“Dennis Murphy sniffed the bobcat urine he uses to lure his prey. He checked the silencer on his AR-15 assault rifle and loaded a few snares into his Ford pickup.
“Let’s go kill some coyotes,” he said.
But he wasn’t heading for the wilderness. Mr. Murphy’s stalking ground is on the contentious new frontier where hunters are clashing with conservationists: cities and suburbs.
Coyotes are largely associated with their ancestral bastions in the wild lands of the American West, but they are highly adaptable, and in recent years they have been colonizing large population centers throughout North America. The hunters have come after them, stalking the predators in settings like strip mall parking lots, housing tract cul-de-sacs, and plazas in the shadow of skyscrapers.
The growing popularity of urban hunting is igniting a fierce debate over the perils and benefits coyotes pose in populated areas, and whether city dwellers ought to adapt to living alongside a cunning predator that has thrived since one of its top adversaries, the gray wolf, has been all but wiped out in much of the continent.
Enthusiasts for the urban coyote chase contend that they are helping to limit the spread of a pest that federal authorities already kill by the tens of thousands every year in eradication projects. Some also concede that they enjoy the thrill of urban hunting, which requires different kinds of training and marksmanship than prairie or mountain hunting.
“Coyotes are a formidable predator, moving into the places where we take our kids to school and walk our pets,” said Mr. Murphy, 59, a former Army Green Beret who has hunted bears in Alaska and now deals in the pelts of coyotes he kills in the suburbs of Columbus.”
“For millions of Americans suffering from debilitating nerve pain, a once-overlooked option has emerged as an alternative to high doses of opioids: implanted medical devices using electricity to counteract pain signals the same way noise-canceling headphones work against sound.
The approach, called neuromodulation, has been a godsend for Linda Landy, who was a 42-year-old runner when a foot surgery went awry in 2008. She was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome, a condition dubbed the suicide disease by doctors: The pain is so unrelenting that many people take their own lives.
Last November, Landy underwent surgery to get an Abbott Laboratories device that stimulates the dorsal root ganglion, a spot in the spine that was the pain conduit for her damaged nerves. A year after getting her implant, called DRG, she’s cut back drastically on pain pills.
“The DRG doesn’t take the pain completely away, but it changes it into something I can live with,” said Landy, a mother of three in Fort Worth, Texas. She’s now now able to walk again and travel by plane without using a wheelchair. “It sounds minor, but it’s really huge.”
Crackdown on Opioids
Recent innovations from global device makers like Abbott to smaller specialists such as Nevro Corp. made the implants more powerful and effective. Combined with a national crackdown on narcotics and wanton pain pill prescriptions, they are spurring demand for implants.
The market may double to $4 billion in 10 years, up from about $1.8 billion in the U.S. and $500 million in Europe today, according to health-care research firm Decisions Resources Group.
“There was a big stigma around this when it first came out,” said Paul Desormeaux, a Decisions Resources analyst in Toronto. “The idea of sending an electrical signal through your nervous system was a little daunting, but as clinical data has come out and physicians have been able to prove its safety, there has been a big change in the general attitude.””
“When Democrats and many in the media are always telling people a tax plan benefits only “the rich” or when Democrats flat-out lie and say middle-class people will see a tax increase, people will tend to believe it. If you repeat something over and over, chances are, a lot of people will think it’s true.
The GOP tax cut plan certainly has flaws. And yes, people with higher income will get a more significant percentage of the benefits. But that is only natural as they pay most of the income taxes.
CBS This Morning asked three families in North Carolina, Rhode Island and California to send in their tax returns from last year. They had a CPA go over the returns and calculate what happens when using the new rates. Check it out:
“Pity the poor liberal Democrats. Once upon a time leading Democrats understood the need for tax reform. It’s not necessary to go back to John F. Kennedy or even the bipartisan tax reform of 1986 to see this. If you paid close attention to Hillary Clinton ten years ago when she was still in the Senate, she noted publicly that our corporate income tax system needed reform, and even Obama declared that he thought the corporate income tax rate should be lowered to around 25 percent. But he never pursued the idea, even though it would have been an easy bipartisan achievement for him. What explains this resistance?
The mystery deepens when you realize that if even eight or 10 Democratic senators had decided to support tax reform and bargain with Republicans, they might well have been able to keep the state and local tax deduction beloved of insolvent blue states everywhere, and probably the Obamacare individual mandate. One thing a handful of Democrats would easily have preserved is the prohibition on oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which has been the holy grail for environmentalists for nearly 40 years. By their intransigent opposition, Democrats were completely routed. What explains this shortsightedness, if not political incompetence?
The sudden liberal concern with the federal deficit is not to be credited, of course. And it’s long been true that liberals only like tax changes that are “targeted” at their favored interests, which is why they don’t like across-the-board tax cuts. A more likely reason is the political calculation that full-on “resistance” to Trump is a good political strategy if not a necessity. This is sound on the surface for two reasons: first, the increasingly leftist Democratic base would punish severely any Democrat who cooperated with Republicans on tax reform. Second, intransigence is seen as the best path back to power in the next election, and in the short term this calculation may prove out. Next November’s mid-term election may well be a Democratic wave for all of the usual reasons along with the unpredictability of how Trump’s unusual personality and performance play out.
But I think there’s a deeper reason emerging for why liberals have become intransigent and have moved even sharply to the left. Unfortunately you need to be embedded, as I am, deep in the cocoon of academia to make it out. If you hang around the intellectual left for very long, you discover they are obsessed today with “neo-liberalism.” Now, at first you might think that “neo-liberalism” is the left’s equivalent of “neo-conservatism”—that is, an updated form of liberalism adapted to new circumstances. In fact there was a self-conscious effort in the mid-1980s for give birth to a “neo-liberalism” that would be the counter to newly influential neo-conservatism. Charles Peters, the long-time editor of the Washington Monthly, edited a short book entitled A Neo-Liberal Manifesto, which was mostly warmed over Gary Hart speeches.
In fact the “neo-liberalism” that the left discusses today is an object of complete contempt, and is quite different from what Peters and other smart liberals meant 30 years ago. The term has well-neigh replaced “the bourgeoisie” in the lexicon of leftist class hatred. “Neo-liberalism” refers to the market-friendly policies of successful liberal politicians like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton—accommodations made of political necessity if the Labour Party and the Democratic Party were ever going to win national elections again. Recall that Clinton was for free trade and “ending welfare as we know it,” culminating in agreeing late in his presidency to cut the capital gains tax. As the liberal writer Richard Reeves wrote about ten years ago, “Wittingly or not, the Democrat [Clinton] who ran as the agent of change gave up after a couple of years and joined the Reagan revolution.” By 1999 Reeves’ capitulation was complete: “Reagan, in fact, is still running the country. President Clinton is governing in his shadow. . .” Tony Blair ostentatiously abandoned the Labour Party’s long-standing principle of nationalizing key industries, and when in office did noting to reverse any of the dramatic privatizations that Margaret Thatcher achieved.
Some on the left hated the Clinton and Blair accommodations at the time, but their electoral success was hard to argue with. But now that Republicans are back in charge, the left is chafing to get even with the compromises of “neo-liberalism.” This, more than his sexual peccadillos, is the main reason for the newfound hostility to Clinton on the left just now.”
————————
Even though Rick Newman was wrong, he still wants to be right. It’s almost a mea culpa, but he just can’t bring himself to admit what seems apparent to everyone in the comment section.
“When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, I predicted gloom. “The policies he favors … pose many land mines for the economy,” I wrote the day after the election. The result, I suggested, could be a prompt Trump recession.
There was no Trump recession. Quite the contrary, in fact. Economic growth accelerated modestly in 2017. Job growth has continued to improve steadily. The biggest financial story in 2017 is the stock market, with the S&P 500 index up a robust 20% for the year. Americans feel increasingly confident about their prospects, and the business tax cuts Congress just passed ought to keep the party going.
How did I get this so wrong?
Many critics have weighed in via email and Twitter, arguing that I’m a fake-news practitioner biased against Trump. They’re wrong. It’s true that I’m turned off by Trump’s bombast, by his untruths, and by his racially charged incitements. But I also concede that Trump won legitimately in 2016, in large part because he understood the frustrations of millions of disaffected voters his many opponents in both parties talked down to or simply ignored. Voters wanted change. Trump delivered it.
Here’s why I guessed wrong about Trump’s impact on the economy: I expected him to do what he said he would do. Instead, Trump has done only some of what he said he would do, and apparently accepted the counsel of cooler heads persuading him to deep-six several of his most troubling campaign promises. People who know Trump say it’s a mistake to take everything he says literally. Instead, they advise, follow the direction of his thinking, while leaving considerable room for detours. This is the lesson I hope to take from 2017.”
—————
“On trade, Trump’s minions are, in fact, working behind the scenes to revamp NAFTA and the U.S. trade relationship with China. But so far, Trump has declined several opportunities to take tough steps that might disrupt the status quo.
On immigration, Trump has in fact cracked down, to some extent, on undocumented migrants and imposed some new limits on legal immigration. But even this hasn’t been the Gestapo-like crusade some economists and business leaders feared.
Meanwhile, Trump has delivered the one thing companies love most: tax cuts.
As the 2016 election neared, several well-known research groups—including Moody’s Analytics, Citibank, Oxford Economics and Macroeconomic Advisers—estimated the impact Trump’s policies would have on the economy. They examined all of his policies, not just the salubrious ones. And all of them saw trouble—declining growth, falling stock values, rising unemployment, and a possible or likely recession. Those analyses, based on Trump’s full set of campaign promises, prompted gloomy stories like the one I wrote right after the election.
Trump fooled us in 2017. He only pursued policies likely to be good for the economy, while setting aside those that most troubled economists and business owners. Will he do the same in 2018? Let’s hope so. Trade wars would still raise prices, kill jobs and hurt workers. And the economy arguably needs more legal immigrants, not fewer, to help fill the 6 million job openings employers can’t fill and crank up production even more.”
Coyotes are just following the raccoons and deer into the suburbs. Since all three would rather just be left alone than pose a threat to humans, hunting isn’t necessary and definetely isnt safe in an urban area.
Why use opiates or send jolts of electricity through your body? Marijuana works well…and less side effects.
Amused. AJ’s article criticizes the media for misinforming the public then cites a CBS fluff piece. The CBO which is neither the media nor Democrat is quite critical of the tax cuts.
The Democrats haven’t newly discovered the debt or deficit. They generally clean up after Republican mismanagement; eg Clinton cleaned up after Bush/Reagan. Its a myth the Republicans are better fiscal managers. They simple have no respect for govt and thus dont really care about its financial position. Its the rational explanation for such incompetence.
Democratic politicians have learned a few things in the last decade. Ideological purity motivates and brings out the vote and when in opposition don’t compromise (they learned from Republicans). Americans are more left wing than the pundits think. Universal healthcare is popular. And finally trickle down economics dont work and people know it.
There was a demo of neoNazis, the KKKs, and others of similar ilk. Trump said there was good people on both sides. Any respectable person wouldnt be in that crowd, so who were the good people Trump was referring to?
You lost me when you gave credibility to the joke known as the CBO. Their projections in nearly anything that matters have been proven biased, and false.
But I actually agree about the weed thing. We still have that at least. 🙂
The Charlotte protest started as a legitimate demonstration against the removal of Confederate monuments. It was then co-opted twice, first by the hard right, then the hard left. Trump was speaking of those legitimately and legally protesting with approved permits, not the other two groups.
The left should be embarrassed by these ridiculous and inane memes like the one you’re pushing there. It’s as bad as the new one where pics of Trump’s kids on a boat. It’s supposedly proof of their racism because there’s another boat in the background who’s owner is flying the Stars and Bars. It’s childish, and just stupid. I can’t believe people on the left make such a big deal of non-news, and pretend it’s proof and validation for what they believe to be true, despite proof to the contrary. It’s like you all are middle schoolers. Find something legit to bash him on at least.
That shouldn’t be too hard, right? After all, he’s an incompetent idiot, right?
Put in a little work. The race card is just intellectual laziness, and so yesterday. We’re so over it already.
“House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is blasting the Department of Justice and the FBI for its “failure to fully produce” documents related to an anti-Trump dossier, saying “at this point it seems the DOJ and FBI need to be investigating themselves.”
In a Thursday letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein obtained by Fox News, Nunes expressed frustration that information and witnesses subpoenaed by the committee in August related to the so-called Steele dossier had not yet been turned over. The salacious dossier includes unverified allegations about President Trump’s connections with Russia that he has denied.
“Unfortunately, DOJ/FBI’s intransigence with respect to the August 24 subpoenas is part of a broader pattern of behavior that can no longer be tolerated,” the California Republican wrote to Rosenstein.
Nunes demanded that all records – and available dates for witnesses to testify – be provided to the committee by Jan 3.
“As a result of the numerous delays and discrepancies that have hampered the process of subpoena compliance, the committee no longer credits the representations made by DOJ and/or the FBI regarding these matters,” Nunes said.
He called the DOJ’s initial response to the subpoenas “disingenuous at best.”
Nunes said the DOJ informed the House Intelligence Committee several weeks ago that the “basic investigatory documents demanded by the subpoenas…did not exist.”
“As it turns out, not only did documents exist that were directly responsive to the committee’s subpoenas, but they involved senior DOJ and FBI officials who were swiftly reassigned when their roles in matters under the committee’s investigation were brought to light,” Nunes wrote.”
“The Justice Department’s inspector general said the department suffered from “systemic” problems regarding sexual harassment complaints over the last five years, according to a Washington Post report that peculiarly failed to mention former President Barack Obama or Attorney Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.
The DOJ requires “high level action” to solve the issue, which includes mishandling or ignoring complaints of sexual misconduct, according to the IG’s report. Over the last five years, the number of sexual misconduct allegations has increased and includes “senior Justice Department officials across the country,” according to WaPo.
Despite the issue increasing in severity during Obama’s second term, Washington Post reporter Sari Horwitz declined to mention senior administration officials, even though the “most troubling allegations” according to the IG, happened under their watch.”
—————-
“The son of Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine was sentenced to probation Wednesday for his role in a protest against President Donald Trump.
Linwood Michael Kaine, 25, avoided months in jail after being charged with three misdemeanors when he and other protesters began harassing people gathered at the Minnesota State Capitol in March. Protest participants used smoke bombs, mace and fireworks to disrupt a Trump rally, causing some rally members to be treated by paramedics. Kaine ran from officers before being arrested.
Kaine was originally sentenced to 90 days in jail but the judge stayed 86 days, leaving only four days which he had already served, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Kaine was charged in May with three misdemeanor charges, fleeing on foot, concealing identity in a public place and obstructing the legal process, but two of the charges were dismissed in December. However, Kaine pleaded guilty to obstructing legal process and interfering with a peace officer.”
I’m sure some southern revisionist and gentlemen were in Charlottesville that weekend. However if they were intelligent gentlemen, they would’ve seen their demo had been co-opted by neo-Nazis, the KKK, etc and left before the demo took place. For example our friend Ricky qualifies as a southern revisionist but I’m sure he would see the Nazis and leave town. No, Trump was referring to the morons who stayed despite the presence of Nazis.
Of course there is an intellectual laziness. The left sees stars and bars and loses its mind. Meanwhile, someone else watches Fox and Friends and changes his mind on US policy.
I am rather amused watching the American right express a lack of faith in US law enforcement. They’re a little late to the party. Perhaps they should team up with Black Lives Matter as they too lack confidence in US law enforcement.
hwesseli provides us a good object lesson for how so many people now days allow their hate to color every thing they think. It is no more appealing whether it comes from the right or left.
Wandering Views 
Donna,
Time to embrace your inner hunter. 🙂
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/coyotes-are-colonizing-cities-step-forward-the-urban-hunter/ar-BBHmxj3?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout
“Dennis Murphy sniffed the bobcat urine he uses to lure his prey. He checked the silencer on his AR-15 assault rifle and loaded a few snares into his Ford pickup.
“Let’s go kill some coyotes,” he said.
But he wasn’t heading for the wilderness. Mr. Murphy’s stalking ground is on the contentious new frontier where hunters are clashing with conservationists: cities and suburbs.
Coyotes are largely associated with their ancestral bastions in the wild lands of the American West, but they are highly adaptable, and in recent years they have been colonizing large population centers throughout North America. The hunters have come after them, stalking the predators in settings like strip mall parking lots, housing tract cul-de-sacs, and plazas in the shadow of skyscrapers.
The growing popularity of urban hunting is igniting a fierce debate over the perils and benefits coyotes pose in populated areas, and whether city dwellers ought to adapt to living alongside a cunning predator that has thrived since one of its top adversaries, the gray wolf, has been all but wiped out in much of the continent.
Enthusiasts for the urban coyote chase contend that they are helping to limit the spread of a pest that federal authorities already kill by the tens of thousands every year in eradication projects. Some also concede that they enjoy the thrill of urban hunting, which requires different kinds of training and marksmanship than prairie or mountain hunting.
“Coyotes are a formidable predator, moving into the places where we take our kids to school and walk our pets,” said Mr. Murphy, 59, a former Army Green Beret who has hunted bears in Alaska and now deals in the pelts of coyotes he kills in the suburbs of Columbus.”
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Kim,
Is this the type of thing Mr. P. has? Seems like something I could benefit from as well.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-26/spinal-cord-implants-to-numb-pain-emerge-as-alternative-to-pills
“For millions of Americans suffering from debilitating nerve pain, a once-overlooked option has emerged as an alternative to high doses of opioids: implanted medical devices using electricity to counteract pain signals the same way noise-canceling headphones work against sound.
The approach, called neuromodulation, has been a godsend for Linda Landy, who was a 42-year-old runner when a foot surgery went awry in 2008. She was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome, a condition dubbed the suicide disease by doctors: The pain is so unrelenting that many people take their own lives.
Last November, Landy underwent surgery to get an Abbott Laboratories device that stimulates the dorsal root ganglion, a spot in the spine that was the pain conduit for her damaged nerves. A year after getting her implant, called DRG, she’s cut back drastically on pain pills.
“The DRG doesn’t take the pain completely away, but it changes it into something I can live with,” said Landy, a mother of three in Fort Worth, Texas. She’s now now able to walk again and travel by plane without using a wheelchair. “It sounds minor, but it’s really huge.”
Crackdown on Opioids
Recent innovations from global device makers like Abbott to smaller specialists such as Nevro Corp. made the implants more powerful and effective. Combined with a national crackdown on narcotics and wanton pain pill prescriptions, they are spurring demand for implants.
The market may double to $4 billion in 10 years, up from about $1.8 billion in the U.S. and $500 million in Europe today, according to health-care research firm Decisions Resources Group.
“There was a big stigma around this when it first came out,” said Paul Desormeaux, a Decisions Resources analyst in Toronto. “The idea of sending an electrical signal through your nervous system was a little daunting, but as clinical data has come out and physicians have been able to prove its safety, there has been a big change in the general attitude.””
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Kizzie,
You mentioned this on Facebook. So much misinformation…….
https://www.redstate.com/arbogast/2017/12/22/misinformation-makes-three-families-believe-wont-save-gop-plan-watch-learn-truth/
“When Democrats and many in the media are always telling people a tax plan benefits only “the rich” or when Democrats flat-out lie and say middle-class people will see a tax increase, people will tend to believe it. If you repeat something over and over, chances are, a lot of people will think it’s true.
The GOP tax cut plan certainly has flaws. And yes, people with higher income will get a more significant percentage of the benefits. But that is only natural as they pay most of the income taxes.
CBS This Morning asked three families in North Carolina, Rhode Island and California to send in their tax returns from last year. They had a CPA go over the returns and calculate what happens when using the new rates. Check it out:
————————–
But remember, like Chas says, the “issue” is never the “issue’.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/12/behind-the-lefts-tax-cut-freakout.php
“Pity the poor liberal Democrats. Once upon a time leading Democrats understood the need for tax reform. It’s not necessary to go back to John F. Kennedy or even the bipartisan tax reform of 1986 to see this. If you paid close attention to Hillary Clinton ten years ago when she was still in the Senate, she noted publicly that our corporate income tax system needed reform, and even Obama declared that he thought the corporate income tax rate should be lowered to around 25 percent. But he never pursued the idea, even though it would have been an easy bipartisan achievement for him. What explains this resistance?
The mystery deepens when you realize that if even eight or 10 Democratic senators had decided to support tax reform and bargain with Republicans, they might well have been able to keep the state and local tax deduction beloved of insolvent blue states everywhere, and probably the Obamacare individual mandate. One thing a handful of Democrats would easily have preserved is the prohibition on oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which has been the holy grail for environmentalists for nearly 40 years. By their intransigent opposition, Democrats were completely routed. What explains this shortsightedness, if not political incompetence?
The sudden liberal concern with the federal deficit is not to be credited, of course. And it’s long been true that liberals only like tax changes that are “targeted” at their favored interests, which is why they don’t like across-the-board tax cuts. A more likely reason is the political calculation that full-on “resistance” to Trump is a good political strategy if not a necessity. This is sound on the surface for two reasons: first, the increasingly leftist Democratic base would punish severely any Democrat who cooperated with Republicans on tax reform. Second, intransigence is seen as the best path back to power in the next election, and in the short term this calculation may prove out. Next November’s mid-term election may well be a Democratic wave for all of the usual reasons along with the unpredictability of how Trump’s unusual personality and performance play out.
But I think there’s a deeper reason emerging for why liberals have become intransigent and have moved even sharply to the left. Unfortunately you need to be embedded, as I am, deep in the cocoon of academia to make it out. If you hang around the intellectual left for very long, you discover they are obsessed today with “neo-liberalism.” Now, at first you might think that “neo-liberalism” is the left’s equivalent of “neo-conservatism”—that is, an updated form of liberalism adapted to new circumstances. In fact there was a self-conscious effort in the mid-1980s for give birth to a “neo-liberalism” that would be the counter to newly influential neo-conservatism. Charles Peters, the long-time editor of the Washington Monthly, edited a short book entitled A Neo-Liberal Manifesto, which was mostly warmed over Gary Hart speeches.
In fact the “neo-liberalism” that the left discusses today is an object of complete contempt, and is quite different from what Peters and other smart liberals meant 30 years ago. The term has well-neigh replaced “the bourgeoisie” in the lexicon of leftist class hatred. “Neo-liberalism” refers to the market-friendly policies of successful liberal politicians like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton—accommodations made of political necessity if the Labour Party and the Democratic Party were ever going to win national elections again. Recall that Clinton was for free trade and “ending welfare as we know it,” culminating in agreeing late in his presidency to cut the capital gains tax. As the liberal writer Richard Reeves wrote about ten years ago, “Wittingly or not, the Democrat [Clinton] who ran as the agent of change gave up after a couple of years and joined the Reagan revolution.” By 1999 Reeves’ capitulation was complete: “Reagan, in fact, is still running the country. President Clinton is governing in his shadow. . .” Tony Blair ostentatiously abandoned the Labour Party’s long-standing principle of nationalizing key industries, and when in office did noting to reverse any of the dramatic privatizations that Margaret Thatcher achieved.
Some on the left hated the Clinton and Blair accommodations at the time, but their electoral success was hard to argue with. But now that Republicans are back in charge, the left is chafing to get even with the compromises of “neo-liberalism.” This, more than his sexual peccadillos, is the main reason for the newfound hostility to Clinton on the left just now.”
————————
They want ideological purity.
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Don’t worry Ricky, I didn’t forget you. 🙂
Even though Rick Newman was wrong, he still wants to be right. It’s almost a mea culpa, but he just can’t bring himself to admit what seems apparent to everyone in the comment section.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/got-wrong-trump-2017-182547760.html
“When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, I predicted gloom. “The policies he favors … pose many land mines for the economy,” I wrote the day after the election. The result, I suggested, could be a prompt Trump recession.
There was no Trump recession. Quite the contrary, in fact. Economic growth accelerated modestly in 2017. Job growth has continued to improve steadily. The biggest financial story in 2017 is the stock market, with the S&P 500 index up a robust 20% for the year. Americans feel increasingly confident about their prospects, and the business tax cuts Congress just passed ought to keep the party going.
How did I get this so wrong?
Many critics have weighed in via email and Twitter, arguing that I’m a fake-news practitioner biased against Trump. They’re wrong. It’s true that I’m turned off by Trump’s bombast, by his untruths, and by his racially charged incitements. But I also concede that Trump won legitimately in 2016, in large part because he understood the frustrations of millions of disaffected voters his many opponents in both parties talked down to or simply ignored. Voters wanted change. Trump delivered it.
Here’s why I guessed wrong about Trump’s impact on the economy: I expected him to do what he said he would do. Instead, Trump has done only some of what he said he would do, and apparently accepted the counsel of cooler heads persuading him to deep-six several of his most troubling campaign promises. People who know Trump say it’s a mistake to take everything he says literally. Instead, they advise, follow the direction of his thinking, while leaving considerable room for detours. This is the lesson I hope to take from 2017.”
—————
“On trade, Trump’s minions are, in fact, working behind the scenes to revamp NAFTA and the U.S. trade relationship with China. But so far, Trump has declined several opportunities to take tough steps that might disrupt the status quo.
On immigration, Trump has in fact cracked down, to some extent, on undocumented migrants and imposed some new limits on legal immigration. But even this hasn’t been the Gestapo-like crusade some economists and business leaders feared.
Meanwhile, Trump has delivered the one thing companies love most: tax cuts.
As the 2016 election neared, several well-known research groups—including Moody’s Analytics, Citibank, Oxford Economics and Macroeconomic Advisers—estimated the impact Trump’s policies would have on the economy. They examined all of his policies, not just the salubrious ones. And all of them saw trouble—declining growth, falling stock values, rising unemployment, and a possible or likely recession. Those analyses, based on Trump’s full set of campaign promises, prompted gloomy stories like the one I wrote right after the election.
Trump fooled us in 2017. He only pursued policies likely to be good for the economy, while setting aside those that most troubled economists and business owners. Will he do the same in 2018? Let’s hope so. Trade wars would still raise prices, kill jobs and hurt workers. And the economy arguably needs more legal immigrants, not fewer, to help fill the 6 million job openings employers can’t fill and crank up production even more.”
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Dreher tells an interesting story about an infamous spy:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/fake-news-russian-mole-robert-hanssen/
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What are Trump’s “racially charged incitements”?
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Coyotes are just following the raccoons and deer into the suburbs. Since all three would rather just be left alone than pose a threat to humans, hunting isn’t necessary and definetely isnt safe in an urban area.
Why use opiates or send jolts of electricity through your body? Marijuana works well…and less side effects.
Amused. AJ’s article criticizes the media for misinforming the public then cites a CBS fluff piece. The CBO which is neither the media nor Democrat is quite critical of the tax cuts.
The Democrats haven’t newly discovered the debt or deficit. They generally clean up after Republican mismanagement; eg Clinton cleaned up after Bush/Reagan. Its a myth the Republicans are better fiscal managers. They simple have no respect for govt and thus dont really care about its financial position. Its the rational explanation for such incompetence.
LikeLike
Democratic politicians have learned a few things in the last decade. Ideological purity motivates and brings out the vote and when in opposition don’t compromise (they learned from Republicans). Americans are more left wing than the pundits think. Universal healthcare is popular. And finally trickle down economics dont work and people know it.
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hwesseli you said Trump called neo-Nazis in Charlotte good people. You’re discredited.
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If this is true, there’s nothing you can do but laugh…
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And yet, what a disgrace by Obama sycophants/Trump-haters-for-the-sake-of-hate…
https://twitter.com/dbongino/status/946183291660591105
Obama. Worst president ever.
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There was a demo of neoNazis, the KKKs, and others of similar ilk. Trump said there was good people on both sides. Any respectable person wouldnt be in that crowd, so who were the good people Trump was referring to?
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HRW,
You lost me when you gave credibility to the joke known as the CBO. Their projections in nearly anything that matters have been proven biased, and false.
But I actually agree about the weed thing. We still have that at least. 🙂
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And HRW,
Just. Stop. Digging.
The Charlotte protest started as a legitimate demonstration against the removal of Confederate monuments. It was then co-opted twice, first by the hard right, then the hard left. Trump was speaking of those legitimately and legally protesting with approved permits, not the other two groups.
The left should be embarrassed by these ridiculous and inane memes like the one you’re pushing there. It’s as bad as the new one where pics of Trump’s kids on a boat. It’s supposedly proof of their racism because there’s another boat in the background who’s owner is flying the Stars and Bars. It’s childish, and just stupid. I can’t believe people on the left make such a big deal of non-news, and pretend it’s proof and validation for what they believe to be true, despite proof to the contrary. It’s like you all are middle schoolers. Find something legit to bash him on at least.
That shouldn’t be too hard, right? After all, he’s an incompetent idiot, right?
Put in a little work. The race card is just intellectual laziness, and so yesterday. We’re so over it already.
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Meanwhile, over at that bastion of truth, justice, and the American way………
The DoJ/FBI, continue with the cover-up and real obstruction of justice.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/nunes-blasts-doj-fbi-for-failure-to-produce-records-relating-to-anti-trump-dossier/ar-BBHsJHY?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout
“House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is blasting the Department of Justice and the FBI for its “failure to fully produce” documents related to an anti-Trump dossier, saying “at this point it seems the DOJ and FBI need to be investigating themselves.”
In a Thursday letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein obtained by Fox News, Nunes expressed frustration that information and witnesses subpoenaed by the committee in August related to the so-called Steele dossier had not yet been turned over. The salacious dossier includes unverified allegations about President Trump’s connections with Russia that he has denied.
“Unfortunately, DOJ/FBI’s intransigence with respect to the August 24 subpoenas is part of a broader pattern of behavior that can no longer be tolerated,” the California Republican wrote to Rosenstein.
Nunes demanded that all records – and available dates for witnesses to testify – be provided to the committee by Jan 3.
“As a result of the numerous delays and discrepancies that have hampered the process of subpoena compliance, the committee no longer credits the representations made by DOJ and/or the FBI regarding these matters,” Nunes said.
He called the DOJ’s initial response to the subpoenas “disingenuous at best.”
Nunes said the DOJ informed the House Intelligence Committee several weeks ago that the “basic investigatory documents demanded by the subpoenas…did not exist.”
“As it turns out, not only did documents exist that were directly responsive to the committee’s subpoenas, but they involved senior DOJ and FBI officials who were swiftly reassigned when their roles in matters under the committee’s investigation were brought to light,” Nunes wrote.”
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Anyone shocked?
http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/28/obamas-doj-suffered-from-systemic-sexual-misconduct/
“The Justice Department’s inspector general said the department suffered from “systemic” problems regarding sexual harassment complaints over the last five years, according to a Washington Post report that peculiarly failed to mention former President Barack Obama or Attorney Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.
The DOJ requires “high level action” to solve the issue, which includes mishandling or ignoring complaints of sexual misconduct, according to the IG’s report. Over the last five years, the number of sexual misconduct allegations has increased and includes “senior Justice Department officials across the country,” according to WaPo.
Despite the issue increasing in severity during Obama’s second term, Washington Post reporter Sari Horwitz declined to mention senior administration officials, even though the “most troubling allegations” according to the IG, happened under their watch.”
—————-
The WaPo must protect their Precious……..
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File this in the News You Won’t Hear About category. Nice to see him receive the Kennedy Treatment from prosecutors and the judge too. 🙄
http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/28/tim-kaines-son-sentenced-for-role-in-trump-protest/
“The son of Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine was sentenced to probation Wednesday for his role in a protest against President Donald Trump.
Linwood Michael Kaine, 25, avoided months in jail after being charged with three misdemeanors when he and other protesters began harassing people gathered at the Minnesota State Capitol in March. Protest participants used smoke bombs, mace and fireworks to disrupt a Trump rally, causing some rally members to be treated by paramedics. Kaine ran from officers before being arrested.
Kaine was originally sentenced to 90 days in jail but the judge stayed 86 days, leaving only four days which he had already served, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Kaine was charged in May with three misdemeanor charges, fleeing on foot, concealing identity in a public place and obstructing the legal process, but two of the charges were dismissed in December. However, Kaine pleaded guilty to obstructing legal process and interfering with a peace officer.”
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hwesseli, AJ addressed it well enough. There is plenty to criticize Trump about. Why do folks like you get so lazy, though?
“There was a demo of neoNazis, the KKKs, and others of similar ilk.”
You must know THERE WERE PERSONS OF OTHER ILK THERE, TOO.
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I’m sure some southern revisionist and gentlemen were in Charlottesville that weekend. However if they were intelligent gentlemen, they would’ve seen their demo had been co-opted by neo-Nazis, the KKK, etc and left before the demo took place. For example our friend Ricky qualifies as a southern revisionist but I’m sure he would see the Nazis and leave town. No, Trump was referring to the morons who stayed despite the presence of Nazis.
Of course there is an intellectual laziness. The left sees stars and bars and loses its mind. Meanwhile, someone else watches Fox and Friends and changes his mind on US policy.
I am rather amused watching the American right express a lack of faith in US law enforcement. They’re a little late to the party. Perhaps they should team up with Black Lives Matter as they too lack confidence in US law enforcement.
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Amen, HRW. Orange Lives Matter!
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hwesseli provides us a good object lesson for how so many people now days allow their hate to color every thing they think. It is no more appealing whether it comes from the right or left.
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