NYT

If Donald Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama

If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.

Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

NYT Opinion

On this day in 1864,

Union Admiral Farragut Captures the Confederate Port of Mobile

It’s a beautiful morning here in Bama on Mobile Bay.  It’s so quiet I can hear the waves lapping on the shore, birds warbling in the distance, all while my son-in-law is catching tonight’s dinner off a pier on the back bay.

It was a lot different 153 years ago.  On this day in 1864, Union Admiral David Farragut and his flotilla sailed through floating mines (then called “torpedoes”), and past Confederate batteries hidden inside Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines on the southern end of the bay, to seal off the last major Southern port. The fall of Mobile was a huge blow to the Confederacy, and the victory was the first in a series of Yankee successes that helped secure the re-election of Abraham Lincoln later that year against the Democrats, who wanted to end the Civil War and let the South maintain slavery.

After Farragut’s takeover of the port of New Orleans in 1862, Mobile became the major Confederate port on the Gulf of Mexico, with blockade runners carrying critical supplies from Havana.  Ulysses S. Grant made the capture of the Port of Mobile a top priority after assuming command of all Federal forces in early 1864.

One of Farragut’s first ships through the Bay channel was immediately sunk by a torpedo, throwing the rest of the Union fleet into a panic.  Farragut, who suffered from vertigo, strapped himself to a mast and rallied the Union forces by yelling, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Miraculously, Farragut’s ship and those that followed made it past all the torpedoes without losing another vessel.  Once past the torpedoes and forts, the Union fleet quickly demolished the Confederate fleet.  Fort Gaines fell a couple days later and Fort Morgan surrendered a couple weeks later.

Civil War.org
Wikipedia
History.com

Chicago Tribune Editorial: The next Foxconn and Illinois: Here's why Wisconsin will be the state growing more taxpayers

The final reason Foxconn picked Wisconsin over Illinois is the difference-maker: government cooperation and competence. The Journal Sentinel wrote that Gou believed "the responsiveness of the public and private partners in Wisconsin far exceeded those of other states." Gou singled out the cooperation of Gov. Scott Walker, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and local business groups: "These key people pushed very hard."

A blind proposal, a summons to Washington and a jet trip: Wisconsin's drive to win Foxconn

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker speaks during the July 26, 2017 announcement at the White House in Washington, D.C. about the creation of a Foxconn factory in Wisconsin to build LCD flat screen monitors. 

In other words, Foxconn liked everything about Illinois, but Wisconsin officials convinced Gou they made the best business partners. How could that be? Wisconsin will provide $3 billion in tax benefits over 15 years, but incentives are the norm and Illinois, one of seven finalists, was willing to offer some. National politics could have been a factor, given that Foxconn would benefit from pleasing President Donald Trump, who hopes to win Wisconsin again in 2020. But companies don't make huge investment decisions just to make a president smile.

Here's the takeaway: Foxconn chose the state that has stable government, healthy finances and pro-growth policies for employers. Illinois has none of the above.

Chicago Tribune

 

The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

A software engineer’s 10-page screed against Google’s diversity initiatives is going viral inside the company, being shared on an internal meme network and Google+. The document’s existence was first reported by Motherboard, and Gizmodo has obtained it in full. 

In the memo, which is the personal opinion of a male Google employee and is titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the author argues that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” he writes, going on to argue that Google’s educational programs for young women may be misguided.

via Gizmodo

Diane Kendricks and Beloit

In Weary Wisconsin Town, a Billionaire-Fueled Revival

NYT Article

Some contrarian thinking from my third favorite economist.

Gary Shilling: Still plenty of world labor supply putting pressures on worker wages

Some policy makers fret that the output gap - the percentage of un-utilized output in the U.S. economy - is shrinking fast. This is debatable since the economy’s output potential isn’t a fixed number but depends on speed of growth, which influences the economy’s flexibility. Business can adapt much better to slow growth, as proven in this recovery.

Also, capacity is sensitive to wages and prices. Higher pay attracts new workers who otherwise are comfortable drawing welfare, unemployment and disability benefits. By the same token, high selling prices can make otherwise obsolete machinery profitable to utilize in times of increased demand for their output and rising prices. In any event, the current overall operating rate remains muted and definitely below the levels that in the past have initiated capital spending surges.

More important, in today’s world, supplies of labor and productivity capacity need to be considered on a global basis. By all accounts, such supplies are ample and will remain so, barring all-out protectionist wars and tariff walls in advanced countries that could drastically chop imports.

Gary Shilling Blog

On this day in 1944.

Anne Frank/Family Arrested in Amsterdam

On this day in 1944, Anne Frank and her family were arrested in Amsterdam by the Nazis, thanks to a tip from a Dutch informer.  Although Amsterdam has historically been known as a liberal haven, a greater percentage of Jews from The Netherlands were killed by the Nazis than from any other Western European country, including Poland.

Wikipedia
This Day in History Article
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

Do Asian-Americans Have an Equal Right to Go to College in the United States?

Admissions programs frustrate accountability because schools wield “holistic review” as a shield to frustrate scrutiny, judicial or otherwise. Holistic review can serve as a cover for the illegitimate use of race.

For example, Princeton professor Thomas Espenshade found that Asian students applying to selective private colleges are six times less likely to be admitted than Hispanic students with the same academic qualifications and 16 times less likely than black students. And despite being the fastest-growing population in America, Asians are admitted at Ivy League schools in remarkably similar numbers and percentages year-to-year.

That’s strong evidence that schools are discriminating based on race. It all hearkens to the less-than-illustrious history of the so-called Harvard Plan, which began as an alternative to explicitly capping the number of Jewish students

Those are the sorts of things that the Justice Department should look into. Government lawyers must open the “holistic” black box and hold administrators’ feet to the constitutional fire. And that’s before we even get into the harm to the beneficiaries of racial preferences!

USA Today Opinion

Obama-Voter Althouse: Liberals Think Trump Talks Like An Idiot But He Doesn't

[Althouse: Why is there so little talk about the leaked transcripts of Trump’s conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia?]

The Washington Post must have thought it was worth it to drop these full transcripts. They had to worry about criticism, exposing the confidential communications of the President with world leaders, undermining the power and prestige of the American presidency. They had to have thought it was worth doing. Why dump all this verbiage? Did they think the sheer amount of material would have a devastating impact?

I thought we were going to see many, many articles picking into the details here, but the story seems to have already blown over. On the front page of the NYT website, the only reference to the transcripts is a little teaser under the heading "More in Politics." Coming in third after "Kushner Firm Said to Be Under Inquiry Over Visa Program" and "Trump Cites Familiar Argument in Ban on Transgender Troops" is "Trump Called New Hampshire a ‘Drug-Infested Den.’" Trump's calling New Hampshire a ‘Drug-Infested Den'" is incredibly inconsequential, but it's what I broke out too when I was reading the news yesterday. 

Why are we not seeing more? I noticed some stories claiming the transcripts show Trump is an idiot, but every day I see stories saying Trump is an idiot. And from what I've read of the transcripts (not every word), I don't think they show idiocy, and I think they're going to take careful reading to understand how Trump was trying to work with the 2 leaders. I suspect that Trump-haters who undertook serious study of the language have decided it's best not to try, that a close examination of the text will only help Trump, and therefore the transcripts have rapidly become a non-story.

Althouse Blog

 

West Virginia Governor: I’m Switching Parties Because ‘I Can’t Help You Anymore’ as a Democrat

Video of Announcement/Article

Why the Rust Belt just gave Donald Trump a hero’s welcome

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — This town was on fire.

By 1 in the afternoon on Tuesday, every main thoroughfare downtown was filled with happy people heading toward the Covelli Centre. Folks dressed in red, white and blue crisscrossed the main grids as vendors sold “Make America Great Again” ball caps, American flags and bottles of water.

Thousands had filled the gravel parking lot to wait until the doors opened at 4, license plates revealing they had traveled from as far as Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and West Virginia to see the president speak directly to them in this Rust Belt city.

Music played on almost every corner as Donald Skowron, a retired Youngstown police officer, drove his green pickup truck up and down Champion Street — in the back, a 6-by-8-foot homemade wooden Trump-Pence sign straddling the bed of the truck, with two large Trump flags flowing from the top.

“I am very happy with the president’s performance so far,” said Skowron. “He has set the exact tone I was looking for, although I’ll be honest, I wish he didn’t tweet all of the time, but that is hardly anything to complain.”

Skowron said he is encouraged by reading about Trump’s constant meetings with industry leaders as well as union and trade members in trying to understand how to create jobs: “We have a president invested in trying to navigate between the people who create jobs and the men and women doing the jobs and how repealing regulations help both.”

Six months after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, he received a hero’s welcome in this town. The festive scene made a counter-visual to the daily nonstop press reports about investigations into members of his inner circle, Russian interference in last year’s election and the debate over ObamaCare.

Trump’s approval rating, according to Gallup, is 39 percent. Youngstown is the 39 percent.

On Monday, police said the advance ticket request of over 20,000 had exceeded the 6,000-seat capacity of the center, prompting the event coordinators to put a large screen outside the center for the overflow crowd.

N.Y. Post

Surveys Show 60 Percent Opposition to all Immigration

College grads more opposed to immigration than average American

Source Article

Trump Presents Medal of Honor to Viet Nam War Medic James McCloughan 

Start at the 45:30 mark of the video.  Well, well worth your time.

Video

Happy birthday to my favorite economist

Milton Friedman Was Right to Call Them “Government Schools”

And Trump is right - the answer is School Choice

FEE Article

Obama-Voter Althouse Trashes Intelligence Consenus re Russian Hacking

It's simply amazing that an [U.S. Intelligence Community] assertion this weak has become a fact that must be taken as true. I'd ask who benefits from shutting that door?

The part that seems the most absurd is the assumption "based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." When was it ever established that private hackers can't do things on a big scope and wouldn't target what is sensitive? And what exactly was so big about what was done here? Why are "senior-most officials" so special when it comes to computer hacking? 

We're told what happened in this case is like what happened in other cases because the same "methods and motivations" are present. Even if we assume the "methods and motivations" are so special that they indicate a unique source, did we know in those prior cases who the unique source was?  

This statement has been used to impose an indisputable fact on us, but it's so weak on its face. A lot of people must really want that fact to be true. Why — of all whose reputation was bundled into the creation of this fact — has no one come forward to cast doubt on it or pick it apart? The simplest answer (to my mind) is that those in the know know much more, it's more convincing, and they can't tell us why.

Althouse Blog

 

The Media’s Shameful Refusal To Report On Putin’s Ties To The American Left

The evidence of Russia’s prolific history of meddling in U.S. politics is incontrovertible. And it would behoove our elected leaders to shed some light on this insidious foreign influence. A good starting point is Russia’s financial ties to powerful anti-fracking and anti-oil lobbies in the United States. . .

Let’s consider motive. What is Russia’s interest in meddling in U.S. energy policy?

It’s simple, really. The fracking revolution has played a central role in driving down global oil prices, which has significantly hampered Russia’s oil-centric economy. So what’s bad for fracking is good for Russia. . .

We know that Putin is fanatically committed to expanding Russia’s sphere of influence and strengthening her economic position. We know the risk U.S. fracking poses to Russia’s economy, and we know of direct Russian ties to firms that contribute tens of millions of dollars to environmental extremists.

As Democrats and their media friends continue to obsess over Trump surrogates’ ties to Russia, it’s incumbent on everyone else to further examine Russia’s ties to anti-fracking groups. After all, we wouldn’t want a foreign power to influence our public policy. Or elections.

Daily Caller

Andrew McCarthy: Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Pakistani IT Scammers

There’s more than bank fraud going on here.

This is not about bank fraud. The Awan family swindles are plentiful, but they are just window-dressing. This appears to be a real conspiracy, aimed at undermining American national security. 

National Review

 

Go figure

Trump’s Wall Is Unpopular With People He’s Trying To Keep Out, Pew Study Says

Daily Caller