Archive for the ‘Election 2016’ Category

For the past month, Democrats have talked the Trump/GOP economy down, saying that it’s only helping the richest 1%. That’s been debunked thoroughly but now we have proof thanks to Brian Bakst’s article on Minnesota’s oversized surplus.

In his article, Mr. Bakst reports “Minnesota tax collections soared well past expectations for April, according to a tally released Friday. The Department of Minnesota Management and Budget reported revenue that was $489 million above what had been projected to come in. The excess is 17 percent above expectations for the month. April is when most income tax payments are made, so this update is more pivotal than others.”

This is vitally important for several reasons. First, it’s proof that President Trump’s policies are working. Exceeding expectations by 17% in the biggest collection month of the year is a big deal. Next, it’s a death blow to Gov. Walz’s and the DFL’s tax increases. With the economy growing in spite of Gov. Dayton’s and the DFL’s policies, it’s safe to say that we don’t need another $12,000,000,000 in tax increases.

We’re already running a $1,000,000,000+ surplus. Minnesota’s Rainy Day Fund has $2,500,000,000 in it. With the economy roaring, why should Minnesota plan on a downturn or recession? That’s as stupid as moving to Hawaii and bringing your winter parka from Minnesota.

The question for Gov. Walz and the DFL now is whether they want to spend Minnesota into oblivion or whether they’re willing to act like adults for a change. At this point, I’m not sure whether the DFL’s special interests will win out or whether the people of Minnesota will win out.

What I’m certain of, though, is that the GOP is consistently aligning with the people of Minnesota. That’s a stark contrast with Gov. Walz and the DFL.

When it comes to demagoguery, Democrats are utterly shameless. They don’t tell the truth much, either. If you’re looking for integrity, you won’t find much of that in the Democrat Party. Alfredo Ortiz’s article lays out the details nicely.

Ortiz wrote “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that ‘the evidence shows that most of the economic gains continue to benefit those already well-off.’ House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer claimed, ‘wages aren’t growing fast enough to allow millions of workers to keep pace and feel that real economic security is within reach.’ And Sen. Cory Booker broadly asserted that ‘Americans are struggling.'”

Then he wrote “Start with unemployment rates, which are at or near record lows for Hispanic, black, female, and young workers. The unemployment rate for Americans without a high-school education, supposedly a group that’s been shafted in today’s economy, is hovering near a record low. The rate for those with disabilities has fallen by more than 20 percent over the last year to a mere 6.3 percent — the lowest level on record.”

These Democrats pretend that the economy isn’t helping anyone outside the top 1% but these Democrats know that they’re lying. Democrats know that they don’t stand a chance in 2020 if people think that they’re doing well. That’s what’s leading to the Democrats talking like we’re living in ‘soup line America’, a mythical place where nobody’s getting a fair shake and where evil corporations get all the benefits of the tax cuts.

Then look at wages. While average wages have been growing at about 3.2 percent for several months now, they’ve been increasing even faster for middle-class production and nonsupervisory workers. Last year, wage growth was 6.5 percent for the 10th percentile of workers with the lowest incomes — about double the overall average. Contrast this wage growth to the paltry 2 percent average under President Obama.

It’s at points like this that I like to highlight the fact that consumer is near an all-time high. The reason I like highlighting that is because people aren’t confident if they’re worried that they’re about to get laid off or if they think that they won’t get a raise anytime soon. In other words, people are feeling the effects of the tax cuts and they aren’t worried about getting laid off anytime soon.

This is what President Trump is fighting against:

Let’s be honest. This economy is helping lots of people in every sector of the economy. Blue collar workers are experiencing the fastest wage gains of anyone. More small businesses are getting created. Income earned outside the US is flooding back in.

Finally, Democrats are establishing an impossible benchmark. They’re finding a person here or there that isn’t doing well. Since when did any economy literally help everyone? Further, I’d ask how President Obama’s handling of the economy compare with President Trump’s. Job growth was ok but economic growth and wage growth were pathetic.

The only way to characterize this article is to call it Democrat spin from another planet. How else would you characterize this BS?

Supreme Court reform has entered the public debate, with legal luminaries like former Attorney General Eric Holder and constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe supporting adding justices to the Supreme Court, and a number of 2020 presidential candidates expressing openness to the idea.

Regardless of your views on proposals to reform the Supreme Court, there is important context to this discussion that is often missed: Conservatives are already packing the courts. Senate Republicans have been changing the rules and ignoring long-standing practices in order to fill the judiciary with narrow-minded conservative elitists. Their goal is to use the courts to implement conservative policies, regardless of their popular support. The issue we face now is how to respond to this power grab.

Conservatives have done everything they can to keep their years-long court packing efforts under the radar. Rather than start by adding new judges, they instead subtracted them, quietly refusing to let President Barack Obama appoint judges. Then, under President Donald Trump, they have changed the rules to fill those seats with ultra-right wing judges at breakneck speed.

First, it’s BS to say that conservatives quietly refused “to let President Barack Obama appoint judges.” They stood in the way of Judge Merrick Garland. That’s the only one. Period. That’s judge (singular), not judges (plural.)

Next, conservatives aren’t “packing” any court. They’re doing a fantastic job of confirming judges appointed by President Trump, just like Harry Reid did when he was the Senate Majority Leader and President Obama did the nominating. The difference is that Sen. Reid threw out the rulebook (and the filibuster) on district court and appellate court judges.

The other difference is that Sen. Mitch McConnell is doing a far better job of confirming President Trump’s judicial nominees than Reid did with confirming President Obama’s judicial appointees. That falls under the category of “Elections have consequences. I won.” Only presidents get to nominate judges. Congress’s role is advise and consent. They play a roll but their role is well-defined and limited.

Packing the court has always meant that a president has tried adding judges to a court when it’s already full. This idiot spinmeister is attempting to tell people that a president filling vacancies on the district courts, appellate courts and the Supreme Court, which is the president’s responsibility, is somehow a constitutional crisis. Hint to the author: Presidents have been doing this since the late 1700s. They’ve done it because it’s part of their job.

A year ago, CNN’s Don Lemon asked what is President Trump hiding? A month ago, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace asked the same question. Yesterday on FNC’s The Five, Juan Williams asked the same question. Since this seems to be the Democrats’ favorite question, let’s try and determine what they’re talking about.

Yesterday, the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress. (This is as meaningful as finding out whether unicorns are real.) During the course of that kangaroo court, we learned that Part II, aka the obstruction of justice part, of the Mueller Report was 182 pages long from Rep. Tom McClintock, (R-Calif.) Later, we learned that a whopping total of 6 lines were redacted from those 182 pages.

That isn’t even enough to qualify as a rounding error.

Here’s a question for showboating Democrats. How is it possible to hide evidence of obstruction of justice in just 6 lines? Here’s another question. Is it possible to hide evidence of obstruction of justice 6 lines? Let’s remember that these 6 lines aren’t consecutive in the report. They’re spaced throughout those 182 pages.

What this provides is a picture of how intellectually unimpressive House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, (D-NY), is. Based on his performance thus far, I’m betting that boxes of cereal have more gravitas than Chairman Nadler. Then again, some of the sideline commentators aren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, either:

Let’s be clear about something. Jerry Nadler is the opposite of a principled person. Nobody mistakes him for a man of integrity.

For the first time in US history, a committee ordered the Attorney General of the United States to break the law. In voting to hold Attorney General Barr in contempt of Congress, House Democrats cited AG Barr’s unwillingness to hand over to them a totally unredacted copy of the Mueller report.

One of the reasons why AG Barr didn’t turn that type of report over to the Democrats is because grand jury testimony is confidential and can’t be turned over without a court order. Even then, there are only 5 exceptions for releasing grand jury testimony. Congressional oversight isn’t one of those exceptions.

Think about that. Democrats, led by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, have ordered the Attorney General to break the law. Talk about theater of the absurd! That’s simply stunning. Jim Jordan nails it with this statement during today’s hearing:

Today on Outnumbered OT, Rep. Tom McClintock, (R-Calif.) and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, stated something stunning. He said that only 6 lines were redacted from the 182-page report on obstruction of justice. Think about that! Just 6 lines out of almost 200 pages were redacted. This isn’t about oversight. It’s about Democrats doing whatever they can to destroy AG Barr’s reputation.

Rep. Doug Collins, the Ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, nailed it in this tweet:

Democrats have launched a proxy war smearing the attorney general when their anger actually lies with the president and the special counsel, who found neither conspiracy nor obstruction. Full statement below ? pic.twitter.com/BgCWMqRJW4

— Rep. Doug Collins (@RepDougCollins) May 6, 2019

This tweet from Rep. Collins is pretty revealing, too:

Chairman Nadler: The intent of the subpoena is “to increase our clout in court.”

Does that mean the intent was never actually to get documents? How is this not an abuse of the process? #MuellerReport

— Rep. Doug Collins (@RepDougCollins) May 8, 2019

Today’s ‘hearing’ was mostly about Democrats showboating for the 6:00 news. This wasn’t about seeking justice.

Democrat pundits have repeatedly said that they’re capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. I have 2 thoughts on that. It’s perhaps possible that they’re capable of walking and chewing gum simultaneously. The question is whether they’re interested in walking and chewing gum simultaneously. Next, I say perhaps because we haven’t seen proof that they can walk and chew gum simultaneously.

Finally, today’s clown show is proof that the Democrats’ priorities are totally screwed up. While Democrats were conducting this clown show, they weren’t addressing illegal immigration, which, the last I looked, is a full-blown crisis. I only know what I can prove. I can’t prove that Democrats give a damn about homeland security. I certainly can’t prove that they’ve investigated and legislated simultaneously.

It’s time to throw these idiots out in large numbers. Hate-America-first Democrats like Jerry Nadler, Ted Lieu and David Cicilline need to stripped of their authorities because they’ve created this clown show.

It’s disappointing, though not surprising, that Sen. Klobuchar is pandering to the max to win the Democrat nomination for president. She’s pandering now by saying that President Obama, not President Trump, deserves the credit for Trump’s booming economy.

She said “‘I give our workers and our businesses the credit.’ Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar says the American workforce and ‘policies in place, starting with President Obama’ get the credit for historically strong economic numbers.”

Despite her statements to the contrary, Sen. Klobuchar isn’t that stupid. The policies put in place by President Obama and Sen. Klobuchar have been dispatched with one exception, aka the ACA. By using the Congressional Review Act, President Trump and the GOP majorities in the House and Senate got rid of the industry-killing regulations imposed by President Obama’s administration.

Further, the corporate tax cuts and provisions allowing for repatriation of profits from overseas are leading to previously unforeseen prosperity. How can President Obama insist on taking credit for the rocketship known as the US economy after he told the nation that the GDP numbers that then-candidate Trump predicted were a figment of President Trump’s imagination? Remember this, Sen. Klobuchar?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: He says he’s gonna negotiate a better deal. Well, how’s he gonna do that? How, exactly, are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have and, usually, the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.”

Just because President Obama was too inept to negotiate great trade deals doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to negotiate great trade deals. It’s just proof that President Obama wasn’t capable of negotiating great trade deals.

Changing economic incentives changes the economy’s growth trajectory. You don’t need a PH.D. to figure that out. Getting rid of counterproductive regulations lift the weight off major industries’ shoulders. Think fossil fuels, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.

The policies that Sen. Klobuchar voted for and that President Obama put in place were thrown onto the scrap heap of history’s discredited policies. Virtually all of the Obama administration’s economic legacy was trashed within the first year of President Trump’s administration. I’d love hearing Sen. Klobuchar, or any other Democrat presidential candidate, explain how policies that aren’t in place anymore are triggering this economic growth.

When incentives change from stifling economic growth to enticing economic growth, isn’t it human nature for profit-makers, aka entrepreneurs, to make profits again?

Ms. Klobuchar also said that many Americans are still struggling financially, thanks to high student loan debt and health-care costs. “That being said, a lot of people aren’t sharing in this prosperity, because of the cost, the cost of college, the cost of health care,” Ms. Klobuchar said. “The fact that the president had promised he would bring down the prices of their prescription drugs, and that just hasn’t happened.”

Larry Kudlow has heard enough of the Democrats’ criticism and he’s speaking out about it:

“I’m just gonna use the damn facts,” he told Fox News’ Leland Vittert. “On the wage front, [average hourly earnings are] rising 3.2 percent overall. The bottom [poorest] quarter [of workers], 4.4 percent increase, the top quarter, 3.5 percent [increase].”

“First of all, both are good and a rising tide is lifting all boats,” Kudlow added. “But the point I’m making is, it’s the blue collar people that have the fastest job expansion and it’s the blue collar people that have the best wage growth.”

“Wow! Low unemployment, high jobs, high wages, big consumer confidence, major productivity and no inflation,” said an enthusiastic Kudlow while gesturing toward the camera. “It’s totally awesome. We’re killing it on the economy.”

Obama and Klobuchar can lie all they want about people not experiencing the gains triggered by President Trump’s policies but the reality is that people are experiencing the growth. Why else would small business and consumer confidence be through the roof? If people aren’t feeling good about their economic situation, they aren’t confident.

For 2+ years, Democrats have criticized President Trump’s economy. The first shit-for-brains Democrat to criticize President Trump’s economy was Paul Krugman. In fact, he didn’t wait for Trump’s inauguration. On Election Night, Krugman said “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never. Under any circumstances, putting an irresponsible, ignorant man who takes his advice from all the wrong people in charge of the nation with the world’s most important economy would be very bad news. What makes it especially bad right now, however, is the fundamentally fragile state much of the world is still in, eight years after the great financial crisis.”

Krugman later said “Now comes the mother of all adverse effects, and what it brings with it is a regime that will be ignorant of economic policy and hostile to any effort to make it work. Effective fiscal support for the Fed? Not a chance. In fact, you can bet that the Fed will lose its independence, and be bullied by cranks.”

After that statement, it’s amazing that anyone would listen to him. Unfortunately, they did:

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman warns a global recession could come this year from CNBC.
Tom Rogan’s article asks the right question:

What planet are the Democrats on?

That’s a perfect question, although at times I wonder if they’re part of the same solar system. For the past 2-3 months, Democrats have peddled the storyline that people aren’t feeling the good economy, that the GDP and the great job creation numbers and the rising wage numbers are hiding the misery that most people are feeling.

What the hell are Democrats talking about? Would consumer confidence be soaring if people didn’t notice the strong economy? Should people think that nobody’s noticing their rising wages and the extra wages in each paycheck?

Of course, they’re noticing these things. They’d have to be as dumb as a Democrat to not notice. My advice to LFR readers is simple. Ignore the Democrats’ spin. Follow President Reagan’s advice:

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

The economy is going gangbusters. Now, though, isn’t the time to be lethargic. It’s time to mobilize. It’s time to defeat the socialists, aka Democrats. Let’s not give them the chance to ruin this prosperity cycle.

For the past 6 months, Democrats have consistently tried talking down the economy, suggesting that we were heading for a slowdown, if not a full recession. The economy just won’t cooperate with the Democrats. This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, aka the BLS, announced that the US economy created 263,000 jobs in April. Further, “Nonfarm payrolls increased a seasonally adjusted 263,000 in April, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate fell to 3.6% last month, the lowest level since December 1969. Average hourly wages for private-sector workers grew 3.2% from a year earlier, matching the prior month’s increase.”

Welcome to Speaker Pelosi’s ‘Soup line America’. This morning, she released this statement. In the statement, she said “The April jobs report numbers show some promising news, yet these gains hide the true weight of the economic uncertainty felt by millions of hard-working Americans. Unfortunately, the evidence shows that most of the economic gains continue to benefit those already well-off. We must do more to ensure that the economy is benefiting every family in every community, and that all Americans have the opportunity to move ahead in our economy.”

First, what the hell is she babbling about? Is she intentionally misleading the American people? Compare Pelosi’s negativity with Larry Kudlow’s optimism:

Let’s be clear about something. The strongest job growth, according to Mr. Kudlow, is “has come from the blue collar sector.” Democrats have been attempting to paint a gloomy picture on the economy. That tactic is failing. You things are good when President Trump is getting help from this NYTimes article:

Which workers are benefiting?

The recent gains are going to those who need it most. Over the past year, low-wage workers have experienced the fastest pay increases, a shift from earlier in the recovery, when wage growth was concentrated at the top.

Check out the Times’ graphic, too. In Stuart Varney’s interview of Larry Kudlow, Mr. Kudlow repeatedly kept referring to the economy being in the “sweet spot.”

PS- Check out John Hinderaker’s post on the economy. It’s both pithy and powerful.

The common theme amongst Democrat propagandists, aka Resistance journalists, is that the economy isn’t nearly as fantastic as people know it is. Take Juan Williams latest article, for instance.

Williams writes “After almost two-and-a-half years with Trump in the White House, including two years with Republican control of both houses of Congress, the middle class is getting squeezed to a pulp. The rich got their Trump tax cut. GDP looks good. And the stock market is doing great for people with money to invest. But it is only the rich who get the big rewards in Trump’s economy. What about the middle class?”

Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, has an explanation for Williams in this interview with Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal:

Incomes keep rising, with the lowest incomes growing at the fastest rate. Minority unemployment is the lowest in history. The unemployment rate for women is the lowest it’s been in 50+ years. Paychecks are bigger, partially because of the rising wages, partially because of the tax cuts. Disposable incomes are rising, too. Williams’ spin that “the middle class is getting squeezed to a pulp” is fiction.

The average family making $75,000 saved $2,300 in taxes last year. How is that like “getting squeezed to a pulp”? If that’s Williams’ definition of getting squeezed to a pulp, sign me up. Lost in all of this is the fact that wage growth for people in the bottom quintile are rising at a 6.4% rate, almost doubling the wage growth overall, which is at 3.4%.

I don’t know what Williams is talking about when he asks “What about the middle class”? Does he automatically trust everything that Media Matters feeds him? Listen to this BS:

Wages remain stagnant. Trump’s trade wars are hurting farmers. Coal mines keep closing. Teachers in several states have been on strike.

That first sentence is utter BS. That isn’t my opinion. That’s what the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) is reporting. Further, people that’d left the workforce are returning to the workforce.

Further, President Obama’s trade deals had already been hurting farmers. At least with President Trump, there’s a strong possibility that they won’t be hurt in the future. As for coal mines closing, the markets are determining what’s happening; with newer power plants switching to natural gas, the switch was inevitable. With the Obama administration, they simply attempted shutting down the entire coal industry through regulations.

Do people who watch the markets agree with Trump? Not Rick Newman of Yahoo Finance. He wrote in his column last week:

“If Trump deserves credit for a roaring stock market then Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan do as well. In fact, all of them presided over more total highs in the S&P 500 than Trump so far.”

Certainly, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan deserve credit for robust economic growth. President Obama can’t take credit for robust economic growth during his time in office because economic growth during his administration was pathetic. Stock market growth the result of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, not President Obama’s economic policies.

When President Trump took office, economic growth was pathetic, wages were legitimately stagnant and people were leaving the workforce in droves. President Trump got rid of the Obama administration’s policies and replaced them with pro-growth economic policies. Since President Trump’s and the GOP’s policies have kicked in, economic growth has doubled, consumer confidence and small business confidence have hit all-time highs and people are returning to work. If Williams thinks that President Obama deserves part of the credit or that it’s purely coincidental, he isn’t paying attention.

Salena Zito’s column does a great job highlighting the advantages that Joe Biden has in winning the Democrats’ nomination, then the general election. Personally, I don’t think that Biden’s got any chance in the general election but that’s just my opinion.

Ms. Zito starts by writing “Joe Biden joined the 2020 race for president last week by declaring that the next election will be ‘a battle for the soul of this nation.’ But his decision to make a Western Pennsylvania Teamster hall his first campaign stop on Tuesday shows he truly understands the heart of it.”

I don’t doubt that Biden identifies with western Pennsylvania. It’s just that I think he starts with an albatross around his neck. The name of that particular albatross is President Obama. During their 8 years in office together, the Obama-Biden team tried to demolish the coal industry, the manufacturing industry and the steel industry.

In his announcement video, Biden said that “I believe that history will look back on 4 years of this president and all that he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump 8 years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.”

That’s odd considering the fact that the president he served said “We are 5 days away from fundamentally transforming America.”

Sleepy Joe, along with his other Democrat presidential aspirants, sat idly by while President Obama tried destroying steel mill towns, the coal-mining industry and the manufacturing industry. That isn’t the only disturbing thing Obama said. This statement is something else that will live in infamy:

They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

He was talking specifically about Pennsylvania. Why hasn’t Vice President Biden stepped forward and criticized President Obama for essentially saying that voters in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio and other midwestern states were racists? This might be Biden’s biggest mistake of the campaign.

I don’t doubt that Democrats will let him off the hook for not criticizing President Obama but I’m betting blue-collar Trump voters who felt forgotten under President Obama don’t feel forgotten with President Trump. A major part of President Trump’s accomplishments have benefitted these voters. What reason would they have for leaving the guy whose policies have helped restore their towns and their industries?

I don’t disagree that Biden has some strengths that will help him. It’s just that I think he’s got a ton of liabilities that will hurt him as much as his strengths will help him.