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.
Vetting Process
You may be wondering about the vetting process that allowed killer mom Tashfeen Malik to slip into the US from Pakistan. Molly Hemmingway, in The Federalist, says Malik’s U.S. visa application included theses questions:
- “Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization?”
- “Have you ever ordered, incited, committed, assisted or otherwise participated in genocide?”
- “Have you ever committed, ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in torture?
The New York Times also reported on Dec 12 that “she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad”. The feds were never aware of it.
Vetting Process
Yesterday, Dec 16, FBI director James Comey said Tashfeen did not post about jihad on social media. Here’s the story in The LA Times.
Now you may be wondering about the vetting process at Bokbluster.com. …
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.
Tashfeen Malik
Tashfeen Malik left her 6 month old baby with her mother-in-law and then joined her husband, Syed Farook, on a suicidal killing spree.
While trying to comprehend this I came across a letter to America written by Osama bin Laden in 2002 explaining “why they hate us”. The text was published here in the The Guardian.
I still don’t get it.
