If economic growth under Trump feels like it was under Bill Clinton, that's because it is: Trump so far ranks 6th best out of 11 starts

Jeff Greenfield is a Democrat political hack forging equivalency between Roy Moore, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton

Here in Politico: 

So what changed? Three people: Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump and Roy Moore.

Actually, nothing's changed.

When blacks like Bill Cosby and Jews like Harvey Weinstein suddenly get outed and become ground zero for sex crime in the popular imagination, Democrats have to act quickly to change the narrative to deflect the attention away from themselves and onto their opponents.

Same old same old.

GQ's Men of the Year: Sexual predators, wankers, queers, and now a $39 million traitor

The country's become more liberal as "moderates" decline 21% since 1992

Gallup reported in January here that the country's moderates have declined from 43% in 1992 to 34% in 2016, a decline of nearly 21%.

At the same time the country's liberals have risen in number from 17% in 1992 to 25% in 2016, an increase of 47%.

Meanwhile conservatives are still stuck at 36%.

This means the country has become more polarized along the conservative-liberal axis as a huge part of the squishy middle has converted to the left.

My hunch is that the real story is that as the older generations have died off, what has been exposed is the more liberal elements of the Baby Boom generation and especially of their children and grandchildren, who were all indoctrinated in liberalism by the public schools, which were gradually taken over by the left after the 1960s.

I experienced this first hand in my high school in the early 1970s. I remember how two new young teachers freshly minted from college stuck out like sore thumbs compared with the old guard of my teachers. They wasted no time and immediately introduced us to the work of such luminaries as the Marxist Bertolt Brecht and the gay counterculture revolutionist Charles A. Reich, a teacher of both Bill and Hillary Clinton at Yale. Meanwhile I learned useful things from my lunkhead economics teacher, like how to do my taxes, but the textbook for the other parts of the class was the socialist Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. Fortunately for me, my American History teacher loved America and the US Constitution. His name was Walt Anderson. I think now he saved me.

I survived to become a conservative, but obviously, most of you didn't.    

Trump is fabulous right now answering questions . . .

. . . ripping into McConnell and Republicans on repeal of Obamacare and into Bill Clinton and Obama for enabling North Korea.

He's fightin' mad.

I love it when Rush Limbaugh compares Bill Clinton to the Rosenberg spies

It's a crystal clear example of the success of Fabian socialism.

George Herbert Walker Bush's legacy: It took only 7 years of NAFTA to destroy hours worked in the United States

Hours of all persons grew 44% during the Reagan bull market, which ended in August 2000. Since then, hours of all persons has grown just 3%.

NAFTA went into effect in January 1994, eleven years after the Reagan bull began and a little over one year after Bush inked the deal. Seven years later hours of all persons peaked.

It reminds me of Bill Clinton's innovation, the so-called Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which blew up the housing market after just 10 years.

Republicans take away your job, then Democrats come along and take away your house.

If you're living in your car, you'd better watch your back.  

The Reagan GDP miracle is a complete myth: It was all government spending (on defense)

And it set a horrible precedent for the dramatic overspending of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, which has sent us on a course to oblivion. You can argue it was necessary to defeat the USSR, but you can't argue that baseline spending (in black) has done anything but go up, up, up to dangerous new levels as a result (notice the baseline Jimmy Carter inherited from liberal Republicanism, for which he got the blame from Ronald Reagan, which wasn't very nice of the old man who went on to bequeath a similar giant new baseline to his successor, G.H.W. Bush).

No, the real miracle was the pathetic loser in Iran, Jimmy Carter, who spent the least in the post-war for his additional GDP, followed by Bill Clinton.

Of course, the spending is all the prerogative of the Congress. The president proposes but the Congress disposes, as the saying goes.

Beware libertarian politicians preaching balanced budgets, as well as utopian infrastructure spending enthusiasts promising the moon and liberal Republicans selling government spending as security to senior citizens at the expense of younger Americans in a time of protracted war. They have delivered little beyond $20 trillion in debt.

Trump presidential approval at this point 39%, better than Bill Clinton's at 38%, according to FiveThirtyEight

Reported here:

Different polling outfits put Trump at varying levels of approval, but the RealClearPolitics average had him at 39.8 percent Tuesday, while the weighted average from FiveThirtyEight had him at exactly 39 percent. Not great numbers, but still better than Clinton. On Day 138 of his presidency, just 37.8 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Jake Novak calls Hillary Clinton's personality "non-viable"

Here:

A winning candidate with a more winning personality wouldn't sit at the Code Conference and come off so obliviously arrogant and utterly without contrition. You can say that's yet another bad decision, but it's primarily a product of Clinton's politically non-viable personality. Her decisions are the fruit of that poison tree. ...

Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election the moment the American people took a good look and listened to her for five minutes or so.

For many of us, that was way back in 1992 when we decided we liked Bill Clinton and appreciated that his wife stood behind him, but we didn't exactly go for her. For others, that moment came in 2008 when she just wasn't as likable as the handsome newcomer Barack Obama. And finally, that moment came for the rest of the critical mass of voters in 2016 when she still wasn't any more likable or believable in her way of speaking and appearance than she was for the previous 24 years.

Donald Trump may not be very persuasive either for millions of Americans, but he's a lot more persuasive than Hillary Clinton. And she was his opponent. That's the breaks.

Robert Shiller blames housing bubbles on get rich quick flipper narratives, still completely misses the tax angle

Here, in The New York Times:

There is still no consensus on why the last housing boom and bust happened. That is troubling, because that violent housing cycle helped to produce the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2007 to 2009. We need to understand it all if we are going to be able to avoid ordeals like that in the future.

Ordinary Americans were suddenly able to make a lot of money by flipping their homes because of the tax law changes of 1997. Capital that was previously locked-up in housing by the rules of the New Deal until 1997 was suddenly unleashed to slosh around in the economy when lawmakers gave homeowners the right to avoid most capital gains on the sale of their homes as long as they lived in them only two years. Until 1997, if you didn't buy a more expensive home after you sold yours, you were exposed to a tax hit, unless you took the option of a once in a lifetime exclusion on the gain. The old arrangement had insured, along with the 30-year mortgage, that housing capital built up over a long period of time, creating forced savings for the middle class which could be safely liquidated in retirement without adversely affecting the housing market.

The Republican and Democrat geniuses who ran our government in 1997 changed all that, and within ten years the dang thing blew up. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Bill Clinton, and you, Newt Gingrich.

Too bad Robert Shiller still doesn't get it.

It would probably be unwise to turn back the tax clock now that the damage has been done, but the reinflation of the housing bubble after the crisis wasn't inevitable. The Fed's unprecedented zero interest rate policy has been responsible for that.

When the next housing crash comes, we'll probably not understand it either.

Meanwhile, the median sales price of homes in the aggregate has never been higher, or more unaffordable, and remains the primary driver of wealth inequality in America. 

Clinton era neocon seriously worries about US starvation and societal collapse from EMP attack

James Woolsey, here.

Yeah, but Bill Clinton enabled North Korea's current nuclear capabilities, which you won't learn from the story.

Foreign influence flashback March 2016: Top donor to Hillary, Saudi Arabia, also bankrolled Trump critic Senator John McCain

This is real news. Jeff Sessions is fake news, which is why Jeff Sessions is being crucified, and John McCain rolls in the dough. The elites protect their own.

Reported here:

A nonprofit with ties to Senator John McCain received a $1 million donation from the government of Saudi Arabia in 2014, according to documents filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. ...

Founded in 1998 to raise money for then-President Bill Clinton’s presidential library, the Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from foreign governments over the years, including while Hillary Clinton, now running for president, served as secretary of State during President Barack Obama’s first term. The foundation says that Clinton was not involved in its work when she worked for the Obama administration.

The Saudi donation to the McCain Institute Foundation may be the first congressional instance of that trend coming to light.

“The extent of this practice is difficult to gauge, of course,” Holman said, “because we only know about it when a nonprofit or foreign government voluntarily reveals that information.”

Alan Blinder's alternative facts about the politics of GDP

Alan Blinder, Bill Clinton's Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, quoted and discussed here:

“Here is an interesting historical fact. Since Harry Truman, the growth rate has fallen every time a Republican president replaced a Democrat and has risen every time a Democrat has replaced a Republican.”

No, not every time, in either case.

Nixon/Ford current dollar GDP growth (Republican) was better than previous JFK/LBJ GDP (Democrat), up 100% vs. 80%.

And Obama current dollar GDP growth (Democrat) was worse following Bush GDP (Republican), up 30% vs. 39%.

For best growth of current dollar GDP in the post-war, Democrat presidents own positions one and four covering 12 years, but Republicans own positions two and three covering 16 years:

Carter: 13.5%

Nixon/Ford: 12.5%

Reagan: 10.1%

JFK/LBJ: 10.0%.

Four Republican administrations lasting 8 years each have averaged 8.2% in the post-war, and four Democrat administrations lasting 8 years each have averaged 7.5%.

Democrat Carter's 4 years at 13.5% easily beats Bush 41's 4 years at 6.0%, but this hardly offsets the better Republican performance over the long haul compared with the Democrat (see here for the figures).

Middle class brick wall: Obama ends his presidency with new housing starts down 34% overall compared with 1959-2008

Not seasonally adjusted, new housing starts averaged 1.28 million per year from 1959-2008, but under Obama they averaged just 0.84 million per year, according to the December data out today, completing his eight year record down 34% from the post-war average.

The monthly average for 2016 annualized is 1.17 million starts, which will end up being Obama's best year but only just above the post-war average cyclical low of 1.13 million per year.

So under Obama all we have done is climb back to the average cyclical low point for new housing starts.

Housing booms have been marked by an average cyclical high of 1.97 million new starts per year in the post-war, but Obama's best performance in 2016 is over 40% off that average high.

2009 marked the low point since 1959, with just 0.55 million new starts, sliding all the way down from the 2005 cyclical high of 2.07 million, a collapse of over 73% for the new housing industry.

Since September 2008 through November 2016 there have been approximately 6.5 million completed foreclosures according to Corelogic here. That means that over 16 million people have been displaced from their homes during the Obama era based on the average household size of 2.5 people.

The homeownership rate in the second quarter of 2016 fell to its lowest point in five decades at 62.9%, the same rate which prevailed in 1965.

Pew reported in December 2015 that after more than four decades as the economic majority in the United States, the middle class had become out-numbered by the combined number of the rich and the poor. Pew reports that in 1971 middle class adults were 61% of their fellows vs. only 50% in 2015. The underclass has grown by 25% while the richest tranche has grown by 125%.

At least some of the decline in the relative size of the middle class has to do with the enormous number of illegal aliens flooding the country since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, and with a large number of Baby Boomers moving on up in an era of credentialism while eschewing larger families for themselves than they came from.

Births per 1,000 women fell to their lowest point since 1909 in the first quarter of 2016 at 59.8. The rate was 122.9 in 1957.

You can't have a decent country unless you give birth to it.

Bill Clinton's killer of 76 at Waco in 1993 Janet Reno has died at 78

She was diagnosed with Parkinson's already in 1995, two years after the infamous deed.

She did not reproduce.

Our un-American president Barack Obama comes perilously close to encouraging illegal aliens to vote without fear

He uses the slippery rhetoric, does he have any other kind?, that it is the simple act of voting which makes you a citizen.

Here, in response to a question also composed in slippery fashion to propose the hypothetical case of an "undocumented citizen" voting (an oxymoron), to which the president replies:

"When you vote you are a citizen yourself." 

As John Podesta has reminded us via Wikileaks, it's Bill Clinton's 1993 motor voter law which is the mechanism preferred by the left to get illegals to vote:

On the picture ID, the one thing I have thought of in that space is that if you show up on Election Day with a drivers license with a picture, attest that you are a citizen, you have a right to vote in Federal elections.

Clinton Defense Secretary wants to scrap ICBMs and nuclear cruise missiles, unilaterally

Here.

Traitor.

Hillary pal Sid Vicious Blumenthal pushed birther story to McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher

McClatchy reported last night here also that there was a birther email sent by a quickly fired Iowa campaign volunteer:

Meanwhile, former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher tweeted Friday that Blumenthal had “told me in person” that Obama was born in Kenya.

“During the 2008 Democratic primary, Sid Blumenthal visited the Washington Bureau of McClatchy Co.,” Asher said in an email Friday to McClatchy, noting that he was at the time the investigative editor and in charge of Africa coverage.

“During that meeting, Mr. Blumenthal and I met together in my office and he strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya. We assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and that reporter determined that the allegation was false.

“At the time of Mr. Blumenthal’s conversation with me, there had been a few news articles published in various outlets reporting on rumors about Obama’s birthplace. While Mr. Blumenthal offered no concrete proof of Obama’s Kenyan birth, I felt that, as journalists, we had a responsibility to determine whether or not those rumors were true. They were not.”

Blumenthal, who worked in the White House with President Bill Clinton and later was employed by the Clinton Foundation, could not be reached Friday but said in an email to The Boston Globe, “This is false. Period.”

Recent Monmouth poll showing Clinton +7 overweights younger voters who don't turnout like older voters

The Monmouth poll is here.

In the last three presidential elections voters under 45 years of age actually turned out to vote at an average rate of 52% compared with 70% for voters 45 and older. Almost half the sample in a recent Monmouth presidential poll is populated by that younger demographic, which means that the part of the sample which is more likely to represent Democrat preference could be overstating their likely election turnout for Hillary in 2016 by almost 50%.

A notable feature of the last three presidential elections has been the enormous uptick in voter turnout by young people aged 18 to 29, most of whom have been for Bernie Sanders this cycle, not Hillary Clinton. Turnout has averaged 45% for this age group since 2004 compared with 37% prior, and given the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary the turnout for this demographic may well revert to the status quo ante. 

Excepting the election in 1992 when the 18-29s turned out for Bill Clinton at almost 43%, in 1988, 1996 and 2000 they yawned Meh! turning out at an average of 34% compared to 66% for their elders aged 60+.