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The Animal Cunning and Instinct of Donald Trump
He grasped that what voters cared about were the very issues politicos were disdainfully ignoring.
By Victor Davis Hanson — December 20, 2016
The American middle classes, the Chinese, and Vladimir Putin have never been convinced that Ivy League degrees, vast Washington experience, and cultural sophistication necessarily translate into national wisdom. Trump instead relies more on instinct and operates from cunning — and we will soon see whether we should redefine “wisdom.”
But for now, for example, we have never heard a presidential candidate say such a thing as “We love our miners” — not “we like” miners, but “we love” them. And not just any miners, but “our” miners, as if, like “our vets,” the working people of our moribund economic regions were unique and exceptional people, neither clingers nor irredeemables. In Trump’s gut formulation, miners certainly did not deserve “to be put out of business” by Hillary Clinton, as if they were little more than the necessary casualties of the war against global warming. For Trump, miners were not the human equivalent of the 4,200 bald eagles that the Obama administration recently assured the wind turbine industry can be shredded for the greater good of alternate energy and green profiteering.
In other words, Trump instinctively saw the miners of West Virginia — and by extension the working-class populations of states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio — as emblematic of the forgotten man, in a way few of his Republican rivals, much less Hilary Clinton, grasped.
No other candidate talked as constantly about jobs, “fair” trade, illegal immigration, and political correctness — dead issues to most other pollsters and politicos. Rivals, Democratic and Republican alike, had bought into the electoral matrix of Barack Obama: slicing the electorate into identity-politics groups and arousing them to register and vote in record numbers against “them” — a fossilized, supposedly crude, illiberal, and soon-to-be-displaced white working class.
For Democrats that meant transferring intact Obama’s record numbers of minority voters to a 68-year-old multimillionaire white woman; for Republicans, it meant pandering with a kinder, softer but still divisive identity-politics message. Trump instinctively saw a different demographic. And even among minority groups, he detected a rising distaste for being patronized, especially by white, nasal-droning, elite pajama-boy nerds whose loud progressivism did not disguise their grating condescension.
Trump Dismissed as a Joke
Yet even after destroying the Clinton Dynasty, the Bush-family aristocracy, the Obama legacy, and 16 more-seasoned primary rivals, Trump was dismissed by observers as being mostly a joke, idiotic and reckless. Such a dismissal is a serious mistake, because what Trump lacks in traditionally defined sophistication and awareness, he more than makes up for in shrewd political cunning of a sort not seen since the regnum of Franklin Roosevelt. Take a few recent examples.
Candidate Donald Trump was roundly hounded by the political and media establishment for suggesting that the election might be “rigged.” Trump was apparently reacting to old rumors of voting-machine irregularities. (In fact, in about a third of blue Detroit’s precincts, to take just one example, more votes this election were recorded than there were registered voters.)
Or perhaps Trump channeled reports that there was an epidemic of invalid or out-of-date voter registrations. (Controversially, the normally staid Pew Charitable Trust found that 2.4 million voter registrations were no longer accurate or were significantly inaccurate.)
Or maybe he fanned fears that illegal aliens were voting. (Another controversial study from two professors at Old Dominion suggested that over 6 percent of non-citizens may have voted in 2008; and the president on the eve of the election, in his usual wink-and-nod fashion, assured the illegal-alien community that there would be no federal interest in examining immigration status in connection with voting status.)
Or perhaps Trump was convinced that the media and the Democratic establishment worked hand in hand to warp elections and media coverage. (The WikiLeaks trove revealed that media operatives leaked primary debate questions and sent their stories to the Clinton campaign for fact-checking before publication, as two successive DNC chairpersons resigned in disgrace for purportedly sabotaging the primary-challenge efforts of Bernie Sanders.)
For all this and more, Trump was roundly denounced by the status quo as a buffoon who cherry-picked scholarly work to offer puerile distortions. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both expressed outrage at Trump’s supposedly incendiary suggestions of voter irregularity, alleging that Trump was either delusional or insurrectionary or both.
But was he?
Or did he sense that his candidacy was touching off an “any means necessary” effort of unethical progressives to warp the law and custom for purportedly noble ends? After the election, that supposition was more than confirmed.
The Joke’s on Them
Trump’s enemies have now proved him a Nostradamus. Fourth-party candidate Jill Stein, joined by the remains of the Clinton campaign, asked for a recount of the 2016 election, but only in those states that provided Trump his electoral majority and only on the assumption that there was zero chance that Stein’s candidacy would be affected by any conceivable new vote figure.
Though perhaps, Trump’s critics wished, the recount would resurrect the candidacy of Stein’s stalking horse Hillary Clinton.
Then members of the Clinton campaign and powerful Democrats joined an effort to pressure electors of the Electoral College to defy their state-mandated duty to reflect the vote totals of their states and instead refrain from voting for Donald Trump. That was all but a neo-Confederate, insurrectionary act that sought to nullify the spirit of the Constitution and the legal statues of many states — part and parcel of new surreal progressive embrace of states’-rights nullification that we have not seen since the days of George Wallace.
Trump then earned greater outrage when he questioned the CIA’s sudden announcement, via leaks, that the Russians had hacked Clinton-campaign communication. When Trump said that the newfound post-election “consensus” on Russian hacking was improper, unreliable, and suggestive of an overly politicized intelligence apparatus, he once again drew universal ire — proof positive that he lacked a “presidential” temperament.
Yet our intelligence agencies do have a history of politicization. The 2006 national intelligence assessment at the height of the Iraq insurgency and of George W. Bush’s unpopularity oddly claimed that Iran had stopped nuclear-weapons work as early as 2003 — a finding that, if plausible, would probably have rendered irrelevant all of Obama’s frantic efforts just three years later to conclude an Iran deal. And our intelligence agencies’ record at assessment is not exactly stellar, given that it missed the Pakistan and Indian nuclear-bomb programs, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and the status of Saddam’s WMD program.
There is still no solid proof of deliberate Russian cyber interference intended to aid Donald Trump. Loretta Lynch is skeptical that Russia tried to help the Trump campaign. A Washington Post story alleging that the RNC was hacked was based on myth. WikiLeaks, for what it is worth, insists its source was not Russian. And we now learn that intelligence authorities are refusing to testify in closed session to the House Intelligence Committee about the evidence that prompted their odd post-election announcements — announcements that contradict their earlier pre-election suggestions that Russian hacking was not affecting the election.
One possibility is that the likelihood of a Clinton victory spurred the administration and the likely president-elect to suggest that the election process remained sacrosanct and immune from all tampering — while the completely unforeseen loss to Trump abruptly motivated them to readjust such assessments.
Trump has a habit of offering off-the-cuff unconventional observations — often unsubstantiated by verbal footnotes and in hyperbolic fashion. Then he is blasted for ignorance and recklessness by bipartisan grandees. Only later, and quietly, he is often taken seriously, but without commensurate public acknowledgement.
A few more examples. Candidate Trump blasted the “free-loading” nature of NATO, wondered out loud why it was not fighting ISIS or at least Islamic terrorism, and lamented the inordinate American contribution and the paucity of commensurate allied involvement.
Pundits called that out as heresy, at least for a few weeks — until scholars, analysts, and politicos offered measured support for Trump’s charges. Europeans, shocked by gambling in Casablanca, scrambled to assure that they were upping their defense contributions and drawing the NATO line at the Baltic States.
President-elect Trump generated even greater outrage in the aftermath of the election when he took a call from the Taiwanese president. Pundits exploded. Foreign policy hands were aghast. Did this faker understand the dimensions of his blunder? Was he courting nuclear war?
Trump shrugged, as reality again intruded: Why sell billions of dollars in weaponry to Taiwan if you cannot talk to its president? Are arms shipments less provocative than receiving a single phone call? Why talk “reset” to the thuggish murderous Castro brothers but not to a democratically elected president? Why worry what China thinks, given that it has swallowed Tibet and now created artificial islands in the South China Sea, in defiance of all maritime custom, law, and tradition?
Two weeks later after the call, analysts — true to the pattern — meekly agreed that such a phone call was hardly incendiary. Perhaps, they mused, it was overdue and had a certain logic. Perhaps it had, after all, sent a valuable message to China that the U.S. may now appear as unpredictable to China as China has appeared to the U.S.
More recently, Trump asked in a tweet why we should take back a sea drone stolen by China from under the nose of a U.S. ship. Aside from questions of whether the drone is now compromised, damaged, or bugged, would anyone be happy that a thief appeared days later at the door, offering back the living room’s stolen loot, on the condition to just let bygones be bygones — at least until the next heist?
On most issues, Trump sensed what was verbiage and what was doable — and what was the indefensible position of his opponents. Prune away Trump’s hyperbole, and we see that his use of the illegal immigration issue is another good example. Finishing the existing southern border wall is sane and sober. “Making Mexico pay for it” can quietly be accomplished, at least in part, by simply taxing the over $50 billion in remittances sent to Mexico and Latin America by those in the U.S. who cannot prove legal residence or citizenship. Ending sanctuary cities will win majority support: Who wants to make the neo-Confederate argument that local jurisdictions can override U.S. law — and, indeed, who would make that secessionist case on behalf of violent criminal aliens?
Deporting illegal-alien law-breakers — or those who are fit and able but without any history of work — is likewise the sort of position that the Left cannot, for political reasons, easily oppose. As for the rest, after closing off the border, Trump will likely shrug and allow illegal aliens who are working, who have established a few years of residence, and who are non-criminal to pay a fine, learn English, and get a green card — perhaps relegating the entire quagmire of illegal immigration to a one-time American aberration that has diminishing demographic and political relevance.
Trump the Brawler
Finally, Trump sensed that the proverbial base was itching for a bare-knuckles fighter. They wanted any kind of brawler who would not play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules of 2008 and 2012 that had doomed Romney and McCain, who, fairly or not, seemed to wish to lose nobly rather than win in black-and-blue fashion, and who were sometimes more embarrassed than proud of their base.
Trump again foresaw that talking trash in crude tones would appeal to middle Americans as much as Obama’s snarky and ego-driven, but otherwise crude trash-talking delighted his coastal elites. So Trump said the same kinds of things to Hillary Clinton that she, in barely more measured tones, had often said to others but never expected anyone to say out loud to her. And the more the media cried foul, the more Trump knew that voters would cry “long overdue.”
We can expect that Trump’s impulsiveness and electronically fed braggadocio will often get him into trouble. No doubt his tweets will continue to offend.
But lost amid the left-wing hatred of Trump and the conservative Never Trump condescension is that so far he has shattered American political precedents by displaying much more political cunning and prescience than have his political opponents and most observers.
Key is his emperor-has-no-clothes instinct that what is normal and customary in Washington was long ago neither sane nor necessary. And so far, his candidacy has not only redefined American politics but also recalibrated the nature of insight itself — leaving the wise to privately wonder whether they were ever all that wise after all.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443188/donald-trumps-cunning-animal-instinct
Michelle Obama's Christmas Lump of Coal
By Michelle Malkin
December 21, 2016
Just what we all need to ring in the Christmas season: Un-merry millionaire Michelle Obama belly-aching about the burdens and sacrifices of public life with billionaire Oprah Winfrey.
"There's nowhere in the world I can go and sit and have a cup of coffee," Obama lamented. It's a frequent grievance. In September, she told InStyle magazine: "My hopes are to recapture some of the everydayness, some anonymity. ... (I)t will be nice to open up the paper, look at the front page, and know that you're not responsible for every headline."
And back in June, again with Oprah, the first lady griped that living in the spotlight was like "living in a cave."
Complain, complain, complain. What a way to make the most of your last six months in the grand and glorious White House.
For the past eight years, Obama has traveled to every corner of the planet on the taxpayers' dime. She has splurged in Spain, traversed the Great Wall of China, tangoed in Buenos Aires, skied in Aspen, lolled in Martha's Vineyard and feasted in Marrakesh. Thanks to her public position and celebrity, she has been bestowed "fashion icon" status -- donning a $12,000 custom-made Atelier Versace gown at her final State Dinner last month after enjoying two terms clad in Givenchy, Gucci, Jason Wu, Vera Wang, Caroline Herrera and other haute couture stars whose designs are unattainable to ordinary women in America.
Count your blessings much, Mrs. Grinch? Nope. All Barack Obama's bitter half really wants to do, she told Winfrey, is "drop into Target. I want to go to Target again."
Funny that. The last time Obama shopped at Target, she turned the outing into a fake news narrative to stoke racial division in America. It is worth reminding the public about the noxious lie one last time before the grumbling FLOTUS leaves office because I consider her exploitation of the incident a perfect metaphor for the Obama years -- faux populism bolstered by elitist Hollywood enablers, and then cynically transformed into a phony social justice crusade for crass political gain.
Back in 2012, you may remember, Obama sat down with David Letterman in one of her endless, popularity-enhancing pop culture appearances. She bragged about her ability to shop incognito at Target (does she get a secret commission every time she mentions the store?) and told a warm and fuzzy story about helping a fellow customer who didn't recognize her. The shopper innocently asked Obama to retrieve laundry detergent from a high shelf.
"I reached up, 'cause she was short, and I reached up, pulled it down," the first lady recounted, and the shopper joked, "Well, you didn't have to make it look so easy." Obama beamed as she told Letterman: "I felt so good" doing an everyday good deed. Letterman's audience cheered at the "first ladies, they're just like us!" theater.
Just a few years later, however, the encounter morphed into a tall tale of rampant racism, which she cunningly reshaped for People Magazine in 2014 during the aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri riots and Black Lives Matter protests.
"Even as the first lady," she moaned, "not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me" at a Target store "was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf." The headline of the article? "The Obamas: How We Deal With Our Own Racist Experiences." ABC News added that Michelle Obama claimed such "incidents are 'the regular course of life' for African Americans and a 'challenge' for the country to overcome."
Last year, Obama persisted in plying and fine-tuning her false narrative at Tuskegee University's commencement ceremony -- decrying the "sting" of "daily slights" she blamed on racism, including unnamed "clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores."
Now, as she walks away with sky-high poll ratings, a glittering Rolodex, and government benefits for life, this incredibly blessed and privileged woman has the audacity to claim that "we" are "feeling what not having hope feels like," as she whined to her well-heeled gal pal, Oprah Winfrey.
So put upon. So downtrodden. So oppressed. To borrow one of Mrs. Woe-Is-Me's own favorite phrases:
Bye, Felicia!
You and your manufactured miseries won't be missed.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/12/21/michelle_obamas_christmas_lump_of_coal_132612.html
Obama’s Hawaii Christmas vacations cost taxpayers $35 million over 8 years
For the last time, taxpayers are paying for a Hawaiian Christmas vacation for President Obama and his family, an annual luxury getaway that has cost the Treasury easily more than $35 million over eight years.
Golfing on oceanside courses, dining at high-end restaurants and frolicking on stunning white-sand beaches where security guards keep other tourists at bay, the president and his family are in the midst of a 17-day holiday that requires dozens of Secret Service agents, military personnel and other government employees to guarantee their safety and ease of travel around Oahu.
The Obamas are once again renting a multimillion-dollar oceanfront home in Kailua, a town on the northeast side of the island where houses in the neighborhood fetch around $10 million. It’s near golf courses and a Marine Corps base where the president goes for morning workouts at the gym.
One plantation-style house in Kailua touted online as the “Obama winter White House” is listed for sale for $8 million, featuring more than 7,000 square feet of interior space, 5.5 bathrooms, five bedrooms, a rock-walled pool and waterfall, three lanais (porches) and majestic ocean views.
The president’s itinerary on Wednesday was typical — a workout at the gym followed by a motorcade trip to Bellows Beach.
“Bellows could hardly be more ideal, with a wide strip of mature pines edging up to a white sand beach,” said a pool reporter chronicling the president’s travels. “The water offers four distinct shades of aquamarine going out to what appears to be a reef, where white breakers form a boundary with a sapphire blue Pacific beyond.”
The Obamas pay for the Kailua rental home themselves each year. Last year, their rented estate was priced at $5,000 to $10,000 per night, depending on the season.
Taxpayers foot the bill for nearly everything else.
The first family’s Christmas vacation in 2015 cost taxpayers more than $4.8 million, according to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which obtained Secret Service records after filing Freedom of Information Act requests and a lawsuit. Multiply that cost by eight years, and taxpayers have paid in the range of $35 million to $40 million — at a minimum — for the first family’s tropical vacations.
According to the organization’s review of government records, the Secret Service spent more than $1.2 million on travel costs alone for the Obamas’ Hawaii trip last year. The protective service’s total included just over $1 million for hotel and lodging, with agents renting several Kailua homes for 19 nights at a cost of nearly $250,000, and rooms at the Ala Moana Hotel costing more than $671,000.
It could be tough for the average tourist to rent a car on Oahu when the Obamas are visiting. Last year, the Secret Service rented 103 cars from Alamo, Avis and Hertz at a total cost to taxpayers of $165,893.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Mr. Obama has taken too much advantage of the travel perks of his office.
“The Secret Service and the Air Force are being abused by unnecessary travel,” Mr. Fitton said. “Unnecessary presidential travel for fundraising and luxury vacations on the taxpayers’ dime would be a good target for reform for the incoming Trump administration.”
Mr. Obama will mix in some business during his last Hawaiian vacation. On Tuesday, he will host Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a visit to Pearl Harbor to honor the more than 2,000 U.S. service members killed by Japan’s attack in December 1941, propelling the U.S. into World War II.
Mr. Abe wants to use the visit to send a message that the alliance between former foes Japan and the U.S. is solid. He was the first foreign head of state to meet with President-elect Donald Trump after the Nov. 8 election.
When Mr. Obama made a historic visit to Hiroshima, Japan, in May to visit the site of the world’s first atomic bombing, Mr. Trump tweeted, “Does President Obama ever discuss the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor while he’s in Japan? Thousands of American lives lost.”
Mr. Abe will not apologize for the attack 75 years ago, saying his trip will be “a visit to soothe the souls of the victims. We should never repeat the ravages of the war.”
Mr. Obama likewise didn’t apologize for Hiroshima, although some in the U.S. viewed the visit itself as a symbolic apology.
The prime minister’s visit to Pearl Harbor will “express the value of reconciliation between Japan and the United States,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said this month.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Abe also will hold their final summit in Hawaii before the president leaves office on Jan. 20.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/22/obamas-hawaii-christmas-vacations-cost-taxpayers-3/
53 shot, 11 fatally, over Christmas weekend
(Barrly's home town celebrates in their usual manner.
Democrat policies at their finest.)
By Katherine Rosenberg-Douglas and Peter Nickeas•Contact Reporters
Chicago Tribune
December 26, 2016, 5:33 PM
Nine people wounded in daylight shootings Monday morning brought to more than 50 the number of people shot since Christmas weekend began Friday afternoon.
Eleven of the 53 people shot between about 4:50 p.m. Friday and about the same time Monday died from their wounds. More than a dozen others were listed in serious or critical condition.
The city has seen eight multiple-victim shootings, including two double homicides. One was an attack in the East Chatham neighborhood that left five dead and two wounded, and an attack in the Austin neighborhood left two dead.
Much of the violence happened in areas "with historical gang conflicts on the south and west side of Chicago," said Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. He also referenced the department's "strategic subject list," which is generated daily from a computerized algorithm and assigns a score from 1 to 500 based on such factors as a person's arrests and the activities of his associates. Those people with a score in the upper 200s or higher are considered in danger of being shot or of shooting someone else.
"Ninety percent of those fatally wounded had gang affiliations, criminal histories and were pre-identified by the department's strategic subject algorithm as being a potential suspect or victim of gun violence," Guglielmi said Monday.
The most recent shooting happened Monday afternoon in the Lawndale neighborhood on the city's West Side. A 45-year-old man was shot in the 4100 block of West Arthington Street and taken Mount Sinai Hospitalf or treatment. He had been in an argument just before getting shot, police said.
Two people were shot in the 5800 block of South May Street in the Englewood neighborhood about 3:25 p.m. A 20-year-old man was taken to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County with a back wound and a 35-year-old man refused medical treatment for a graze wound. Someone in a dark-colored sedan fired shots and fled the scene, police said.
A 22-year-old man walked into Advocate Trinity Hospital on the city's South Side seeking treatment for a gunshot wound sustained in the 7900 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue about 2:45 p.m., police said.
Earlier, about 11:20 a.m. in the 1800 block of South Ridgeway Avenue in North Lawndale, a 23-year-old man was shot in each leg. He was being treated at Mount Sinai Hospital, according to police.
ore that, police were called about 10:40 a.m. to the 400 block of West Marquette Road in Englewood. A 24-year-old man was shot in the hand, officials said. Other details about that shooting weren't immediately available.
In the 7000 block of South Indiana, in the Park Manor neighborhood about 9:30 a.m., an initial call went out for two people shot in the area of 78th Street. Police later said a 25-year-old man had a graze wound to his head and also was shot in a leg. A 26-year-old man was shot in the face. The men were able to get themselves to St. Bernard Hospital, where they were being treated.
The first daylight shooting happened about 9:25 a.m. in the 300 block of South Kostner Avenue. A man was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital with gunshot wounds to the ankle and leg. He was in stable condition, authorities said.
The mass shooting in East Chatham overnight, and the others on Christmas, added to the tolls this year in Chicago, where more than 700 homicides have been recorded with more than 4,000 people shot -- a level of violence not seen in Chicago since the late 1990s, according to Tribune and police data. Last year, 488 people were killed in Chicago.
The holiday weekend began with five teenagers shot within feet of each other in the South Austin neighborhood. At 3:30 p.m. Friday, a 16-year-old boy was shot in the 4900 block of West Kinzie Street. A little more than an hour later, four other teenagers were shot just feet away, in the 4900 block of West Hubbard Street. Their conditions had stabilized.
Guglielmi said most of the attacks were targeted attacks by gangs against potential rivals who were at holiday gatherings. That only brought on retaliatory gun violence. In response, police adjusted their assignments as needed and seized 45 guns from areas with a heavy presence of gangs, Guglielmi said.
"While we have promising leads, this unacceptable level of gun violence demonstrates the clear and present need for policy makers to convene in January and give Chicago the gun sentencing tools against repeat offenders so that we can adequately hold people accountable," he said.
Copyright © 2016, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-christmas-shootings-violence-47-shot-holiday-weekend-20161226-story.html
Finding The Money For America The Fixer-Upper
by George P. Shultz, John F. Cogan
via Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Common sense and careful observation tell us that the water systems, roads and many other parts of America’s infrastructure are badly in need of modernization and repair. The residents of Flint, Mich., certainly experienced firsthand their city’s crumbling water system. Americans who travel by car this summer will dodge potholes and bounce over uneven roads, highways and outdated bridges.
With all the taxes Americans are paying, why is our public infrastructure in such bad shape? Where can we find the resources to fix it?
The answer to both questions is the same. Rapidly rising expenditures on entitlement programs by all levels of government are squeezing out needed public investments. At the federal level, Social Security and Medicare are the primary causes of the squeeze. At the state and local levels, soaring public-employee pensions, Medicaid and welfare are the culprits. Even the military is seeing the squeeze from its own high retirement and health-care costs.
According to the federal government’s national income statistics, since 2003 expenditures on major entitlement programs by all levels of government have risen 15% faster than revenues. At the same time, according to the Congressional Budget Office, public infrastructure spending adjusted for the price of materials used in construction has declined by 9%. Reductions have occurred at the state and local levels of government as well as at the federal level.
The squeeze is about to get a lot tighter. As the Federal Reserve transitions from near-zero interest rates to more normal rates, the burden of the government’s high debt will take a substantial bite out of the federal budget. Larger numbers of baby boomers collecting their federal, state and local retirement and health-care benefits will take an even larger bite.
Entitlement restraint, which is necessary to ensure the nation’s economic health, can also free up resources to rehabilitate public infrastructure. Shaving just 1% off the growth in entitlements would free up $100 billion annually after four years. We estimate that shaving 2% can free up enough money to double federal transportation spending.
Significant savings are not hard to get. Let’s start with Social Security. First, change the method of calculating initial benefits for future retirees from wage to price indexing, taking effect, say, for those now younger than 60 so that future retirees have time to adjust. No current retiree would be affected. Future retirees would still be guaranteed a Social Security benefit protected from inflation.
Second, continue the current policy of raising the age for full benefits to 67 and keep it going by indexing that age to changes in longevity. Also, give people an incentive to stay in the labor force longer by eliminating the payroll tax for those who have reached the age of full benefits. The modified Social Security program will be a better deal for younger people than worrying about the system being bankrupt by the time they reach retirement age.
These changes will help to ensure that Social Security continues to meet the primary goal that President Franklin Roosevelt set for the program 81 years ago; namely, that monthly benefit levels provide “some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against . . . poverty-ridden old age.” The changes will also go a long way toward ensuring that benefits can continue to be paid without substantially relying on general fund revenues, thereby meeting FDR’s stated objective that the program not become “the same old dole under another name.”
There are trends in the health-care system that, if encouraged sensibly, can result in a major improvement in Americans’ quality of life and the cost of health care. Our scientists, with a lot of help from National Institutes of Health funding, are teaching us more and more about how our bodies work so that more and more people can take better control of their own health. Gradually, lower-cost prevention can replace higher-cost treatment.
Health-savings accounts, which allow individuals to set aside money tax-free for out-of-pocket health-care expenses, can be expanded to encourage this development. They should be made more broadly available, allowing those who administer Medicare and Medicaid to provide adequate HSAs to their clients. The result can be universal coverage that puts consumers, rather than bureaucrats, at the center of the system.
Just as the federal government has politically difficult but conceptually easy work to do, so do the state governments. All too many of them have overpromised pensions and health care to retirees, and these entitlements need to be brought under control. The same basic ideas can be helpful here. While federal dollars are important, funding and control are even more important at the state level. We need a coordinated effort. The entitlement fix is not hard to conceive of, but it takes real political effort to do what is obvious.
The money can be there if we exercise common sense. As our bold boss, Ronald Reagan, once told us, “there are simple answers, they just are not easy ones.” So let’s put on our hard hats and get on with it.
http://www.hoover.org/research/finding-money-america-fixer-upper
Finding The Money For America The Fixer-Upper
by George P. Shultz, John F. Cogan
via Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Common sense and careful observation tell us that the water systems, roads and many other parts of America’s infrastructure are badly in need of modernization and repair. The residents of Flint, Mich., certainly experienced firsthand their city’s crumbling water system. Americans who travel by car this summer will dodge potholes and bounce over uneven roads, highways and outdated bridges.
With all the taxes Americans are paying, why is our public infrastructure in such bad shape? Where can we find the resources to fix it?
The answer to both questions is the same. Rapidly rising expenditures on entitlement programs by all levels of government are squeezing out needed public investments. At the federal level, Social Security and Medicare are the primary causes of the squeeze. At the state and local levels, soaring public-employee pensions, Medicaid and welfare are the culprits. Even the military is seeing the squeeze from its own high retirement and health-care costs.
According to the federal government’s national income statistics, since 2003 expenditures on major entitlement programs by all levels of government have risen 15% faster than revenues. At the same time, according to the Congressional Budget Office, public infrastructure spending adjusted for the price of materials used in construction has declined by 9%. Reductions have occurred at the state and local levels of government as well as at the federal level.
The squeeze is about to get a lot tighter. As the Federal Reserve transitions from near-zero interest rates to more normal rates, the burden of the government’s high debt will take a substantial bite out of the federal budget. Larger numbers of baby boomers collecting their federal, state and local retirement and health-care benefits will take an even larger bite.
Entitlement restraint, which is necessary to ensure the nation’s economic health, can also free up resources to rehabilitate public infrastructure. Shaving just 1% off the growth in entitlements would free up $100 billion annually after four years. We estimate that shaving 2% can free up enough money to double federal transportation spending.
Significant savings are not hard to get. Let’s start with Social Security. First, change the method of calculating initial benefits for future retirees from wage to price indexing, taking effect, say, for those now younger than 60 so that future retirees have time to adjust. No current retiree would be affected. Future retirees would still be guaranteed a Social Security benefit protected from inflation.
Second, continue the current policy of raising the age for full benefits to 67 and keep it going by indexing that age to changes in longevity. Also, give people an incentive to stay in the labor force longer by eliminating the payroll tax for those who have reached the age of full benefits. The modified Social Security program will be a better deal for younger people than worrying about the system being bankrupt by the time they reach retirement age.
These changes will help to ensure that Social Security continues to meet the primary goal that President Franklin Roosevelt set for the program 81 years ago; namely, that monthly benefit levels provide “some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against . . . poverty-ridden old age.” The changes will also go a long way toward ensuring that benefits can continue to be paid without substantially relying on general fund revenues, thereby meeting FDR’s stated objective that the program not become “the same old dole under another name.”
There are trends in the health-care system that, if encouraged sensibly, can result in a major improvement in Americans’ quality of life and the cost of health care. Our scientists, with a lot of help from National Institutes of Health funding, are teaching us more and more about how our bodies work so that more and more people can take better control of their own health. Gradually, lower-cost prevention can replace higher-cost treatment.
Health-savings accounts, which allow individuals to set aside money tax-free for out-of-pocket health-care expenses, can be expanded to encourage this development. They should be made more broadly available, allowing those who administer Medicare and Medicaid to provide adequate HSAs to their clients. The result can be universal coverage that puts consumers, rather than bureaucrats, at the center of the system.
Just as the federal government has politically difficult but conceptually easy work to do, so do the state governments. All too many of them have overpromised pensions and health care to retirees, and these entitlements need to be brought under control. The same basic ideas can be helpful here. While federal dollars are important, funding and control are even more important at the state level. We need a coordinated effort. The entitlement fix is not hard to conceive of, but it takes real political effort to do what is obvious.
The money can be there if we exercise common sense. As our bold boss, Ronald Reagan, once told us, “there are simple answers, they just are not easy ones.” So let’s put on our hard hats and get on with it.
http://www.hoover.org/research/finding-money-america-fixer-upper
Just Say "Merry Christmas"
https://www.prageru.com/courses/political-science/just-say-merry-christmas
Just Say "Merry Christmas"
https://www.prageru.com/courses/political-science/just-say-merry-christmas
Were the Founders Religious?
https://www.prageru.com/courses/history/were-founders-religious
Differences?
How Do We Make Society Better? Left vs. Right #5
https://www.prageru.com/courses/left-and-right-differences/how-do-we-make-society-better-left-vs-right-5
Wouldn't want to see them all over the hills in the Bay Area. We don't have them and have the strongest leftist city in the state and the strongest leftist Governor finishing his 4th 4 year term.
https://www.prageru.com/courses/left-and-right-differences/how-do-we-make-society-better-left-vs-right-5
Obama’s Midnight Regulation Express
The goal is to issue more rules than the new administration could ever repeal.
By
Kimberley A. Strassel
Dec. 22, 2016 6:59 p.m.
Barack Obama isn’t known for humility, though rarely has his lack of grace been more on display than in his final hours in office. The nation rejected his agenda. The president’s response? To shove more of that agenda down the nation’s gullet.
Notice the growing and many ugly ways the Obama administration is actively working to undermine a Donald Trump presidency. Unnamed administration sources whisper stories about Russian hackers to delegitimize Mr. Trump’s election. These whispers began at about the same time Hillary Clinton officials began pressuring electors to defy election results and deny Mr. Trump the presidency. How helpful.
Trump transition-team members report how Obama officials are providing them with skewed or incomplete information, as well as lectures about their duties on climate change. (No wonder Mr. Trump is bypassing those “official” intelligence briefings.) The Energy Department is refusing to provide the transition team with the names of career officials who led key programs, like those who attended U.N. climate talks. Sen. Ron Johnson recently sent a letter to President Obama voicing alarm over “burrowing,” in which political appointees, late in an administration, convert to career bureaucrats and become obstacles to the new political appointees.
But perhaps nothing has more underlined the Obama arrogance than his final flurry of midnight regulations. With each new proposed rule or executive order, Mr. Obama is spitefully mocking the nation that just told him “enough.”
The technical definition of a midnight regulation is one issued between Election Day and the inauguration of a new president. The practice is bipartisan. George W. Bush, despite having promised not to do so, pushed through a fair number of rules in his final months. But Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were more aggressive, and Mr. Obama is making them look like pikers.
Mr. Obama has devoted his last year to ramming through controversial and far-reaching rules. Whether it was born of a desire to lay groundwork for a Clinton presidency, or as a guard against a Trump White House, the motive makes no difference. According to a Politico story of nearly a year ago, the administration had some 4,000 regulations in the works for Mr. Obama’s last year. They included smaller rules on workplace hazards, gun sellers, nutrition labels and energy efficiency, as well as giant regulations (costing billions) on retirement advice and overtime pay.
Since the election Mr. Obama has broken with all precedent by issuing rules that would be astonishing at any moment and are downright obnoxious at this point. This past week we learned of several sweeping new rules from the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, including regs on methane on public lands (cost: $2.4 billion); a new anti-coal rule related to streams ($1.2 billion) and renewable fuel standards ($1.5 billion).
This follows Mr. Obama’s extraordinary announcement that he will invoke a dusty old law to place nearly all of the Arctic Ocean, and much of the Atlantic Ocean, off limits to oil or gas drilling. This follows his highly politicized move to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. And it comes amid reports the administration is rushing to implement last-minute rules on commodities speculation, immigrant workers and for-profit colleges—among others.
Any action that is rushed is likely to be shoddy, especially if it’s from the federal government. The point is for Mr. Obama to have his way and to swamp the Trump administration with a dizzying array of new rules to have to undo. That diverts manpower from bigger and better priorities.
President Obama is hoping this work will prove too much and his rules will stand. He’d be making a good bet. George W. Bush promised to undo last-minute Clinton regulations. Yet a paper done in 2005 by Jason M. Loring and Liam R. Roth in Wake Forest Law Review found that a whopping 82% were left to stand.
Then again, a Republican Congress seems ready and willing to invoke the Congressional Review Act, which allows legislators to reject rule-making. More important, Mr. Trump and his team seem to understand that Americans are angry at Mr. Obama’s tendency to rule like an autocrat. They also surely know how damaging many of these Obama parting gifts (particularly energy rules) will prove to their own agenda.
A Trump administration could send a powerful message to future presidents and build public support by highlighting the “midnight regulation” phenomenon and then making it a priority to ax every final Obama order. Single them out. Make a public list. Celebrate every repeal. That would be as profound a rebuke to the Obama legacy—a legacy based on abuse of power—as any other.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-midnight-regulation-express-1482451192
It's amazing how he is openly setting as many time bombs and obstacles in front of Trump on his way out the door. Freeing criminals, allowing more illegals and 'migrants' from terrorist countries to enter the country. Even announced to have mass regulations added, strengthening existing ones to make it nearly impossible to change. Fundamentally destroying America.
If you have the space and people don't mind looking at it which most do. Reminds me of 43's wind farms before he became President. If one has the space and few have to look at it. Would be tough in CA. Even Moonbeam isn't pushing it. Would have to take away farming land. Heck, Moonbeam didn't build water storage over 4, four year terms other than to replace one he didn't like. Then cut the water allotments to the farmers. His 'bullet train' has been put off until 2022 now so don't expect that to happen either despite slicing off taxpayer money for years now. Stole a bunch of private property for that boondoggle. Wonder what happened to the money?......
James Madison Thwarts Obama From Beyond the Grave
"Our Founders' political system disadvantages Democrats," he bitterly complains.
Louis DeBroux · Dec. 21, 2016
In his last press conference of the year, Barack Obama began whining when asked about the Electoral College, which on Monday voted for Donald Trump to become the next U.S. president, and in the process [denied the Oval Office to Hillary Clinton, who would have continued and expanded Obama's lawless behavior and his trampling of the Constitution.
And therein lies Obama's disdain and contempt for the Constitution; it is an impediment to his desire for imperial executive rule and the creation of a permanent socialist democracy in America. The "fundamental transformation of the United States," if you will.
"So there are some structures in our political system, as envisioned by the Founders, that sometimes are going to disadvantage Democrats," Obama bitterly complained. Fortunately, he's right.
After tossing a bone to our electoral process — "it's the American people's job, and now the electors' job to decide my successor" — Obama proceeded to complain about the Electoral College, which gave Donald Trump an overwhelming electoral victory despite losing the aggregate popular vote by more than 2.5 million votes, or 2.1%.
Obama described the Electoral College as "a vestige [and] a carryover from an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on states." He continued, "It's the same type of thinking that gives Wyoming two senators with about half a million people, and California with 33 million gets the same two."
For once, when speaking of the Constitution, Obama is right. The Founders did put a premium on the power and influence of the states in limiting the power of a majoritarian government, which they saw as a necessary evil but a danger to the rights of citizens. Democrats constantly speak of America as a democracy, when the truth is that America has never been a democracy — it's a republic. In fact, the Founders took great care to prevent the evils of democracy, which is little more than mob rule.
To better understand the brilliance of the Electoral College, one has only to look at where Trump won versus where Clinton won. There are 3,142 counties in the United States. In the 2016 election, as the election map by county shows, Trump won 2,623 to Hillary's 490. America is a sea of Republican red with densely populated pockets of Democrat blue in the major urban areas like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In fact, if you take away Clinton's 4.3 million vote margin of victory in California, Trump wins the rest of the country by about 1.5 million votes.
And that is exactly why the Founders created the Electoral College; so that presidents would be forced to represent every American, and not just those in the major cities.
Make no mistake. Obama, though feigning an air of detachment, is livid with the results of the election. Why? Because Obama knows full well that his policies have been extremely unpopular, and that without Hillary in the White House, his legacy, such as it is, is toast.
He has run roughshod over the Constitution and the separation of powers, achieving most of his "accomplishments" through "a phone and a pen," as he liked to say. His so-called achievements were primarily the result of unlawful executive orders, regulatory overreach and blatant violations of the Constitution. All the while, he mockingly told Republicans to sue him if they didn't like it — which they did, winning an astonishing 44 cases in which the Supreme Court issued unanimous rulings against Obama. He lost even more in lower courts.
The Obama years have been a case study in abuse of power, unconstitutional actions and despotism. Obama's signature achievement, "ObamaCare," barely passed on a party-line vote near midnight on Christmas Eve, and only then after Harry Reid openly bribed and/or threatened any Democrat senator who did not fall in line. Once signed into law, the bastardized monstrosity, cobbled together in a festering tapestry of legislative creepy-crawlies oozing forth from the minds of radical leftist Democrats, immediately began to run into major logistical and actuarial problems.
"No worries," cried Obama, "I'll rewrite the law myself!" And he did, literally dozens of times, extending deadlines, issuing waivers to Democrat donors, shifting money from Medicare to ObamaCare without an appropriation by Congress, issuing ACA tax credits for illegal immigrants, exempting labor unions, refusing to enforce abortion restrictions, etc.
This, of course, was just one of many times that Obama showed his utter contempt for the Constitution's limitations on his power.
Obama weaponized the IRS, using it to attack and harass conservative critics. He declared the right to determine when the Senate — part of a co-equal branch of government — was officially in session, making recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board despite the Senate still being in pro forma session (this was one of the unanimous SCOTUS decisions against Obama). He threatened colleges with loss of federal funding and investigations by the Justice Department if they didn't crack down on "unwelcome" speech (i.e., conservative speech), and, as reported in Forbes, demanded that sexual harassment complaints at colleges be heard in "quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere 'more likely than not' standard."
Obama also instituted a de facto amnesty for illegals. He launched an unauthorized war against Libya. His EPA interpreted the Clean Water Rule so broadly that the feds can regulate large water puddles on private property. The same EPA vastly expanded the scope of the Clean Power Plan such that it was able to begin forcing dozens of coal plants to shut down.
Even all this is just the tip of the iceberg, as evidenced by this list of Obama's unconstitutional actions compiled by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), including his unlawful dismissal of work requirements for welfare recipients, his demand for Boeing to fire 1,000 employees and shut down a new plant in right-to-work South Carolina, his unlawful moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, his violation of decades of bankruptcy law in bailing out GM/Chrysler by giving favored terms to unsecured creditors — the UAW — while forcing secured creditors — including pension plans for millions of middle class Americans — to take massive losses.
Sadly, decades of horribly inadequate or inaccurate public education has left a vast portion of American citizens ignorant about the principles and structure of our republican/federalist government, and why it's a safeguard for individual liberties against the encroaching power of a leviathan government.
Obama spent the last eight years acting like a king, when in reality he is nothing but a petty tyrant with a slick PR machine and obedient legions of minions willing to do his bidding.
Luckily, James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," foresaw such tyranny, and created a complex system which distributed powers among the branches and levels of government, and in doing so he has thwarted Obama's aims from beyond the grave.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/46572
Higher Education And The Media: Institutions In Decline
Victor Davis Hansen interview:
http://www.hoover.org/research/classicist-higher-education-and-media-institutions-decline?utm_source=hdr&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2016-12-19
Would like to see TNN (Trump Nocturnal News) go away. Time to be President, it's mostly a day job.
Higher Education And The Media: Institutions In Decline
Victor Davis Hansen interview:
http://www.hoover.org/research/classicist-higher-education-and-media-institutions-decline?utm_source=hdr&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2016-12-19
Would like to see TNN (Trump Nocturnal News) go away. Time to be President, it's mostly a day job.
Rex Tillerson interview on Charlie Rose (2013)
Rex Tillerson interview on Charlie Rose (2013)
Republicans stopped voting here a long time ago. The exception is for local areas where we still can get an R due to numbers living here. Plus the new voter registrations this year are 1 of 3 are Hispanics. Guess that BO, JB plan to let the flow of illegals vote but not have to pay taxes is working out just fine........ Our 'invisible' economy is quite large here so the rest of us have to 'pick up the slack'.
Report: Hillary Planning Yet Another Run For President in 2020
Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com - November 29, 2016
Just when you thought it was safe to forget about her, reports are emerging that Hillary Clinton is already planning yet another run for president in 2020.
According to National Journal columnist Ron Fournier, Hillary’s involvement in Jill Stein’s widely derided recount is all part of the agenda.
“Raising doubts about legitimacy of election, even w/out overturning result, is part of Clinton’s plans to keep her options open for 2020,” tweets Fournier.
Another part of the strategy is the endless series of “random viral selfies” Clinton has taken with voters while walking in the woods. By portraying herself as a regular person, Hillary is attempting to eschew the reality that she is a completely out of touch elitist.
“This is also why she’s “randomly” appeared with so many Dem operatives/PR flacks in grocery stores and on hiking trails recently, btw,” tweets Sonny Bunch, editor of the Washington Free Beacon.
“These encounters seem about as spontaneous her entire presidential campaign, which was excruciatingly conventional,” writes Andrew Stiles.
Indeed, many observers suggested that at least one of the encounters was totally staged for a public relations stunt.
Clinton, whose ailing health became a huge focus of the 2016 campaign, will be 73-years-old by the time of the next election.
“If you think you’re depressed about the thought of Hillary Clinton 2020, imagine how Democrats feel!” jokes Jim Geraghty.
(One good thing is the high speed train's first section has been delayed until 2022. Hopefully, the next Governor will 'get it' and cancel the loser project.)
http://www.infowars.com/report-hillary-planning-yet-another-run-for-president-in-2020/
Mitch gets lost in himself from time to time......
Tillerson Is A Great Choice For State – Lunch Alert!
By Dick Morris on December 14, 2016
http://www.dickmorris.com/tillerson-great-choice-state-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
Tillerson Is A Great Choice For State – Lunch Alert!
By Dick Morris on December 14, 2016
http://www.dickmorris.com/tillerson-great-choice-state-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
Registration surges but GOP's share shrinks—1 in 3 new voters is Latino
(best to go to link to see charts, etc. This state should not be 'all or none'. If we made a difference and electors were portioned with the vote, massive numbers of Rs would be voting more for the President of our choice and continuing the focus on local races.)
https://calmatters.org/articles/states-voter-rolls-are-surgingand-1-in-3-new-voters-is-latino/
Nice we had BO around to give them their financing to do it.....
The Sexist Man Alive.
PragerU
https://www.prageru.com/courses/life-studies/sexiest-man-alive
The Sexist Man Alive.
PragerU
https://www.prageru.com/courses/life-studies/sexiest-man-alive
thought I had included it. sorry.
Chicago Board of Elections Refused Nine Republican Candidates Ballot Access
CBOE Threw Out 72% of the Republicans’ Signatures
As with fish, the Chicago Board of Elections (CBOE) is rotting from the head down. The Cook County Circuit Court is currently deciding whether or not to remove CBOE Chairman Langdon Neal from office. During his 15 year tenure, CBOE Chairman Neal has personally earned $30 to $40 million from numerous and substantial conflicts of interests. Neal’s law firm received over $100 million from the same public officials whose elections he conducted and certified. It doesn’t stop there. Neal personally collected over $11 million in fees for lobbying the mayor and aldermen whose elections he previously oversaw.
In spite of the intense scrutiny of Neal’s private legal business conflicting with his election commissioner duties, Neal continues to abuse his election authority. Recently CBOE Chairman Neal and his underlings denied ballot access to all nine Illinois Republican state legislative candidates who filed to run against Democrats in November, 2012. The boundaries for these nine legislative districts are partially or completely in Chicago
Illinois election law requires state representative and state senator candidates to submit a minimum number of signatures for their names to appear on the ballot. The number of required signatures varies with each candidate’s district. Three of the nine Republican candidates–Scott Campbell, George MaAyteh, and Tom Morris–needed a minimum of 1,000 valid signatures and the remaining six candidates needed at least 500 valid signatures (see table below).
CBOE Chairman Neal and two other CBOE commissioners had the final authority to determine the validity of the signatures submitted by all candidates. The CBOE commissioners denied ballot access to all nine Republican candidates for the very same reason: insufficient number of valid signatures.
Republican Signature Statistics1
(link provides full chart)
3,294 is the total number of valid signatures
8,561 is the total number of invalid signatures
72% is the total percentage of invalidated signatures
The fact that the CBOE denied all nine Republican candidates ballot access is highly suspicious. Invalidating an average of 72% of the Republican candidates’ signatures warrants a criminal investigation. One or two Republicans with 72% invalid signatures would be a startling statistic. But 72% as an average for all nine Republican candidates can only mean the CBOE was biased in favor of the Democrats and prejudiced against the Republicans.
The CBOE preventing non-machine candidates’ names from appearing on the ballot has been going on for years. Sixteen years ago Barack Obama ran unopposed for the Illinois state senate because the CBOE invalidated 62% of Obama’s four opponents’ signatures.
The Democratic Controlled State Legislature and the CBOE are in Cahoots
The CBOE commissioners, the circuit court judges who appointed the them, the City of Chicago executive branch who hired CBOE employees, and Democratic state legislators are all important parts of the Chicago machine. Each facet of the Chicago machine plays a role in denying the Republican candidates ballot access.
The Illinois state legislature wrote the law that established the appointment of the three CBOE election commissioners. In fact, according to Illinois election law commissioners must maintain their partisanship or face removal from office. The election law states that if either the Democratic or Republican party is not represented on the election board, then the circuit court must remove one commissioner and replace him or her with a commissioner from the unrepresented party. The problem has been that the Republican party has not had any true representation on the CBOE board for over 25 years. In other words, the circuit court judges are failing to follow Illinois election law. Circuit court judges don’t want to appoint a true Republican election commissioner because it would make it more difficult for the CBOE board to deny ballot access to non-machine candidates.
The Illinois election law that requires the circuit court to appoint partisan, Chicago election commissioners is outdated. Chicago doesn’t hold partisan elections any more. In 1994 the city switched from partisan elections to non-partisan elections. Candidates for aldermen, city clerk, city treasurer, and mayor do not run with any party affiliation. Hence, the election law that requires partisan Chicago election commissioners does not accurately reflect the city only holding non-partisan elections to elect its public officials.
The same political machine bosses who control the elections for state senator and state representative also control the elections for Cook County judges. Since these circuit court judges are beholden to the machine bosses who put them on the bench, circuit court judges appoint whomever the machine honchos want as CBOE election commissioners. Circuit court judges must obey their machine bosses when dealing with the CBOE or the judges will face the wrath of the machine when they are up for reelection.
The Democratic state legislators who are members of the machine write the election law that the CBOE applies to each candidate and each election. The CBOE’s interpretation of Illinois election laws depends on a candidate’s status with the machine. CBOE commissioners liberally apply Illinois election laws in favor of machine candidates every chance they can. On the other hand, CBOE commissioners narrowly apply Illinois election law to stop non-machine candidates from appearing on the ballot when it is the least bit feasible. Since the nine Republican candidates dared to defy the Chicago machine by merely attempting to run for public office, the CBOE evaluated their signatures with the strictest possible standards.
It seems obvious that candidates making it on the Chicago ballot has more to do with the candidates affiliation with the machine then it does with the U.S. Constitution or Illinois election law.
Biased CBOE Election Commissioners is Not Enough to Favor the Machine
It’s not just the CBOE election commissioners who show favoritism to machine candidates. As with CBOE election commissioners many of the 124 CBOE workers were hired at the behest of influential Chicago machine honchos. From 1988 to 2004 the Daley administration illegally hired thousands of workers, including those working at the CBOE. Chicago patronage workers’ jobs depended upon them campaigning for Mayor Richard M. Daley and Daley’s favored candidates. Voters are still feeling the effect of the job rigging scandal that gave Daley and his allies an insurmountable advantage at the polls. Fair and competitive Chicago elections are impossible as long as a majority of CBOE employees continue to take orders from their machine sponsors.
The Democratic controlled Illinois state legislature established an extremely adversarial and onerous signature validation process for the purpose of helping the CBOE deny non-machine candidates ballot access. Because Democrats at the CBOE control ballot access, the more state legislators wrote election laws to make it difficult to access the ballot, the more it benefited Democratic candidates. The November, 2012 election is a perfect example. As a result of the CBOE denying nine Republican candidates ballot access, nine Democratic candidates will now run unopposed.
If Illinois Democratic state legislators spent as much time working on the state’s fiscal problems as they did conniving ways to protect their machine and political offices, the state of Illinois could dig itself out of the massive debt incurred by these self-serving Democratic public officials.
Related Article
Obama’s Win at All Cost Strategy Violated His Four Opponents’ Civil Rights
Notes
To view the CBOE decisions on the nine Republican candidates, click here. Their names are listed in column 3. To read the CBOE decisions for each Republican candidate, click the word “Decision” that is highlighted in blue on the left-hand side of the page.
The number of valid and invalid signatures listed in the table comes directly from the CBOE’s decisions. A candidate’s percentage of invalid signatures was determined by the following formula: the number of the candidate’s invalid signatures divided by the total number of signatures the candidate submitted. The CBOE listed the total number of each candidates’ signatures in its descions. The total number of each candidate’s signatures can also be derived by adding the valid signatures in column 2 with the invalid signatures in column 3.
Obama’s Strategy to Win at All Costs Violated His Challengers’ Civil Rights (go to webpage for charts)
The Chicago Board of Elections’ Biased Decisions Eliminated Barack Obama’s Four Opponents for State Senate
Political pundits often joke about Chicago corruption: “Vote early, vote often.” “Chicago is where the dead resurface to vote.” The Chicago machine has controlled the Chicago Board of Elections (CBOE) since the early 1990s. To insure that Cook County Circuit Court judges would receive favorable treatment from the CBOE when they ran for office, local judges appointed a corruptible, third generation Chicago machine politician named Langdon Neal to head the CBOE. Neal is infamous because his law firm received $101 million in no-bid government contracts from the same politicians whose elections he conducted and certified.
With influential members such as Langdon Neal in charge of the CBOE, the machine no longer needs the dead to vote or voters to stuff the ballot boxes. The Chicago political mafia found a much easier way to win their elections. The political hacks in charge of the CBOE use their election authority to stop candidates who are unaffiliated with the machine from appearing on the ballot. Machine candidates have an unimpeded path to public offices because they often run unopposed–like Barack Obama did when he won his first election in 1996.
The machine’s henchmen working at the CBOE showed Barack Obama’s four 1996 state senate opponents no mercy. The CBOE ruled that 62% of the signatures that these opponents submitted with their nominating petitions were invalid. Two of Obama’s state senate challengers were so outraged, they filed federal court lawsuits. However, the two Obama opponents who sued could not present the evidence nor make the arguments below because in 1996 ballot access information wasn’t readily available on the Internet. Whether it is a future U.S. presidential candidate or candidates for other offices, unjustly denying anyone their inalienable right to run for office is unconstitutional and no laughing matter.
Obama Chose a Surrogate to Do His Dirty Work
According to Chicago election laws, a challenger must come forward to object to signatures on nominating petitions. Because candidates want to make it appear that they respect their opponents’ and constituents’ civil rights, they appoint a trustworthy surrogate to challenge their opponents’ nominating signatures. During Obama’s 1996 state senate primary race, it was Obama campaign worker Ron Davis who acted as Obama’s surrogate. The fact that Harvard law school graduate Barack Obama chose Ron Davis instead of himself to knock his four opponents off the ballot shows that Barack Obama was steeped in dirty Chicago politics from the inception of his political career.
Ron Davis’ name appeared as the objector to the nominating petitions of Obama’s four opponents, but there is little doubt it was Barack Obama who provided Davis with a lawyer. According to CBOE records, a lawyer represented Davis through the entire objection process that eliminated Obama’s four challengers. Attorney Thomas Edward Jones represented both Barack Obama and Ron Davis in one of Obama’s challenger’s federal court lawsuits.
Altogether, Obama’s four opponents submitted 5,865 signatures. Obama and Davis’s lawyer had to carefully scrutinize all 5,865 signatures before the attorney for the Davis-Obama state senate campaign filed formal objections with the CBOE. Because the Davis-Obama lawyer challenged more than 4,000 of Obama’s opponents’ 5,865 signatures, the attorney needed to attend a minimum of two or three full days of hearings while the CBOE compared the signatures from Obama’s opponents with the signatures that the CBOE had on file.
The CBOE was Prejudiced in Favor of Obama
The names of Barack Obama’s four 1996 state senate primary opponents are as follows: Gha-is F. Askia, Marc Ewell, Ulmer D. Lynch Jr., and Alice J. Palmer (See Table 1 below). The four candidates who wanted to run against Obama turned in 529 to 1,142 signatures more than the legal requirement of 757. Yet an insufficient number of valid signatures was the reason all four of Barack Obama’s opponents were denied the opportunity to run against the future president. Obama’s four opponents were not frivolous candidates seeking publicity. Who knew in 1996 that first-time state senate candidate Barack Obama would be elected president of the United States in 2008?
The CBOE’s rejection of 62% of Obama’s state senate opponents’ signatures is quite a revealing and shocking statistic. It wasn’t just one of Obama’s opponents who allegedly turned in a majority of bogus signatures. Remember the 62% invalid signature rate is for all four Obama opponents. There is not an election board in the U.S. that invalidates candidates’ signatures anywhere close to the 62% that Obama’s opponents endured.
More Proof the CBOE was Biased in Favor of Obama
No objector came forward to challenge Obama’s state senate signatures; hence, no one knows the number or percentage of invalid signatures Obama might have submitted to the CBOE when he filed for state senator in 1996. The invalidation of Obama’s opponents’ signatures at a rate of 62% certainly suggests the CBOE was biased in his favor. However, there is more compelling proof that the CBOE gave Obama special treatment. The percentage of invalid signatures was significantly lower for candidates who ran in other state senate and state representative districts at the same time as Obama (Table 2).
Richard D. Taylor was the only other state senate candidate who was denied ballot access by the CBOE for invalid signatures at the same time CBOE election commissioners were denying Obama’s four challengers ballot access. CBOE election commissioners determined that 43% of Taylor’s signatures were invalid. However, Taylor’s invalid signatures were 19% fewer than the 62% average for Obama’s four opponents.
The election laws that determined the validity of the candidates’ signatures in Table 2 and of Obama’s four opponents in Table 1 are one and the same. Richard Cowen, Michael Hamblet, and Annette Hubbard were the same election commissioners who ruled on all four Obama cases and the 10 election cases listed in Table 2. Cowen, Hamblet, and Hubbard decided the challenges to 9 of the 10 candidates in Table 2 within 14 days of deciding the election cases against Obama’s four opponents.
The CBOE’s Questionable Decisions Made Barack Obama the Chosen One
The CBOE declared 62% of Obama’s four opponents’ signatures invalid, yet the CBOE deemed that only 36% of 10 other Illinois legislative candidates’ signatures were invalid. The figures of 62% and 36% were the result of the same CBOE officials using the same Illinois elections laws to evaluate candidates’ signatures during the same period of time. Barack Obama’s candidacy in one legislative race is the key variable that is different.
The invalid signature difference of 26% between Obama’s opponents and the 10 other Illinois state legislative candidates clearly shows the CBOE was biased in favor of state senate candidate Barack Obama or prejudiced against Obama’s four opponents. There is no other way to explain why the CBOE deemed so many more of Obama’s four opponents’ signatures were invalid other than the fact that Barack Obama was the CBOE’s chosen one.
Obama opponent Alice Palmer was highly educated and politically experienced. In fact, Palmer was the incumbent state senator when the CBOE denied her a chance to run for reelection. Palmer graduated with a master’s degree in urban studies from Roosevelt University and a PH.D. in education administration from Northwestern University. Given Palmer’s political experience and education, other than the CBOE commissioners and employees’ favoritism of Obama, it’s hard to comprehend why Palmer failed to reach the 757 valid signatures that were necessary for her name to appear on the ballot. Palmer never forgot Obama’s mistreatment of her; Palmer was a Hillary Clinton delegate at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Indeed, the CBOE and the machine honchos wanted Barack Obama in the state senate and they were ready to violate his opponents’ civil rights if necessary. Table 1 shows that candidates Askia, Ewell, Lynch Jr., and Palmer combined to turn in two and half times the amount of legally required signatures; thus, the CBOE needed to invalidate a high percentage of them in order to stop the four from appearing on the ballot with Obama. State senate candidate Obama needed the CBOE to invalidate his opponents’ signatures at a rate of 62% and that was what Obama got. Had Obama needed his opponents’ signatures invalidated at 70% or 75%, he would have gotten that from the CBOE.
Obama was the machine’s choice for state senator, and the CBOE made sure Obama assumed office without facing any Democratic primary opposition. Obama’s state senate district voted 80% Democratic in the general election. When the CBOE handed Obama an uncontested primary victory, the CBOE guaranteed Obama an Illinois state senate seat.
Indeed the lessons Obama learned from his first state senate election remain with him. Obama extended the CBOE’s unchecked power and corruption while in the White House. President Obama suspiciously invited CBOE Chairman Langdon Neal to the White House nine days before Neal decided an election case in favor of Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
Barack Obama has a reputation as a civil rights icon, but there is no record of Barack Obama making any effort to change the onerous signature requirements needed to run for political office or the ballot access process that allowed him to run unopposed in his very first election. As a state senator, Obama was in a position to write a senate bill to make it easier for candidates to reach the ballot. Moreover, the CBOE would have been obligated to follow any Illinois election law that Obama championed through the Illinois legislature. Barack Obama neither wrote such a bill nor championed such a cause.
Related Article
The Chicago Board of Elections Refuses to Let Nine Republican Candidates on the Ballot
Notes
1. To view the CBOE records on Barack Obama’s four state senate primary opponents, click here and scroll down to 1996. You’ll see Obama’s objector Ron Davis’ last name listed three times in column 2 and three Obama opponents’ last names listed in column 3 on the bottom of page 49. Obama opponent Askia’s name is listed in column 3 at the top of page 50. To read the CBOE’s decisions concerning the four Obama challengers, click the word “Decision” that is highlighted in blue on the right-hand side of the page.
The number of signatures filed and the number of signatures the CBOE invalidated are clearly stated in Gha-is F. Askia and Marc Ewell CBOE decisions.
The CBOE did not include the total number of signatures that Ulmer D. Lynch Jr. filed nor the total number of signatures the CBOE invalidated. Therefore, these numbers were deduced from the CBOE’s decision. According to the CBOE decision, Lynch Jr. had 350 signatures on the 14 sheets that the CBOE did not review. This means Lynch Jr.’s petition sheets had 25 signatures on each sheet (350 signatures ÷ 14 sheets = 25 signatures per sheet). Lynch Jr. filed 44 sheets with 25 signatures. The total number of signatures on Lynch Jr.’s 44 petition sheets was 1,100 signatures (44 petition sheets x 25 signatures per page =1,100 signatures).
During the CBOE’s examination of Lynch Jr.’s first 750 signatures, the CBOE accepted 222 signatures and rejected 528 signatures (30 sheets x 25 signatures per sheet = 750 signatures and 750 total signatures – 222 valid signatures = 528 invalid signatures). The CBOE deemed 70% of Lynch Jr.’s signatures invalid (528 invalid signatures ÷ 750 total examined signatures = 70% invalid signatures).
At this point the CBOE stopped Lynch Jr.’s hearing because it was mathematically impossible for him to reach the legal requirement of 757 signatures. Because Lynch Jr. could not reach the legal minimum with his remaining signatures, the CBOE did not review Lynch Jr.’s last 14 petition sheets. CBOE’s 70% rejection rate of Lynch Jr.’s signatures was extrapolated to include all of Lynch Jr.’s 1,100 signatures, including the Lynch Jr. signatures on the 14 petition sheets that the CBOE did not examine.
The CBOE’s Alice Palmer decision did not state the number of Palmer’s invalid signatures because Palmer withdrew from the race against Barack Obama after the CBOE invalidated nearly two-thirds of the signatures she filed. There are numerous stories circulating the Web about the Obama-Palmer feud, and her dropping out of the 1996 state senate race. For starters, click here or here.
The Obama camp made unfounded claims that Palmer circulators sat around a table and fraudulently signed voters’ names to her petitions. Obama supporters have offered no evidence or proof to support their “round tabling” accusations against Palmer. Obama’s supporters’ unproven vote fraud accusation against Palmer is an attempt to justify denying her ballot access. Obama backers need to recant their vote fraud claims and apologize to Palmer unless they can provide solid proof of Palmer’s vote fraud.
2. To view the information on the 10 legislative candidates who filed their petitions at the same time as Barack Obama, click here. The files I reviewed start with state senatorial candidate Schreiner, 4th name from the bottom listed on page 48, and end with state senatorial candidate Anderson III, 4th from the top on page 50. Several names listed were frivolous candidates who only submitted 1, 7, 16, etc., signatures when several hundred signatures were required. Frivolous candidates were not included in Table 2 because the CBOE did not need to examine the signatures to know that frivolous candidates did not meet the minimum signature requirements to appear on the ballot.
http://stoneformayor.com/obamas-strategy-to-win-at-all-costs-violated-his-challengers-civil-rights/
You can believe the contrarians all you like. They probably not living in this state. Plus, it's like saying that the Government doesn't lie to the citizens. The BO administration ordered the reading to NOT be revealed. Go ahead, eat that great Alaska salmon and really much out on the tuna. yum, yum.......
Thomas Friedman: A Field Guide to the 21st Century
Thomas Friedman: A Field Guide to the 21st Century
Groundbreaking Diplomacy: An Interview with George Shultz
(if you go to the link, it includes the photos of their meetings and it's easier to skip over the declarations)
George Shultz reflects on his tenure as Secretary of State in the Reagan administration and the process of making foreign policy and conducting diplomacy during the decade leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union.
BY JAMES E. GOODBY
Editor’s Note: George P. Shultz is an economist and Republican presidential adviser best known for serving as Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan. He joined the Nixon administration in 1969 and served as secretary of Labor, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of the Treasury. Shultz was president of Bechtel and an economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan when he was tapped to replace Alexander Haig as Secretary of State in 1982. He served for the remainder of Reagan’s time in office, and was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1989.
The Foreign Service Journal is pleased to publish this transcript of James E. Goodby’s interview with the former Secretary of State. The interview was conducted in October 2015 in connection with a study at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on governance in America, but it was never published. The general theme of their conversation is how Secretary Shultz perceived his service to President Ronald Reagan, whom he served for six years, and the Secretary’s reflections on President Reagan’s approach to strategic thinking.
James E. Goodby: Mr. Secretary, we have talked before about your role as Secretary of State in the Reagan administration. What I would like to do is sound you out about Ronald Reagan, about presidents, and about your relations with the White House. I would like to begin by quoting something from your 1993 memoir, Turmoil and Triumph. In it, you said something that struck me very forcefully: that Reagan, like any president, had his flaws and strengths, and the job of an adviser was to build on his strengths and try to help him overcome whatever flaws he might have. What struck me about that observation was that it was rather similar to something that Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote about his relationship with President Harry Truman.
George Shultz: I think the Secretary of State needs to have the same attitude any other Cabinet officer does. People would ask me what my foreign policy was, and I always said, “I do not have one; the president has one. My job is to help him formulate it and carry it out, but it is the president’s foreign policy.” So I think you need to be clear about who is the guy who got elected.
However, I had something special that President Reagan suggested himself. We had twice-weekly private meetings,just the two of us. Of course, we would talk about whatever he wanted to talk about, and I always had an agenda of my own. We tried to look over the horizon and not make any decisions, but in the process, I got to know him very well. I think that in all of my early associations with him, which went back quite a bit before I became his Secretary of State, we had managed to build between us (and also between Nancy and me) a relationship of trust. He knew that I would tell him what I thought, and he also knew that I knew it was his foreign policy, not mine. So we had good conversations, but underneath it all was trust.
One of the outstanding things about President Reagan was his consistency and the way he handled himself. People trusted him. Here is an example. One time [German Chancellor] Helmut Kohl came to Washington about four months before the president was to go to Germany. Kohl said, “When [French President François] Mitterrand and I went to a cemetery where French and German soldiers were buried, we had a handshake. It was publicized and was very good for both of us. You are coming to Germany, Mr. President; would you come to a cemetery and do the same thing?”
President Reagan agreed. Then the Germans sent word they had picked the cemetery, a place called Bitburg, and someWhite House person did a little checking and said OK. But once they shoveled the snow off the gravestones and discovered SS troops were buried there, all hell broke loose.
I remember Elie Wiesel came to the White House and said, “Mr. President, your place is not with the SS; your place is with the victims of the SS.” It was lots of pressure. We tried to get the Germans to change the site. We made a lot of suggestions for alternatives, and they would not change. So, in the end, he went.
After that, he went home and I went to Israel to be the speaker at the unveiling of the outdoor Yad Vashem [Israel’s official Holocaust memorial]. When I came back to Washington, I stopped in London for a talk with [British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher. She said to me, “You know, there is not another leader in the free world that would have taken the political beating at home your president took to deliver on a promise that he made. But one thing you can be sure of with Ronald Reagan: If he gives you his word, that is it.”
And that is a very important thing to establish: that you are good for your word.
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DoD did not like the idea of negotiating, but President Reagan did. … And in the fall of 1985 we had the big meeting in Geneva between President Reagan and then-Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev.
JEG: Another thing you said in your memoir is that it is not just having strength that gives an advantage to a nation, but knowing what to do with it. President Reagan was ready to negotiate [with the Soviets], but some of his advisers were not so ready. You backed him up, and that contributed to his strength. I presume you thought that he would be as successful as he was with your support. Could you tell us a little about that part of it?
GS: I have always felt that strength and diplomacy go together. If you go to a negotiation and you do not have any strength, you are going to get your head handed to you. On the other hand, the willingness to negotiate builds strength because you are using it for a constructive purpose. If it is strength with no objective to be gained, it loses its meaning. So I think they go together. These are not alternative ways of going about things.
JEG: You have also said that there is a tendency in Washington to go to one extreme or the other, either to all military strength or to all diplomacy, and that the task of blending the two together is very difficult. Can you give us some real-life examples of that from the Reagan administration?
GS: Actually, I don’t think it is difficult. I think it is like breathing. Of course, they go together. There is no other way. When I went into the job of Secretary of State, our relations with the Soviet Union were almost non-existent, very strained. President Jimmy Carter had cut off nearly all ties after they invaded Afghanistan, and it was still tense.
I’d had quite a lot of experience in dealing with the Soviets when I was Secretary of the Treasury. I had worked out quite a few deals and spent time there. So I managed to negotiate. I worked a deal to meet with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, once a week. The object was to resolve little irritants so they did not grow into big problems.
In early 1983, I returned to Andrews Air Force Base from a visit to China on a Friday morning, and it was snowing so hard I was lucky to land. It snowed all day Friday, Friday night and into Saturday morning. So the Reagans are stuck in the White House. They cannot go to Camp David. Our phone rings, and Nancy says, “How about you and your wife come over for supper?” The four of us sit around, we are having a good time, and they start asking me about the Chinese leaders. What kind of people are they? Do they have a bottom line? Can you find a bottom line? Do they have a sense of humor? And so on.
Then they knew I had dealt with the Soviets when I was at Treasury, so they started asking me about them. A lot of them were still in office. All of a sudden, it dawns on me: This man has never had a real conversation with a big-time communist leader, and he is dying to have one.
So I said to him, “Next Tuesday at 5, Ambassador Dobrynin is coming in for one of my regular sessions. What if I bring him over here and you talk to him?” He said that would be great, and it will not take long, just 10 minutes. All I want to tell him is that if their new leader, Yuri Andropov (who had just succeeded Leonid Brezhnev), is interested in a constructive conversation, then I am ready.”
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President Reagan and I both thought that foreign policy starts in your own neighborhood. If you have a strong, cohesive neighborhood, you have a much better base then, if something goes wrong.
That attitude was totally different from the atmosphere that people thought existed. The White House staff tried to kill the meeting, but the president had decided he wanted to have it, so we did. We were in there for at least an hour and a half, and Reagan talked about everything under the sun. About a third of the time, he talked about Soviet Jewry and how they were being mistreated.
Then he brought up the Pentecostals. Do you remember during the Carter administration, a group of them had rushed our embassy in Moscow? They had not been allowed to emigrate or worship the way they wanted, and we could not expel them from the building because they would probably be killed, but it was a very uncomfortable thing. President Reagan kept saying, “It is like a big neon sign in Moscow saying, ‘We do not treat people right. We do not let them worship the way they want.’ You ought to do something about it.”
Dobrynin and I were riding back to the State Department afterward, and we agreed, “Hey, let us make this our special project.” So we exchanged memos back and forth. Finally, I got one that was pretty good, and I brought it over to the White House. I said, “Mr. President, any lawyer would say that you could drive a truck through the holes in this memo, but I have to believe after all this background, that if we get them to leave the embassy, they will be allowed to go home and eventually emigrate.” We talked about it and decided to roll the dice. All the time the president talked about Soviet Jewry, and he just said, “I want something to happen. I will not say a word about credit. I just want something to happen.”
So we got the Pentecostals to leave the embassy. They were allowed to go home. A couple of months later, they were all allowed to emigrate along with their families, around 60 people. I said to the president, “The deal is: ‘we’ll let them go if you don’t crow.’” And he never said a word.
I’ve always thought this little incident, which was unknown, had some important implications. What Reagan learned was you can make a deal with these people, and even if it is kind of fuzzy, they will carry it out. And they learned the same thing. They knew how tempting it is for American politicians to say: Look what my predecessor did, and now look what I did. But President Reagan did not do that, so you could trust him. You could deal with him. You can deal with somebody you trust. You cannot deal with somebody you do not trust. It is very hard.
On the other hand, then there was a huge buildup of Soviet strength because—as you remember, Jim; you were involved in it—the Soviets deployed their SS-20 missiles, intermediate range, aimed at Europe. The diplomatic idea was if they attacked Europe with intermediate-range missiles, we would use our intercontinental missiles to retaliate, thereby bringing a retaliatory strike on us. That is how they were hoping to divide Europe from the United States.
We had a deal with NATO that we would negotiate with the Soviets, and if we could not reach a satisfactory conclusion, we would deploy our own intermediate-range missiles. We had a hard negotiation. At one point, the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner and we led the charge in condemning them.
We had a transcript of the Soviet pilot in contact with his ground control and some time elapsed. It showed that they consulted and they gave the pilot the go-ahead to shoot down the airliner. We read all this out. At the same time, stunning the hardline people, we sent our negotiators back to Geneva, and I went on with a meeting I had scheduled with [Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei] Gromyko. All this was, in part, to convince the European public that we were negotiating energetically.
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I tell myself not to look at my inbox; instead, I go sit in a comfortable chair with a pad and a pencil, take a deep breath, and ask myself: “What am I doing here? What are our strategic objectives and how are we doing?”
After the meeting, the interpreter, who had interpreted for a lot of meetings between Secretaries of State and Soviet foreign ministers, said it was the most bitter, contentious meeting he had ever seen. But it registered on Gromyko what we thought. The point is, we did deploy the cruise missiles in Britain and Italy, and then ballistic missiles in Germany, and it was a huge thing. The Soviets walked out of negotiations, and fanned war talk, but we stood up to it.
Early in 1984, we had a coordinated approach. President Reagan gave kind of a high-level, reasonably friendly speech, and I had a more operational one in a meeting which Gromyko and I attended in Stockholm that January. We were not yelling at each other. It was sort of constructive, and it was a huge moment.
Then, as time went on, things gradually cooled off a little. I was out here at Stanford for summer vacation, and the president was in Los Angeles. I went down there for a meeting and asked him for a little private time. I said, “Mr. President, at three or four of our embassies in Europe, a Soviet diplomat has come up to one of ours and he said virtually the same thing, which we think boils down to this: If Gromyko is invited to Washington when he comes to the United Nations in September, he will accept. Mr. President, you may want to think it over because President Carter canceled those meetings when they went into Afghanistan, and they are still there.” Reagan replied, “I do not have to think it over. Let’s get him here.”
In other words, the Soviets blinked. So Gromyko came, and it was a good meeting, with an interesting little sideline. I had a good relationship with Nancy Reagan and said to her, “Nancy, the routine here is he comes to the West Wing, we have a meeting in the Oval Office, and we walk down the colonnade to the mansion for some stand-around time. Then there is a working lunch. How about you being there during the stand-around time, since this is your home and you are the hostess?” She agreed.
We walked down there, Gromyko sees Nancy, and he goes right after her. At one point—and you know Nancy can bristle—Gromyko said, “Does your husband want peace?” Nancy bristled, “Of course, my husband wants peace.” Then Gromyko says, “Please whisper it in his ear every night before he goes to sleep: ‘peace.’”
He was a little taller than she was, so she put her hand on his shoulder and pulled him down so he had to bend his knee, and she said: “I will whisper it in your ear: peace.”
Anyway, after the 1984 election, which President Reagan won by a landslide, we resumed our meetings in Geneva from a position of strength. Our economy was really moving by that time, and we had built up our military strength. And the showdown over the INF missiles put us in a good position to negotiate.
Then along comes [Mikhail] Gorbachev. All of the preceding is pre-Gorbachev. I remember going over there with the U.S. delegation for the Andropov funeral. The president had given me a few things to say, but Vice President [George H.W.] Bush was there as the delegation head.
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President Reagan knew that I would tell him what I thought, and he also knew that I knew it was his foreign policy, not mine. So we had good conversations, but underneath it all was trust.
We were one of the last delegations to meet with Gorbachev. We met for over an hour. He had all these notes in front of him, but he shuffled them around and never looked at them. I had just a few things to say, which I said, and then I had the luxury of watching. Afterward, I said to our people, this is a different kind of man than any Soviet leader we have ever dealt with: more nimble. He is smarter, better informed. Still a hard-edge communist, but you can talk to him. He listens and then he answers, and he expects you to listen and answer back, and have a conversation. Usually, you say something, it goes by my ear, and I say something, it goes by your ear—and that is not a conversation. With Gorbachev, you can engage.
And that was how our negotiations started: from a position of strength. We knew what we wanted, we were strong, and we negotiated.
JEG: You and President Reagan had a very clear view of what you wanted to accomplish. You had trust between you and yet, as you mentioned earlier, there were people in the White House who did not agree with what you both wanted to do. So that makes me wonder how Secretaries of State, in general, manage to get and keep a president’s ear in spite of all of these other pressures to do something else. What is the secret of your success in this? To quote another striking line from your memoir: “I learned to exercise responsibility in a sea of uncertain authority.” How did you manage that?
GS: I think I would rewrite that line now, because there was no uncertain authority. The president was the authority, I had my meetings with him, and I had my insight from that long evening about where his instincts were. So that gave me the basis for proceeding, but there was a huge analytical difference of opinion in Washington. There were people who thought basically the Soviet Union was there and they would never really change.
Reagan had a different idea. If you read his Westminster speech in 1982, it is very striking because he thought they were basically weak, and they would in the end change if we were strong enough in deterrence. I think George F. Kennan in his Long Telegram said something similar: If we can contain the Soviets long enough, they will look inward; they will not like what they see, and they will change.
And for my part, I had a lot of experience with the Soviets when I was Treasury Secretary and saw the deficiencies in their system. So, for all those reasons, I thought they would change.
The CIA people were really focused on military hardware and did not think change was possible. DoD did not like the idea of negotiating, but President Reagan did. So we had some back and forth, and in the fall of 1985 we had the big meeting in Geneva between President Reagan and then-Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev. I remember [Defense Secretary Caspar] “Cap” Weinberger opposed the meeting and tried to sabotage it, but he did not succeed. Out of that meeting came this phrase that President Reagan had already used in his State of the Union message: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That was a big statement from those two leaders, and it was the start of bringing the numbers of nuclear weapons down.
JEG: In your memoir, you talk about how each president has many more advisers than his predecessors, and they often quarrel with one another and get into fights that the principals often are not even aware of. Would you like to elaborate on that?
GS: Well, it seems to me when you try to make policy and carry out policy entirely in the White House, you do not have access to the career people and you do not really use your Cabinet to full advantage. You wind up not having the right players, and policy is not as good, and is not carried out as well.
I remember when General Colin Powell became national security adviser. I knew him pretty well, and he came over to my office and he said, “George, I am here to tell you I am a member of your staff.” I told him that was an interesting statement. He explained: “The National Security Council consists of the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense; and that National Security Council has a staff; and I am the Chief of that Staff. Obviously, the President is my most important client, but I am working for the whole National Security Council.”
Colin had the right idea. When the Reagan administration was leaving office, he came to a ceremony in my honor and he said, “The chief of staff of the National Security Council and the Secretary of State have not gotten along so well since Henry Kissinger held both jobs simultaneously.”
JEG: How would you describe the general approach to foreign policy you and President Reagan followed?
GS: President Reagan and I both thought that foreign policy starts in your own neighborhood. If you have a strong, cohesive neighborhood, you have a much better base then, if something goes wrong. I remember my first trip out of the country as Secretary of State was to Canada and the traveling press was saying, what in the world are you doing going there?
I replied, “Who do you think our biggest trading partner is?” They all said Germany or Britain or something. One said Japan. I said they were out of their mind: Add all those up together and it does not come to as much as Canada.
My second trip out of the country was to Mexico, and we tried to lay the foundation for what eventually came together as the North American Free Trade Agreement. We first had to get an agreement with Canada; then Mexico came in. But, anyway, it was not just the Soviet Union; we had a strategy for North America. We paid a lot of attention to South America, Central America and the Asia-Pacific region, as well. And we had strategies for each of those regions.
A second principle we followed was this: You have to think you are a global power. That is one of the reasons why the Foreign Service is so important: so you have people of professional quality who cover the globe. That’s why, when I hear the idea that we are going to pivot to Asia or something like that, I say it does not sound right to me. We need a global diplomacy. We have to be there, everywhere. Of course, you shift your focus a little bit depending on where the action is.
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If you plant a garden and go away for six months, what have you got when you come back? Weeds. Diplomacy is kind of like that. You go around and talk to people, you develop a relationship of trust and confidence, and then if something comes up, you have that base to work from.
JEG: You have written that you very consciously set about finding time in your schedule to think about where you were going and what you needed to do. That seems to be one of the shortcomings that we have had in Washington throughout the years. People usually do not do that. They let the urgent drive out the important. Is there any way you can encourage people to think a bit more instead of frenetically traveling around the world?
GS: In the State Department you have a group of people whose job is to think: the Policy Planning staff. I always felt—and this goes way back to my time in other Cabinet positions, and for that matter in business—that you tend to be inundated with tactical problems. Stuff is happening all the time and you are dealing with it. So I developed the idea that at least twice a week—in prime time, not the end of the day when you are tired—I take, say, three-quarters of an hour or so and tell my secretary: If my wife calls or the president calls, put them through; otherwise, no calls.
I tell myself not to look at my inbox; instead, I go sit in a comfortable chair with a pad and a pencil, take a deep breath, and ask myself: “What am I doing here? What are our strategic objectives and how are we doing?” Reflecting on that has helped me quite a lot, I think.
A lot of this goes back to the process of governance, which has gotten way out of kilter because there is too much White House and National Security Council staff, and not enough consultation with Cabinet people. But there are other problems, too. These days, if you take the job of assistant secretary of State for something or other, you get presented with a stack of paper an inch thick that you need an accountant and a lawyer to help you fill out. Then the Senate takes its time before holding a hearing. And after all that, they may never vote on your nomination. At the end of the 113th Congress, there were 133 nominees who had been reported out favorably but not voted on, so they had to flop over to the next Congress.
That is not the way you recruit A-players.
JEG: I’d like to wind up with a couple of questions about how Secretaries of State relate to Congress. How do you see the relationship? What is the responsibility of the Secretary in terms of selling the president’s policies to Congress? And does that process work, or can it be improved?
GS: Different people do it different ways, but you have to spend a lot of time with members of Congress. For one thing, they have good ideas. So if you listen to them, you might just learn something. As you remember, Jim, we had congressional observers come over to Geneva for our negotiations with the Soviet Union. We got the INF Treaty ratified as a result, something many people thought was impossible. But we did it.
We did not take Congress for granted. We had brought all the negotiating records back and stored them in a secure room. We had one of the negotiators there all the time to answer questions, and we not only gave formal testimony, but held a lot of informal meetings. There was a lot of opposition, but in the end the treaty was ratified 93 to 5. So our efforts to cultivate Capitol Hill paid off, and we learned from it.
If you develop trust, you develop the ability to have frank conversations, and that helps.
JEG: This reminds me that you have compared diplomacy to gardening: keeping down the weeds and cultivating relationships.
GS: Yes, the analogy is if you plant a garden and go away for six months, what have you got when you come back? Weeds. And any good gardener knows you have to clear the weeds out right away.
Diplomacy is kind of like that. You go around and talk to people, you develop a relationship of trust and confidence, and then if something comes up, you have that base to work from. If you have never seen somebody before and you are trying to work a delicate, difficult problem, it is hard.
For example, I got to know Wu Xueqian, who was the Chinese foreign minister, and we had a good relationship. I remember him saying to me once: “OK, George, you wanted to get to this point and you are trying to go about it in a certain way. That way is very hard for us, but if you can come at it in a little different way, we can get where you want to go.” I said, fine, and we did. But that kind of progress does not happen unless you have gardened.
JEG: Let me end by asking you about one more quote from your memoir: “Public service is something special, more an opportunity and a privilege than an obligation.” Do you feel the same way today in light of everything that has happened since you wrote that 20 years ago?
GS: Oh, yes! I have had an academic career and a business career, both very exciting and worthwhile. But if I look back on my government career, that is the highlight, because I can think back to things I was involved in that made a difference. Really, that’s what your life is about: You are trying to make a difference. And you can do that in public life in a way that is hard to do otherwise.
JEG: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I appreciate this very much.
GS: Well, I am a Marine, so I say, “Semper Fi.”
JEG: Semper Fi! Thank you.
James E. Goodby, currently an Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, retired from the Foreign Service in 1989 with the rank of Career Minister. His diplomatic career included assignments as a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (1974-1977) and Bureau of European Affairs (1977-1980), ambassador to Finland (1980-1981), vice chair of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks (1981-1983) and head of the U.S. delegation to the Conference on Confidence-Building Measures in Europe (1983-1985).
In 1993 Ambassador Goodby was recalled to serve as chief negotiator for the Nunn-Lugar nuclear threat reduction agreements (1993-1994), special representative of the president for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons (1995-1996), and deputy to the special adviser to the president and Secretary of State for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (2000-2001). He is the author of At the Borderline of Armageddon: How American Presidents Managed the Atomic Bomb (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and Europe Undivided (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1998), His article, “The Putin Doctrine and Preventive Diplomacy,” appeared in the November 2014 issue of the Journal.
http://www.afsa.org/groundbreaking-diplomacy-interview-george-shultz
Groundbreaking Diplomacy: An Interview with George Shultz
(if you go to the link, it includes the photos of their meetings and it's easier to skip over the declarations)
George Shultz reflects on his tenure as Secretary of State in the Reagan administration and the process of making foreign policy and conducting diplomacy during the decade leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union.
BY JAMES E. GOODBY
Editor’s Note: George P. Shultz is an economist and Republican presidential adviser best known for serving as Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan. He joined the Nixon administration in 1969 and served as secretary of Labor, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of the Treasury. Shultz was president of Bechtel and an economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan when he was tapped to replace Alexander Haig as Secretary of State in 1982. He served for the remainder of Reagan’s time in office, and was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1989.
The Foreign Service Journal is pleased to publish this transcript of James E. Goodby’s interview with the former Secretary of State. The interview was conducted in October 2015 in connection with a study at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on governance in America, but it was never published. The general theme of their conversation is how Secretary Shultz perceived his service to President Ronald Reagan, whom he served for six years, and the Secretary’s reflections on President Reagan’s approach to strategic thinking.
James E. Goodby: Mr. Secretary, we have talked before about your role as Secretary of State in the Reagan administration. What I would like to do is sound you out about Ronald Reagan, about presidents, and about your relations with the White House. I would like to begin by quoting something from your 1993 memoir, Turmoil and Triumph. In it, you said something that struck me very forcefully: that Reagan, like any president, had his flaws and strengths, and the job of an adviser was to build on his strengths and try to help him overcome whatever flaws he might have. What struck me about that observation was that it was rather similar to something that Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote about his relationship with President Harry Truman.
George Shultz: I think the Secretary of State needs to have the same attitude any other Cabinet officer does. People would ask me what my foreign policy was, and I always said, “I do not have one; the president has one. My job is to help him formulate it and carry it out, but it is the president’s foreign policy.” So I think you need to be clear about who is the guy who got elected.
However, I had something special that President Reagan suggested himself. We had twice-weekly private meetings,just the two of us. Of course, we would talk about whatever he wanted to talk about, and I always had an agenda of my own. We tried to look over the horizon and not make any decisions, but in the process, I got to know him very well. I think that in all of my early associations with him, which went back quite a bit before I became his Secretary of State, we had managed to build between us (and also between Nancy and me) a relationship of trust. He knew that I would tell him what I thought, and he also knew that I knew it was his foreign policy, not mine. So we had good conversations, but underneath it all was trust.
One of the outstanding things about President Reagan was his consistency and the way he handled himself. People trusted him. Here is an example. One time [German Chancellor] Helmut Kohl came to Washington about four months before the president was to go to Germany. Kohl said, “When [French President François] Mitterrand and I went to a cemetery where French and German soldiers were buried, we had a handshake. It was publicized and was very good for both of us. You are coming to Germany, Mr. President; would you come to a cemetery and do the same thing?”
President Reagan agreed. Then the Germans sent word they had picked the cemetery, a place called Bitburg, and someWhite House person did a little checking and said OK. But once they shoveled the snow off the gravestones and discovered SS troops were buried there, all hell broke loose.
I remember Elie Wiesel came to the White House and said, “Mr. President, your place is not with the SS; your place is with the victims of the SS.” It was lots of pressure. We tried to get the Germans to change the site. We made a lot of suggestions for alternatives, and they would not change. So, in the end, he went.
After that, he went home and I went to Israel to be the speaker at the unveiling of the outdoor Yad Vashem [Israel’s official Holocaust memorial]. When I came back to Washington, I stopped in London for a talk with [British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher. She said to me, “You know, there is not another leader in the free world that would have taken the political beating at home your president took to deliver on a promise that he made. But one thing you can be sure of with Ronald Reagan: If he gives you his word, that is it.”
And that is a very important thing to establish: that you are good for your word.
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DoD did not like the idea of negotiating, but President Reagan did. … And in the fall of 1985 we had the big meeting in Geneva between President Reagan and then-Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev.
JEG: Another thing you said in your memoir is that it is not just having strength that gives an advantage to a nation, but knowing what to do with it. President Reagan was ready to negotiate [with the Soviets], but some of his advisers were not so ready. You backed him up, and that contributed to his strength. I presume you thought that he would be as successful as he was with your support. Could you tell us a little about that part of it?
GS: I have always felt that strength and diplomacy go together. If you go to a negotiation and you do not have any strength, you are going to get your head handed to you. On the other hand, the willingness to negotiate builds strength because you are using it for a constructive purpose. If it is strength with no objective to be gained, it loses its meaning. So I think they go together. These are not alternative ways of going about things.
JEG: You have also said that there is a tendency in Washington to go to one extreme or the other, either to all military strength or to all diplomacy, and that the task of blending the two together is very difficult. Can you give us some real-life examples of that from the Reagan administration?
GS: Actually, I don’t think it is difficult. I think it is like breathing. Of course, they go together. There is no other way. When I went into the job of Secretary of State, our relations with the Soviet Union were almost non-existent, very strained. President Jimmy Carter had cut off nearly all ties after they invaded Afghanistan, and it was still tense.
I’d had quite a lot of experience in dealing with the Soviets when I was Secretary of the Treasury. I had worked out quite a few deals and spent time there. So I managed to negotiate. I worked a deal to meet with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, once a week. The object was to resolve little irritants so they did not grow into big problems.
In early 1983, I returned to Andrews Air Force Base from a visit to China on a Friday morning, and it was snowing so hard I was lucky to land. It snowed all day Friday, Friday night and into Saturday morning. So the Reagans are stuck in the White House. They cannot go to Camp David. Our phone rings, and Nancy says, “How about you and your wife come over for supper?” The four of us sit around, we are having a good time, and they start asking me about the Chinese leaders. What kind of people are they? Do they have a bottom line? Can you find a bottom line? Do they have a sense of humor? And so on.
Then they knew I had dealt with the Soviets when I was at Treasury, so they started asking me about them. A lot of them were still in office. All of a sudden, it dawns on me: This man has never had a real conversation with a big-time communist leader, and he is dying to have one.
So I said to him, “Next Tuesday at 5, Ambassador Dobrynin is coming in for one of my regular sessions. What if I bring him over here and you talk to him?” He said that would be great, and it will not take long, just 10 minutes. All I want to tell him is that if their new leader, Yuri Andropov (who had just succeeded Leonid Brezhnev), is interested in a constructive conversation, then I am ready.”
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President Reagan and I both thought that foreign policy starts in your own neighborhood. If you have a strong, cohesive neighborhood, you have a much better base then, if something goes wrong.
That attitude was totally different from the atmosphere that people thought existed. The White House staff tried to kill the meeting, but the president had decided he wanted to have it, so we did. We were in there for at least an hour and a half, and Reagan talked about everything under the sun. About a third of the time, he talked about Soviet Jewry and how they were being mistreated.
Then he brought up the Pentecostals. Do you remember during the Carter administration, a group of them had rushed our embassy in Moscow? They had not been allowed to emigrate or worship the way they wanted, and we could not expel them from the building because they would probably be killed, but it was a very uncomfortable thing. President Reagan kept saying, “It is like a big neon sign in Moscow saying, ‘We do not treat people right. We do not let them worship the way they want.’ You ought to do something about it.”
Dobrynin and I were riding back to the State Department afterward, and we agreed, “Hey, let us make this our special project.” So we exchanged memos back and forth. Finally, I got one that was pretty good, and I brought it over to the White House. I said, “Mr. President, any lawyer would say that you could drive a truck through the holes in this memo, but I have to believe after all this background, that if we get them to leave the embassy, they will be allowed to go home and eventually emigrate.” We talked about it and decided to roll the dice. All the time the president talked about Soviet Jewry, and he just said, “I want something to happen. I will not say a word about credit. I just want something to happen.”
So we got the Pentecostals to leave the embassy. They were allowed to go home. A couple of months later, they were all allowed to emigrate along with their families, around 60 people. I said to the president, “The deal is: ‘we’ll let them go if you don’t crow.’” And he never said a word.
I’ve always thought this little incident, which was unknown, had some important implications. What Reagan learned was you can make a deal with these people, and even if it is kind of fuzzy, they will carry it out. And they learned the same thing. They knew how tempting it is for American politicians to say: Look what my predecessor did, and now look what I did. But President Reagan did not do that, so you could trust him. You could deal with him. You can deal with somebody you trust. You cannot deal with somebody you do not trust. It is very hard.
On the other hand, then there was a huge buildup of Soviet strength because—as you remember, Jim; you were involved in it—the Soviets deployed their SS-20 missiles, intermediate range, aimed at Europe. The diplomatic idea was if they attacked Europe with intermediate-range missiles, we would use our intercontinental missiles to retaliate, thereby bringing a retaliatory strike on us. That is how they were hoping to divide Europe from the United States.
We had a deal with NATO that we would negotiate with the Soviets, and if we could not reach a satisfactory conclusion, we would deploy our own intermediate-range missiles. We had a hard negotiation. At one point, the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner and we led the charge in condemning them.
We had a transcript of the Soviet pilot in contact with his ground control and some time elapsed. It showed that they consulted and they gave the pilot the go-ahead to shoot down the airliner. We read all this out. At the same time, stunning the hardline people, we sent our negotiators back to Geneva, and I went on with a meeting I had scheduled with [Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei] Gromyko. All this was, in part, to convince the European public that we were negotiating energetically.
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I tell myself not to look at my inbox; instead, I go sit in a comfortable chair with a pad and a pencil, take a deep breath, and ask myself: “What am I doing here? What are our strategic objectives and how are we doing?”
After the meeting, the interpreter, who had interpreted for a lot of meetings between Secretaries of State and Soviet foreign ministers, said it was the most bitter, contentious meeting he had ever seen. But it registered on Gromyko what we thought. The point is, we did deploy the cruise missiles in Britain and Italy, and then ballistic missiles in Germany, and it was a huge thing. The Soviets walked out of negotiations, and fanned war talk, but we stood up to it.
Early in 1984, we had a coordinated approach. President Reagan gave kind of a high-level, reasonably friendly speech, and I had a more operational one in a meeting which Gromyko and I attended in Stockholm that January. We were not yelling at each other. It was sort of constructive, and it was a huge moment.
Then, as time went on, things gradually cooled off a little. I was out here at Stanford for summer vacation, and the president was in Los Angeles. I went down there for a meeting and asked him for a little private time. I said, “Mr. President, at three or four of our embassies in Europe, a Soviet diplomat has come up to one of ours and he said virtually the same thing, which we think boils down to this: If Gromyko is invited to Washington when he comes to the United Nations in September, he will accept. Mr. President, you may want to think it over because President Carter canceled those meetings when they went into Afghanistan, and they are still there.” Reagan replied, “I do not have to think it over. Let’s get him here.”
In other words, the Soviets blinked. So Gromyko came, and it was a good meeting, with an interesting little sideline. I had a good relationship with Nancy Reagan and said to her, “Nancy, the routine here is he comes to the West Wing, we have a meeting in the Oval Office, and we walk down the colonnade to the mansion for some stand-around time. Then there is a working lunch. How about you being there during the stand-around time, since this is your home and you are the hostess?” She agreed.
We walked down there, Gromyko sees Nancy, and he goes right after her. At one point—and you know Nancy can bristle—Gromyko said, “Does your husband want peace?” Nancy bristled, “Of course, my husband wants peace.” Then Gromyko says, “Please whisper it in his ear every night before he goes to sleep: ‘peace.’”
He was a little taller than she was, so she put her hand on his shoulder and pulled him down so he had to bend his knee, and she said: “I will whisper it in your ear: peace.”
Anyway, after the 1984 election, which President Reagan won by a landslide, we resumed our meetings in Geneva from a position of strength. Our economy was really moving by that time, and we had built up our military strength. And the showdown over the INF missiles put us in a good position to negotiate.
Then along comes [Mikhail] Gorbachev. All of the preceding is pre-Gorbachev. I remember going over there with the U.S. delegation for the Andropov funeral. The president had given me a few things to say, but Vice President [George H.W.] Bush was there as the delegation head.
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President Reagan knew that I would tell him what I thought, and he also knew that I knew it was his foreign policy, not mine. So we had good conversations, but underneath it all was trust.
We were one of the last delegations to meet with Gorbachev. We met for over an hour. He had all these notes in front of him, but he shuffled them around and never looked at them. I had just a few things to say, which I said, and then I had the luxury of watching. Afterward, I said to our people, this is a different kind of man than any Soviet leader we have ever dealt with: more nimble. He is smarter, better informed. Still a hard-edge communist, but you can talk to him. He listens and then he answers, and he expects you to listen and answer back, and have a conversation. Usually, you say something, it goes by my ear, and I say something, it goes by your ear—and that is not a conversation. With Gorbachev, you can engage.
And that was how our negotiations started: from a position of strength. We knew what we wanted, we were strong, and we negotiated.
JEG: You and President Reagan had a very clear view of what you wanted to accomplish. You had trust between you and yet, as you mentioned earlier, there were people in the White House who did not agree with what you both wanted to do. So that makes me wonder how Secretaries of State, in general, manage to get and keep a president’s ear in spite of all of these other pressures to do something else. What is the secret of your success in this? To quote another striking line from your memoir: “I learned to exercise responsibility in a sea of uncertain authority.” How did you manage that?
GS: I think I would rewrite that line now, because there was no uncertain authority. The president was the authority, I had my meetings with him, and I had my insight from that long evening about where his instincts were. So that gave me the basis for proceeding, but there was a huge analytical difference of opinion in Washington. There were people who thought basically the Soviet Union was there and they would never really change.
Reagan had a different idea. If you read his Westminster speech in 1982, it is very striking because he thought they were basically weak, and they would in the end change if we were strong enough in deterrence. I think George F. Kennan in his Long Telegram said something similar: If we can contain the Soviets long enough, they will look inward; they will not like what they see, and they will change.
And for my part, I had a lot of experience with the Soviets when I was Treasury Secretary and saw the deficiencies in their system. So, for all those reasons, I thought they would change.
The CIA people were really focused on military hardware and did not think change was possible. DoD did not like the idea of negotiating, but President Reagan did. So we had some back and forth, and in the fall of 1985 we had the big meeting in Geneva between President Reagan and then-Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev. I remember [Defense Secretary Caspar] “Cap” Weinberger opposed the meeting and tried to sabotage it, but he did not succeed. Out of that meeting came this phrase that President Reagan had already used in his State of the Union message: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That was a big statement from those two leaders, and it was the start of bringing the numbers of nuclear weapons down.
JEG: In your memoir, you talk about how each president has many more advisers than his predecessors, and they often quarrel with one another and get into fights that the principals often are not even aware of. Would you like to elaborate on that?
GS: Well, it seems to me when you try to make policy and carry out policy entirely in the White House, you do not have access to the career people and you do not really use your Cabinet to full advantage. You wind up not having the right players, and policy is not as good, and is not carried out as well.
I remember when General Colin Powell became national security adviser. I knew him pretty well, and he came over to my office and he said, “George, I am here to tell you I am a member of your staff.” I told him that was an interesting statement. He explained: “The National Security Council consists of the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense; and that National Security Council has a staff; and I am the Chief of that Staff. Obviously, the President is my most important client, but I am working for the whole National Security Council.”
Colin had the right idea. When the Reagan administration was leaving office, he came to a ceremony in my honor and he said, “The chief of staff of the National Security Council and the Secretary of State have not gotten along so well since Henry Kissinger held both jobs simultaneously.”
JEG: How would you describe the general approach to foreign policy you and President Reagan followed?
GS: President Reagan and I both thought that foreign policy starts in your own neighborhood. If you have a strong, cohesive neighborhood, you have a much better base then, if something goes wrong. I remember my first trip out of the country as Secretary of State was to Canada and the traveling press was saying, what in the world are you doing going there?
I replied, “Who do you think our biggest trading partner is?” They all said Germany or Britain or something. One said Japan. I said they were out of their mind: Add all those up together and it does not come to as much as Canada.
My second trip out of the country was to Mexico, and we tried to lay the foundation for what eventually came together as the North American Free Trade Agreement. We first had to get an agreement with Canada; then Mexico came in. But, anyway, it was not just the Soviet Union; we had a strategy for North America. We paid a lot of attention to South America, Central America and the Asia-Pacific region, as well. And we had strategies for each of those regions.
A second principle we followed was this: You have to think you are a global power. That is one of the reasons why the Foreign Service is so important: so you have people of professional quality who cover the globe. That’s why, when I hear the idea that we are going to pivot to Asia or something like that, I say it does not sound right to me. We need a global diplomacy. We have to be there, everywhere. Of course, you shift your focus a little bit depending on where the action is.
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If you plant a garden and go away for six months, what have you got when you come back? Weeds. Diplomacy is kind of like that. You go around and talk to people, you develop a relationship of trust and confidence, and then if something comes up, you have that base to work from.
JEG: You have written that you very consciously set about finding time in your schedule to think about where you were going and what you needed to do. That seems to be one of the shortcomings that we have had in Washington throughout the years. People usually do not do that. They let the urgent drive out the important. Is there any way you can encourage people to think a bit more instead of frenetically traveling around the world?
GS: In the State Department you have a group of people whose job is to think: the Policy Planning staff. I always felt—and this goes way back to my time in other Cabinet positions, and for that matter in business—that you tend to be inundated with tactical problems. Stuff is happening all the time and you are dealing with it. So I developed the idea that at least twice a week—in prime time, not the end of the day when you are tired—I take, say, three-quarters of an hour or so and tell my secretary: If my wife calls or the president calls, put them through; otherwise, no calls.
I tell myself not to look at my inbox; instead, I go sit in a comfortable chair with a pad and a pencil, take a deep breath, and ask myself: “What am I doing here? What are our strategic objectives and how are we doing?” Reflecting on that has helped me quite a lot, I think.
A lot of this goes back to the process of governance, which has gotten way out of kilter because there is too much White House and National Security Council staff, and not enough consultation with Cabinet people. But there are other problems, too. These days, if you take the job of assistant secretary of State for something or other, you get presented with a stack of paper an inch thick that you need an accountant and a lawyer to help you fill out. Then the Senate takes its time before holding a hearing. And after all that, they may never vote on your nomination. At the end of the 113th Congress, there were 133 nominees who had been reported out favorably but not voted on, so they had to flop over to the next Congress.
That is not the way you recruit A-players.
JEG: I’d like to wind up with a couple of questions about how Secretaries of State relate to Congress. How do you see the relationship? What is the responsibility of the Secretary in terms of selling the president’s policies to Congress? And does that process work, or can it be improved?
GS: Different people do it different ways, but you have to spend a lot of time with members of Congress. For one thing, they have good ideas. So if you listen to them, you might just learn something. As you remember, Jim, we had congressional observers come over to Geneva for our negotiations with the Soviet Union. We got the INF Treaty ratified as a result, something many people thought was impossible. But we did it.
We did not take Congress for granted. We had brought all the negotiating records back and stored them in a secure room. We had one of the negotiators there all the time to answer questions, and we not only gave formal testimony, but held a lot of informal meetings. There was a lot of opposition, but in the end the treaty was ratified 93 to 5. So our efforts to cultivate Capitol Hill paid off, and we learned from it.
If you develop trust, you develop the ability to have frank conversations, and that helps.
JEG: This reminds me that you have compared diplomacy to gardening: keeping down the weeds and cultivating relationships.
GS: Yes, the analogy is if you plant a garden and go away for six months, what have you got when you come back? Weeds. And any good gardener knows you have to clear the weeds out right away.
Diplomacy is kind of like that. You go around and talk to people, you develop a relationship of trust and confidence, and then if something comes up, you have that base to work from. If you have never seen somebody before and you are trying to work a delicate, difficult problem, it is hard.
For example, I got to know Wu Xueqian, who was the Chinese foreign minister, and we had a good relationship. I remember him saying to me once: “OK, George, you wanted to get to this point and you are trying to go about it in a certain way. That way is very hard for us, but if you can come at it in a little different way, we can get where you want to go.” I said, fine, and we did. But that kind of progress does not happen unless you have gardened.
JEG: Let me end by asking you about one more quote from your memoir: “Public service is something special, more an opportunity and a privilege than an obligation.” Do you feel the same way today in light of everything that has happened since you wrote that 20 years ago?
GS: Oh, yes! I have had an academic career and a business career, both very exciting and worthwhile. But if I look back on my government career, that is the highlight, because I can think back to things I was involved in that made a difference. Really, that’s what your life is about: You are trying to make a difference. And you can do that in public life in a way that is hard to do otherwise.
JEG: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I appreciate this very much.
GS: Well, I am a Marine, so I say, “Semper Fi.”
JEG: Semper Fi! Thank you.
James E. Goodby, currently an Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, retired from the Foreign Service in 1989 with the rank of Career Minister. His diplomatic career included assignments as a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (1974-1977) and Bureau of European Affairs (1977-1980), ambassador to Finland (1980-1981), vice chair of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks (1981-1983) and head of the U.S. delegation to the Conference on Confidence-Building Measures in Europe (1983-1985).
In 1993 Ambassador Goodby was recalled to serve as chief negotiator for the Nunn-Lugar nuclear threat reduction agreements (1993-1994), special representative of the president for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons (1995-1996), and deputy to the special adviser to the president and Secretary of State for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (2000-2001). He is the author of At the Borderline of Armageddon: How American Presidents Managed the Atomic Bomb (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and Europe Undivided (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1998), His article, “The Putin Doctrine and Preventive Diplomacy,” appeared in the November 2014 issue of the Journal.
http://www.afsa.org/groundbreaking-diplomacy-interview-george-shultz
Fukushima radiation has reached U.S. shores
(read between the lines, no Alaska salmon, Hawaii, Monterey, west coast sea food and remember Fukushima continues to dump radiation into the ocean every day since the accident and will probably forever. So if you want to glow after your meal and from then on..... you know what to request from your server.....)
SALEM, Ore. -- For the first time, seaborne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster has been detected on the West Coast of the United States.
Cesium-134, the so-called fingerprint of Fukushima, was measured in seawater samples taken from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in Oregon, according to researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Because of its short half-life, cesium-134 can only have come from Fukushima.
For the first time, cesium-134 has also been detected in a Canadian salmon, according to the Fukushima InFORM project, led by University of Victoria chemical oceanographer Jay Cullen.
In both cases, levels are extremely low, the researchers said, and don’t pose a danger to humans or the environment.
Massive amounts of contaminated water were released from the crippled nuclear plant following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. More radiation was released to the air, then fell to the sea.
Woods Hole chemical oceanographer Ken Buesseler runs a crowd-funded, citizen science seawater sampling project that has tracked the radiation plume as it slowly makes its way across the Pacific Ocean.
The Oregon samples, marking the first time cesium-134 has been detected on U.S. shores, were taken in January and February of 2016 and later analyzed. They each measured 0.3 becquerels per cubic meter of cesium-134.
Buesseler’s team previously had found the isotope in a sample of seawater taken from a dock on Vancouver Island, B.C., marking its landfall in North America.
In Canada, Cullen leads the InFORM project to assess radiological risks to that country’s oceans following the nuclear disaster. It is a partnership of a dozen academic, government and non-profit organizations.
Last month, the group reported that a single sockeye salmon, sampled from Okanagan Lake in the summer of 2015, had tested positive for cesium-134.
The level was more than 1,000 times lower than the action level set by Health Canada, and is no significant risk to consumers, Cullen said.
Buesseler’s most recent samples off the West Coast also are showing higher-than background levels of cesium-137, another Fukushima isotope that already is present in the world's oceans because of nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s.
Those results will become more important in tracking the radiation plume, Buesseler said, because the short half-life of cesium-134 makes it harder to detect as time goes on.
Cesium-134 has a half-life of two years, meaning it’s down to a fraction of what it was five years ago, he said. Cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life.
A recent InFORM analysis of Buesseler’s data concluded that concentrations of cesium-137 have increased considerably in the central northeast Pacific, although they still are at levels that pose no concern.
“It appears that the plume has spread throughout this vast area from Alaska to California,” the scientists wrote.
They estimated that the plume is moving toward the coast at roughly twice the speed of a garden snail. Radiation levels have not yet peaked.
“As the contamination plume progresses towards our coast we expect levels closer to shore to increase over the coming year,” Cullen said.
Even that peak won’t be a health concern, Buesseler said. But the models will help scientists model ocean currents in the future.
That could prove important if there is another disaster or accident at the Fukushima plant, which houses more than a thousand huge steel tanks of contaminated water and where hundreds of tons of molten fuel remain inside the reactors.
In a worst-case scenario, the fuel would melt through steel-reinforced concrete containment vessels into the ground, uncontrollably spreading radiation into the surrounding soil and groundwater and eventually into the sea.
“That’s the type of thing where people are still concerned, as am I, about what could happen,” Buesseler said.
Scientists now know it would take four to five years for any further contamination from the plant to reach the West Coast.
Tracking the plume
Scientists are beginning to use an increase in cesium-137 instead of the presence of cesium-134 to track the plume of radioactive contamination from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. These figures show the increase in cesium-137 near the West Coast between 2014 and 2015.
Graphic courtesy Dr. Jonathan Kellogg of InFORM, with data from Dr. John Smith, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and Dr. Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Learn more about Ken Beusseler’s crowd-funded, citizen-science seawater sampling project at http://www.ourradioactiveocean.org/.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fukushima-radiation-has-reached-us-shores/ar-AAlkXUr?li=BBnb7Kz
Fukushima radiation has reached U.S. shores
(read between the lines, no Alaska salmon, Hawaii, Monterey, west coast sea food and remember Fukushima continues to dump radiation into the ocean every day since the accident and will probably forever. So if you want to glow after your meal and from then on..... you know what to request from your server.....)
SALEM, Ore. -- For the first time, seaborne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster has been detected on the West Coast of the United States.
Cesium-134, the so-called fingerprint of Fukushima, was measured in seawater samples taken from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in Oregon, according to researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Because of its short half-life, cesium-134 can only have come from Fukushima.
For the first time, cesium-134 has also been detected in a Canadian salmon, according to the Fukushima InFORM project, led by University of Victoria chemical oceanographer Jay Cullen.
In both cases, levels are extremely low, the researchers said, and don’t pose a danger to humans or the environment.
Massive amounts of contaminated water were released from the crippled nuclear plant following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. More radiation was released to the air, then fell to the sea.
Woods Hole chemical oceanographer Ken Buesseler runs a crowd-funded, citizen science seawater sampling project that has tracked the radiation plume as it slowly makes its way across the Pacific Ocean.
The Oregon samples, marking the first time cesium-134 has been detected on U.S. shores, were taken in January and February of 2016 and later analyzed. They each measured 0.3 becquerels per cubic meter of cesium-134.
Buesseler’s team previously had found the isotope in a sample of seawater taken from a dock on Vancouver Island, B.C., marking its landfall in North America.
In Canada, Cullen leads the InFORM project to assess radiological risks to that country’s oceans following the nuclear disaster. It is a partnership of a dozen academic, government and non-profit organizations.
Last month, the group reported that a single sockeye salmon, sampled from Okanagan Lake in the summer of 2015, had tested positive for cesium-134.
The level was more than 1,000 times lower than the action level set by Health Canada, and is no significant risk to consumers, Cullen said.
Buesseler’s most recent samples off the West Coast also are showing higher-than background levels of cesium-137, another Fukushima isotope that already is present in the world's oceans because of nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s.
Those results will become more important in tracking the radiation plume, Buesseler said, because the short half-life of cesium-134 makes it harder to detect as time goes on.
Cesium-134 has a half-life of two years, meaning it’s down to a fraction of what it was five years ago, he said. Cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life.
A recent InFORM analysis of Buesseler’s data concluded that concentrations of cesium-137 have increased considerably in the central northeast Pacific, although they still are at levels that pose no concern.
“It appears that the plume has spread throughout this vast area from Alaska to California,” the scientists wrote.
They estimated that the plume is moving toward the coast at roughly twice the speed of a garden snail. Radiation levels have not yet peaked.
“As the contamination plume progresses towards our coast we expect levels closer to shore to increase over the coming year,” Cullen said.
Even that peak won’t be a health concern, Buesseler said. But the models will help scientists model ocean currents in the future.
That could prove important if there is another disaster or accident at the Fukushima plant, which houses more than a thousand huge steel tanks of contaminated water and where hundreds of tons of molten fuel remain inside the reactors.
In a worst-case scenario, the fuel would melt through steel-reinforced concrete containment vessels into the ground, uncontrollably spreading radiation into the surrounding soil and groundwater and eventually into the sea.
“That’s the type of thing where people are still concerned, as am I, about what could happen,” Buesseler said.
Scientists now know it would take four to five years for any further contamination from the plant to reach the West Coast.
Tracking the plume
Scientists are beginning to use an increase in cesium-137 instead of the presence of cesium-134 to track the plume of radioactive contamination from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. These figures show the increase in cesium-137 near the West Coast between 2014 and 2015.
Graphic courtesy Dr. Jonathan Kellogg of InFORM, with data from Dr. John Smith, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and Dr. Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Learn more about Ken Beusseler’s crowd-funded, citizen-science seawater sampling project at http://www.ourradioactiveocean.org/.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fukushima-radiation-has-reached-us-shores/ar-AAlkXUr?li=BBnb7Kz
Obama's False Reality
Thomas Gallatin · Dec. 7, 2016
(The continued self portrait of his legacy. Get down he wants to kiss himself......)
Yesterday, Barack Obama delivered his final lecture, er, speech to the U.S. military. In his all-too-familiar pattern, Obama wove an eloquent farce. Seeking to deflect responsibility for facilitating the rise of the Islamic State, Obama said, “There’s been a debate about ISIL that’s focused on whether a continued U.S. troop presence in Iraq back in 2011 could have stopped the threat of ISIL from growing. And as a practical matter, this was not an option. … In addition, maintaining American troops in Iraq at the time could not have reversed the forces that contributed to ISIL’s rise.” Obama seeks to have it both ways: Claim credit for keeping his ideologically driven campaign promise to end the war in Iraq, while blaming George W. Bush for allegedly creating a situation where Obama was unable to keep a sizable military presence in Iraq. (Hilarious since BO is the one who refused to complete the Troop Status Agreement while a friend of ours was still there training their police, setting up their security, and working with their troops as a contractor. Our friend has very different interpretation. Especially since BO called him to go back but changed his mind after the violence picked back up. The rookie couldn't handle the pressure.)
Obama then pivoted and suggested that ISIL is not really the significant threat to the U.S. that many Americans know it to be. He stated, “Today’s terrorists can kill innocent people, but they don’t pose an existential threat to our nation, and we must not make the mistake of elevating them as if they do.” For Obama, the only significant “existential threat” facing the nation is climate change.
The outgoing commander in chief has at times acted as though he were the most limited president in history, while at other times he has exercised almost dictatorial power to go around Congress in order to implement his agenda. Obama has always had an excuse ready for why his policies have failed. Either A) it wasn’t his plan so it’s not his fault or B) Congress prevented him from acting according to his policy plans so it’s not his fault. Some people might think Obama is an eloquent speaker, but speeches don’t create reality. There’s a reason fairytales are sold in the fiction section of the local book store.
After eight years under Obama’s watch, America finds itself facing a terrorist threat every bit as dangerous as we faced on 9/11. Sadly, Obama, rather than take the enemy seriously, has sought to convince the American people that the Islamic State really isn’t that big of a problem. It makes one wonder if he believes he can perform what he once errantly called a “Jedi mind meld” on the American populace.
https://patriotpost.us/posts/46314
The Obamas' Extravagant Vacation Price Tag
Political Editors · Dec. 6, 2016
Barack and Michelle Obama have long treated taxpayers as their personal sugar daddies when it comes to vacations and travel. Judicial Watch has long tracked these expenses, as we have, and the group estimates, "To date, Obama's and his family's travel expenses total at least $85,029,819."
We'd emphasize the "at least" part. There are direct costs, which the administration may or may not entirely disclose (this is the Most Transparent Adminsitration in History™, after all), and there are indirect costs that aren't reported. As the Washington Examiner explains, "The [disclosed] expenses cover items such as security, flights and hotel rooms for staff and U.S. Secret Service. They do not include the price of prepositioning ships and aircraft in the area or much of the communications costs." Indeed, largely because of the latter factors, we've estimated the Obamas' heritage tour to Africa alone cost between $80 and $100 million. That's living rich and famous, Obama style.
They routinely head for extravagant vacations in Hawaii (at $5 million a pop) or the glitzy Martha's Vineyard. And they generally live higher on the hog than even billionaire Donald Trump — and the Obamas do it, like all socialists, on the backs of the people.
https://patriotpost.us/posts/46291
Excellent.