On Liberty Watch

Donald Trump apparently can’t understand why women haven’t come forward to accuse President Obama of sexual assault. Perhaps it’s because, unlike Trump, Obama isn’t a predator. Just a guess.

In the meantime Trump announced that he doesn’t much care for Hillary Clinton’s looks, clearly an important consideration when choosing a President.

You really have to hand it to Donald Trump though. He is probably the only man in the entire universe who could hand over the high road—or the less low road—to Hillary Clinton.

Team Trump Strikes Again

And for sheer stupidity it is hard to beat the latest gambit by team Trump. They decided to rebut one of Trump’s accusers by trotting out a certain Anthony Gilberthorpe to say that he sat across from Trump on the flight in the early 1980s where Trump was accused of groping Jessica Leeds. Gilberthorpe says he didn’t see anything untoward going on.

But they omitted a couple of details. Like this one. It turns out that… “Gilberthorpe made headlines in 2014, when he went public with a claim that as a 17-year old he procured boys (some who “could have been” underage) for sex parties with high-ranking British politicians”.

So to vouch for Trump, his campaign managed to produce a guy who got his start as a teenage pimp. That would be the Donald Trump who is going to “surround himself with the best people.”

Another Day Another Rant

“Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.” –Donald Trump at a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, on this past Thursday.

As numerous observers have pointed out, Trump’s language seems to mimic that of anti-Semitic tracts like the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Perhaps. But it isn’t necessary to look for subtle links here. It should be pretty obvious by now that the man is a psychopath.

That should be enough.

JFB

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It appears that although Hillary Clinton got quite a bounce from the Trump Groping scandal, Trump’s poll numbers may be stabilizing, and even coming back a bit. To be sure the odds of a Clinton victory are in the vicinity of 9 to 1; Clinton still has an advantage in the battleground states, and Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes is narrow. But after enduring two of the worst weeks in campaign history, Trump is still standing, however tenuously.

Moreover by declaring open warfare on the Republican Party establishment, Trump may open the door for traditional blue collar Democrats to vote Republican even as college educated whites run away from the Republican nominee. This could be critical for two reasons. First, non-college educated whites outnumber college educated whites. Second, college educated whites increasingly live in states like New York and California which are going Democratic in November regardless. But a large Republican pickup of whites without college degrees could alter the electoral map by putting heartland states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in play.

On the other hand, Trump could lose Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, but still carry Florida and New Hampshire. In either scenario, the remaining and decisive state would be none other than Utah.

Here is where it gets really interesting. Utah is very red, and it has a very large conservative Mormon population that is decidedly uncomfortable with the way Trump has conducted himself. But Utah is getting increasingly comfortable with Evan McMullen who is running as a third party candidate. He is an ex CIA official, and former chief policy director of the House Republican Conference. He has a conservative platform and he is a Mormon. Recent polls have put McMullen, Trump and Clinton in the low to mid 20s, within the margin of error.

If McMullen were to carry Utah, there are at least 3 or 4 plausible scenarios that would deny any candidate the 270 electoral votes needed to win, thus throwing the election into Congress. (Please see the Electoral College Maps below outlining possible tie scenarios). Were that to happen the newly elected Congress would decide who would be President and the Senate would choose the Vice-President.

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

But the President would not be selected by a majority of House members. The President would be selected by a majority of House delegations. At the moment the Republicans control 33 House delegations, the Democrats control 14 and 3 are tied. One reason Republicans control so many delegations is that Democrats tend to be concentrated in large urban areas while Republicans are more spread out. So it is likely that if the election were to be thrown to the House, the Republicans would dominate.

But it isn’t clear that the Republicans would necessarily vote for Trump, given Trump’s open declaration of war against the party. It is entirely possible that the Republican House could pick someone like ex Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, or Governor Kasich of Ohio, or former Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels. Meanwhile, the Senate could vote to make Tim Kaine VP, thus creating a sort of center right national unity government.

None of these scenarios are likely. But they are not impossible either.

JFB

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The civil war raging in the GOP has passed the point of no return. At this point over 50 prominent Republican officials have announced they will not support Donald Trump’s quest for the Presidency. And it is a virtual certainty that Hillary Clinton will win the Presidential election come November 8.

That said, Donald Trump is still going to receive well over 40 million votes, the vast majority of which will come from self-described Republicans. But college educated voters are abandoning the GOP in droves. For the first time ever, the majority of college educated voters are going to wind up in the Democratic column.

The indisputable fact is that Donald Trump is now the face of the Republican Party. And Donald J Trump won the nomination by tapping into the forces driving the grass roots of the Party: an abandonment of the virtues of small government, individual freedom, free markets and free trade. It is now a party in the grip of disaffected voters who feel marginalized by elites; who are inward looking, and who are afraid of the future. And they are going to lose in November.

And for two reasons it is hard to see how the GOP is going to pick up the pieces after the debacle that is sure to come. First, the Trump candidacy has exposed a fundamental fissure in what had heretofore been the Republican coalition. Up until this point the Republican coalition consisted of a congeries of loosely connected ideologies that were vaguely “conservative”. In general they agreed that government is too big and too intrusive; that markets are superior to government for allocating resources; that the culture is in a state of serious disrepair, and that the traditional institutions of civil society are in need of a robust defense.

With the ascension of Donald Trump, that is out the window. While the conservative intelligentsia continues to hold these positions, it is clear that neither Donald Trump nor his followers do. Trump would make government, and especially the executive branch, bigger and more intrusive. He has no respect for the separation of powers. His tirades against trade, much cheered by the base, are antithetical to free markets.   And as far as the culture is concerned, Donald Trump is the poster boy for all that is wrong with it.

The second problem the GOP faces is that Trump does not have a cogent theory of the case. Instead, his whole campaign is based on the idea of the Big Man who alone can fix things. And of course, the Big Man is none other than Donald J Trump. All who oppose him are weak and corrupt. Further, by casting himself as the outsider who is fighting a corrupt and “rigged” system, he implicitly denies the legitimacy of any outcome in which he does not emerge triumphant. He will leave his followers embittered at the GOP by blaming his all-but-certain loss on party elites.

So the problem for the GOP is twofold. First, Trump’s policy positions are fundamentally and irreconcilably in conflict with the worldviews of conservative political and policy elites that constitute the GOP establishment. Second, the GOP cannot win without Trump’s voters, and they can’t win Trump’s voters without Trump. In short, unless it can reconfigure itself to attract voters to replace the ones lost to Trump and the next demagogue who follows him, the GOP may very well be on its way to extinction, and with it a voice that defended liberty in a world of ever growing state power.

JFB

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The Appallingly Rude Senator Kaine

In the Tuesday night Vice-Presidential debate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine managed to be almost as rude and boorish as Donald Trump with his constant interruptions and snarky one-liners. In the process he managed to irritate almost everybody. It isn’t yet clear whether Senator Kaine actually practiced being a boor or whether it comes naturally to him. Some of the fallout is reflected in the Frank Luntz focus group video below.

Bill Clinton Goes Rogue. Again.

Michael Kinsley famously defined a gaffe as occurring when a politician tells the truth. And as gaffes go, Bill Clinton just uttered a doozy when he trashed Obamacare as “the craziest thing in the world”.

Phony Outrage

Among other amusements is the faux outrage that lefties have churned up over allegations that Donald Trump “got away with” not paying income taxes for years. And how did he “get away” with that? By not having any net income. If you don’t have any income you don’t pay income taxes. That shouldn’t be hard to understand.

The net of this phony scandal is that that Trump apparently lost about $1 billion in 1995 and as a result he didn’t pay income taxes that year. In future years his tax liability continued to be zero until new net income exceeded tax-loss carry forwards from 1995.   Every business in the world operates like that.

Trump sycophants, including Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, insist losing that losing $1 billion is a sign of genius. The community of the sane understands that losing $1 billion is evidence of incompetence.

Hillary Clinton, Constitutional Scholar

When Donald Trump described his sister as a “great judge” because she signed some great laws, he was correctly derided for not understanding that judges do not sign laws. Which brings us to Hillary Clinton, (Yale Law School, 1973) who announced that, were she to be elected President, she would “pass a law” requiring Presidential candidates to release their tax returns.

Mrs. Clinton seems to be blissfully unaware that the requirements for President, the job to which she aspires, are specified in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. And to refresh Mrs. Clinton’s memory, the Constitution is supposed to be the supreme law of the land. Legislation must fit within the constitutional framework, not the other way around. Then again, Mrs. Clinton has little use for the 1^st amendment, the 2^nd amendment, the 4^th amendment, the 5^th amendment, the 6^th amendment or the 10^th amendment. So there is no reason to be surprised when Mrs. Clinton’s authoritarian streak shows through. As it does with her apparent willingness to “drone” Julian Assange.

Droning Julian Assange

Mrs. Clinton now claims that (1) she doesn’t remember it and (2) it was all really a joke. According to the latest on the Wikileaks front, Mrs. Clinton may have suggested “droning” Julian Assange, in keeping with the Obama Administration’s penchant for extra-judicial killings. Perhaps her supporters believe that her apparent willingness to select political enemies for summary execution is a sign of Presidential temperament.

Corruption Watch

Evidence of the industrial scale corruption of the Clinton’s and their allies continues to mount. A leak by Guccifer 2.0 suggests that Top Democrats had TARP funds funneled to their Political Action  Committies (PACS).

JFB

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A Clinton Bounce in Swing State Polls
Hillary Clinton appears to be getting a bounce in some crucial battleground states in the wake of the first Presidential debate. For his part, Donald Trump continues to provide badly needed assistance to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign by Tweeting insults about a former beauty contestant.

Trump’s Latest Strategy
According to Politico, the Trump campaign has decided to sharpen its message by “invoking the specter of a conspiracy by big corporations, media companies and donors to elect Hillary Clinton.” The idea is that this would solidify white working class support and attract Bernie Sanders supporters.

These featherbrained conspiracy theories were all the rage among radical leftists in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Now they are the pet theories of the nominally Republican Trump campaign. As Trump continues to redefine the Republican Party as a populist / progressive movement he will do more to advance progressive causes than Hillary Clinton ever could. Trump voters desperate to keep Mrs. Clinton out of the White House should think about that for a minute—if their attention span can last that long.

The Clinton Tapes

Some hacked tapes of Clinton speeches to donors have been leaked. It is easy to see why the Clinton campaign tried to keep them under wraps. She implicitly acknowledges that much of the Free Stuff campaign is just rhetorical. That could enrage the Bernie Sanders supporters she is so desperately courting.

About Those Pesky E-Mails

Surprise, surprise, surprise as Gomer Pyle used to say.

It turns out that President Obama was lying when he said he found out about Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail address on the news like everybody else. It turns out that, not only did he know about Clinton’s set-up, he sent and received e-mails through her system himself while using a pseudonym.

Which also explains why Hillary Clinton was not indicted—because Obama was guilty of the same offense, meaning that he had a conflict of interest over Mrs. Clinton’s potential prosecution. A legal analysis by Andrew McCarthy of National Review is available at this link.

JFB

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There is some argument over whether Mark Twain is the author of the aphorism “It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Monday night’s Presidential debate should leave little doubt that it is advice that Donald J. Trump should have heeded. After all, Trump opened with a diatribe against free trade that convincingly demonstrated that he doesn’t have the slightest understanding of basic economics despite his alleged business savvy.

About Free Trade

The case for free trade is not new. The theory of comparative advantage, which is the underlying theory in support of free trade, was developed by David Ricardo in the early 19^th century. The basic idea is that gains from trade accrue to individuals, firms or nations from differences in their relative abilities to produce tradable goods. Countries should specialize in producing goods in which they possess a comparative advantage, and then trade among themselves.

For example, suppose France has a comparative advantage in producing wine and England has a comparative advantage in producing beer. They will both be better off if France produces wine, England produces beer and France trades some wine for some English beer. They will produce more of each good at lower cost than would have been the case had each produced both wine and beer. The two countries are wealthier than they would have otherwise been.

While this is well understood by economists, it is widely misunderstood (or disbelieved) by the public. That is largely because politicians insist on arguing that trade deficits are “bad” and trade surpluses are “good”. To see just how ridiculous this is try a thought experiment. Imagine that after a few years U.S. companies were to sell $1 trillion worth of goods into the Chinese market. Then imagine that in return for the goods sold, the U.S. companies received pieces of paper denominated in Chinese Yuan nominally worth $1 trillion. And further suppose that the U.S. companies decided never to spend the Chinese Yuan they received for the goods they sold.

The U.S. now has a trade surplus of $1 trillion and a vault filled with lots of pieces of paper. On the other hand there are $1 trillion worth of actual goods in China that Chinese consumers have available to them. For free. How in the world does that make U.S. companies and consumers better off?

It doesn’t.

The U.S. will have given away $1 trillion for nothing in return except for useless pieces of paper. Because ultimately, all the Yuan in the vault are only useful when they are spent. And when they are spent, they are ultimately spent on Chinese goods. When that happens the U.S. trade surplus is reduced, as is the U.S. capital account deficit, (the flip side of the same coin) and the accounts move into balance.

It is unfortunately true that Hillary Clinton joined in the trade bashing and attempted to deny that she referred to the Trans Pacific Partnership deal as “the gold standard”. She can’t even tell the truth about being right. That is a pity because it is one of the very few sensible things she has ever backed.

And All the Other Stuff

When discussing trade Trump merely displayed yet again the stunning depths of his ignorance. Most of the rest of the time he was busy demonstrating his trademark boorishness and his adolescent lack of self-control. Moreover, it is hard to imagine that the vast majority of taxpayers agree with Trump that his failure to pay any federal taxes for some years is a sign that he is smart. Ditto from financially benefitting from his foundation. He might want to check how Leona Helmsley fared after she announced “Only the little people pay taxes.”

As soon as the debate ended the Trump team started complaining about the moderator, Lester Holt, who happens to be a registered Republican. As everyone knows, the team that complains about the referee after the game is the losing team. Like all loudmouths, Trump and Co. excel at whining.

It is too early for most polls to have picked up the fall out (if any) from the debate. A Reuters / Ipsos poll published Wednesday put Clinton ahead by 4 to 6 points. The most recent general election tracking poll by LA Times / USC conducted before the debate shows Trump expanding a lead over Clinton from 3 points to 4.

Note: There is a difference in methodology in the two polls. The Reuters/ Ipsos poll is based on a random sample of 1,705 Americans interviewed online. The LA Times / USC poll takes a random sample of about 400 Americans from a constant cohort of about 3,000 people. It also has about a 1-week lag.

JFB

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In the wake of the latest terrorist attack, this time in New York and New Jersey, Hillary Clinton announced that “This threat is real…”.

Thanks for that update, Mrs. Clinton, but the rest of the world pretty much had that figured that out on 9/11, over 15 years ago.

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Mrs. Clinton also announced that she has a plan (she has a “plan” for everything) to defeat ISIS that includes an intelligence “surge”. To all but the most gullible, it is painfully obvious that that the term “intelligence surge” is devoid of any substantive meaning, but works well in focus groups.

Not to be deterred, Clinton also took the opportunity to remind us that she “sat at the table” when the “hard decisions” were made about terrorism. Be on the lookout when a politician speaks of “hard choices”. It’s a tell. Politicians love to speak of hard choices as they strive mightily to avoid making them. In this regard it is instructive to call to mind Clinton’s past behavior as described by former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. In his book “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” he recounts how Hillary Clinton, when she was a Senator from New York, declined to support the Bush Administration’s ultimately successful military surge in Iraq for political reasons. As Gates tells it, “Hillary told the president [Obama] that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . .”

Gates is hardly a partisan. His criticisms of Donald Trump are particularly withering. His comments include this one. “At least on national security, I believe Mr. Trump is beyond repair. He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform… He is unqualified and unfit to be commander in chief.”

Naturally enough, that led to a fairly typical schoolboy rant from Donald Trump. This, according to NBC News is what Trump had to say, “We had a clown today, an absolute clown, Robert Gates,” Trump told a crowd. “He’s supposed to be an expert. He’s been there forever … he goes out and he says negative things about me. I never met him. I never talked to him. Believe me, I am so much better at what he’s doing than he is.”

Gates aside, it should be noted that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, did have a seat at the table when the hard choices were made. And she does have a good deal of experience when it comes to making truly awful decisions. For example, the ongoing fiasco in Libya is almost entirely her handiwork. She was instrumental in, and continues to support, the Iran nuclear deal, the obvious defects of which become more apparent daily, not to mention the Obama Administration’s dissembling about it. The Russian reset produced the annexation of Crimea, and Soviet troops in parts of Ukraine. And the Obama Administration’s combined mishandling of Syria’s Assad, Russia’s Putin and Iran’s Khamenei has further eroded the U.S. position in the Middle East while opening the door to Russia.

So once again the major party candidates have seized the opportunity to demonstrate just how stunningly ill-qualified they are to take the oath of office come January 2017.

Bridge Gate Trial Starts Today

This just in. One of Trump’s lead sycophants and fellow adolescent, NJ Governor Chris Christie, who appears to have succumbed to a Trump induced case of Stockholm Syndrome is in the news again. According to prosecutors, Christie knew his aides were involved in plan to shut down lanes to the George Washington bridge as the plan was unfolding. And, prosecutors say, Christie was aware that the point of the exercise was to punish the Mayor of Fort Lee who had the temerity to decide not to endorse Christie’s re-election bid.

JFB

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