If you’re thinking of staffing up your intelligence agency, this kind of guy is probably not your ideal choice.
What will really upset you about this is that we lost to these guys in 2008 and 2012: 42% of Democrats think the recount will result in Hillary winning. That’s why Stein is able to get so much money! Ask anyone with an above-room-temp IQ and they’ll tell you: there is NO WAY the recount will change the result. But there’s 42% of Democrats thinking it will. These are the smart people? These are the people who got degrees? This is the Reality-Based Community? If brains were dynamite, these guys couldn’t blow their noses…
Rumor is that Trump is considering Senators Manchin (D-WV) and Heitkamp (D-ND) for Cabinet positions. Both are centrist Democrats. Both can help build more Trump bridges to a lot of Democrats turned off by the hard-left turn of the Democrat party. Both are up for re-election in 2018 in States where Trump crushed it. Both seats would almost certainly fall to the GOP, should they take positions in Trump’s Administration. This is brilliant politics, folks.
That terrorist in Ohio? He was taking a class in micro-aggressions…but, as it turns out, it’s still your fault that he attacked.
How Trump can create an economic boom:
…The basis of any Trump Revolution would have to be energy. The shale-led revival of America’s energy production was the most important economic development of the Obama administration, and Trump is likely to double down on it. The turnaround in America’s energy fortunes is almost a miracle. Over the last ten years, U.S. oil production has grown by more than 3.6 million barrels per day—an output increase of roughly 75 percent. Natural gas production has seen similar joy, rising nearly 52 percent over the last decade. This hydrocarbon boom has defied the predictions of most analysts, who expected American oil production to plummet alongside falling crude prices over these past two years. Instead, the shale industry has relentlessly pursued innovations that have allowed it to keep the oil and gas flowing, despite unfavorable market conditions…
The follow-on effects of a completely unleashed American energy sector are countless – just in making American energy so cheap that manufacturing becomes competitive in the United States would be a major boon to our economy. Don’t listen to the naysayers who are insisting that we can’t revive manufacturing in America. We can. They’ll use the hook of “those jobs aren’t coming back”…which is true, but only in the very narrow and meaningless sense that the particular manufacturing jobs of 20 years ago aren’t coming back…but a new, automated factory employing 100 workers is still 100 jobs in manufacturing that we didn’t have before. We can set this up so that cheap, consumer goods are made here and exported to China, folks…but also to all manner of nations which are rising out of poverty and demanding the sorts of consumer goods we’ve taken for granted for a half century or more. We can do it.
Democrat Congressman: we have no strategy. Our first clue on that was the re-election of Pelosi as Minority Leader…perhaps to be Much Smaller Minority Leader before too long…
General Mattis is to be Secretary of Defense. The change will be rather night-and-day, I suspect. I don’t think our military will be spending a lot of time on diversity awareness over the next four years…
Blogs For Victory 
To say that I was an unenthusiastic Trump voter would be the understatement of the year. I did breathe a sigh of relief when I woke up early Wednesday morning, November 9th to learn that he had won, but more because of the fact that Hillary WASN’T elected than that Trump was. I told my wife tonight after seeing Trump announce Mattis as SECDEF that, for the first time in a long time, I was feeling pretty good about the future of this great country. Our troops have got to be pretty stoked too. It may well turn out that “Make American Great Again” will prove to be much more than just a slogan.
I’m liking all of the appointments I have read about—I may have missed one or two. My feeling about Trump was that if he could get elected he would have a chance to get more done than anyone in my lifetime. I figured Trump at his worst would still be better than Hillary and Trump at his best could bring about some pretty radical changes.
There’s been a lot of talk, almost exclusively on the Left, that the Electoral College is outdated and should be scrapped in favor of a direct vote. I heard a great analogy the other day that bears repeating.
The Pittsburg Pirates beat the New York Yankees in the 1960 World Series 4 games to 3, but the Yankees outscored the Pirates in total runs 55 – 27. The Yankees won 3 blowouts and the Pirates won 4 close games. No one was clamoring to change the rules so that the team that scored the most runs over 7 games would be declared the winner. I’m sure the Yankees wished they could have spread their runs out over more games, just as I’m sure Hillary Clinton would have liked to have taken a few hundred thousand votes from California and New York and spread them over Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
If we had a homogeneous society where all states are the same size and have the same size and type of population, direct democratic vote might make sense, But we have one of the most heterogeneous societies on the planet. The Founders foresaw this and came up with an ingenious electoral method that gave voice first and foremost to the states, the majority of which would become irrelevant if we adopted direct democratic vote in national elections.
Remember “drill baby drill” and the scorn and mockery that received? We were told that “we can not possibly drill our way out of this problem of high energy costs” yet as Mark noted the increased US oil production has indeed brought down prices …..
Ok I just have to stop here and let you know what is being said on MSNBC right now. The liberal pundits are worrying about the Carrier deal and stating that a POTUS telling private companies what they need to do is a “dangerous precedent”. Can everyone please just take a minute and wrap your heads around the hypocrisy of those concerns.
Back to energy which will in fact be the next economic platform that will return wealth back to our country. We can and must become a net exporter.
I love the Mattis pick, the Flynn pick, the Pompeo pick, the Mnuchin pick and am kind of hoping that Romney gets the state job. I don’t know much about DeVos but what I have read is that she is also results oriented and a big proponent of school choice and charter schools so those are good things. I think Trump is showing everyone that not only is he up for the job, but he could be in the process right now of assembling one of the best leadership teams this country has ever had.
And Mark your link to Gay Patriot was interesting. A married father of four, German intelligence officer, Islamist converter, who leads a secret gay porn life?? Wow, and I thought my life was busy.
Cluster, don’t you get the impression, or at least have the hope that Trump’s ballsy approach to problem solving is going to embolden the Repubs in the House and Senate to stand up to the Democrats on a lot of issues. A good example is the news this morning that the Dems are going to demand 3 years of tax returns for every cabinet nominee. But there’s nothing in the Constitution or the Senate rules that requires that. In the past the Republicans have gone along with stuff like that. They should just learn two new words: POUND SAND!
Oh I agree 100%. Trump has brought back the gravitas to the GOP and it is about time. For decades we were lectured that we needed to be conciliatory and needed to “reach out” and embrace more leftist positions in order to win, ie; amnesty and the campaigns of Jeb Bush and John Kasich were tailor made for another Democrat win because of those squishy positions. Thankfully the GOP base nominated the bull in the china shop who wouldn’t back down from the bully media and all the liberal attacks, and now we have a chance to really turn this country around.
While I agree that Trump’s unique approach to the presidency and the problems of the nation have great promise, I don’t know if I will ever be quite comfortable thinking of Trump and “gravitas” in the same sentence. It’ll take him a while to overcome the clownishness (often scary-clown) and WWE Raw aspects of his campaign, and I know I will never, no matter what he does or how great the results, forgive him for the savagery and sheer petty ugliness of his primary campaign.
However, everyone who knows him claims, swears up and down, that Campaign Trump is not the Real Trump, for which I offer up a prayer that this is true.
Spook, as usual you and I are thinking alike. You said “Cluster, don’t you get the impression, or at least have the hope that Trump’s ballsy approach to problem solving is going to embolden the Repubs in the House and Senate to stand up to the Democrats on a lot of issues “ and I have been thinking/hoping the same thing. With a bold and fearless Trump in the Oval Office and a cabinet full of people like Sessions and Mattis a timid and flaccid Republican Congress is going to look even worse than they do now, and they have to realize that the very presence of Trump in the Oval Office is a rebuke to their prior weakness. I think the message is going to be very clear: Be ready to run with the big dogs or stay on the porch. And the porch isn’t going to be very comfortable.
The entire GOP also has to realize that if they don’t produce, in the face of the shrill hysteria of the Left, we might not get another chance. One thing I like about Trump is his tactic of reaching into the Left’s bag of appeals to the public and taking out what he wants and making it his own, such as the commitment to rebuilding the infrastructure. I hope he and his whole administration never miss a chance to point out that the darling of that screeching Left, Barack Obama, dumped TRILLIONS of dollars into the hands of cronies, without ever making a dent in the crumbling infrastructure problem, or even doing more than a head-fake in that direction.
A couple of really interesting articles this morning on the topic of same-sex marriage, here and here.
Well this is interesting:
http://vesselnews.io/trump-clinton-aides-get-shouting-match-harvard-forum/
I don’t think the divide has healed.
I see Trump doing a lot of things that I agree with, but I don’t see him as a healer. Which is OK with me because I don’t see many of the differences between Right and Left as being reconcilable. On the Right we mostly have people who just want to be left alone to live their lives the way they see fit. On the Left we have a great many people who want to force those on the Right to live their lives the way the Left sees fit. As long as the Left doesn’t have the power to prosecute “thought” crimes, we’ll be OK. In all fairness there are some on the Right who would like to turn America into a theocracy, but they’ll never have the power to make that happen.
On the Left we have a great many people who want to force those on the Right to live their lives the way the Left sees fit.
But there are also a great many people who never give a thought to their assumed political identity, and base it almost exclusively on accepting the Left’s characterizations of the Right as greedy, racist, corrupt, etc. How many Lefties have you ever talked to who explain that they are on the Left because of their philosophy about how best to govern the nation? I’m guessing somewhere in the range of none to, well, none.
Vulgarity alert: Bad word coming up, a few times.
A few years ago I was at one brother’s farm when a good friend of another brother came out to do something. I hadn’t seen this man for many years and never knew him well, but somehow within a minute or two we were talking about politics. He is a commercial airline pilot, and he said that he has to be very careful about what he says in the cockpit because so many other pilots are Liberals and the last thing you want in the cockpit of a jumbo jet full of people is the pilots distracted by a fight over politics. Very quickly we fell into a routine that could have been rehearsed. (This was, by the way, well into Obama’s first term.)
C: “How do you feel about the need to follow the Constitution?”
L: “GEORGE BUSH IS AN ASSHOLE !”
C: “Do you think it’s OK for the president to bypass Congress?”
L: “GEORGE BUSH IS AN ASSHOLE !”
And so on, for a dozen questions or so. It was a very accurate portrayal of what passes for political philosophy on the Left.
We have a chance to start a shift away from Identity Politics into consideration of the real purpose of the two-party system. It is not to allow people to choose up teams on the basis of personality or what they think of the other side’s character. It is about a decision of which basic type of governance is the best blueprint for governing the country, and it is a choice between following our Constitution or simply ignoring it. It’s not about what should be done, but about how to do it within the framework of the Constitution. The Left has skillfully shifted the perception of about half of the country away from that into portraying the other half as people who don’t want something accomplished rather than simply disagreeing about the best way to make it happen. And we have let them get away with it.
The thing is, it doesn’t require a tectonic shift to move from the belief that if a Republican doesn’t believe the federal government should do something that means he doesn’t want it done at all (feeding the chirrun, helping the “poor”, etc) but is merely a difference of belief on how this can and should be done while respecting the Constitution to a realization that when the personality aspect is removed it becomes a simple problem-solving exercise, without emotion. It can be done without arguing, without fighting, without name calling and recrimination. But it does require understanding of the process and the goal, and leadership to get this message across consistently.
It is my belief that about 90% of Democrat support is based on the belief that Republicans are bad people. That is the brilliance of Leftist propaganda. But anything based on emotional manipulation has a shaky foundation that can be undermined by removing the emotional component as much as possible and replacing it with reason. That means having a skillful and coordinated communications branch of our own party, and being consistent and clear. That means, when the Republicans pass a bill that changes the structure of a Leftist policy, we have to explain that we agree with the goal of the policy itself (feeding the poor, protecting the environment, whatever) but we just don’t agree with the mechanism the Left put in place. We need to explain, explain, explain. We need to do what the Left does, and accompany every action with an explanation of why we did it and what it is supposed to accomplish.
This is why it is possible that the most important position to be filled by Trump will be Press Secretary.
Ben Crystal has a wonderful way with words, especially in commenting on our soon-to-be-ex-president.
“…“(T)here is a cohort of working-class white voters that voted for me in sizable numbers, …” let me finish that sentence for him in real-world, as it actually happened, terms.
“…“(T)here is a cohort of working-class white voters that voted for me in sizable numbers,…” but then after they voted for me and objected to some of my policies the reason for doing that was racism. In other words, they weren’t racist when they voted for me, but then they became racist when it came to not agreeing with what I was doing.
Of course, many of us see this in reverse—-these “… working-class white voters that voted for (him) in sizable numbers…” only did it because of the color of his skin, which was racism, and then when they didn’t like what I was doing they did it with no regard for the color of his skin, which was not racism.
“…as credible as an article written by a guy in his underwear in a basement,..” You mean like Leftist spokesbaby Onesie Boy?
And Captain Clueless speaks again: “…whatever policy prescriptions that we’ve been proposing don’t reach, are not heard, by the folks in these communities. ,,”
Wow. Talk about delusional. The whole election was about hearing about, experiencing the fallout from, those very “policy prescriptions”, or seeing them for the incremental shift to an even more powerful and dominating Central Authority they represented, and rejecting them. Heard them, Barry. Understood them, Barry. And kicked them to the curb, Barry.
Yeah, Barry, you just comfort yourself with the fantasy that the only reason those ignorant white working class folks voted the way they did is because they just didn’t have what it takes to recognize your greatness. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I’d stick with that, if I were you, because at this point that’s pretty much all you’ve got.
“…curated journalism …” Is that the same as “nuanced” reporting?
The man is coming right out and saying that the problem is that the people are getting raw information they can process on their own, through their own intellect, instead of simply being fed “curated” information which has been carefully edited, manipulated, and predigested so the newsreader can tell them what it really means.
Can you imagine a Democrat announcing, “I’m nominating Mad Dog Mattis for Secretary of Defense”? This is gonna be fun.