoddiest journalists in Canada, fully rejects the charge of university malfeasance. Rather, he claims, the campus is “less radical, more tolerant, more open and more politically moderate than ever before.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Consequences Will be Dire’ if Assad, Russia, Iran Attack Haley Warns By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on September 7th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/consequences-will-be-dire-if-assad-russia-iran-attack-idlib-haley-warns/

“When Russia and the Assad regime say they want to counter terrorism, they actually mean they want to bomb schools, hospitals, and homes.”

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley warned today at a UN Security Council briefing on Syria that an impending regime offensive “will only leave Syria weaker and more broken and create generations of Syrians who will never forget the heinous and senseless brutality of the Assad regime and its allies.”

About three million people live in northwestern Idlib province, one of the last strongholds of opposition forces who have been battling dictator Bashar al-Assad for years. Airstrikes were reported in the province today as the international community is trying to stop a major regime-Russia offensive that could be especially bloody and include more chemical weapons use by Assad.

“Any offensive is to us objectionable as a reckless escalation. There is lots of evidence that chemical weapons are being prepared,” said Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, America’s newly appointed special representative to Syria.

Jeffrey said the U.S. is “not in a hurry to pull out” of Syria because ISIS, which the non-regime Syrian Democratic Forces have been fighting, is not defeated.

Haley said today that the “Assad regime and its enablers, Russia and Iran, have a playbook for this war.”

“First, they surround a civilian area. Next, they make the preposterous claim that everyone in the area is a terrorist, so every man, woman, and child becomes a target. Then comes the ‘starve and surrender’ campaign, where they keep attacking until the people no longer have food, clean water, or shelter. It’s a playbook of death. The Assad regime has spent the last seven years refining it with Russia and Iran’s help,” she said.

“The atrocities committed by Assad will be a permanent stain on history and a black mark for this council – which was blocked over and over by Russia from taking action to help,” she added. CONTINUE AT SITE

ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Keith Windschuttle: Captain Cook and the Great Game

Posted By on September 7th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/captain-cook-great-game/

Margaret Cameron-Ash’s ‘Lying for the Admiralty’ demonstrates how Cook discovered Bass Strait and drew deliberately misleading maps, presenting Van Diemen’s Land as a peninsula and disguising his discovery of Sydney Harbour. His goal and that of the Admiralty was to mislead the French.

The book’s title is Lying for the Admiralty (Rosenberg, Sydney, 2018) and instead of a subtitle to spell out its subject matter, its cover has a portrait of Captain James Cook and a map of New Holland with its east coast uncharted, as it was before the great navigator’s first expedition. For a brief moment I thought this might be another assault on Cook, adding to the indignities his reputation suffered from the graffiti attack on his statue in Sydney last September. The accusation of lying sounded like the now well-entrenched leftist campaign to discredit him on the 250th anniversary of his epic voyages of discovery, which began when he left Plymouth Dock on August 26, 1768.

Author Margaret Cameron-Ash quickly dispels any such thoughts. Her introduction confirms that Cook was not only a great man but a loyal English patriot who was not above preparing charts, log books and journals which, with the approval of the British Admiralty, provided misinformation to deceive the navigators of foreign powers. Cook was a player in what Rudyard Kipling later called the “Great Game” of spying and deception in the geopolitical rivalry among the European powers for maritime supremacy. Cook’s discovery of the Australian continent’s east coast, and the information he kept secret about it, were critical manoeuvres in this rivalry.

This is both a compelling new take on the political climate behind the founding of Australia and an exciting, page-turning work. It is easily the best book I have read all year, and one of the best in many a year. It is located within the same revisionist version of Australia’s origins that Alan Frost has been pioneering since the 1990s in his books Botany Bay Mirages, The Global Reach of Empire and his recent popular summaries Botany Bay and The First Fleet.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

David Singer: Jordan’s Re-entry into West Bank Looms Large as Trump Dumps PLO

Posted By on September 7th, 2018

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/09/david-singer-jordans-re-entry-into-west.html
Two major developments this past week could see a large part of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) being reunified with Jordan – as existed between 1950 and 1967 – or becoming a Jordanian enclave – under President Trumps’ yet-to-be- announced “ultimate deal” intended to resolve the100 years-old Arab-Jewish conflict.

Those developments were:

Trump immediately stopped all further American financial aid to UNRWA:

The PLO refusedto have anything to do with Trump’s slowly-gestating peace proposals after Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017.

This PLO anti-Trump stance has continued unabated despite US Ambassador to the United Nations – Nikki Haley – publicly warning the PLO last January when asked about future US funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian Arab refugees:

“The President has basically said he doesn’t want to give any additional funding, or stop funding, until the Palestinians agree to come back to the negotiation table. We still very much want to have a peace process. Nothing changes with that. The Palestinians now have to show they want to. As of now, they’re not coming to the table, but they ask for aid. We’re not giving the aid. We’re going to make sure that they come to the table.”

This week Trump gave up waiting – ending all future donations to UNRWA including $300 million pledged for this year.

More than 2 million UNRWA registered Palestinian Arab refugees live in Jordan – most of whom have full citizenship. Nearly 370,000 – or 18 per cent – live in 10 refugee camps.

The West Bank has nearly 775,000 UNRWA registered Palestinian Arab refugees – a quarter of who live in 19 camps.