He Didn't Ask Russia to Hack Hillary!

Josh Earnest is the press secretary for Barack Obama, which means he has to say things that he may not mean, to try to explain away Obama's views on things that Obama may not actually hold and, in fact, that Obama himself may not actually believe to be true.  Got it?

We need to keep that in mind, after Earnest decided to take on the accusations of the Russians hacking into the 2016 campaign.  He said on Wednesday, which is not the first time he has said it, that Trump had "asked Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton's server" to find the 30,000 missing emails that Hillary still has not provided and, obviously, never will.  I don't recall precisely what Earnest said, but he was explicit that Trump had asked the Russians to hack in.

Now, let's start with one inconvenient truth.  At that point, when Trump made that obviously joking reference in the press conference in Florida, the server couldn't be hacked, as it was unplugged and on a shelf in the FBI's evidence locker.  Earnest knew that, Trump knew that and you and I did.  You can't hack an unplugged server, let alone an unplugged one that had gotten BleachBitted into submission.

With that as background, let's look at what Trump said in his exact words (and remembering that this was an answer to a press-conference question, add in with your mind's ear the usual Trumpian sarcastic tone):

"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Hey, you know what gives me more pause? That a person in our government - Crooked Hillary Clinton - that a person in our government would delete or get rid of 30,000 emails. Now, if Russia or China or any other country has [my emphasis] those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I'd love to see them."

I heard the press conference live earlier in the year.  There is no question whatsoever that he was making that joke on the assumption that the emails, which could no longer be retrieved from their originating server, were already "out there" in cyberspace, because hacking had already occurred.

The joke was based on this -- Russia and China hack the heck out of the Internet now, and everyone knew it.  If anyone already had those emails, it was going to be Russia (and China).  So Trump's statement, or joke, or whatever, was at least a joke based on the notion that the Russians hack so much that they already had them.  Already.  Got it?  That was the punch line.  "Already had them."

He wasn't telling the Russians to try to hack our servers to get them; he was joking that they probably already had them in their own hacking files, and just needed to find them.  I know that's true because that is exactly what I was laughing at when I watched the press conference live -- that the FBI couldn't find the emails; that Hillary wouldn't turn them over, but the Russians probably already had them in their massive stores of hacked data and would get lots of credit from the U.S. press corps if they'd just find them.

It is contemptible on so many levels for Earnest to say what he did; and it is foolish for the press corps today to try to make an affirmative "Russia, please hack her server" interpretation, out of a joke based on the assumption that Russia already had the emails.

As I was writing that line, Bret Baier of Fox was on the air this second, actually saying that Trump had asked the Russians to hack our systems.  Et tu, Bret?  

If even Fox is casually misquoting that line, the Obamists have won.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

News for Your Election-Denying Friends

Standard line of "Democrat strategists: "Oh, but the Electoral College doesn't matter.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes and she ought to be president."

You've probably heard that before, one or two million times in the last few weeks.  And I am here to give you an article that you can simply send them in reply that should quiet their poor, snowflakey, jangled nerves.  Hint: you're reading the article now.  Please do forward them this piece.

So first, let's start with the numbers, so they're not an issue of contention.

Across the entire country, fifty states and the District of Columbia, Donald Trump received 62,979,616 votes, which got him 306 electoral votes.  Hillary Clinton received 65,844,594 votes, which earned her 232 electoral votes and meant that she had to crawl back to Chappaqua, NY, moaning about the Russians.

That means that Hillary had a higher popular vote, by 2,864,978 votes, totaling the fifty states and DC. 

Here, for reference, is the vote total for one state, the state of California.  Hillary Clinton received 8,753,788 votes in California.  Donald Trump received 4,483,810 votes.  That's plot material.  Hillary won California by 4,269,978 votes.  In fact, according to the state's own board of elections, five counties in California account for Hillary Clinton's entire national margin.

Why is California relevant?  Simple.  The system in which we have operated since 1789 for electing the president is as a representative democracy.  Each state has a voice, including California.  When states are, as they say, "not in play", meaning that the people who live there are assumed to vote in a certain way, for decades the candidates have left them to themselves, and don't campaign there.

Not-in-play states are ignored in the campaign; they are not visited by the candidates and there is no advertising there.  Idaho is not going to vote for a Democrat for president any time soon, and neither is South Dakota or Texas or Alabama or South Carolina.  And California is not going to vote for a Republican for president; nor is New York or Massachusetts.

Why is this important?  Because if you are going to try to claim that "the people" voted for Hillary, and especially if you're going to claim that the campaign swayed anyone's vote, it is relevant that in one state, California, the campaign never happened.  So many of those Hillary voters lived there that in the other 49 states combined (and even including the District of Columbia), Donald Trump out-polled Hillary by almost 1.4 million votes.

California was written off by both campaigns.  It is entirely logical that, had both Trump and Clinton had only California to win, they would have campaigned there, and the results would have been markedly different.  Hillary would have won, sure, but the numbers would have changed quite a bit (if you don't think they would have, then why is there even a campaign?).

Under the rules in play, California was deemed by both candidates to be irrelevant.  Its electoral votes would be a huge block on which Hillary built her electoral base, but they weren't contested.  So it is not as if California's voters aren't relevant; they are, and their fat electoral bloc shows it -- but the margin -- and its impact on the national popular vote -- is not relevant.

In other words, if there were only a popular vote, the campaign would have been played out less in Ohio, Florida and North Carolina, and a lot more in all the urban centers.  It is the fact that the Electoral College system, which is effectively the "vote by state" system, the forces the campaign into the contested states.

So you can't look at the popular vote nationwide, because it includes millions of votes in states where the campaign never existed.  Had popular vote mattered, we would have seen a different campaign; therefore, the nationwide popular vote is an interesting sidelight but not a reflection of anything.

Bill Clinton himself, for example, said this past week that he thought that Hillary should have gone into Wisconsin in the last week to campaign.  What does that mean?  It means that campaigns are indeed relevant, and that the impact of the electoral system on the way that campaigns are run renders the nationwide popular vote an irrelevant curiosity.


So there.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

The Birth of Snowflakes

So a day or two back, Donald Trump, the president-elect, was speaking on his "Thank You Tour" in Wisconsin, amusing the audience with a reprise of some of the basics -- he always spoke in basics -- that he had used in his campaign.

My best girl was watching a news show where a clip of the speech was being shown, and her immediate comment was not about the speech, or any part of it, or even about Mr. Trump himself.

No, it was about the podium.  And that's where we start this morning.

The podium and stage, as you may have readily seen, were festooned with Christmas-season things, trees in the background, and the words "Merry Christmas USA" unmistakably writ large across the front of the podium.  You couldn't have missed it.

And my best girl did not miss it, which got her to thinking, and often that is a good thing as it was in this case.  Now, it did not fall on blind eyes that, to have a president making a speech from a podium with the words "Merry Christmas USA", was a reversal of at least eight years of contemptible secularism from our current administration and from society in general.

Certainly the news programs at least momentarily pointed out that it was not a white-bread, generic "Happy Holidays" message.

So the Missus observed this, and mentioned that she thought the dynamic was going to be interesting.  Donald Trump was elected in a specifically politically-incorrect, or at least a specifically not dogmatically politically correct campaign.  So this means that a peck of politically correct actions from years recent was going to be eliminated in a very short time.

What she noticed was the dynamic.  These little chip-aways had taken place over a long period of time, the result of one person here and there claiming being offended at this or that thing, and then another person a few months later.  Over the years, an accumulated pattern of claimed offense by this or that offended person led to a pattern of utter neutrality.

That neutrality is hammered home in the college campus, where the left breeds, sort of like bacteria in the kitchens of one of those taverns that Jon Taffer fixes on on Bar Rescue.

But her point was that the catering to the offended had been a pick, pick, pick thing over many years, while the expected reversal under Mr. Trump is going to be a fairly all-encompassing effect in a fairly short time -- a year maybe.  The left works that way, she pointed out.  Push the extremes one by one until what we thought was stupid -- not saying "Merry Christmas" -- becomes mainstream.

But all that politically correct stuff over the years had stiffened the opposition, and was absolutely a big factor in the election of Mr. Trump, a very plain talker who made it clear what he thought was right and wrong.

It finally occurred to both of us that it was the children of the pick, pick left who started growing up thinking that they had a right not to be offended by anything, who had become the snowflakes of today.  Nurtured first in the homes of parents who felt that they had to be good little Democrats and go along, and then radicalized on campuses, to the point where the Ft. Hood murders were "workplace violence" and the Ohio State terrorist attack was a "misunderstanding", they became the entitled generation.

When we no longer nurture a "right not to be offended", and the cessation of that acceptance at the Government level happens fairly abruptly, it will be as if a flood of rationality refreshes the USA.  The "pick, pick, pick" that had happened over years had, in fact, been irritating reasonable adults for years at the same time.  The genie is out of the bottle, and the left may never be able to put it back.

Barren of actual productive ideas for governing that have ever worked, the left will first retrench into screaming matches (e.g., the attempt to nullify the election whose results, they fear, would crush them into oblivion for years).  What they do next is anyone's guess.  The colleges, after all, are still there, you know.

Mr. Trump will need to be suitably advised as to who his enemy is and how they may come after him during his administration.  Once the election stuff dies down, the left will have to figure out how to reinstate the political correctness that cost them the 2016 election in the first place.  After all, that's what they want; a compliant population that will mutely allow them to be the ruling class without argument.

But the genie is out of the bottle.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

The IRS Regulation I'd Like Trump to Issue

I'm not a fan of the Internal Revenue Service.  No one is, except possibly John Koskinen, the current IRS Administrator, a political hack for whom an impeachment bill is pending, and an embarrassment to Finnish-Americans everywhere.

I contend that I have more argument than most, having been through the torture of an audit. As recounted here, it resulted in a determination of zero obligation to the government in taxes, but many thousands in accountant's fees to show that I did not owe many thousands -- or even a red cent, for that matter -- to the IRS.

So in a column whose title is about an income tax regulation I'd like to see, you might assume that it might somehow relate to the audit that we had, and be one that would have prevented something so stupid from happening.

Obviously there are a few things that could have helped, but I'm not sure that anything could be put into law.  When your IRS auditor flat-out doesn't understand the law, and it takes my accountant explaining to her supervisor that she had been misapplying the law, to get the audit to be stopped without owing anything, well, the law won't help.  What would help is to make sure that you don't get a letter informing you of an audit until at least two levels of IRS agent agree to its necessity.

Maybe they needed to try to pay for this insult to the taxpayer.

And another thing that would help would be to forbid the IRS from mailing any notices to taxpayers except on Mondays or Tuesdays.  Somehow letters from the IRS which, except for when they contain checks, and are almost never legible and comprehensible, always seem to be mailed on a Wednesday, so they arrive when you get home after work on a Friday.  That means that you can get no clarification or sleep until the following Monday if you're lucky, and your weekend is full of panic and royally hosed.

That could easily stop with an executive order that would be appreciated.

I'd be thrilled if the IRS would be treated like any other law enforcement agency, meaning that the burden of proof for any claim of debt to them, or contention regarding a filing, is handled with a presumption of innocence on the part of the taxpayer, and the burden of proof shifted to the IRS themselves.  Maybe with an impartial arbiter hearing the case.

Man, I'd be thrilled to be a judge in one of those cases.

But my proposal is not related to audits at all.  Now, I have written tons about how the tax code should be written to flatten the heck out of it, particularly (and first) in this piece from 2014 that still represents my opinion.

That may not happen, certainly not before Congress is somehow incentivized to stop social engineering with the tax code.  I have taken advantage of the mortgage interest deduction for years, but I'd trade that in a heartbeat for a flat tax system with a 17% rate on personal and business income and get rid of the tiered structure.

But if it doesn't, let's try this.  "No individual shall have, as a result of his or her filing, any obligation exceeding 25% of adjusted gross income in the year in which the return is filed."  Now, that 25% can be achieved through ordinary deductions that reduce taxable income, or by taxable expenses or whatever.  But when push comes to shove, and the return has to come up with a number to pay, it would have to be the lesser of the computed tax on taxable income, or 25% of the adjusted gross income (meaning everything that came in to the taxpayer less basic adjustments).

Why?  It's very simple.  The United States of America needs to make an affirmative statement that it is immoral for any country to confiscate more than one dollar out of every four that a person makes, for the running of the country.

I think that 25% is a bit high, but reasonable enough and certainly as high as it should be.  But more importantly, it is vital that the Government state affirmatively that there is -- and always will be -- a moral ceiling on what it should ever be paid in Federal taxes by any one individual, relative to his income.  If you recall, that was something that I made a case of when the Obama Administration, as represented by Valerie Jarrett, refused ever to answer the question about how much tax was "too much."

I hope that you understand the difference.  It's not about whether it is 25%, or 20.665% or whatever.  It is about the moral principle that there is indeed a rate that is too high in the eyes of the American people, and that the Government's right to seize our earnings is limited by percentage.

What do you think?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Five, Ten and Forgotten

As my biography notes, I spent a somewhat brief part of my life performing the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, if not for a living, at least for a few bucks here and there.  So at least for a good number of years I was very familiar with those pieces, both the libretti of Gilbert, and the music of his teammate Mr. Sullivan.

Gilbert's words and Sullivan's notes, so well-paired in actuality, were always a point of contention between the two of them.  Although they certainly respected each other's talents, it had previously been the historic reality in opera that the libretto was simply a canvas upon which the "true" artist, the composer, was able to set his music.

Gilbert and Sullivan's works were certainly the groundbreaking exception.  W. S. Gilbert was a brilliant man, of great talent and skill in the use of the English language.  Arthur Sullivan forever felt that his music was simply regarded as less important and did not take to that so kindly.  Eventually they quarreled enough so that some of their latest works were simply not of the quality -- and popularity -- of their earlier material.

But I suppose I digress, a lot.

I only brought them up because the words in Gilbert's dialogue and song lyrics were written in the era from the 1870s through the 1890s, and they're a reference point.  I have, for example, performed in 75 productions of the various operettas, and there are still, or were until looking them up, words and phrases that would give me pause, to where I had to look up what they actually meant.

Gilbert did some of that intentionally, sometimes to force a rhyme, and sometimes to reflect what a character in that area might have actually said.  The Yeomen of the Guard, for example, takes place a in a setting a few hundred years earlier than its initial performance in 1888.  Gilbert was, of course, a lawyer and a very well-read Victorian man, and knew his English quite well, at a time when it was an admired trait to use it.

There are, in fact, books on their operettas, which print the libretto replete with notes in the margins describing the actual meaning of unfamiliar words and phrases, and most pages are truly full of the marginal notes.

All the above flashed by as I was listening to a Christmas music satellite-radio station in my car, and the song "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" went by in one of its 4,344 recorded iterations.  Mel Torme, I think, was velvetly fogging the line, "Take a look in the five-and-ten, glistening once again ..."

It occurred to me that I had certainly been in a small town five-and-ten many times in my youth (that's a "five and ten-cent store" for the Russians enjoying this piece, by the way, who may have gotten this far).  Many, many times.  God knows that I didn't need to have explained to me what a "five-and-ten" is.

But my imaginary great-grandchildren would likely have no better idea of what a "five and ten" is than they would a phone book or a typewriter or a VHS videotape.  And I got thinking that in, say 50 years, while people will certainly be singing that song (It is, after all, a classic, a catchy tune and a classically-harmonized melody), a great percentage of those listening will have to look up on the 2066 version of Al Gore's Amazing Internet what the reference to a "five and ten" means.

I thought of Gilbert, of course, because I was performing his words 60 years after his death, and still kept looking his words up as long as I was singing them.  We still hear "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" in all sorts of settings, and if you can get through it without having to ask what "mamelon" or "ravelin" may be, or a Chassepôt rifle (no fair saying, "oh, yeah, that's a rifle"), or a "commissariat", then you're probably 114 years old.

The language evolves over time, well, duh.  I don't think that we'll need to remember telephone books, since it will always be a joke for short people and kids to have to sit on one, probably long after the last of them has been printed and thrown away, or in the Smithsonian.  And I don't have any romanticized notion that there should always be a town square five-and-ten (and certainly not that there should always be its current successor, the "dollar store").

But it has been interesting to listen, this season, to Christmas songs the past few days.  Christmas songs, after all, are brought back for a few weeks each year and therefore survive far longer than whatever is being "sung" these days by the usual assortment of pop tarts, to be quickly forgotten.

As each Christmas comes around, a few more of those little phrases will jog the minds of people like me, wondering if fifty years hence, we will hear "as the shoppers run home with their treasures" and ask what that meant, given that Christmas presents will have only been ordered online for decades.

Back to work.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

What's "Too Close for Comfort"?

Rex Tillerson is the CEO of Exxon Mobil, and is, as of this morning, Donald Trump's choice to be the next Secretary of State.  Tillerson would succeed John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, meaning that the bar for success is incredibly low, given where the USA sits in terms of being unfeared by our enemies and untrusted by our friends after the last eight years.  And, oh, yeah, the incomprehensibly bad Iran deal.

Mr. Tillerson is receiving unusually high scrutiny from the left and the press (but I repeat myself), as well as by some Republicans, like Sen. McCain of Arizona.  This, surprisingly, has nothing to do with his tenure and track record at Exxon Mobil and lots to do with, as if we hadn't talked enough about them already, Russia.

You know as well as I.  Mr. Tillerson has raised the eyebrows of his possible opposition because of the fact that he has done business with Russia, as might be expected when the largest energy company in the world deals with one of, if not the, leading energy-producing nations.

In the course of that business, Mr. Tillerson has developed a relationship with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, that led to his having gotten some kind of award of friendship (the Russian "Order of Friendship") from Putin not long ago, in 2013.  That, of course, gives raw meat to the left as they seek to de-legitimize Mr. Trump's position and fight him at every turn.

With "opposition" as their goal, and not the leadership of the country that they blew by nominating Hillary, this relationship has been characterized as fairly chummy.  However, it is not presented -- and I've been listening -- as to how a preexisting, positive relationship between the Secretary of State and the leader of Russia is, a priori, a bad thing.

I confess to being willing to give Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt, in that this appointment is a "part of the whole" in the sense of his construction of a government.  So I find myself asking why it might not be a good thing, long before I ask why it might be bad.  But the left is already doing the latter.

And again, I cannot see how it might be bad.

Look, friends, we are not about to change Putin the man; he is still a murderer and an autocrat, and we can only seek to constrain his tendency to do things like invading his neighbors.  In other words, Putin is a reality, and we need to accept that we must face him.  We're not going to replace him; we simply need to get him to keep his troops at home and stop his cyber warfare campaign.

What people do not seem to get is that Donald Trump does not think like a politician.  Politicians are concerned with how things look so they can get reelected; a businessman is concerned with getting things done.  That means that if our goal is to get Putin to keep his troops at home and turn off the cyber warfare, and trust me, we're not going to be doing it by bombing Volgograd, then we need to do it through negotiation, which is the Trump version of what we used to call "diplomacy."

Diplomacy as practiced by the Obamists obviously doesn't work, since Russia is blithely invading its neighbors, practicing cyber warfare on us and meddling in the Middle East.  And, by the way, they're also reading this column.  Trump clearly believes that if we need to get this to stop, there has to be something in it for Putin.

If that's what he believes, then at least to the extent that dealing with Russia is a necessary part of our foreign policy, he needs to have the ability to deal directly with Putin.  It would seem that to do that, a good start would be to have a Secretary of State that has a relationship with him and has worked with him on some kind of negotiating, positive level.  To have that person be one with extensive negotiating experience throughout the world, including some of the ugliest places on earth, seems like a logical thing to me.

It is not logical to the left and the press (but I ...), but they're apparently unable to explain why it doesn't make perfect sense.  Perhaps it does, but they're intent on simply opposing Trump by reflex.  I, however, am willing to listen.  The next time someone provides a good reason why a positive relationship with Putin is a bad thing, I'm listening.  Happy to listen if you can explain it.

Absent that, I will come down on the side of friendship and negotiation as our diplomacy.  Perhaps after eight years of abject failure on the world stage, trying something different is worth the effort.

All for it.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

What ARE the Russians Doing?

Amazingly, this piece is not about the election that was finished last month (or Saturday, depending on whether you include the Senate).  It is not about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, or the leaks of the emails of John Podesta, all of which certainly contributed to the nation's contempt for the way Democrats run their shop, if not to the election result.

After all, Hillary Clinton was simply such a bad candidate that she sank her own ship by being so completely out of touch with the pulse of the nation, and still, based on recent comments, appears to be.

No, it's about the Russians, all right, but I don't have an explanation and I don't have an answer to the question that has been bugging me for a month or so.

Why are the Russians so fascinated with me?

I am, after all. a veritable cipher in the history of our nation.  In my long career, I have done a lot of things, but not accomplished anything lasting that would make me worth a medal, or a holiday, or an MVP award.  No Pulitzer, nor a Nobel Prize for literature is headed my way, although I can say with authority that I have posed for a picture with a Nobel Prize (and its actual winner).

That's me, sans beard, posing third from left with my fraternity brother Dr. Adam Riess, who is holding the prize for Physics he won a few years back for his discoveries regarding universe expansion.  This has nothing to do with Russians, of course, but it is, after all, my column, and if I've got a cool picture, I'm going  to find an excuse to show it.

And I don't think I'm worth reaching out across half the world to read.  OK, I get that the Internet doesn't require much in the way of a "reach", but you get the idea, if not what the heck I'm even talking about.  So let me explain.

The Russians are reading me, and they are reading me regularly and, if I may spin it a bit, they are reading me loyally.

It should not surprise you that the platform on which this site is hosted provides its authors with a reasonable array of statistics on readership.  This is how I know things like what operating systems are used to read the column, and what Internet browsers, and what articles are being read, all on an instantaneous basis, as well as last day, week, month, year and since September 2014, when the first piece was posted on this site.

Now, 544 pieces later, those statistics are telling me that an inordinate percentage of the readers of this column are in, of all places, Russia.  Yes, those good old boys and girls behind what used to be the Iron Curtain, with names ending in "sky" and "ov" and "ev" and"adze" and "in" and the like, are apparently quite interested in what I have to say.

How interested?  Well, I get read in this country, the good old USA, quite a bit, and have some pretty good stats on readership to share if anyone were interested in advertising here.  But over the last week, there were more column-reads (one reading of one column) by Russians than anywhere else on earth, including here.

Other than my opinions, I am not providing any information in this column that is not universally known, unless sharing the fact that "Ted Williams was the greatest Latino baseball player ever" counts.  All you find here other than well-known facts are opinions and, like intestinal tracts, almost everyone has one.  My opinion is every bit as valuable (unfortunately also meaning "every bit as worthless") as anyone else's.

So what, pray tell, do the Russians expect to find here?  That I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton?  Shoot, if you ask her, she thinks they're the reason she isn't the president-elect now, and that it has nothing to do with her being an out-of-touch leftist with no track record of accomplishment.  Nobody is much of a fan of Hillary any more.  And Bill is probably pretty happy.

But I did want to point out, for the record and for my American readership, that not only are you not alone, but it is imperative that you start going back to earlier columns and enjoying them, because the Russians have zoomed past you in readership.

And darn it, that's a race we need to win.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

More about Generals

It is now a well-publicized fact that Donald Trump has populated his proposed Cabinet with a healthy number of retired three-star and four-star flag officers, with one or two more considered, not just the Secretary of Defense candidate I wrote of yesterday.

This large number of retired generals and admirals is discomfiting much of the left and the other canned opposition, who will simply take any reason possible to de-legitimize Mr. Trump by claiming whatever they think will sell well in, and be carried by, their advocates in the equally leftist press.

Now, we know that the left tosses around words like "concerning" and "troubled", because they make a living off being concerned and troubled whenever they are out of power as they're about to be.  Of course, after this past presidential campaign their attempt to "concern and trouble" the electorate by their character assassination of Mr. Trump seemed only to stiffen the resolve of that same electorate to turn the left out of office.  Which they did, mercifully.

I confess that if the Cabinet were made up of thirteen generals, I might look a bit askance, if only because there would be a dearth of functional experience in certain of the departments, like say, Treasury or HUD.  But the three or four who have been nominated to date are in places like Defense and National Security, places where their expertise and experience will doubtlessly be helpful.

And here's the thing as we sail off into the weekend.  You do not slide your way to becoming a flag officer, and certainly not to getting three or four stars.  You get there by a thirty-year career in the service in which you have shown remarkable capability for leadership, and have had years to exercise that leadership and succeed at it.  Failures don't get stars, if you know what I mean.

But a lot of outstanding senior officers don't become generals and admirals either, and I know a good number of retired colonels and Navy captains who were incredibly successful and great leaders who did not become generals and admirals either.

When you reach the flag level, you have shown a lot.  The sheer responsibility handed to military and naval leaders is incredible -- they are responsible for the defense of our nation and for the very lives of the people entrusted to their leadership.  It is an awesome burden to have as the background of the decisions you make.

At times, I have to have thought that what we needed as Cabinet secretaries was more of those leaders, not less.  If it takes Donald Trump to see, from his own background, what leadership is, in the face of responsibility, enough to take retired military leaders more seriously as leaders of the civilian side of government, then so be it.

Mr. Trump had already pointed out during his campaign that he planned to tap the capabilities of some very successful businessmen and women, the leaders whose skills would be needed in government to replace the lobbyists and political cronies and hacks (such as the fellow running the IRS now), the people who had always been picked for jobs they had no innate ability to do.

It would be a frightening waste of excellence not to take advantage of great leaders.  In fact, the fundamental criticism by the left, that we might become a more militaristic nation with so many military leaders in government, is in fact the opposite of the truth -- when you have been tormented for years with the responsibility for the lives of your troops, you are going to be very conservative in making the decisions to deploy them.

As with many situations in which Trump is the re-inventor rather than the one doing things the same way as his predecessor had, history will be the judge as to the level of success that this influx of general officer talent has.  It is for Trump now to put forth his metrics for success so that history can have the right benchmark to judge their performance against.

History, as is often noted, is written by the victors.  Let's win with our best and brightest.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

A General over the Pentagon

At this point we know that retired Marine General "Mad Dog" Mattis is going to be Donald Trump's nominee to be the Secretary of Defense.  That's a pretty interesting selection, one that has gotten a lot of attention and a lot of praise from military folks, active and retired.

It is also one that will take a two-stage approval process, in that Gen. Mattis has not been retired, and thus separated from the military, for long enough to qualify for the seven-year gap required under the applicable 1947 law as later amended.  So Congress will first have to grant a waiver for Mattis to be considered, and thereafter they will need, at least the Senate will need, to approve the selection and confirm him.

The most significant thing about the appointment of Mattis is precisely that, the fact that his was a career spent in uniform.  That is a significant departure from the norm; a civilian, or at least someone whose uniformed service was a relatively brief part of his career, has been the Secretary of Defense for most of my lifetime.

So we have to take a look at this nomination on two different levels; aside from simply evaluating the candidacy of James Mattis the human being, we also have to look at the very notion of a military man -- and Lord knows Mattis is a "military man" -- to oversee the Pentagon.

Donald Trump, our president-elect, has been a rule-breaker and a trendsetter throughout his campaign and now into his appointments to the Cabinet.  That makes it a bit ironic that selecting a retired general to run the Pentagon is not so much an unusual option, as a logical option that has been avoided as a matter of custom.

So I think that the appointment of Gen. Mattis, stirring as it is among the uniformed services, is going to have to be one that capitalizes on his deep and thorough knowledge of the military he is going to have to fix.

You see, the Pentagon -- and by that I mean all the services and the civilian and contractor forces that support the military -- is in serious need of reform from two directions.

First, of course, is that our military has deteriorated, both in equipment and in morale, after eight years of Barack Obama's incompetent oversight of our foreign policy.  Mattis, it should be noted, is not the only flag officer to have retired out of frustration with not being allowed to do his job and not being listened to.  The military needs to be rebuilt, which costs money.

Second is the opposite side, which is to say that the military has shown a propensity to waste a lot of taxpayer dollars.  I can certainly speak from experience when I say that the military's capability in acquisition is often atrocious, and frequently incompetent.  That it can take years to get a simple request for proposal out the door to be bid on, is the clearest evidence possible.

Mattis has the curious obligation, assuming his confirmation, to have to figure out how to spend a lot less in acquisition costs and mistakes, and a lot more in restoration of warfighting capabilities.  Any Secretary of Defense appointee would face the same twin, opposing dictates.  This is why I believe that it is appropriate to have the person who needs to oversee that being someone intimately familiar with the problems and, at the same time, possessed of both the stature and respect of his peers, and the recognition of the problems to be solved.

James Mattis appears to have those skills and attributes in spades.  I do believe that in the subsequent administrations, appointments as Secretary of Defense will be greatly affected by Gen. Mattis -- excuse me, Secretary Mattis -- and what he is able to accomplish.  We have had previous secretaries be lifelong bureaucrats, congressmen and senators, businessmen and the like.  It will be quite something to see what a retired general does in his term, and how he actually performs when working for a president who was a businessman first and always.

I will tell you that I find the military's acquisition problems to be almost as troublesome as its equipment aging, and I will be fascinated to see if the fact of the background of the president influences the focus of his Secretary of Defense more than might otherwise be expected.

I defer, in part, to the number of rave reviews the appointment has gotten from those who have served with the general and those who are sufficiently familiar with his track record.

OK, I'll say what I mean.  I can't wait until Mad Dog hits the Pentagon.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Thinking Trump and China Through

Earlier this week I heard a very rational person speaking on a panel on one of the news programs.  She was talking about the dust-up regarding President-elect Trump taking a congratulatory call from the new president of Taiwan, and how the stuffy folks over at the State Department were horrified and, more to what she was saying, how the Chinese might retaliate.

Now, let's get a few things on the table.

First, given the performance of those entrenched types over at State the past forty years in positioning the USA, and the fact that at this moment our friends don't trust us and our enemies don't fear us, I'd say they don't have a lot of standing to determine what works and what doesn't.

Second, I would add that the Trump approach is to speak first, as a negotiating tactic, and then go back and forth and achieve an agreement.  That's how he has always operated, and why his Twitter feed is an extension of himself and his approach.  That, however, is a bit fragile as he becomes president, where the words of the president of the United States are policy, or at least are taken as policy by the rest of the world.  He will not like that, and we need to remember that.

Still, neither is the point of this piece.

The commentator made the point that the Red Chinese are puffing out their cheeks at the fact that our president-elect would ever take a call from the president of Taiwan, whom they think is a province of Red China, same as they regard big chunks of the navigable South China Sea as a province of Red China, and the way they must see this column as a province of Red China (since, for reasons that escape me, this column is actually read often by readers with Chinese IP addresses.  Yes, I am quite aware of that; they must like me.  So are the Russians, who read this column regularly, also for reasons that elude me).

This is the point.  The commentator stated that the Red Chinese (I have to call them that since this column is also about the "free" Chinese on Taiwan) had a few ways that they could get back at "us" for taking a phone call from the Taiwanese president.

One of those ways would be for them to sell of lots of the U.S. Treasury bonds that they hold.  And that, friends, triggered a whole lot of collateral thinking, at least in this office.

You see, here are all the State Department types getting all twitchy about Trump's phone call, when none of them is asking how we got there in the first place, i.e., how we got to a point that we have so much debt to China that they could threaten to sell it.  And that's what I'm concerned about.  We borrow a lot of money from China, and the only reason that a staggering 7.2% of the $20 trillion we owe is held by them (and anyone else) is because we're borrowing too frigging much.

We are borrowing that "too frigging much" because the U.S. Government does not live within its means, meaning that we spend more every year, by far, than we take in.  We are not paying down the principal on that debt.  Congresses past and present have simply created budgets that require us to borrow rather than determining how much tax revenue we can take in without crashing the economy, and spending only that.

I don't have to tell you why we got into that tar pit, but we're in it and we need to get out of it.  And the idea that Red China can actually attack us with T-bonds rather than bombs is so appalling, that instead of worrying if we're ticking them off by taking phone calls from Taiwan, we ought to be worrying about how we can get out from under debt that allows Red China to threaten us simply by their potential to sell our bonds.

Debt is a weapon.  It's a weapon that is loaded and pointed straight at us.  And we sold them the weapon.

Please, Mr. Trump.  Get us to a balanced budget and get us out of debt.  We can only produce about $3.5 trillion in tax revenue, about $500 billion less than the current budget.  We desperately need to cut spending, to create a Federal budget that is under $3.5 trillion so we can start to pay it down.

The risk is too great, and the threat of economic warfare too high.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

The Truth v. the Democrats

So now, it appears, the same people who cried that Donald Trump was trying (re the "birther" movement) to "de-legitimize our first black president", are doing the same thing back to Mr. Trump.

We had the first salvos of "that" this past week, courtesy of some program at Harvard University, which is, of course, the school that fancies itself  to be "the M.I.T. of the back end of Cambridge."  In that program, which generally follows election season, there is a post-mortem of the campaign, and in this one we were treated to some interesting interactions.

The chief episode was between Jennifer Palmieri, a mouthpiece for the failed Hillary Clinton campaign, and Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager for the Trump campaign.  It went like this:

CONWAY: Excuse me, she said "white supremacist" ... Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform? Are you going to look me in the face and tell me that?
PALMIERI: It did. Kellyanne, it did.
CONWAY: Oh, that's how you lost?
PALMIERI: It did!
CONWAY: Do you think you could have just had a decent message for the white working class voters? Do you think this woman who has nothing in common with anybody --
PALMIERI: I'm not saying that's how you won but that's the campaign that was run, yes.
CONWAY: We flipped over 200 counties that President Obama won, and Donald Trump just won. You think that's because of what you said, or that people aren't ready for a woman president? Really? How [about] it's just Hillary Clinton? She doesn't connect with people. How about they have nothing in common with her? How about you had no economic message?

The point of all this is that the Democrats are now trying to de-legitimize the election of Donald Trump by claiming that he has the support of "white supremacists", who "had a platform."  In other words, candidates should be judged on, and their legitimacy derived from, not what they said or did but on who voted for them.  In this case, worse, it's who might have voted for them.

OK, that's what the Democrats are trying to do, but it's not the point.  The point is that the Democrats are completely removed from the reason that Hillary lost to Trump, and that there are simple mathematical facts that refute the Democrats before they even open their mouths.

Follow this: For the argument that "white supremacists had a platform in the Trump campaign", and that's why he won, the Clintonistas suggest that the election was turned on who did vote for him.  But the numbers, ah, the numbers, well, they tell a different story.  In fact, the whole election turned on who didn't vote, and that's our story.

Numbers don't lie.  Donald Trump ran a campaign that was actually a bit unsuccessful at attracting voters to the polls.  Believe me?  Trump tallied only about a million and a half more votes than Mitt Romney had in 2012.  In most cycles, that would be thought of as unsuccessful, especially given that Romney lost.

The story is actually that, as I write this, 65,240,114 people voted for Hillary Clinton.  That sounds like a lot, and the Democrats are screaming about how she got two million more votes than Trump did (Trump out-polled her total in the 49 states other than California, where neither candidate campaigned and where she won by 4,180,000).

Only one problem there -- Hillary's vote count was about 700,000 votes fewer than Obama pulled in 2012, meaning that she essentially failed in making the case to the American voter that she should be president.  It wasn't who voted for Trump; it was who did not vote for Hillary.  That has nothing to do with the Trump voter; it had everything to do with Hillary and the Hillary campaign.

Jen Palmieri and Joy Behar and other Democrat apologists can holler about the "basket of deplorables" all they want, but it really was not about Trump at all -- if Hillary couldn't even draw as many voters as Obama had four years earlier, well, she has only herself and her team to blame.

"How [about] it's just Hillary Clinton? She doesn't connect with people. How about they have nothing in common with her? How about you had no economic message?"

Those are the words of Donald Trump's campaign manager to a senior member of the Hillary campaign last week.  The Clintonistas and the rest of the Democrats -- and the press, if they intend to be the same shills next election that they were this one -- would be wise to figure out that it wasn't any bogus "white supremacists" that cost them the 2016 election -- it was their campaign and their entitled, corrupt candidate.

But they'll never learn.  Thank God.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Talking Past Each Other #3: Unemployment

By now you either have or have not seen the latest figures on employment in the USA as released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  BLS is a part of the Department of Labor, meaning that it is subject to political manipulation.

That manipulation, which is a bit more visible during election campaigns, is of the kind that may have you see numbers which are beneficial to the party of the president in a given month and, dependent on how "cooked" they are, are ultimately corrected retroactively in a subsequent report a month or two later.  No one sees those, of course, since they're like the little corrections of fact that you occasionally see in newsprint, hidden on page Q21 of the Saturday edition.

To give the BLS credit, they put out a lot of numbers each month, and the metrics are pretty much the same every month, which is why if they're subsequently "fixed" to offset the cooking, at least you can look back and see trends after the cooking is corrected.

The fact that there are a lot of numbers makes it fairly easy for one party to argue by using one set of figures, while the other party can cherry-pick equally and argue their side.  This, to me, constitutes the whole "talking past each other" situation, and is the third time, I believe, that I've had to write about it.

So here are the facts.  BLS put out a number that said that the "unemployment rate" had dropped from 4.9% in October to 4.6% in November.  That meant that, of those who were actual participants in the labor force, only 4.6% were looking for work.  Conversely, in the sense of the opposition, the "labor participation rate" sank to 62.7%, meaning that we're around a 40-year low as far as the number of potential workers in the workforce who were actually employed.

The "talking past each other" here is mainly a debate over which number more fairly represents the actual labor situation in the USA.

Let's look at those numbers as actual numbers and not percentages, and then you tell me what you think.  The economy created 178,000 jobs in November.  Is that a good number?  Well, it is a relative number.  By comparison, the number of people who left the work force, either by giving up looking for work and settling for welfare, or by retirement, was well over double that number, as 446,000 Americans left the work force.  That's why the "unemployment rate", which is now so irrelevant, dropped and let the Obamists claim that something good had happened.

It is not hard to make somewhat qualitative inferences from this quantitative data.  The number of new jobs being created does not come close to the number of people giving up on the labor force in some form.  The total labor force declined by a net 334,000, meaning that 112,000 people were added to the work force (446,000 minus 112,000), against the net increase in jobs of 178,000.

None of that suggests that the employment rate of 4.6% has any relevant meaning whatsoever.  If the number of new jobs, and the number of people added to the labor market, are dwarfed by the number of people leaving the work force, then it is quite clear that the net of new jobs is a minor factor in the unemployment rate; its drop is far more reflective of people leaving the job market.

Now, we can talk past each other all day about whether this is a good or a terrible economy for jobs, but I would suggest that those apparent low percentages are a smokescreen to mask what are referred to as "discouraged workers", those who would like to work but have given up.  Even BLS admits in its FAQ that such people are not counted in the unemployment rate, which accounts for seemingly opposite results between the labor-participation and unemployment percentage changes.

I believe the answer will start to be seen about a year from now, when the Trump Administration has had a year to pass legislation that encourages business to grow and hire.  If I am (and the labor-participation rate is) right, and the economy is indeed in a horrible state, then we will see some interesting numbers.

The labor participation rate after a year or so of Donald Trump should be rising toward 65% or a bit higher, because new jobs will be added but the number of those potentially in the labor force will stay steady.

However, the unemployment rate could actually rise, because some number of those who are discouraged will reappear in the labor force, encouraged to not be "discouraged."  So the unemployment rate might actually rise, even though more people are finding work, if enough people who had voluntarily dropped out of the work force -- even once-retired -- are attracted back.

So it is here that I encourage the Trump camp to explain now why we should expect a rise in the unemployment rate we're used to, even as the economy is recovering.  Use the bully pulpit and teach about the labor stats that have meaning.

How ironic that would be if the economy improves obviously but the unemployment rate actually rises as more people are attracted into it.  Well, there are lies, darn lies and statistics.  And the unemployment rate is simply lipstick on a pig under Barack Obama.

Let us see what Trump does.  And perhaps then we might use the same terminology to discuss what is good.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Secretaries of Dismantlement

We are busily engaged in watching the parade of candidates for senior Trump Administration positions, as they troop in and out of Trump Tower for meetings with the transition team.  Carefully and diligently (OK, the Secretary of Defense announcement last night was a bit different), the names of appointees are being announced to the public and "vetted" by the news media.

It is interesting that, with the possible exception of Tom Price, the Georgia congressman who is the choice to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, we are not discussing specific priorities of the agencies whose incipient leaders are now known.  Price, of course, having written bills to repeal and replace Obamacare and provide something that may actually have a chance of working, is quite obviously going to start by ridding the nation of that ugly piece of rammed-through legislation.

So here is one for you.

Donald Trump has already announced his secretary nomination for the Department of Education.  That would be Betsy DeVos, who has been a passionate advocate for "school choice" throughout her life.  Mrs. DeVos would obviously be expected to take affirmative steps to promote the right of parents to send their children to a school with a good chance of actually educating them, and to support the "charter school" concept, which also helps provide those alternatives.

I believe that one of Mrs. DeVos's first priorities, however, should be one that would save the American taxpayer billions of dollars, and all by itself promote many of the reforms that she advocates for.

Yes, you guessed it.  Betsy DeVos, upcoming Secretary of Education, should immediately, and with the proper legislative support of Congress, begin to oversee the dismantling of the entire Department of Education.

The Department of Education is not, of course, a great, historic institution but is rather, along with the Department of Energy, a Carter-era (1979) relic of the usurpation by the Federal government of power that was given by the Constitution to the states.  So there is no long history of its existence, and no specific tradition that rationalizes its assumedly unconstitutional existence.

We have heard Mr. Trump discussing a "penny rule", essentially an edict he may issue to all of the Cabinet departments and lesser agencies to cut one cent per dollar out of their budget, as a means to approach a balanced budget and start paying down the $20 trillion we currently owe close friends like, you know, China.

For Education, this would be about a 75-cent rule, since at least three-quarters of the effort of "DoED" employees is plainly unconstitutional, as it constitutes oversight of education, a duty not explicitly granted to the Federal government in the Constitution and thus reserved for the States in its Tenth Amendment.

Now, I will grant you that some functions are arguably tolerable, such as the Federal student loan program.  I'm not crazy about the taxpayer being forced to lend money to kids who often do not pay it back (I would advocate for such college debts, by the way, lent by the taxpayer, when defaulted, to be exempt from discharge under Federal bankruptcy statutes, by the way -- borrow from the taxpayer and you have to pay it back).  But I can probably be argued into this being livable, under a small agency with a modest staff.

Most important, I believe, is that the very existence of a DoED is a threat to the sovereignty of the corresponding state departments overseeing education.  The Founders had schools in the 1700s; it certainly was a conscious decision not to include schools in the powers assigned to the Federal government and, thus, to reserve them so that local governments and the states could decide how to educate their citizens.  The Department's own website concedes this: "[It] is important to point out that education in America is primarily a State and local responsibility, and ED's budget is only a small part of both total national education spending and the overall Federal budget ..."

Small part, yes.  "Small", no.

Years back, I was VP of Operations for a company that provided the staff to support the information technology infrastructure at DoED.  Our role was primarily to be the help desk for the employees and manage their servers.  The whole Department was only about 20 years old then, and even that "young", it had already settled into a mundane, humdrum grind so characteristic of Federal offices.

The proposed budget for Education is a shade under $70 billion for FY 2017, meaning that probably $50 billion could go away and not be missed.  Against a $4.1 trillion budget for the entire Federal government, cutting DoED down to a sub-Cabinet agency or two -- and I'm betting that it doesn't take $20 billion to run the staff of a student loan program -- losing $50 billion out of that budget takes care of that "penny rule" all by its lonesome, before the other Departments have done anything at all, and before all that rental space can be subleased out to commercial tenants for even more bang for the P&L.

And. of course, in this administration, there will be plenty of "shovel-ready" jobs for all those Federal employees needing new jobs.  Although it should be noted that their talents will surely be in demand by the states who are now granted the right to run their own schools without imposition from Mama Washington.

How about it, Mrs. DeVos?  First priority?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

A Lib Who Wants It Both Ways (Duh)

Hey, here's something you don't see every day, boys and girls and non-specific-gender unicorns, and prom queens gender-neutral prom celebration monarchs.

Maxine Waters is a true liberal's liberal, in that her willingness to say anything, regardless of self-contradiction, is simply unbounded.  We in the intelligent right need people like Mrs. Waters, an almost 80-year-old congresswoman from, of course, California.  After all, liberals who say utterly stupid things are a good part of the reason that Donald Trump is about to become the president of the United States.

As cited in this article, Mrs. Waters had this to say last week on the meaningful uptick in the Dow Jones Industrials.  “I’m appalled that the reaction to Tuesday’s election on Wall Street is record highs for bank stocks.  Short-lived increases in the stock market are not the same as real, hard-earned economic growth, and the demise of the regulations Wall Street is cheering are the same regulations that have made our consumers, investors and economy safer and more resilient.”  She added, "Does he mean letting the Wall Street banks he’s so indebted to write their own rules?"

Let us dispose quickly of the second part of the quote.  I will be happy to remind you that Wall Street is hardly indebted to Donald Trump.  Their campaign bribe dollars were contributed overwhelmingly to Hillary Clinton, not Trump; I can assure you that Mr. Trump does not see himself as "indebted" to Wall Street bankers, given that they gave him little to nothing and dumped billions on Hillary.

So, Mrs. W., in your view it is OK if the market goes up because of what a Democrat, Barack Obama does, but not OK if it goes up because of what a Republican, Donald Trump, promises to do when inaugurated.  Sure, Maxine.

Now, I want to try to avoid revisiting what I wrote recently in regard to why the market was responding to the incoming Trump, and why it had reached such an unwarrantedly lofty height during the Obama years.  But in essence (you should read the link anyway, though), the Dow's life in the 18,000 range before the election was simply based on there being nowhere else to put one's investment dollars, given that Obama's heavy manipulation of the interest rate had driven savings percentage returns down to nothing.

Now, to give Mrs. Waters her due, we should point out that she seemed to be referring to the heights in bank stocks specifically, not necessarily the entire Dow, or the entire stock exchange.

Still, those bank stocks were doing quite well under her sainted Mr. Obama.  Citigroup's share price has exactly doubled in the last five years, under you-know-who's presidency.  Bank of America has almost quadrupled in that same period.  JP Morgan Chase is right at about two-and-a-half times its November 2011 share price.

So perhaps Mrs. Waters thinks that those gains were a result of "hard-earned economic growth"?  I don't know that I can say, but I bet that you can attribute that stock increase to a combination of strategic layoffs (cutting expenses), hoarding cash and using it, among other things, to buy back its own stock (raising demand lifts prices), switching employees to part-time to avoid Obamacare hikes, and moving money offshore to try to get a better return than Obama's Federal Reserve has driven it down to, and avoid oppressive taxation.

Taking effective, corporate-wide steps to increase profitability could, I suppose, be reckoned as "hard-earned economic growth" by these banks, or it could be simply making business decisions that are forced on them by Obama's strangling policies.

Either way, it is impossible not to sound like a hypocrite when you declare that it is OK for share prices of companies to rise because a Democrat president imposes regulations that stifle hiring and force them to cut personnel expense, but it's not OK for the prices to rise when a Republican promises to eliminate those same regulations to where industry can actually invest in itself (i.e., employees) to make products and deliver services again.

That, as I have written ad nauseam, is simply the way the left operates.  Just "say it -- anything, no matter how absurd", their mantra goes, "since the press won't call you out on it."  And liberals go out and say whatever they want to, unfiltered and uncorrected.  Say it often enough, and someone will believe that it might be true.

But the tide may be a-turning, as this election pointed out.  Eventually, the electorate will simply say that it has had enough, and they want more intelligent solutions to the problems of the nation, solutions that actually can work.  Solutions, I would add, that avoid going back again to the same failed leftist policies that give us insanely entrenched poverty in big cities, education strangled by far-left teacher unions, and murder rates there beyond belief.

Maxine Waters is a relic of old, failed liberalism.  It failed 50 years ago and still fails today.  And it's not just the failed policies, but the failed hypocrisy that tries to rationalize it.  She will go bye-bye, sooner or later.

I just hope the lesson we learn from not tolerating that hypocrisy stays with the electorate for a long, long time.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Whither Hillary?

I spent almost four seconds over the Thanksgiving day football marathon considering the topic that somehow has evaded the lips of the pundits since the election.  We and they have been grappling over the turmoil that defined America after the immense election upset, to wit:

- How did Trump pull off the election?
- Who will be in his Cabinet?
- Will his Cabinet have the requisite percentages of different sexes, races and religions?
- Will Person X, who didn't endorse Trump, be made Secretary of Something?
- Why are all the rioters always from the left?
- What is that "alt-right" that the media made up?
           - Corollary: is there an "alt-left"?
- How come my 401(k) value didn't plummet like they told me it would?
- When are all those people who promised to leave the USA actually going to leave?

OK, so not only have none of those actually been answered, save for the first one (hint: it's answered quite adequately here), they're not what anyone should be asking, except for the first one and that one about when Whoopi Goldberg is going to move to Namibia and Cher is going to Jupiter (or vice versa).  Given that there were offers of first-class airfare, including to Jupiter, I still want to know when they're going.  Any of them.

But I digress.

The questions we should be asking are actually about the big loser on Election Tuesday, that is to say, Hillary Clinton.  It would surprise no one to know that she planned to be working on assembling her Cabinet today, assuming she hadn't used all that campaign time spent not taking questions from the press, to have already built her list.

Hillary is 69 years old, which pretty much means that her political career is done, unless she carpetbags some new state to try to run for another Senate seat, sort of like the hour and a half she spent in New York before running for the Senate from there in 2000.  Even if she did that, she almost certainly would not be replacing an incumbent Republican, meaning that her presence would not change the landscape at all.

What will she do?

I suppose the correct answer, snarky though it may be, is "who cares?".  She had no issue to run on, running primarily on her possession of a uterus.  Oh, she had positions on issues, well-documented on the website of the campaign.  But they weren't "her" issues.  There was nothing she was really prepared to work on.  It is possible that part of the reason she isn't president-elect is that no one could come up with a good reason why we should even want her to be president.

That said, it becomes very difficult to imagine that Hillary Clinton is going to be anything more than an elder stateswoman of the Democrats in her already-here elder years, perhaps even fading back into being Bill Clinton's wife.  Having lost an immensely winnable election -- remember that Donald Trump in winning received about a million fewer votes than Mitt Romney had in losing in 2012 -- Hillary will have lost a goodly chunk of her constituency, the ones who blame her for what is about to happen to the Supreme Court.

We also, no matter what Donald Trump says, are likely to see some serious legal trouble for her.  While it is more likely than not that the whole email/private-server/sloppy-handling-of-classified-documents thing will eventually fade with a public shaming, the Foundation is a whole 'nother thing.

The Clinton Foundation is clearly a racketeer-influenced and corrupt organization (RICO), set up to funnel money to the Clintons and their cronies in exchange for the sale of influence by a sworn Cabinet officer to, among others, foreign interests.  That much of that was done while Hillary was Secretary of State leaves the FBI unable to walk away, lest there be another one of those "charities" built.

We sort of imagine the actual charitable works of the Foundation, like the AIDS medicines that are pretty much the only example anyone presents of actual charitable work, as being not the "reason for existence", but the "cover."  Sort of like the little groceries set up to hide the casinos in the back, or the way the Corleone family sold olive oil in The Godfather.

The FBI is definitely investigating the Foundation, and it is far from beyond question that Bill and Hillary, and perhaps Chelsea and a few other capos of the regime, are going to spend a lot more time hiding behind lawyers than running for office or making policy speeches.

Ironically, even though the Foundation was built as a RICO enterprise, the Clintons are going to have to keep it active and roaring, precisely so that they can keep up the front.  After all, if somehow its contributions dried up because the Clintons no longer have any influence to sell, it would scream to the world that the Foundation was RICO through and through. Unfortunately for the Clintons, those contributions have tanked, including about a 90% drop from Norway alone, and nearly a 40% drop overall.

If the Clintons try to phase out the Foundation, it will cement the notion that it was an influence-peddling enterprise.  But with a full-out drying up of contributions -- no influence, no pay-for-play -- they're going to have to figure out how to get a pile of money contributed or they can expect to lose the argument that it was on the up and up.

So Hillary's future may indeed be in stripes, although she might be able to have her husband in a neighboring cell, which would be amusing given the level of their relationship and the screaming volume.  The other inmates might have to ask for one of them to be moved so they can get some sleep.  And where would the Secret Service detail Bill still gets go?  Next cell over?  The mind boggles.

Ahhhhh, it's Tuesday.  Just a fun way to let the mind wander.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Learning from the 20th Century? We did!

I have a grand-niece who, in her early twenties, is unsurprisingly, but retrievably leftist.  She was a Bernie Sanders type, back when he wasn't crushed by the corrupt weight of the Clintons and the corrupted Democratic National Committee.  Unaware, presumably, that it was Hillary who had gotten the DNC to tilt the scales in her favor, she then switched over to the Clintonistas.

Needless to say, she was terribly disappointed by the outcome of the election and, like most of her peers, turned to social media to vent their respective spleen.  It is apparently quite easy to hide behind the relatively masked presence, if not the total anonymity, of Al Gore's Amazing Internet.

And it is such that I was apprised of a Facebook post (I am not on Facebook; this was forwarded to me) in which my lovely grand-niece "liked" a tweet from a fellow in England who apparently spends a great deal of his time all day tweeting out little phrases.  In this case, he appeared to be replying to a phrase he had heard, or made up, such that his tweet was this one (remember; he is in the UK):

"Leave that bigoted person alone; they're old."  Translation: They lived through almost every 20th-Century social movement & learnt nothing.

This was the message my grand-niece chose to "like" on Facebook.  As I took a look at the original poster's account, I could pretty much infer that he tweets, and lots of similar-aged people of similar persuasions tweet back, or "like" or "retweet" and reinforce his sense of rightness, certainly absent anyone replying and telling him that there are actually other "right" people who think quite differently.

I'm going to take a leap of faith and assume that, from the context of his other recent tweets, by "bigoted people" he was referring to all Trump supporters and voters, not just actual old, bigoted people.  After all, Hillary already called us "racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic ...", so it can be comfortably assumed that the youthful left can't discern the difference.

I cannot and need not disguise the fact that I am 65 and voted for Donald Trump.  That probably makes the youthful left decide immediately that I am an "old, bigoted person."  They are welcome to presume whatever they feel and tweet their little brains out.  They certainly can presume that I "lived through almost every 20th-Century social movement."

They cannot assume, though, that I learned nothing.

I learned, for example, that the best fable ever written was "The Emperor's New Clothes."  It was the best, because its moral, however written, was that we should not believe that just because thousands of people do or say something, that they are, a priori, right.  Human beings have a certain need for association, and a certain "go along to get along" mentality that turns them into lemmings if they don't engage their brains' capacity for critical thinking.  That, friends is a tool the left uses to its advantage.

The music industry, by the way also uses that tool.

I did learn a few things from the USA's civil rights movement.  I learned that you should be careful about making assumptions about people based on where they came from or what color they were -- but I also learned that offsetting past discrimination by overcompensating was about as ineffective and exactly as prejudicial.  The corollary -- if you want more racism, not less, simply switch the colors and impose "affirmative action" or any other form of reverse discrimination that punishes people who have done nothing to deserve it.

I learned that replacing a system or environment that had a failing in one area with a replacement that patched the failing issue but failed in another was not worth the effort (hint -- check out my Electoral College piece from Monday).

I learned that relationships that are worth the commitment to share a home are worth the commitment to "put a ring on it."  No commitment thereafter will carry the weight it deserves, if the first one can be dissolved just by one party moving out.

I learned that the idealism of the human in his or her 20s is oh, so gradually tempered with the reality of mortgages, and jobs and electric bills -- when you have to earn your money with a little sweat, you get a whole lot more careful about your government wasting it by putting moths on treadmills, or paying for someone else's kid's college tuition.

I learned that socialism cannot be sustained without a dictator -- a Castro, a Kim-il Sung, a Stalin -- because eventually, if you disincentivize success and entrepreneurship in favor of all of the people "working together", tra-la, people stop pulling their weight and everyone's effort declines to that of the typical employee you get at the end of the phone when you call a Federal Government department for help.  And those dictators all turn into the pigs from "Animal Farm."

I learned lessons like interpreting what happened at Hampshire College this month.  You are aware that the school put its American flag to half-staff after Donald Trump's election, and when students complained, they simply took down the flag for good.  I learned that when, say, a child takes something he knows he shouldn't from off a table, you lightly slap his hand; you don't stop putting things on the table -- you teach the lesson.  That flag should still be up there, at full staff.

In other words, I learned the lessons that experience teaches you.  Things that don't work, ideas that fail in practice, fail generally because they produce unintended consequences.  And I learned that children in their 20s are simply not capable of seeing through to identify unintended consequences, because they haven't gained the experience to predict what can happen.  So they believe that "this time it will be different."  And when it isn't, and when their ideas fail, as they so often have, they eventually learn the lessons that we "old" people learned.

Of course, it is 2016, so when those lessons are learned, the learning process is delayed by copious tweets and Facebook posts among only like-minded and like-aged, inexperienced peers complaining about things.  Eventually, they have to get a job.

And, unless they work for the Federal government, they're likely to learn a few things, too.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Oh, That Pesky Electoral College

So of course, now that the liberal academicians and their overly-influenced snowflakes, the students who should know better, have all retreated to their "safe zones" after the election, those of them who are the loud pampered ones have taken off toward the destruction of a venerable institution.

That would be, of course, the Electoral College.

[Note -- I suppose it would be wise at this point to recall that during Rush Week at the Phi Delta Theta house in 1972, as a senior, I was unforgettably amused when one of the incoming freshmen who pledged showed up with a sweatshirt titled "Electoral College Athletic Department."  I think it is completely coincidental that he now lives in Canada.] 

Several times in these pages I have written about people's propensity to "talk past each other" when they're arguing.  This happens either when one side is so unalterably correct that the opposing voice needs to distract from the fact that they are losing the debate, sort of like "But Mussolini made the trains run on time", or "Castro certainly had a high literacy rate while mass-murdering his opposition, right?".

They also talk past each other when the topic has two separate components to it that complicate the argument.  Such is the case with the Electoral College.

You see, here's the thing.  There are indeed two completely separate things to argue regarding the Electoral College.  The first is the whole "electors" thing, meaning the mechanics of each state physically casting its votes for the presidency based on which candidate got the most votes in the state.  Since the electors are people too, we assume, and are not all legally bound as to whom they vote for, strange things could happen.

The other is probably most important, and that is the "popular vote" thing -- whether or not the candidate who gets the most votes across the country should be the president.

Of course, those two "things" get conflated all the time.  While the "electors" thing is, by all accounts", somewhat of a relic of the 18th Century, the system of electors has become part of the voting argument, when it should in fact be about 406th in priority as to fixing what we may think is wrong with the nation.

So we are going to stay today on the "popular vote" thing, and since it is my column, you will pretty much hear one side.  And I'll start by saying that nothing is going to change, not ever, never.  The Constitution is not going to get amended, and I may even circle back to just why that is the case before I'm done here.

The 2016 campaign is actually surprising in terms of where the candidates did their campaigning.  The past few cycles, the candidates had spent an inordinate amount of time in Florida and Ohio, with side trips to maybe 5-6 other states to say hello and then return to Florida and Ohio.  And we understand why; those two states have the twin attributes of being populous (and therefore having a lot of electoral votes), and being politically balanced, such that the number of Democrat and Republican votes can be surprisingly equal.

In 2016, principally because of the phenomenon of Donald Trump running a very different campaign and running on a somewhat-different set of issues, a number of other states got actual candidate visits -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, North Carolina -- which was a breath of fresh air, at least depending on which one was speaking.

But it has been the truth for a long time that states like California and New York, which are large in electors but vote only for Democrats, never see a speech except on TV.  Why would they?  Even for someone like Trump who can do five or six rallies in a day, there is a finite amount of time, and none to waste on quixotic treks to states you won't win.

So, the argument goes, those states' voters get no attention and their needs are never met.  Of course, if once in a while they might tease us and vote for Republicans, they might rise to the attention of a candidate.  Same, I suppose, for Texas in the other direction.

And this is the bottom line as far as the popular vote goes.  Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it, along with a whole set of unintended consequences.  With the current state-based, proportional system, the candidates spend time only in toss-up states and, theoretically, the provincial needs of unwinnable or unloseable states are given no air.

But if you were to switch to a popular vote nationwide, you leave the frying pan and jump into the fire -- instead of states that are toss-ups and get attention, the candidates would speak only in big population centers, trying not so much to influence their thinking as simply to get them to the polls.  Forty states would never see a candidate and, of course, only big urban centers (with lots of votes) would be promised anything.  Rural states with scattered population would be electoral wasteland.  

Nothing is going to change -- as I mentioned, the preponderance of the states being low-population, and a change requiring two-thirds of the states to ratify it, and the change being anathema to most states, no Constitutional amendment is going to happen.  But at least you understand why.  There is no moral superiority in disenfranchising one set of voters in favor of another.

And that is the argument that will always win the day.  Unlike most colleges in this country, the Electoral College is free ... and working tolerably as it is.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Come On, Aretha, It's Kickoff Time

This is not the piece I actually intended to publish this morning, but sometimes the best-writ columns get overtaken by events.

By "events", I'm referring to the otherwise-interesting NFL game played on Thanksgiving between the now-6-4 Minnesota Vikings and the now-7-5 Detroit Lions, after the Lions won in the last few moments of the game.  But the game almost didn't happen, or at least it almost didn't get watched.

I am referring, of course, to the bizarre moment before the game when the National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, was turned over to the fragile hands of Aretha Franklin to sing.  Unfortunately, she dropped it.

In my home, as in millions of others around the good old USA, the start of the game was a shared activity with the consumption of turkey, stuffing and other dishes in celebration of Thanksgiving.  So while the TV was on at the time, the rest of us were busy filling up plates with the aforementioned edibles.

At that moment, our attention turned to our plates and the associated filling up thereof, we were not paying attention to the public-address announcer introducing the anthem performance, and did not know who was doing it.  All we heard were the first attempted bars, "Oh say, can you see ..."

That part alone took, I don't know, about thirty seconds to get through, whereupon I said something like "Looks like kickoff will be delayed an hour or so for that lady to finish."  I didn't ask who it was, because I didn't care; would anyone actually care 99% of the time?

That's about when someone said  "That's Aretha Franklin!".

Oh, dear.  Unfortunately the lugubrious pace of the first few bars was matched by the equally sad, sloooooowwwwwww rest of the song.  My first thought was "Oh, man, is Fox Sports going to be mad", because they need to have these things timed to the second to allow for the erratic pace of the game itself and the need to ensure that all the commercials bought and paid for get aired in a time appropriate for the fee charged.  And I think 14 of the 22 starting players were nodding off, and the game would have to be cancelled if there were insufficient conscious players.

My second was "And you thought presidential candidates have big egos?  They're nothing compared to a former celebrity who convinces herself that people came to the game to hear her sing the anthem."  I mean, do you think that even 500 of the 60,000 or so who came to the stadium knew (or cared) who was going to be singing the anthem?  Do you think even five of the thirty million who watched on TV knew or cared?

Aside ... I am only fractionally more sensitive about all this than you, having done the anthem at numerous major-league baseball games in my remote youth and some of my middle-ageth.  And I've already complained about self-aggrandizing anthem performances in these pages.  Obviously that was to no avail.

This one was bothersome because Aretha Franklin is already a celebrity, reasonably respected, and frankly, she does not need to be a full-fledged jerk to get our attention.  In other words, she could have gone out and given a respectful, respectable performance in a minute or so, and been cheered wildly.  After all, the fans paid to see football; no one paid to see her.

Instead, we got a gospeled-up rendition that took every second of five times as long as the song should have taken.  Notes were multiplied and only occasionally was an actual note of the actual melody performed.  But then again, this was clearly not about what should be a moment of respect for our flag and our country.  It was all about Aretha Franklin, who should know better.

I suppose it should be appreciated for what it is -- an obvious attempt to give the home audience more opportunity to pile the canned corn and cranberry sauce on our plates without fearing that we were going to miss the first few minutes of the game.  For that, or at least for our gastronomic enjoyment, I imagine that we should thank her.

But as far as musicality, well, my, we're going to diverge there.  I simply don't -- even if you take away the fact that it was our national anthem at a football game -- care to hear a song with those lyrics, performed in a style so inappropriate for them.  I can't say it enough -- it was ego, ego, ego, all day.  Me, me, me, I'm going to hold every note long enough that you can say something about ME.

Music is about the story, the story that's told in the lyric line.  In this lyric, we celebrate the true but metaphoric story of the captured physician held on a British ship during a battle of the War of 1812, happy to see that the American flag was still flying over Fort McHenry the next morning.  At the same time, it is a metaphor for the leading role that the USA would have in the decades since, and that we would still be there the next morning to take our place in the world.

There was no connection between the interminable version done yesterday by Aretha Franklin and either the actual or the metaphoric message of the Star-Spangled Banner.  It was the purest and most unpleasant form of self-aggrandizement.

Oh, there will be others who think that it was wonderful, because anything done by Aretha Franklin must, a priori, be wonderful because it was done by Aretha Franklin.  As a singer of many decades, she has her fans; as a woman, and a black woman at that, she is almost impervious to criticism because in these declining days of the Obama administration, no black woman (other than Condoleezza Rice) may be criticized without accusations of racism and sexism filling the air.  Michelle Obama does, on occasion, wear ugly dresses.  You heard it here first.

I heartily disagree.  That awful performance was not wonderful no matter what color or gender the singer was.  It was terrible and inappropriate, and in these pages we call out awful for what it is -- in this case, an egotistical, self-important rendition that was more worthy of criticism for being bad musically than for its lack of respect.

But I did get enough turkey, so sure, thanks, Aretha.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.