URLs du Jour

2019-08-31

  • Goodness knows I'm not a Trump fan, don't plan to vote for him unless the Libertarian is an utter goofball (and maybe not even then), but I laughed out loud when I saw his campaign website's 404 page.

    [Trump 404 Page]

    Could I be persuaded to vote for a guy just because his web designer has a wicked sense of humor? Stay tuned…


  • Andrew C. McCarthy is at a high level of ire, and if your name is Andrew McCabe, that ire is well-deserved.

    The FBI’s former deputy director is in the Justice Department’s crosshairs. His lawyers are reportedly pleading with top officials not to indict him for lying to FBI agents who were probing a leak of investigative information, orchestrated by none other than McCabe.

    McCabe is feeling the heat because the evidence that he made false statements is daunting. So daunting, in fact, that even he concedes he did not tell the truth to investigators. Listen carefully to what he says about the case — there being no shortage of public commentary on it from the newly minted CNN analyst. He never “deliberately misled anyone,” he insists. Sure, he grudgingly admits, some of his statements “were not fully accurate,” or perhaps were “misunderstood” by his interrogators. But “at worst,” you see, “I was not clear in my responses, and because of what was going on around me may well have been confused and distracted.”

    Uh-huh.

    I'm sure there are a lot of decent and honorable FBI employees. That number did not decrease, however, when McCabe was fired.

    McCarthy will make you feel, and share, his anger.


  • OK, so that's enough being nice to President Trump for the day. Veronique de Rugy's column this week offers Some Clarity on President Trump's Economic Policies. Sample:

    Some aspects of the 2017 tax reform were great. The cut in the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21% and the reform of state and local tax deductions are important pro-market reforms. The results speak for themselves. High-income taxpayers in high-tax states can no longer shift their state tax burden onto the rest of us through a generous deduction. Capital investments have increased, fueling a growing economy and rising wages. The administration also deserves credit for bringing about some reduction in regulations, an area which Trump has spoken about quite eloquently.

    Now, the bad. The administration's self-destructive protectionist trade policies are well documented. These resulted in higher tariffs on both imports and exports from many countries, higher prices shouldered by American consumers, nonstop uncertainty, bailouts for affected farmers and the first manufacturing output contraction since 2009, all with little tangible progress — in terms of trade deals with our partners — to show for it.

    The fact that potential Democrat replacements will be worse doesn't detract from Veronique's criticisms.


  • David Harsanyi writes truthfully at the Daily Signal: The Left Can't Stop Lying About the Tea Party.

    “In the late summer of 2009, as the recession-ravaged economy bled half a million jobs a month, the country seemed to lose its mind,” The New York Times says, kicking off its 10th anniversary retrospective of the tea party movement. As you can imagine, the rest of the article continues in this vein, portraying conservatives who organized against Obamacare as a bunch of vulgar radicals.

    Yet even this kind revisionism wasn’t enough for most contemporary leftists, who see everything through the prism of race.

    “A fundamental flaw in this analysis is there is no mention of race and how much racism drove the tea party movement,” ABC’s Matthew Dowd claimed. “You can’t talk about the rage politics and leave out race.”

    I was there. People, sure enough, were mad because of Obama's proposal to bail out irresponsible borrowers and their even less responsbile lenders with Other People's Money. This is what triggered Rick Santelli's rant on CNBC, which kind of set off the whole TP thing.

    But—trust me—we were equally pissed off at Dubya's auto bailout. Race had nothing to do with that.


  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)
    Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek provides a pithy Quotation of the Day from George F. Will's new book, The Conservative Sensibility.

    America’s problem, [economist John] Cochrane believes, is not that wealth is the primary determinant of political power, but that political power is much too often the determinant of wealth. So the way to reduce the role of money in politics is to reduce the role of politics in the distribution of money, thereby lowering the stakes of politics and the incentive for investing in it.

    Don considers your level of agreement with this quote to be an accurate test of your intellectual maturity. I can't disagree.

    I'm waiting for the current borrower of The Conservative Sensibility to return it to Portsmouth Public Library, and hope that I'm nimble enough to grab it off the shelf before someone else does. (I know I could put a hold on it, but I've always considered that to be cheating.)

    But if Don keeps posting quotes from it, I may well read the entire book that way.


  • And finally, an early bit of advice from Andrew Cline at the Josiah Bartlett Center: This Labor Day, celebrate economic growth. In fact, people in our fine state might treat it as an early Thanksgiving:

    • New Hampshire in July boasted the largest labor force in its history, at 770,000 people. That month, 751,150 New Hampshire residents had jobs. There are more Granite Staters with jobs than there are Vermonters — in total. New Hampshire has a larger labor force than Maine, though the states have similar populations. 
    • Business boomed, and wage increases followed. New Hampshire posted the largest year-over-year wage gains of any New England state in 2018 (though that growth rate has slowed so far this year). Among New England states, only Massachusetts has had a higher rate of growth in personal income since the recession, according to Pew Charitable Trusts research.
    • New Hampshire scored a No. 1 ranking in U.S. News & World Report’s list of best states for opportunity, helping it land the No. 2 Best State ranking overall. It ranked best in New England for economic growth.  
    • There’s so much opportunity in New Hampshire that thousands of millennials are moving here instead of to Brooklyn. A study of Census data by Smart Asset put New Hampshire in the top ten for millennial in-migration. 

    And (best of all) the Gov said it was OK for that Gonic lady to keep her "PB4WEGO" vanity license plate. We really are the LFOD state.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 5:50 AM EDT