Michael Savage gets Trump's Taiwan overture totally wrong, Marc Thiessen gets it right

Savage calls it a blunder, in keeping with his generally negative assessments about Trump's post-election behavior.

Thiessen calls it deliberate, and brilliant, here, which is what it is.

What a hypocritical gasbag Rush Limbaugh is about Trump's spending plans

Why, Donald Trump could be another FDR!, he says today. He could consolidate Republican rule for decades if he spends the money correctly!

Rush doesn't have a clue about the Obama stimulus, let alone have any principles. He thinks the stimulus was $1 trillion or so, when it was actually nearly $5 trillion, so far. I say so far because the damn thing was built into the outlay train. And look what we've gotten for it. A big fat nothing-burger. Crummier economic growth than under Bush, full-time jobs over 6 million behind trend, and a big fat national debt of nearly $20 trillion.

But Trump's version is going to be successful! Sure it is. $1 trillion or $5 trillion or $10 trillion under Trump isn't going to do anything it couldn't do under Obama.

The February 2009 Obama stimulus got added to Bush's 2009 fiscal year spending, and to every frickin' year thereafter. The fiscal 2008 baseline outlays were $2.9825 trillion.

And here are the annual outlays thereafter in excess of that baseline:

2009: $535.2 billion

2010: $474.6 billion

2011: $620.6 billion

2012: $554.5 billion

2013: $472.1 billion

2014: $523.6 billion

2015: $776.1 billion

2016: $1.017 trillion.

The giant joke on the American people here is that Republicans went right along with this charade the whole time Obama was president.

And now that Trump is running the show, an even bigger joke is about to be played on the American people.

Fake news alert: Time Magazine calls CNN's Ana Navarro "a breakout star of the election"

Here:

"I don’t know how people can possibly survive this election without . . . a good liquor store.”

Democrats are still light years away from recognizing Hillary lost because no one wanted to vote for a lying crook

Democrats here blame a litany of things . . .

• Bernie's challenge
• Comey's investigation
• The Russkies
• Clinton's centrism
• Clinton's campaign
• Clinton's failure to defend herself
• Clinton's messaging
• Democrats' inability to connect with the millions they failed

. . . but never the freight train of sooty baggage which defined Hillary Clinton.

The Donald president is thinking about the South China Sea

Oh yes.

Here.

VP-Elect Mike Pence discusses Trump agenda on Meet the Depressed, never mentions illegal immigration

Pence is a squish, as we told you, but if they don't build The Wall, they are toast.

Noted here.

Where's the "orange" setting on this thing?

Hello Beijing: You illegally created new territory in the South China Sea . . .

. . . now the new sheriff Donald Trump treats Taiwan like a country fully independent of China.

Here's an easy solution: You withdraw from those illegal islands you've created, and maybe the new sheriff stops offending your sensibilities over Taiwan.

Your move. 

It's disturbing that prospective SECDEF Mattis says our hands are tied by the Iran deal when it's not a treaty

Even worse that he wants to predicate US action on prior European action. What is "European" action? And when have they EVER acted without US leadership?

And worse still that the land force part of the nuclear triad is negotiable. He's a M.A.D. dog all right.

Whatever happened to peace through strength?

Mattis, quoted here:

Mattis has voiced deep scepticism about Iran’s motives and warned that the US and its allies would have to remain vigilant for violations. But in April he argued against walking away from the nuclear deal, as Trump has threatened to do. 

“One point I want to make is there’s no going back,” Mattis said at an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Absent a real violation – I mean, a clear and present violation that was enough to stimulate the Europeans to action as well – I don’t think that we can.”

Were the US to renege on its agreement, Mattis said, “I believe we would be alone if we did, and unilateral economic sanctions from us would not have anywhere near the impact of an allied approach to this.”

November 2016 climate summary for Grand Rapids, Michigan

November 2016 climate summary for Grand Rapids, Michigan

Average temperature was 45.4 degrees F. Normal is 39.1. The month ranked 4th warmest November since 1892. The YTD average temperature was 53.4, the 4th warmest YTD average among the previous four warmest full years on record. The normal YTD average temperature is 50. The YTD average temperature in the hottest full year on record in 2012 was 54.4, in 1921 was 54.2, in 1931 was 53.7, in 2016 was 53.4 and in 1998 was 53.2 (the last three were all El Nino episodes).

The lowest temperature recorded this November was 21. The normal lowest temperature is 17. The highest temperature this November was 73. The normal highest temperature is 66.

November 2016 saw 3.24 inches of precipitation. Normal is 2.84. YTD precipitation is 43.33 inches, normal YTD is 31.94. The wettest full year on record was 2008 with 48.80 inches. The driest full year was 1930 with just 20.92.

Snowfall measured 0.8 inches. Normal for November is 6.4 inches. The seasonal total is 0.8 inches, and the normal seasonal total is 6.8. Normal seasonal snowfall is 66.7 inches. The snowiest season on record was in 1951-52 with 132 inches of snow. 1905-06 was the least snowy with 20.

There was no change to Cooling Degree Days in November. YTD there were 936 CDD, the 15th warmest on record so far. Normal CDD is 694.

Heating Degree Days totaled 44 in September, 324 in October and 580 in November for a total of 948 for the season so far. Normal HDD seasonally is as follows: July, 9, August, 19, September, 137, October, 427 and November, 770 for a seasonal normal to date of 1362. Normal for a full season is 6713 HDD. The coldest winter season by HDD was in 1903-04 with 7712. The warmest was in 2011-12 with just 5253.

Actual lower HDD presently have been indicative of the after effects of warmer conditions prevailing since the end of the El Nino this summer. The Very Strong El Nino of 2015-16, averaging 1.43 on the index and 15 months long, was longer but weaker than the 1997-98 episode, which averaged 1.56 on the index and was 13 months long. The 1982-83 VSE averaged 1.3 on the index and was 15 months long.

The Oceanic Nino Index value for the August-September-October measuring period was -0.7, the second consecutive measurement at -0.5 or lower. Five such values consecutively would indicate the onset of a La Nina, which could produce wetter conditions in the US High Plains and Upper Midwest and lots of snow in Canada.

No thanks. Been pretty wet in these parts already, Pilgrim.

Obama can negotiate with Iranian terrorists and visit the communist police state of Cuba . . .

. . . but Trump can't talk to the president of independence-minded Taiwan or invite the pusher-killing president of the Philippines to visit the White House.

Got it.

The Chicago Tribune makes the case for Betsy DeVos, only alludes to hot-button "common core"

Here:

DeVos "has a lot of influence in the reform community," Peter Cunningham, a former Obama administration education official and now executive director of the reform-minded nonprofit Education Post, tells us. "She is unequivocally a champion for choice. The question is whether she is a champion for quality."

Academic Ann Douglas' analysis is a cloister-f*^k: "Even some white men feel they've been left behind"

Here, where her attachment to the ideology of "sexism" blinds her to the real consequences of Obama's intentional inattention to the fate of the white middle class of both sexes, no sex, homosex, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera:

Yes, Hillary was a flawed candidate. Her penchant for privacy—not surprising given what the Republicans and the national press have put her through since 1992—was her Achilles heel, leading to the use of a private email server that came to symbolize her alleged untrustworthiness. It also led her to be not adroit enough with the media. Hillary misread the country: the fury about the wages of neoliberalism—which, yes, she embodied—that was gripping people, young and old, on the Right and the Left. Thus, she didn’t have a galvanizing progressive message that, as the Sanders campaign demonstrated, millions were hungering for, even some white men feeling they’ve been left behind.

Even some white men? 

How about 4 million whites of both sexes, Ann, in the core of the working population aged 25 to 54 years, who've been left behind in fact and don't just "feel" they have:

America: Where Mark Levin is on the radio discussing Sarah Palin's misgivings about Trump's crony capitalism . . .

. . . and the feed cuts off to a basketball game.

Even fascism has to pay the bills.

Kellogg's is financing the communist Black Lives Matter movement to the tune of almost $1 million

See for yourself, here, at the Foundation website.

To protest, you could send your boxes of Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Special K, Rice Krispies and Froot Loops to Kellogg Co. headquarters at:

2 Hamblin Avenue

Battle Creek, MI 49017

(269) 961-2000.

And switch to General Mills' Cheerios. Oats are better for you anyway.

Trump's Carrier intervention isn't just chilling, it's a crock of corporate welfare and perhaps explicit fascism

Jimmy Pethokoukis, on whom I have been very hard in the past, is certainly right about this one, calling the implicit intimidation in this affair "chilling", here.

But it's a lot more than chilling, it's at the very least more of the same cooperation between government and industry we have seen for decades but which used to go by the name of fascism, except it's more explicit than we're used to coming as it does from someone like Donald Trump, perhaps veering off now into explicit top-down federal intervention into business decisions.  

"We certainly don't want to take as our guide to creating jobs special tax breaks for a company that earned $7.5 billion in profits last year, got $6 billion in defense contracts, paid its top five executives $50 million, in order to preserve 1,000 out of 2,100 jobs," said [Robert] Shapiro, [former undersecretary of commerce]. "It's essentially a transfer from the taxpayers of Indiana, who are providing these tax breaks, to the shareholders of United Technology plus those 1,000 workers. That's really not a model for creating jobs across America," he added.

If #NeverTrump Bill Kristol endorsed General Mattis for a 3rd party run in April, I'm against him as Trump's pick for Defense

Bill Kristol, here:

Jim Mattis happens to be a social liberal. He's more liberal than I am. He's very concerned about the debt. He's a strong national security hawk. Why wouldn't someone like him... 

Mattis is also a conventional liberal in that he subscribes to a two-state solution for Israel, just like George Bush and John Kerry.

Duncan Lloyd, Assistant city solicitor in Philly, caught on camera with accomplice vandalizing new grocery with "F*ck Trump"

The guy's still on the payroll at $63,207 per year.

No word on how many other incidents he's responsible for.

From the story here:

Since Election Day, pro- and anti-Trump graffiti have been reported throughout the city. In early November, spray-painted swastikas, racist graffiti, and references to President-elect Donald Trump and Nazi Germany appeared in South Philadelphia. Anti-Trump graffiti have been reported on bus shelters and on the exterior wall of City Hall, where "Not My President" was spray-painted and removed Nov. 12.

The deepest cut, from Cenk Uygur: Obama's not shtrong like Trump

Here:

I'm sorry, if you're a Democrat, and you like Obama, I hate to break your heart and you want to hate me for it and that's okay, but Obama wouldn't have done that. 

That's not who he is, he is not that guy. And in this case, it is an absolutely fact. Because he is president right now. If he wanted, he could have pressured Carrier. But he didn't pressure Carrier. He didn't pressure United Technologies, and he didn't threaten to take away their contracts. Because he's not that strong. And he always thinks, his default mode is there's nothing we can do. You guys don't understand.There are consequences. 

No. I do understand. What I'm asking you to do is to risk those consequences to protect American workers. 

And you didn't do it, and Trump did it, and now he is going to get a world of credit...

Nobody is going to remember the downsides of that deal, no one is going to worry about those tax breaks later. It is going to be a huge political win for Donald Trump, that is by the way, as I just said, somewhat earned. There are so many options that the Democrats never choose to use... They want to outsource the jobs, let them outsource the jobs. 

Threaten their government contracts? Yes, you threaten their government contracts. That's called being strong!

3 weeks since Election 2016: Trump has now won more popular votes than any previous Republican

Trump 2016: 62.6 million

Romney '12: 60.9 million

McCain '08: 60.0 million

Bush '04: 62.0 million

Bush '00: 50.5 million

Meanwhile, Hillary still hasn't bested Obama 2012, and three weeks since Election 2016 remains 4.4 million votes behind Obama 2008:

Hillary 2016: 65.1 million

Obama '12: 65.9 million

Obama '08: 69.5 million

Kerry '04: 59.0 million

Gore '00: 51.0 million

ECRI notices what I noticed in September: Whites missed the job boat under Obama, have fewer jobs than nine years ago

My post was about full-time jobs, here in September. Asians, blacks and Hispanics all had net gains in full-time jobs from their respective 2007-2008 peaks through the second quarter of 2016, from 0.2 million to 1.5 million while whites still suffered from huge losses in full-time totaling 4.4 million. On a percentage basis minorities' gains ranged from 2% to 23% while white losses were 7%, the impact of which was so huge because whites represent 64% of the population. 

Mish's comment on the ECRI story here was this:

Minorities fared far better at job gains on a percentage basis than whites. 

While the ECRI story here concluded this:

Whites actually have fewer jobs than nine years ago, while Hispanics, Blacks and Asians together gained all of the net jobs added, and more.