Cleveland Sports Forum

https://www.wsj.com/articles/median-hou ... 1536762535

Median household income has risen and poverty rate has lowered. Again.

We’re still winning.

You may be winning....I'm not

Al Gore's claim about Hurricane Florence doused by scientists

Meteorologist Ryan Maue says Gore's assertion made 'without any evidence'

By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Sunday, September 16, 2018

Another climate-change claim by former Vice President Al Gore is coming under fire, this one involving Hurricane Florence.

Mr. Gore said Friday that two major storms from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had never made landfall at the same time, referring to Hurricane Florence, the Category 1 hurricane that struck North Carolina on Friday, and Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which hit the Philippines early Saturday.

“This is the first time in history that two major storms are making landfall from the Atlantic and the Pacific simultaneously,” Mr. Gore told the crowd at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, which wrapped up Friday.

He cited the storm activity on opposite sides of the globe as an example of climate change driving unusual and extreme weather, but meteorologist Ryan Maue was quick to dump cold water on Mr. Gore’s assertion.

“Al Gore just (fraudulently) claimed without any evidence that we’ve never had hurricanes in both the Atlantic and Pacific making landfall at the same time,” tweeted Mr. Maue, an adjunct scholar at the free-market Cato Institute.

University of Colorado Boulder meteorologist Roger A. Pielke Sr. also took issue with the claim by Mr. Gore, known for his 2006 climate-change film, An Inconvenient Truth, and the 2017 follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel.

“Such statements show that he is not familiar with the history of tropical cyclone landfalls,” said Mr. Pielke in an email.

Numerous articles and even books have been written fact-checking and challenging Mr. Gore’s climate predictions and pronouncements, including meteorologist Roy Spencer’s An Inconvenient Deception, and “Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to an Inconvenient Truth,” a 154-page paper by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis Jr.

Meanwhile, Mr. Gore’s defenders, including some scientists, have praised his work for bringing climate change to the forefront and dismissed the fact-checks as nitpicks.

(yes, damn some people for wanting actual truth instead of preposterous statements, predictions, and altered facts)

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... d-scienti/

I don't know about you all, but I am not benefiting from the tax reform.

Politics

Americans Are Making Less Money Despite Trump’s Promises

By Toluse Olorunnipa and Sho Chandra

August 28, 2018, 3:00 AM CDT Updated on August 28, 2018, 9:08 AM CDT

RE-POST 1

President Donald Trump heads into a midterm referendum on his presidency showing no real progress on a core promise: to raise the wages of America’s “forgotten man and woman.”

Once the impact of inflation is included, ordinary Americans’ hourly earnings are lower than they were a year ago.

Real wages have remained mostly stagnant despite an expanding economy, record stock prices, soaring corporate profits and a giant deficit-fueled stimulus from Trump’s tax cuts that took effect Jan. 1. The Trump administration claimed its policies would immediately boost wages, with its tax overhaul ultimately increasing average pay by $4,000 to $9,000.

That hasn’t happened. And though Trump regularly boasts of the economy’s performance, many Americans don’t feel they’re sharing in the gains -- a risk for Republicans as they seek to defend their House and Senate majorities in November elections.

A majority of voters believes their personal financial situation has remained the same or gotten worse over the past two years, said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University poll.

“When you look at that backbone of the country -- the middle class -- people think that there’s stagnancy and not much has happened for them,” although “things might be marginally better nationwide,” he said. “That could be a problem in the midterms for a lot of people. At least some people believe that promises were not fulfilled.”

Inflation-adjusted hourly wages dropped 0.2 percent in July from a year earlier, their worst reading since 2012, according to the Labor Department, amid faster price gains. They’ve grown at an average 0.3 percent annual pace under Trump overall, compared with 1.1 percent during Barack Obama’s second term. Trump’s escalating tariff disputes risk eroding buying power further by driving up prices.

At the same time, many Americans received a boost in take-home pay from the tax cuts, though some ended up paying more in taxes. About 65 percent of taxpayers will receive a tax cut in 2018, averaging $2,200 from the new law’s individual provisions, while 6 percent will receive an increase of about $2,800, according to estimates from the Tax Policy Center in March.
As a candidate, Trump excoriated his predecessor for slow growth in American workers’ incomes.

“Household incomes are over $4,000 less today than they were 16 years ago,” he said during a campaign rally in Pensacola, Florida, in September 2016. “We’ll get your salaries and your wages up, up, up.”

Workers are still waiting. By a margin of 58 percent to 38 percent, U.S. voters believe the Trump administration isn’t doing enough to help middle-class Americans, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Aug. 14.

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment. But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday that slow wage growth was attributable to new workers entering the labor force.

“Wages are going up,” he said in an interview on CNBC. “I know that some people comment that the numbers don’t show that but let me just say, with new people coming into the work force at lower wages, that’s going to show on a gross level some different things -- but wages are going up on same people.”

Before the tax bill passed, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett said he expected reducing corporate taxes would spark “an immediate jump in wage growth.”

Speaking to Fox Business Network this month, Hassett said those higher wages will come with time, citing the low unemployment rate, growth in capital spending and rising productivity.

“That stuff, historically, helps blue-collar workers,” he said.

President’s Claims

Trump has been telling voters that wages already are rising at historic rates, though economic data don’t show it. In various recent speeches, he has falsely claimed that wages are going up for the first time in 18 years, 19 years, 20 years, 21 years and 22 years.

“We have so many jobs now coming in, but they’re raising wages,” Trump said last month at a roundtable event in Iowa. “The first time that’s happened in 19 years, where wages are going up.”

Average hourly earnings -- not accounting for inflation -- rose 2.7 percent in July from a year earlier, the same pace as the 12-month period before Trump’s election. They’ve been rising at an average 2.2 percent pace since the recession ended in mid-2009.

Trump’s claim is also belied by other measures of wages often used by economists, including the employment cost index and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s wage-growth tracker.

Tepid wage growth throughout the current economic expansion also bedeviled the Obama administration and remains one of the biggest challenges even with unemployment near the lowest level since 1969. On top of that, workers are failing to reap benefits of legislation cutting corporate taxes, an outcome predicted by some economists before Congress passed the law in December.

“It was our expectation that the major elements of the tax plan likely wouldn’t trickle down into stronger wages for the average worker,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Plc. “It was more likely to go as returns to shareholders.”
Companies in the S&P 500 index are set to authorize $1 trillion in stock buybacks in 2018, a record and a 46 percent jump from last year, according to an estimate this month from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Only 37 percent of Americans approve of the tax package, compared to 45 percent who disapprove, according to a Monmouth University poll released Aug. 20. Such unpopularity is hampering Republicans who had hoped the law would give them a boost in midterm elections.

One in four Americans don’t think they’re “at least doing OK” financially, and more than one in five respondents said they were unable to pay the current month’s bills in full, according to the results of a late 2017 Fed survey released in May.

“People that depend on wages -- and that’s essentially almost everyone except higher-income or higher-wealth individuals -- are not seeing as much benefit from this economy,” said Gregory Daco, head of U.S. macroeconomics at Oxford Economics in New York. “People at the lower end of the income spectrum are actually more constrained.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... stagnation

BUSINESS

Wages Are Low and Workers Are Scarce. Wait, What?

The low unemployment rate and stagnant pay point to a depressed economy underneath.

6:00 AM ET


Annie Lowrey
Contributing editor at The Atlantic covering economic policy

Across the country, there are more jobs available than there are workers looking for them, as the unemployment rate has dropped to a nearly two-decade low. Businesses are complaining of worker shortages, arguing they could do more and sell more and build more if they could just find the labor. Yet wages remain strikingly flat, with much of the raises that workers are making getting eaten up by inflation. Employees still somehow lack the power to cajole businesses into paying them more, nearly a decade into the recovery.

The central paradox of the Trump economy is that widespread concerns about labor shortages coexist with widespread complaints about low wages. But economists do not see it as much of a paradox—instead seeing it as a sign of dimming business dynamism and diminished worker power.

Whatever its causes, the change is striking. The last time that the unemployment rate was this low, during the late Clinton presidency, year-on-year wage growth was roughly 5 percent. It is now just above 3 percent. Moreover, wage growth has not picked up much for the past three years, even as the jobless rate has dropped down to historically low levels.

This may reflect the inherent limitations of the unemployment rate as an economic indicator. During and after the Great Recession, millions of Americans dropped out of the labor force, unable to find a good job or any job at all. They went to school. They retired. They became unpaid caretakers. If they had a disability, they applied for insurance coverage. The share of prime-age adults with a job dropped from 80 percent to 75 percent. Now, even with the unemployment rate in the low single digits, it has not recovered to where it was before this recession or the prior one. There is still slack in the labor market, with hundreds of thousands of workers sitting on the sidelines.

Economists point to another indicator to help explain the persistence of low wages in a climate of low unemployment: sluggish productivity. American businesses and workers are not getting more dynamic, more innovative, and more efficient—at least not like they were in the 1990s or the 1960s. That has the effect of smothering wage growth. “Wage growth feels low by historical standards and that's largely because productivity growth is low relative to historical standards,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Productivity growth between World War II and up through the Great Recession was, on average, 2 percent per annum. Since the recession 10 years ago, it’s been 1 percent.” Given those statistics, the sluggish pace of wage growth makes more sense, he said.

Still, that analysis assumes that productivity gains translate into higher wages—and there are reasons to think that might be less true now than it has been in the past, as Zandi noted. Economists point to the long-term decline in worker bargaining power as part of the reason that employees’ paychecks are not rising right now. The share of employed workers who are members of a union has fallen in half since the 1980s. States have eroded labor standards and hampered collective bargaining. As a result, it is harder for workers to demand higher paychecks, year after year after year.

“Bargaining powers are additive,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “You get them not just from the tight labor market, but also from your union, and also from binding labor standards. When you have this big erosion in this set of things that give you bargaining power, it takes a tighter and tighter labor market and a lower and lower unemployment rate to translate into strong wage growth.” She added: “I don't think that link is broken. I just think the unemployment rate has to be that much lower to spur strong wage growth, given that all of these other forms of worker leverage have been decimated.”

Increasing market concentration is another sweeping factor. In a huge number of business sectors, from manufacturing to retail trade to finance, the top four firms have a bigger share of revenue now than they did in the late 1990s. Measures of aggregate business concentration have increased too. Walmart dominates bricks-and-mortar retail; Google dominates web search; Amazon dominates e-commerce; Uber and Lyft dominate rideshare. Growing monopoly power is present everywhere from hospital systems to rental car companies. This raises profits, slows economic growth, increases inequality, and, yes, suppresses wages. Workers, in effect, have fewer employers to choose from. Employers have more power to set workers’ wages at a low level.

“We should be concerned about this agglomeration of market power not just because of its economic consequences, but also because of its political consequences,” Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate in economics, has argued. “An increase in economic inequality leads to an increase in political inequality, which can and has been used to create rules of the game that perpetuate economic inequality.”

More marginal causes are likely at work too. Roughly one in five workers are bound by a non-compete clause, which serves as an “intertemporal conduit of monopsony power” in the words of researchers. Such clauses can prevent workers from bargaining for a higher-paying job at a competing firm. Drug testing seems to stand in the way of some uncounted number of workers finding a job. And companies’ credential standards—which they inflated in the recession and just after, when there were millions of unemployed and underemployed workers with advanced degrees—might also be having an effect.

Still, the tighter labor market should lead to widespread and stronger wage gains at some point, economists think, and hopefully soon. That is already true in communities and industries with very low unemployment rates. When companies cannot fill positions even after raising wages significantly—that will indicate real labor shortages. And for workers? It will feel like a very good thing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ge/570649/

<

Well! That didn't take long! The trump/gop tax cuts just hit home where our social security checks are concerned. I received a whopping $3.00 increase per month while my wife had her's cut by $488.00 per month from $788.00 to $300.00 per month. Nice!

<b>North Carolina: The Electoral Integrity Project studies democracies across the world, and they concluded that North Carolina is not a democracy and “not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.” This is all thanks to Republican rule, and a new law is making the state even less democratic. According to the state board of elections, Over 60% of North Carolinians voted early in 2016, and that will be much more difficult to do now.</b>

You got some big balls for posting something as stupid as this statement and you live in Chicago !

Obviously you have sniffed too many toilets in your day !

What a tool.

I looked up the project cited, thinking it was probably a Geroge Soros funded project. But even worse. A project by Ivy League students...

The Electoral Integrity Project once scored North Korea's electoral integrity a score of 65.3 and Cuba a score of 65.6. That was higher than some EU countries.

I agree with statistician Andrew Gelman who had this to say about the PEI Index ... "[it] all seems like an unstable combination of political ideology, academic self-promotion, credulous journalism, and plain old incompetence"

No shock Joe laps it up.

I never post here but I will make an exception today and pronounce boldly:

We Tie.

Some liberals don’t want you ever hearing the other side of the story. That’s why they constantly complain about Fox News and right wing news agencies. As if they lie and make up stories, even though it has only been the left wing media that has had to retract stories in the last few years. Including Brian Ross of ABC causing a panic on Wall Street that cost people a ton one day.

Problem is, it keeps these liberals in the dark. Uninformed.

Peter said a while back that the Trump administration has done nothing to bring health care costs down. If he ever bothered to leaf through the Wall Street Journal he would learn that the Trump administration has saved consumers 26 billion on prescriptions since he took office.

-

Opinion | Review & Outlook

Sticking it to Pharma—With Competition

A record pace of generic drug approvals is reducing prices.

Did you hear that the Trump Administration has saved Americans $26 billion on prescription drugs?

Probably not, and one person who seldom mentions it, oddly enough, is President Trump. A report from his own White House shows how faster approvals at the Food and Drug Administration are lowering prices.

The FDA has over 20 months of the Trump Administration approved an astounding 1,617 generic drugs, which are identical to branded versions but sold at commodity prices after patents expire. That works out to 81 a month on average—an 17% increase over the preceding 20 months. The Council of Economic Advisers in October tried to tally the savings from new entrants: $26 billion.

What’s remarkable is that FDA is speeding up even as fewer patents are expiring. The reason is Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s prescriptions: clearing out an application backlog, putting priority on drugs where competition is limited, and more. The market for generics can respond to policy changes with some speed because copying a drug is much less onerous than new drug discovery and approval.

For all the talk of wondrous European health-care systems, the American generics system is the envy of the world. Nine in 10 prescriptions in the U.S. are cheaper generics, which saved $265 billion last year. Compare that with 70% in Canada and less than half in many European countries. The U.S. pays big for breakthroughs but eventually prices fall as competition arrives. Europe enjoys less price discipline.

The White House also notes that “as of August 2018 the relative price of prescription drugs was lower than in December 2016,” which is a dose of reality to anecdotes about skyrocketing costs. Important too is the point that patients also “save” from expensive new therapies in the form of extended and improved lives. Affordability is an issue only if a drug exists.

No past Administration can boast this record of lowering prices without disrupting medical innovation. Yet President Trump is threatening to blow up this progress with his fixation on importing European price controls.

Democrats want to set up a “price gouging” agency that would have roving authority to investigate and fine drug companies that are behaving in ways Democrats don’t like. Their model is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Then again, Mr. Trump has rolled out his own demagoguery at pharma executives. The Administration’s record reveals that the better treatment is more competition.

More On North Carolina:

Aug. 27, 2018
RALEIGH, N.C. — Federal judges on Monday affirmed their earlier decision striking North Carolina's congressional districts as unconstitutional because Republicans drew them with excessive partisanship. Acting under an order of the U.S. Supreme Court to re-examine the case, the three-judge panel ruled again in favor of election advocacy groups and Democrats who had sued to challenge the boundaries drawn in 2016. The groups and individuals that sued alleged GOP mapmakers manipulated the lines of the state's 13 districts in 2016 using political data to ensure Republicans retained a 10-3 majority within the delegation.The same judges in January deemed the map an illegal partisan gerrymander that violated constitutional protections of Democratic voters. U.S. Circuit Judge Jim Wynn noted the decade long challenges. "We continue to lament that North Carolina voters now have been deprived of a constitutional congressional districting plan — and, therefore, constitutional representation in Congress — for six years and three election cycles," he wrote. The U.S. Constitution "does not allow elected officials to enact laws that distort the marketplace of political ideas so as to intentionally favor certain political beliefs, parties, or candidates and disfavor others," Wynn wrote. Wynn, District Judge Earl Britt and District Judge William Osteen agreed again that the 2016 redistricting plan violated the U.S. Constitution's equal-protection provision. They also ruled that it violated provisions requiring states to be in charge of congressional elections because it dictated electoral outcomes.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congre ... al-n904326

<

More On North Carolina 2:

November 15, 2018 05:27 PM
Democrats prepare for fight over Senate vote on Thomas Farr, Trump’s pick for NC judge
Thomas Farr may finally get a confirmation vote in the U.S. Senate, but Democrats are already signaling fierce opposition to Donald Trump’s pick to fill a long-vacant federal judgeship in Eastern North Carolina. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, on Thursday filed to end debate and advance Farr’s nomination for district judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina to the full Senate. The Eastern District of North Carolina includes 44 counties that stretch from Raleigh to the coast. Blacks make up more than 25 percent of the district. “It is a slap in the face to communities of color everywhere,” the NAACP said in a statement Thursday on the move to schedule the vote. “Thomas Farr poses a serious threat to civil rights, especially since he would preside over a jurisdiction with a large African-American population. Even among dangerous Trump nominees, Farr stands out for his decades-long crusade to disenfranchise African Americans.”
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/polit ... 33035.html

<

More On North Carolina 3:


Senate Advances Judicial Nominee With History Of Restricting Voting Rights

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to advance U.S. District Court nominee Thomas Farr, a North Carolina attorney with a long record of defending laws that weaken voting rights for African Americans. Thomas Farr, Trump’s pick for a U.S. District Court seat, defended North Carolina’s voter suppression law and racist gerrymandering. Farr, 62, defended North Carolina’s sweeping voter suppression law passed in 2013, one of the most restrictive in the country. The law required voters to present government-issued photo IDs in order to cast a ballot, shortened the early voting period and eliminated same-day voter registration and out-of-precinct voting. Farr also defended a number of the state’s redistricting maps that were rejected by federal courts for being racially discriminatory. Farr is one of a number of controversial judicial nominees that Trump has put forward this year. Thomas Farr has been the lead attorney in attacking every modern effort in North Carolina to empower the state’s African American voters; and in most cases, he has been a public architect of the regressive and discriminatory backlash. With Republicans in control of the White House and the Senate, conservatives have a lot of leeway to nominate and confirm whomever they want to lifetime jobs on the federal bench.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tr ... 08619ebc79

<

Mississippi:

Mississippi Senator’s ‘Public Hanging’ Remark Draws Backlash Before Runoff


With her arm around a cattle rancher, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, Republican of Mississippi, drew laughter and applause at a recent campaign event when she gushed about how highly she thought of him: “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” But beyond the small crowd at the event, in Tupelo, Miss., the reaction has been markedly different. The N.A.A.C.P. called the comments “sick” after a video of the exchange was posted on Twitter over the weekend, while Mike Espy, Ms. Hyde-Smith’s Democratic opponent, said, “It’s awful.” Mr. Espy, who is black, and Ms. Hyde-Smith, who is white, are locked in a runoff after no candidate in a four-person race received more than 50 percent of the vote on Election Day. Ms. Hyde-Smith has made her ardent support of President Trump, who endorsed her, central to her campaign in a state that the president carried by nearly 18 points in 2016.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/us/p ... smith.html
<

More On Mississippi:

Mississippi GOP Sen. Hyde-Smith calls voter suppression 'great idea.' The caught-on-camera comment surfaced days after her remark about attending a "public hanging" stirred controversy. A video surfaced Thursday of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi saying it might be a "great idea" to make it harder for some people to vote, and her campaign quickly responded that she was "obviously" joking. "And then they remind me that there's a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who ... maybe we don't want to vote," Hyde-Smith is heard saying. "Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that's a great idea."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/electi ... ea-n936946

<

Alabama:


Prosecutor Matt Hart has been fired by Steve Marshall

The most feared man in Alabama politics has been fired. Alabama prosecutor Matt Hart, who until Monday headed up the special prosecutions unit at the Alabama Attorney General’s Office, was unceremoniously fired by AG Steve Marshall. A brief statement from Marshall’s office said Hart resigned and refused to comment otherwise. The firing of Hart was not necessarily surprising to anyone who paid attention to the recent election and Marshall’s run for AG. As APR reported in numerous stories, Marshall accepted campaign donations from several sources with interests in weakening ethics laws and seeing Hart removed. There is also little political downside for firing Hart. Most state lawmakers will be happy to see him go, since it removes a barrier to the quid pro quo style of governance that turned Alabama’s government into one of the most corrupt in the nation. Additionally, Alabama voters have proven to be far more concerned with party politics than rule of law and ethics. Hart’s career spans decades in the state and includes high-profile prosecutions of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. He was a particular thorn in the side of politicians who skirted the ethics laws. He prosecuted and earned a 12-count conviction of former GOP Speaker Mike Hubbard. He negotiated a guilty plea and resignation from former Gov. Robert Bentley. And his special grand jury in Jefferson County was digging through the scheme to undermine an EPA superfund site.
http://www.alreporter.com/2018/11/19/pr ... -marshall/

<

More Corruption; Another Trump appointee Indicted


“Poop Train” Trump EPA Official Resigns After Indictment

The Birmingham Herald reports:

Onis “Trey” Glenn III has resigned from his position as Region 4 Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency after being indicted on ethics charges in Alabama. Glenn submitted a letter of resignation dated Nov. 18 to acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, citing his intention to resign as a result of what he called “unfounded charges levied against me that I must and will fight.” “Stepping down now, I hope removes any distraction from you and all the great people who work at EPA as you carry out the Agency’s mission,” Glenn wrote in the resignation letter which was provided to AL.com. Glenn was appointed by Pres. Donald Trump to head Region 4 of the EPA in 2017, overseeing the eight-state Southeast region that includes Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina. Last week Rachel Maddow devoted a full segment to Trey “Poop Train” Glenn and the corruption scandal.
https://www.joemygod.com/2018/11/poop-t ... ndictment/
<

Blue Wave Or Shockwave ??

The Wave started on the Eastcoast from Canada to the Atlantic/Gulf, swept through the Midwest, and moved on to the Westcoast from Canada to Mexico. In the end, the Dems pickup 39-40 house seats with large wins in the state races. In the end, it came down to 9 million more Democratic votes than Republican votes. To those 100 million voters who came out to do their due diligence on both sides, congradulations. In the end, the big Republican Tax Reform Bill, the Economy, the Jobs Reports, and Gerrymandering did not help the Republicans. Not this time. If it were not for voter suppression and Gerrymandering in some key and deep red states, this would have been a clean Democratic sweep. This was a vote on an out-of-control Donald Trump. The unhinged Donald Trump cost the Republicans big time. What really hurts.....the Democrats now control the house. It's time to clean up the corruption and drain the real swamp.

<

Matthew Whitaker.......Really!!!!

Whitaker was a harsh public critic of special counsel Robert Mueller. He opined that the Trump campaign hadn’t colluded with Russia. He said there was no obstruction of justice case against the president. He mused about how a replacement for Jeff Sessions could rein Mueller in. He recently served on the advisory board of a scam company that the government shut down. The Federal Trade Commission eventually forced the company to shut down in 2017, and an FBI criminal investigation into the firm is ongoing. World Patent Marketing was also infamous for threatening customers who went public about their disgruntlement — and Whitaker participated. He emailed a customer that he was a former US attorney and that “smearing” World Patent Marketing online could lead to “serious civil and criminal consequences,” This, my friend, is your chief law enforcement person. Another Trump Troll.

<

Pleasure Or Paradise ?!?!?

'Pleasure, what a name': Trump confused over fire-hit town Paradise. As Donald Trump landed in northern California on Saturday morning, hundreds of evacuees at a Walmart in Chico were frantically trying to figure out their next steps – which shelter they would go to, and if they should stay close to what’s left of their homes in the fire-ravaged town of Paradise. The president actually visited the town of Paradise, which has been badly damaged by the deadly Camp Fire, that didn’t stop him from mistakenly calling it “Pleasure” — twice. When asked about the president’s visit to the area, Kirk Ellsworth, whose adult children lost their homes in the fire, shook his head in disgust. “My kids lost everything. I voted for him – and now? He can kiss my red ass,” Ellsworth said. “What he said was ridiculous. It hurts my heart. A lot of us voted for him and he [talks] down to us?”

<

Trump attacks retired Adm. William H. McRaven: McRaven Responds In Kind:

In the latest controversy, Trump appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” during which host Chris Wallace tried to ask him about criticism he received from retired Adm. William H. McRaven over the president’s attacks on the media. McRaven responded to Trump later on Sunday in an interview with CNN:

“I did not back Hillary Clinton or anyone else. I am a fan of President Obama and President George W. Bush, both of whom I worked for. I admire all presidents, regardless of their political party, who uphold the dignity of the office and who use that office to bring the nation together in challenging times. The president’s attack on the media is the greatest threat to our democracy in my lifetime. When you undermine the people’s right to a free press and freedom of speech and expression, then you threaten the Constitution and all for which it stands.”

<

Paris! Veterans Day! A Fiasco!

Trump’s trip to France was a fiasco. He failed to attend the ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American cemetery on Saturday morning. He was not present for the morning parade at the Arc de Triomphe. He did not attend the lunch for world leaders. Trump did not take part in Sunday’s afternoon's activity: the opening ceremony of the Paris Peace Forum, a global gathering of leaders and civil society dedicated to international cooperation and multilateralism. To top off a weekend of failed diplomacy, French President Emmanuel Macron used Sunday, while making a speech about the war that still remains France’s dominant historical experience of the last century, to lambast Trump’s America First nationalism.
“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” Macron intoned. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By saying ‘our interests first; who cares about the others?’, we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great, and what makes it essential—its moral values.”

<

Thanksgiving!

Trump Thanks Saudi Arabia For Low Gas Prices After Jamal Khashoggi’s violent murder and dismemberment. Trump said Saudi Arabia is still a U.S ally, despite evidence the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of the journalist. President Donald Trump on Wednesday thanked Saudi Arabia for the declining price of oil, one day after he said the United States would back the country even if Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “Oil prices getting lower. Great! Like a big Tax Cut for America and the World. Enjoy! $54, was just $82,” Trump said in a tweet. “Thank you to Saudi Arabia, but let’s go lower!”

By Max Boot
Columnist
Washington Post
November 26 at 2:42 PM

I admit it. I used to be a climate-change skeptic. I was one of those conservatives who thought that the science was inconclusive, that fears of global warming were as overblown as fears of a new ice age in the 1970s, that climate change was natural and cyclical, and that there was no need to incur any economic costs to deal with this speculative threat. I no longer think any of that, because the scientific consensus is so clear and convincing.

The Fourth National Climate Assessment, released Friday by the U.S. government, puts it starkly: “Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced, with widespread and growing impacts.” The report notes that “annual average temperatures have increased by 1.8°F across the contiguous United States since the beginning of the 20th century” and that “annual median sea level along the U.S. coast . . . has increased by about 9 inches since the early 20th century as oceans have warmed and land ice has melted.”

The report attributes these changes to man-made greenhouse gases and warns: “High temperature extremes, heavy precipitation events, high tide flooding events along the U.S. coastline, ocean acidification and warming, and forest fires in the western United States and Alaska are all projected to continue to increase, while land and sea ice cover, snowpack, and surface soil moisture are expected to continue to decline in the coming decades.”

The U.S. government warnings echo the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In October, it released a report that represented the work of 91 scientists from 60 countries. It describes, in the words of the New York Times, “a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040.”

The wildfires are already here. The Camp Fire blaze this month is the most destructive in California history, charring 153,000 acres, destroying nearly 19,000 structures, and killing at least 85 people. The second-most destructive fire in California history was the one last year in Napa and Sonoma counties. The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies notes that climate change has contributed to these conflagrations by shortening the rainy season, drying out vegetation and whipping up Santa Ana winds. Massive hurricanes are increasing along with wildfires — and they too are influenced by climate change.

It’s time to sound the planetary alarm. This is likely to be the fourth-hottest year on record. The record-holder is 2016, followed by 2015 and 2017. A climate change website notes that “the five warmest years in the global record have all come in the 2010s” and “the 10 warmest years on record have all come since 1998.”

Imagine if these figures reflected a rise in terrorism — or illegal immigration. Republicans would be freaking out. Yet they are oddly blasé about this climate code red. President Trump, whose minions buried the climate change report on the day after Thanksgiving, told Axios: “Is there climate change? Yeah. Will it go back like this, I mean will it change back? Probably.” And, amid a recent cold snap, he tweeted: “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

By this point no one should be surprised that the president can’t tell the difference between short-term weather fluctuations and long-term climate trends. At least he didn’t repeat his crazy suggestion that climate change is a Chinese hoax. Yet his denialism is echoed by other Republicans who should know better. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told CNN on Sunday: “Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time. . . . We need to always consider the impact to American industry and jobs.”

We do need to consider the impact on U.S. jobs — but that’s an argument for action rather than, as Ernst suggests, inaction. The National Climate Assessment warns that global warming could cause a 10 percent decline in gross domestic product and that the “potential for losses in some sectors could reach hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of this century.” Iowa and other farm states will be particularly hard hit as crops wilt and livestock die.

Compared with the crushing costs of climate change, the action needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions is modest and manageable — if we act now. Jerry Taylor, president of the libertarian Niskanen Center, estimates that a carbon tax would increase average electricity rates from 17 cents to 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. The average household, he writes, would see spending on energy rise “only about $35 per month.” That’s not nothing — but it’s better than allowing climate change to continue unabated.

I’ve owned up to the danger. Why haven’t other conservatives? They are captives, first and foremost, of the fossil fuel industry, which outspent green groups by 10 to 1 in lobbying on climate change from 2000 to 2016. But they are also captives of their own rigid ideology. It is a tragedy for the entire planet that America’s governing party is impervious to science and reason.

Oh brother...

Look, John Casey, who is a NASA scientist, space shuttle engineer, and former White House space policy advisor, has been writing for quite a while about how normal changes with the sun causes climate change back & forth here on earth. He has two excellent books, Dark Winter and Cold Sun. He has shown how normal fluctuations with the sun causes fluctuations with the earth's climate. Has happened since the dawn of time, and will continue happening.

Dr. Tony Phillips, editor at SpaceWeather.com and production editor of Science@NASA, and Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center, have been writing this year warning of a lack of sun spot activity and that we are going to be entering into an area of extreme cold. And from the looks of things lately they are sure looking right.

“The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age” - Dr Tony Phillips on 27 Sep 2018.

He says sun spots have been absent for most of 2018 and that the earth's upper atmosphere is responding.

-

Data from NASA’s TIMED satellite show that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere.

To help track the latest developments, Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center and his colleagues recently introduced the “Thermosphere Climate Index.”

The Thermosphere Climate Index (TCI) tells how much heat nitric oxide (NO) molecules are dumping into space. During Solar Maximum, TCI is high (meaning “Hot”); during Solar Minimum, it is low (meaning “Cold”).

“Right now, it is very low indeed … 10 times smaller than we see during more active phases of the solar cycle,” says Mlynczak

“If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold,” says Mlynczak. “We’re not there quite yet, but it could happen in a matter of months.”
-

Mlynczak also said sunspot activity follows a cycle which is believed to last 11 years as the number of patches peaks and drops. There have been very few spots on the sun for most of this year. Well in John Casey's books he says the exact same thing. Warm and cool spells that last around 10 years due to the suns normal fluctuations.

By the way, The sun is predicted to reach its solar minimum in 2019 or 2020, according to Nasa’s calculations. Maybe the most famous period of low sunspot activity was the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century. During that time, there was a ‘little ice age’ when the Thames froze over. Expect some pretty cold winters next few years. And expect liberals to blame it on man made global warming....

Also on the topic (nonsense) of human induced global warming, there has been another fraud alert. Recently researchers with UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Princeton University published "scientific findings" that the ocean was warming faster than they originally thought!! Oh my!! ... However a mathematician saw the findings and pointed out some inconsistencies and they had to walk back their findings. After it was already peer reviewed, published in the world's premier scientific journal, and given wide coverage by the world's biggest english speaking media. This even though the mathematician knew it was wrong while just briefly looking at the first page.

Here is a couple more informative articles on this subject if anybody cares to learn.

Despite What You've Heard, Global Warming Isn't Making Weather More Extreme
(great facts here debunking some recent nonsense spewed by liberal media)
https://www.investors.com/politics/edit ... e-extreme/

Don't Tell Anyone, But We Just Had Two Years Of Record-Breaking Global Cooling
(these facts are getting no media coverage)
https://www.investors.com/politics/edit ... edia-bias/