Category Archives: Politics
Yellen Takes Off Training Wheels
Janet Yellen took the training wheels off the economy on Wednesday. After seven years of near zero percent interest rates, the Fed hiked rates a quarter percent.
Meanwhile, Congress passed a 2,000 page, 1.2 trillion dollar budget. That tacked another 157 billion onto the 18.5 trillion dollar national debt.
Yellen
On Friday the Dow dropped 370 points.
David Stockman says, “sell the bonds, sell the stocks, sell the house”. IBD wonders if the markets know something the Fed doesn’t.
Trump Triad
The Donald may not know much about the nuclear triad but he’s created his own Trump triad for dealing with ISIS. He wants to ban immigration for Muslims, close the internet for ISIS, and take out terrorist families.
Trump Triad
For his part, fellow Republican front runner Ted Cruz channeled his inner Curtis LeMay and promised to carpet bomb ISIS until the sand glows in the dark.
Cruz has been playing nice to Trump, even after Trump called him a maniac. During the CNN Las Vegas debate Trump rewarded Cruz’s good behavior by saying he has a wonderful temperament.
Global Community versus Global Warming
The civilized world rebuked ISIS by agreeing to turn down the global thermostat.
Al Gore was giddy. He proclaimed, “the global community is speaking with one voice”.
Last time the “global community” tried to speak with one voice was the Kyota Protocol. Poor countries said screw it, we want to get rich too. So this time around the rich countries agreed to buy off the poor ones for $100 billion a year. Or, as The Wall Street Journal editorial board put it, “governments of the West are going to dun their taxpayers to transfer money to clean and green governments run by the likes of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe”.
But not to worry. John Kerry says the deal is non-binding. It’s not a treaty because a treaty would never get past the US Senate. In other words it’s empty symbolism. Not that that’s a bad thing, according to Robert Tracinski:
As a global warming skeptic, who thinks it’s absurd that the entire world is supposed to get together to prevent relentlessly rising temperatures (that aren’t happening) and who considers the idea of an international political target for global temperatures at the end of the century to be a monument to the hubris of central planning, I’m not bothered that the Paris Agreement is empty symbolism.
Obama is Making a List
President Obama is making a list and checking it twice. He thinks it’s insane that people on a no-fly list can buy a gun. The problem is there’s no due process involved in earning a spot on the list. And it’s hard to get off if you don’t have a direct line to the Secretary of Homeland Security.
Obama is Making a List
Stephen Hayes, the writer and Fox News contributor, found himself on the list and he hardly ever wears a suicide belt. But he did take a one way flight to Istanbul to board a cruise ship, and that did the trick. Hayes filled out all kinds of paperwork to get himself off the list but to no avail. Finally, Bret Baier asked Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, during an interview, if he thought Steve Hayes was a terrorist. That got him off the list.
The president has worse lists to be on and the way off is even less pleasant.
Prayer Shaming
Prayer shaming went viral last week. Some on the left seem more upset with Christians, Jews, and Muslims who pray than radical Muslims who kill.
After the terror attacks in France, and San Bernardino, and the shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood, normal people and politicians did the only thing they could – they offered their thoughts and prayers.
That was a prayer too far for some in the gun control crowd. And so the prayer shaming began.
This was the front page of the The New York Daily News on December 3. 
The paper complained that Republicans were “preaching about prayer” instead of getting your guns.
The NYT ran its first front page editorial in 95 years demanding confiscation of “assault style” weapons. (NR Online notes that sort thing had zero success preventing the attack in Paris where gun laws are stricter than anything being called for here.)
Even my old Tropic editor at the Miami Herald, Gene Weingarten, tweeted, “Dear “thoughts and prayers people”: Please shut up and slink away. You are the problem and everyone knows it.” He now says he respects people who pray. He claims he was only bashing politicians who offer platitudes instead of action. Gene is a very funny guy. I know for a fact he’s more interested in poop than prayer.
Molly Hemingway in the Federalist, however, is serious about prayer. She says the left prays to its god of government.
If some in the media didn’t want God to “fix this” at least one of the victims did. Townhall says that Holly Petit asked for prayers as the shooting raged around her at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. She survived.
