#11526
Dana Perino slammed GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's immigration plan as "totally unworkable, and impractical"
#11527
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideo...
#11528
On Wednesday night, violent protesters at the University of California, Berkeley shut down the free speech of a scheduled conservative speaker by rioting, committing arson, destroying property and pepper spraying innocent Trump supporters in attendance.
#11529
A new report finds that America's military is in serious trouble.
#11530
As doctors and scientists make advancements at an ever increasing rate, is it possible that we may eventually end human mortality?
#11531
Donald Trump's conservative supporters are sacrificing principles in order to win.
#11532
A Massachusetts police officer and an elderly woman were killed Sunday after a suspect attacked the officer with a rock, took his gun and shot him in the head and chest, officials said.
#11533
Poor Hillary. She looks whipped. Video was posted on imgur today showing Hillary Clinton trying to get out of van. ...
#11534
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley says: "You take this one step at a time."
#11535
Paddy Power said 91 percent of election bets in the last 48 hours have been on a Trump victory.
#11536
Donald Trump, in a statement, said Conway "played a crucial role in my victory."
#11537
The strange thing about bailouts, such as the one Donald Trump and Mike Pence just organized for the Carrier air-conditioner company, is that they are detested in theory but relatively popular in practice, at least when they are put together by your guy. When Barack Obama boasted of having saved GM, he wasn’t scoffed at as a meddling know-nothing who used other people’s money to save incompetent corporate managers and rapacious union goons from their own stupidity and excesses — he was considered a friend of the working man, or at least a well-intentioned would-be friend.
The automaker bailouts were never generally popular. A small majority of Americans disapproved of them, but that majority was lopsided: Sixty-three percent of Democrats approved of the bailouts, while 73 percent of Republicans opposed them. Political tribalism is strong here: The Trump-Pence Carrier handout is supported by 40 percent of Democrats, 54 percent of independents, and a remarkable 87 percent of Republicans, according to a Politico poll.
Carrier, it is worth noting, is not a bankrupt, struggling dinosaur manufacturer like GM: It turned a handsome profit of $4 billion last year.
United Technologies, a large manufacturing conglomerate that owns Carrier along with Otis elevators and Pratt & Whitney engines, operates a few facilities in Mike Pence’s home state of Indiana. While the presidential campaign was under way, it announced that it was going to relocate one of those facilities, a furnace plant, to Mexico, along with the jobs associated with it. A second facility was to be relocated as well, affecting a total of about 2,000 jobs. That this was happening in his vice-presidential nominee’s backyard was embarrassing for Trump.
Trump likes to talk tough about trade and outsourcing, but his actual strategy with Carrier was the usual political approach: showering the firm with other people’s money. In exchange for at least $7 million in tax incentives, Carrier will . . . do almost everything it was planning to do anyway: It will close Indiana facilities, and it will move manufacturing and manufacturing jobs to Mexico. The fig leaf is 800 jobs that will be “saved” in Indiana, a figure that includes at least 300 positions that never were scheduled for offshoring to begin with. Carrier will be using those tax incentives to improve the automation in its U.S. facilities, i.e., to replace Indiana workers with robots instead of Mexicans.
United Technologies, like General Electric and Lockheed Martin, is deeply enmeshed in government. It derives at least 25 percent of its revenue from government contracts, 10 percent of it from the Department of Defense alone. It is not a company that can afford to have an enemy in the White House or the Pentagon. Which is to say that Trump, who prides himself on his negotiating skills, entered the negotiation with a very strong hand. Spending a few million dollars a year on more expensive labor in Indiana is chump change compared with the $5.6 billion in aircraft engines and components United sold to the federal government last year.
Set aside, for the moment, the fact that using those federal contracts as leverage is kinda sorta technically illegal. It is difficult to imagine that a mere matter of law would prevent Trump from playing that card, and knowledgeable players such as former Indiana lieutenant governor John Mutz, who sits on the board of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, are frank about the larger financial stakes for United, as indeed is the firm’s CEO, who told Jim Cramer that the possibility of losing its government contracts weighed on his decision to give Trump a win in Indiana, however symbolic. In fact, Mutz’s organization had put together a similar proposal and was rejected by the company. Trump’s deal was substantially the same, but it was coming from the president-elect.
So, why didn’t Trump get more?
The answer is probably straightforward: He didn’t need more. Trump began his public life as a creature of the tabloid press in New York and is now a creature of social media. He was an incompetent casino operator and hotelier, but he understands publicity and has a genuine gift for it — without that, he’d just be another Fifth Avenue doofus who inherited a $200 million real-estate portfolio from his dad. There will be a day or two of headlines with the words “Trump,” “deal,” “Indiana,” and “jobs,” and that suits Trump. The emptiness of the deal will be documented and lamented by the 0.4 percent of Americans who follow these things closely.
The Carrier bailout is awful, of course. It is a case of two politicians’ using public funds to bribe a business into doing things that benefit them personally and politically while creating no real long-term economic value. Pence, who dropped his free-market principles like the world’s hottest potato once he got within sniffing distance of presidential power, can burnish his populist credentials at the taxpayers’ expense, and Trump can get ready to flit on to the next publicity stunt.
This is not part of an economic-development agenda: It is theater.
But the emerging “Superman” politics here are truly poisonous. One of the genre conventions of superhero stories is the compression of all the world’s drama into the immediate presence of the hero — only his actions and intentions are relevant. People may be dying all over the world, but Superman saves Lois Lane. (Comic-book movies have lately subverted that convention by focusing on the collateral damage done by superheroes to the cities in which they live.) What that means in the context of our contemporary presidential politics is that no one takes any note of the fact that Carrier is not the only HVAC company in the United States or the only industrial concern in Indiana. Carrier has competitors that employ Americans, pay taxes, and produce real economic value, and they have been put at a relative disadvantage by the political favoritism extended to Carrier. What about them? They’re not on the stage, so they do not matter.
What is important to understand here is that this is not part of an economic-development agenda: It is theater. It is an adolescent fantasy of political power, and wherever Superman happens to land is where the action is. Nothing else is relevant. It does not matter that there is no broader logic at work: Small displays of efficacy can work to create an illusion of general efficacy. It is busyness as business.
#related#This is, by his own account, Trump’s conception of the purpose of the presidency: to go from situation to situation and “make deals.” But a long-term economic program for the United States — one that accounts for, e.g., that big automation investment in Indiana and what it means for the future of the American work force — is not a deal to be made. Preventing a single symbolically important act of offshoring is a fundamentally different thing from understanding the underlying economic forces that make that offshoring attractive — as the Germans will tell you, it isn’t just about low wages — and governing in a way that puts those forces to work in Americans’ interests.
Trump’s big idea so far is spending $7 million of other people’s money to delay an embarrassing headline. Some deal. Some deal-maker.
— Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent. This article originally appeared in the December 31, 2016, issue of National Review.
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#11538
After consolidating power in Washington, D.C. and state capitals under President-elect Donald Trump, Republicans are moving to prevent large cities dominated by Democrats from enacting sweeping liberal agendas.
#11539
California’s public pension insolvency is forcing Gov. Jerry Brown to propose dangerously unpopular tax increases.
#11540
The only way the Obamacare replacement bill could have turned out worse is if Republicans had actually passed it. Thank the House Freedom Caucus.
#11541
A second Alabama special Senate election poll has Roy Moore, the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate, up six points over Democrat Doug Jones.
#11542
A startling number of potentially classified emails have been identified among the trove of correspondences that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton turned over as part of the investigation into ...
#11543
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels released a new statement on Tuesday just hours before she is scheduled to appear on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" following President Donald Trump's State of the Union address.
#11544
Griffin deliberated for months over which candidate to support, giving $100,000 to PACs supporting Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush.
#11545
McCain has already been canonized by an establishment media desperate to destroy President Trump in any way it can, but in Egypt they're not so worshipful. McCain "was the main supporter for the terrorist Brotherhood. Senator McCain was the one who opened up the Congress to the Brotherhood. He was the one arranging the meetings...
#11546
Editor’s Note: Social media is cracking down on Conservative content. To ensure you receive conservative and faith-based news items – click here for a free subscription to Todd’s newsletter. Former Vice President Joe Biden unleashed a vicious attack on supporters of President Trump during a Washington, D.C. dinner for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT ?
#11547
One of the reasons Democrats lost the 2016 election is their leadership’s obvious scorn for working class white people.
#11548
The White House rebuffed President-elect Trump's criticism of the administration's decision to not veto a U.N. resolution critical of Israel's settlements. In a briefing on the move Friday, Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, said, On the president-elect, the first thing I'd just say is that there's one president at a time. President Obama is the president of the United States until Jan. 20, and we are taking this action, of course, as U.S. policy. Trump had tweeted his concern about the move at the United Nations that the U.S. did not disavow. As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th, Trump tweeted. Rhodes also said of Israel, I believe that despite what has at times been very strident Israeli government criticism of U.S. policies that President Obama has always made Israel and its security sacrosanct in his approach to these issues.
#11549
Madonna railed against the Trump administration Saturday at the Women's March on Washington and confessed during her profanity-laced speech that's she's been thinking about "blowing up the White House."
#11550
The legacy of Roe v. Wade and companion Doe v. Bolton is a 43-year flight from reason and a political system distorted almost beyond recognition.