Miscellaneous

Normally I consume a lot of news, but not so much lately.  I haven’t really followed Russiagate, since it was  obviously fake news.  And every other story seemed to be about Comey/Rosenstein/Mueller/Clapper/Brennan and on and on and on.  To fill my day I’ve been forced to start reading the Aubrey/Maturin novels for maybe the fourth time.

But in half an hour it’s first pitch in a Yankees-Orioles game, and for the next six months we can watch real men play a real, American game.  A game that Babe Ruth played, and would be familiar with.  Baseball is the sporting version of America First.

There are no iron laws in politics, but a few things come close.  Such as, prosperity elects Presidents.  If come election day, voters feel they’re better off than they were, and think they’re likely to get better, incumbent Presidents win.  Even if they had nothing to do with it.

I am firmly convinced the economy will be humming in November of 2020.  Barring, of course, acts of God or acts of war.  Trump can’t interfere with the Lord, but he can certainly keep us out of war, and he will.  And the tax regime he installed, the regulatory relief he’s providing, and the international markets he’s opening are all powerful stimulants.  The Federal Reserve isn’t going to rain on this parade, especially not with Stephen Moore joining it.  Animal spirits are flowing.  There’s a lot of rational exuberance.  If you ever wanted to go into business, now would be the time to do it.

This all makes a pretty economic pie, and there’s a big scoop of ice cream to top it off.  It’s something Trump had nothing to do with.  It’s the best economic news of all.  Productivity is rising!   James Pethokoukis spells it all out in The Week.

This is profoundly good news.  It means all the creativity of Silicon Valley is infiltrating American business, and the long term consequences could be as drastic as the switch form muscle to steam, and from steam to electricity.  It’s that big.

All this means there’s going to be 3% economic growth in 2020, maybe 4%. And that means Trump is reelected.

Dame Fortune smiles, again, on Donald Trump.

[the foregoing appears in American Thinker]

 

They shot at the king, but they didn’t kill him.  And because they didn’t destroy him, they only made him stronger.  If, a year from now, the economy is robust, Trump will be reelected in an historic landslide.  His enemies have played right into his hands.

This is all because of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), an especially virulent form of the psychiatric disorder known as cognitive dissonance.  If you know, for absolutely certain  —  as an article of faith  —  that something is true, and evidence in contradiction of this truth emerges, the psychic toll can be severe.  Experts say stems from the use of degenerate Meta Probability.

So it is with Donald Trump and his critics.  I was one of those critics myself, and suffered severely when he won the Republican nomination.  I knew Donald Trump could never win a Presidential election, for all kinds of reasons.  Even though his opponent was one of the worst political candidates in our history, I knew he still couldn’t win.  He never read a book, had the attention span of a gnat, was a notorious womanizer, had no apparent political convictions, and was a flim flam artist of a businessman.  What kind of a guy is associated with Trump University, for God’s sake?

All the smart people, liberal and conservative, agreed, from National Review to the Wall Street Journal, from the New York Times to the Washington Post.  And then he won.  What in the hell happened?  How was this possible?  How could we explain to our friends, colleagues and families that we were wrong?

Hillary suffered a virtual nervous breakdown, and concocted the Russia collusion theory.  The media flocked to this fantasy, and the Mueller fiasco began.   After two years, this long national nightmare is over.

God bless America, and God Bless President Trump.

(A lightly edited version of this article is in the American Thinker.)

 

In 1980 I was chair of the Reagan for President Committee in Alaska.  Frank Murkowski and Native leader Roy Huhndorf were vying for the Republican nomination for U. S. Senate.  I supported Huhndorf, because I thought he’d have a better chance against incumbent Senator Mike Gravel.  Murkowski won the primary, and Gravel lost the Democratic primary to former state legislator Clark Gruening, grandson of Alaska political legend Ernest Gruening, one of Alaska’s original U. S. Senators back in 1959.

Bill McConkey had helped get Republican Governor Jay Hammond get reelected in 1978, and I had worked for him.  He was now Murkowski’s campaign manager, and he asked me to be his deputy on the campaign.  I got $4,000 a month, the only money I ever earned in politics.  I had one assignment.  Do a hit on Clark Gruening.  At the time, Murkowski and Gruening were tied in the polls.

My hit worked like a charm, and Murkowski immediately jumped to a ten point lead in the polls, which was his margin on election day.

I thought I now had a friend in the U. S. Senate.  I’d certainly earned it.  I got the son of a bitch elected.  But I was wrong.  Murkowski quickly turned into Ted Stevens’ lap dog.  And U. S. Senator Ted Stevens hated my guts, from an incident back in ’76, when I was district chairman for Reagan for President.

Frank appointed his daughter to serve out his term because Ted Stevens wanted her as his junior Senator.  He sure as hell didn’t want me.  Lisa wasn’t very bright, but she knew enough to do what Uncle Ted told her.  So Stevens actually had two votes in the Senate.

Ted Stevens was corrupt.  He was in bed with the gang of thieves who looted the North Slope Borough in the early 1980’s.   The judge who presided at their trial, James Fitzgerald,  told me confidentially that Stevens had hamstrung the prosecution.

The career people at the Department of Justice knew about this, and they wanted to nail Stevens.  They wanted to get the corrupt bastard so bad that they abused their prosecutorial power.  They got Stevens convicted, but it was a dirty conviction, and was overturned.

For those who doubt this story, how was it that George W. Bush allowed his Department of Justice to engage in prosecutorial misconduct in pursuing a powerful Republican Senator?  Explain that.  You can’t.

So now, thanks to Kai Binkley Sims, Stevens’ legacy Senator, Lisa Murkowski, will soon be put out to pasture.  The Stevens era is finally over.

When I arrived in Alaska with my wife in 1974 Don Young had just been elected to the U. S. House of Representatives.  I got to know Don, and I liked him.  He’s a good man.  He’s still in office, but the word is that this will be his last term.  If so, whoever wins his seat is the automatic favorite to take out Murkowski in 2022.

I don’t know how tight Young is with John Binkley.  Binkley donates $500 every cycle, and I’m sure Don is friends with the whole Binkley family, who have been prominent in Fairbanks for a very long time.  It could be that John knows Young is retiring, and his daughter Kai will run for the House in 2020, in preparation for a Senate run in 2022.

John’s not returning my call.  We were never friends.  More like rivals.

I feel kind of badly for John.  After Frank humiliated him in 2002 by appointing Lisa, Binkley decided to run against Frank when he went for a second term as Governor in 2006.  Frank was an absolute disaster as Governor, and Binkley beat him in the primary.  Frank only got 19% of the vote, which may be a record.  But Binkley only got 30%.  A perky little beauty from the MatSu got 51%.  Sarah Palin beat Binkley 5-3.  That’s got to be painful.

Kai Binkley Sims was a 25 year old petroleum geologist in Anchorage when her dad ran for governor.  I’m sure she’s a loyal, loving daughter,  and worked to get her father elected.  Losing to Palin had to be hard for the whole family to take.

More motivation for KBS.

 

 

The man who recently assumed control of Fox News, James Murdoch, is a donor to the Clinton Foundation.  His lovely wife, and the mother of his three children, works at the Clinton Climate Institute.  As a result, we have uber-Democrat Donna Brazile as a new star at Fox, weather vane Brett Baier tacking left, and so on.  Fox is no longer the conservative counterpart to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC.  It was five to one.  Now it’s five to none.

Presumably. there are a few conservative billionaires around who have more sense than those morons, the Kochs.  Roger Ailes proved you can make money with a conservative news channel.  That space is wide open again, and I’ll be disappointed if we don’t see some action on this front before the end of the year.

The best book, by far, ever written about a presidential campaign is What it Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer.  Ben Cramer got very close to the whole Biden family in writing this book, and the sections on Biden are among the best.

You’ve got to read it to believe it.  Biden’s a nut.  And a drama queen.  And a lightweight.  The process he went through just to decide if he was going to run in 1988 is agonizing.  He can’t take a decision.  He doesn’t have any confidence in his own judgment.  This is not a man with what it takes to be President of the United States.  He went through the same Hamlet act in 2016, and now he’s at it again.  Anyone who takes Biden as a serious candidate for President is uninformed about this man.

Back when I was planning on running for the United States Senate from Alaska, there was only one guy in Alaska politics who I thought might be able to beat me.  I met him in the state legislature, and got to know him a little.  He was John Binkley, of the Fairbanks Binkleys, a smart guy, and ambitious.  He had more going for him than I did, but I figured I was smarter than he was, and I’d figure it out.

I left Alaska in 2001, because I knew the fix was in for the Murkowski Senate seat.  Frank was going to appoint his daughter Lisa.  There was nothing I could do, politically, at that point, so I took my wife back to her home in California.

Like I said, I’m smarter than Binkley.  He thought Frank might appoint him to the Senate.  He and Frank and their families went way back.  So Binkley interviewed for the appointment, and had to suffer the embarrassment of being told Lisa Murkowski would be a better U. S. Senator than he was.

Binkley was pissed, to say the least, and still is.  But he’s about to get his revenge.  His fabulous daughter, Kai Binkley Sims, is going to take out Lisa in the 2022 primary.  It won’t even be close.  Kai is a pistol, and Lisa is dumber than a stump.

Oh, and by the way, the Binkleys now control what’s left of the old Anchorage Daily News, what used to be the principal newspaper in Alaska.

I’ll be calling John tomorrow to congratulate him.  Revenge is a dish best served cold.