Odds and Ends

One of my favorite congressmen, John Campbell, now an ex-congressman, looked at the current economic trends in his recent post. After looking at the pros and cons, his basic summary was “I see storm clouds on the horizon, but no rain in sight for this year.” It is worth a read. Note this is a change for him. Early last year, he predicted no downturn for 2024, but possibly one in 2025.  

Typically, the Fed cut interest rates last year, but it does not want to cut them now. See Campbell’s post for the mixed effects of such a cut. Meanwhile, predictions of significant increases in inflation have not come to pass, the stock market is at record highs, and real wages are rising again for the first time since Trump’s last term. We even had the first monthly surplus since 2017. Trade deals are being signed, and much of the new investment is beginning to kick in. Consumer confidence has risen significantly. Things are looking promising at the moment. Still, I agree with Campbell about the storm clouds.  

Much of the Left is a scam. It is a minority view that can project power far above its numbers. We saw that with USAID, which took billions in taxpayer dollars and used them to support Left-wing causes. Now we have another example. Following the Palisades fire, FireAid raised over $100 million to aid fire victims and fire prevention. None of it went to the victims of the fire. They gave it to left-wing groups, some as far away as Northern California. At least the group that engaged in voter registration among native americans gave the money back. Typically, this would be fraud, but it is California, so I am sure FireAid does not have to worry about that.

You can tell the Left is out of ideas when they try to recycle their problem to attack Trump. They ignored Biden’s mental decline until it was clear that he could not win. Yet, now, they try to claim that Trump’s cognitive decline is such that he should be removed and put in a retirement home. With Biden, they told us to ignore our own eyes; Biden was as sharp as a tack. With Trump, they tell us to ignore our own eyes; he really has declined. 

Mamdami wants government-run grocery stores. Not surprisingly, it has been done in the past and does not work. Kansas City opened Sun Fresh, a city-run grocery store in 2018, sinking tens of millions of dollars into the effort over the years. Utopia had arrived. Yet, the place is a ghost town, with many empty shelves and lost $885,000 last year. Other grocery stores in the area turn a profit. The solution? It’s always the same: pour in more money, though it might close. Like most socialist endeavors, they sound wonderful on paper, but never actually work. This is because most have never run a business, and thus they don’t know what it takes. In short, they don’t know what they are doing. 

I am reminded of George McGovern, who, when he lost in 1972, was the most far-left candidate the Democrats had run up to that time. Later in life, he opened a small hotel, which ultimately failed. When asked about it, he said he never realized how hard the government makes it to run a business. Perhaps he should have known that before he ran for President.

The evil that was the Biden border policy got even more absurd. We knew that Biden lost over 300,000 children, an unknown number into slavery and sex trafficking. We learned that at least some were given a hotline number to call if they had problems with their sponsors. Ok. But in congressional testimony last week, we learned that 65,000 of these calls went unanswered. They really did not care. They just wanted warm bodies to flood into the country. As one House Democrat put it, she needs more people in her district to help with redistricting.

The first rule of holes? Stop digging. This lesson is lost on the media and the Democrats. Sure, they are having some effect on their base. One pollster pointed out that less than half of Democrats knew about how Obama had ordered the intelligence to be changed to fit the Russia hoax. Meanwhile, most independents and virtually all Republicans were aware of the story.

The media is doing its best to lie and divert attention, but there is only so much they can do. They are trying to claim that Trump is himself just trying to divert attention away from the Epstein story. The Epstein story is probably one of the first big screw up by the administration. However, most Republicans don’t think Trump is trying to protect himself. Most believe that if the Epstein records contained information against Trump, it would have been leaked long ago. After all, what didn’t they do to get Trump? So why would they have held this back? 

In any event, it certainly had not affected Trump’s support among Republicans, which, according to CBS, went from 88% positive to 90% following this scandal. It is not that the scandal caused this; instead, there has been a lot of other good news that outweighed any adverse effects from the mishandling of the Epstein story.

Thus, the narrative pushed in the media that Trump is losing support because of the fallout of the  Epstein story, and this is the reason for their claims about Obama’s involvement in creating the Russia hoax, is like most of what they report about Trump: nonsense.

The same can be said about their attempt to recast the Russia hoax into simply a claim that Russia tried to interfere in the election. If that had been the story, it would have been like reporting that it gets dark at night. Of course, they tried to interfere, as do all of our enemies in every election. The Russia hoax had three central claims: Putin wanted Trump to win; Their interference had an impact on the election; and Trump colluded with the Russians to win.

Thus, the Russia hoax was the basis for the claim that Trump’s presidency was illegitimate and that he was Russia’s puppet, which was absurd, as he was harder on Russia than either Obama or Biden.   Fox has had a lot of fun playing clips of Democrats and Media pundits now claiming they never said any of this, followed by them playing some of the vast number of clips from 2016 forward of them saying exactly that. Is it any wonder that the media and the Democrats are at historic lows in polls?

The Intelligence assessments in the December 6th meeting did not support the three core claims of the Russia hoax. Obama ordered them changed, which they were, over intelligence analysts’ objections. The new assessment became the basis for trying to remove Trump from office.

Nor is this the complete picture. I am confident that many of the same people who were part of the soft coup attempt on Trump continued their efforts into the 2020 election and beyond. The labeling of Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” by “51 intelligence officers” is a case in point. This claim has since been refuted, but it served its purpose by giving cover to Biden during a debate and allowing him to attack Trump as a puppet of Russia. As Harry Reid said about why he lied about Romney, “He lost, didn’t he?”

The problem the Democrats are now having is that their defenders in the media have lost their credibility, and thus much of their ability to defend them. They do not know what to do in the new environment, except make silly TikTok videos and swear a lot. After all, nothing gets your point across like a bleep in the audio track.

Here is the next video in our Capitalism vs Socialism series.