Month: December 2016

Will Donald Trump Screw V.A. Privatization? Probably.

As my colleague Peter Suderman has pointed out, Donald Trump’s rumored privatization plan for the Veterans Affairs hospitals is not much of a plan at all. It seems like some Trump official, somewhere, speaking anonymously said the words system, vets, choose, and private in close proximity and that’s really all we know.

But let’s assume some kind of privatization plan is, in fact, afoot. Is that good news?

While there’s a chance that the right people will be at the helm to craft this plan (I know some smart guys, if anyone’s interested) and a robust and carefully considered privatization scheme could be enacted, based on what we know about Trump so far it seems far more likely that we’ll wind up with something that looks like a giveaway to private business without the corresponding market mechanisms that are necessary for such a reform effort to show results. At the heart of the idea of privatization is the idea that when a providers fail to actually deliver products or services as promised, they no longer get paid. Contracts must be canceled for legitimate (non-political) reasons, and companies must be allowed to fail for privatization to succeed. The V.A. hospitals’ immunity to competition and veterans’ inability to seek care elsewhere were two of the biggest reasons waiting lists got as long as they did.

True privatization is tricky to do correctly—though not impossible! As the Reason Foundation attests, it happens all the time in the real world on the state and local level in particular. But if the Carrier deal is at all instructive about how the Trump administration is going handle relations between the state and the private sector, some bullying of major market players combined with watered down cronyism and politically expedient favoritism looks like the most likely outcome. Which means that veterans may indeed wind up getting even worse care that the deeply troubled V.A. was providing. What’s more, a messy half-assed reform effort with the word privatization slapped on the package will give future efforts at thoroughgoing privatization a bad name.

Those of us who are keen on privatization should take a moment to feel deep empathy for those on the other side of the political spectrum. I can only imagine the anticipatory agony of envisioning Trump-administered faux privatization is similar to what advocates of single-payer health care must have felt as they watched the Affordable Care Act take shape. The might-have-beens are cruel indeed.

I was on Kennedy talking about this very topic yesterday. Check it out:

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Obama Takes In 606% More Syrian Refugees Than Last Year, 98.8% Muslim

Submitted by Joseph Jankowski of PlanetFreeWill.com

The Obama administration’s refugee resettlement program took off in 2016 with 15,479 Syrian refugees having been admitted to the U.S, a 606% increase from the resettlement numbers of last year.

In his last month of the presidency alone, Obama admitted 1,307 more Syrian refugees to the states.

Overall, 98.8% of the refugees the president has welcomed into the country are Muslim.

CNS News Breaks it down:

  • 15,302 (98.8 percent) are Muslims – 15,134 Sunnis, 29 Shi’a, and 139 other Muslims
  • 125 (0.8 percent) are Christians – 32 Catholics, 32 Orthodox, five Protestants, four Jehovah’s Witnesses, and 52 refugees described only as “Christian” in State Department Refugee Processing Center data
  • 43(0.27 percent) are Yazidis
  • eight are “other” religion and one is described as having “no religion”
  • 3,904 (25.2 percent) are males between the ages of 14 and 50
  • 3,521 (22.7 percent) are females aged 14-50
  • 7,428 (47.9 percent) are children under 14, of whom 3,824 are boys and 3,604 are girls.

While there were 13,287 less refugees admitted in 2015, the religious ratio was similarly skewed: 2,149 Muslims (98 percent) and only 31 Christians (1.4 percent).

Sunni Muslims account for a majority of Syria’s population – an estimated 74 percent were present in the country when the deadly Syrian conflict began in 2011.

The Obama administration has acknowledged the violence being perpetrated against Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities by the Islamic State in areas under its control but has refused to work with lawmakers to prioritize the vulnerable groups.

Last year, Obama condemned Republican presidential candidates for considering bringing in more Christian, describing the idea as “shameful” and “not American.”

“When I hear folks say that, ‘Maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims,’ when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefitted from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful,” Obama said, most likely striking at sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida).

As polls find that admitting Syrian refugees into the U.S. is an unpopular policy amongst the American people, fiscal year 2017 is already on pace to have more refugees enter the country.

Through the first 11 weeks in FY 2017 (Oct. 1 through Dec. 17), the United States welcomed 23,428 individuals as “refugees,” according to the Refugee Processing Center. At this rate, the U.S. will resettle roughly 110,580 in the new year.

Through the first 11 weeks of FY 2016, the Obama Admin. only welcomed 13,786 refugees.

3,074 refugees who arrived in the fresh fiscal year are from Syria, putting the nation on track to welcome more than 14,500 people from the warn-torn country by year’s end.

“Get them here before Trump takes office on Jan. 20, because you don’t know exactly what Trump will do with regard to this controversial program,” Leo Hohmann of WND said of the outgoing administration’s attitude towards taking in refugees. “The left is in panic mode because this program has run on autopilot for 35 years, and now for the first time we have a president who has expressed an interest in taking a hard, critical look at how it is run and the effects it’s had on our cities, states and country.”

Along with the thousands of Syrians, the U.S. has also resettled 3,269 Somali refugees in FY 2017.

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Farewell 2016, College Accused of Anti-Male Bias, the Democrats’ Problem with Religious Voters, P.M. Links

  • New YearRollins College lacrosse player is suing the school for anti-male bias after he was suspended for sexually assaulting a female student. He says she assaulted him.
  • Michael Wear, an Obama staffer who worked on outreach to religious groups, explains the Democrats’ massive problem with faith-based voters.
  • Another problem for Democrats: multiculturalism isn’t inclusive enough, for real (it doesn’t include white people).
  • When a conservative Republican and a liberal feminist get together, you can bet it’s probably to ban pornography.
  • 5 Things Libertarians Should Be Nervous About in 2016.
  • Sim City: Libertarian Edition.
  • So long, 2016. My New Year’s Resolution: read fewer comments. To be sure.

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Putin Responds To Obama Expulsion Of 35 Russian Diplomats With World’s Biggest Eye-Roll, Offers Hospitality To US Diplomats

brazen-bullLame-cuck President Obama has decided to stuff his legacy into a Brazen Bull in a china shop and light a blazing fire underneath it. Just a week after fucking over Israel, the Obama administration and the FBI cobbled together an embarrassingly empty handed, heavily disclaimered, B-game hacking report. It’s been utterly shredded by experts. Also, John Podesta’s password was p@ssword. Coinciding with it’s release, Barry “Choom Gang” Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and revoked access to their retreat, right before their New Year’s Eve celebration. Oh my god…

Russian President Vladimir Putin (and quite frankly the rest of the world) is laughing at us. The Russian Embassy is trolling Obama with playground tweets. Social Media is on fire. Putin’s response has been, in a nutshell, “We’ll talk in 3 weeks when adults are in the room – in the meantime, US Diplomats and their families are welcome to the Kremlin for New Year’s Eve.”

 

 

 

 

 

Mic Dropsky. The below is an actual tweet from Russia, inviting the children of US diplomats to come party at the Kremlin.


realtweet

 Obama’s actions over the last week have been nothing short of a massive temper tantrum and an embarrassment to the country. That hacking report was a complete joke, only to be outdone by any retards it fooled. My guess is that the “USA Today” demographic, as “compliant and unaware” as they are, ate it up. Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi’s constituency, for example.

President-Elect Trump applauded Putin’s mature response:


 

Nigel Farage, #Brexit avenger also chimed in:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maria Zakharova, Russia’s Director of Information and Press, said this (Translated):

responsea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aaaand, of course the pundits reacted in kind:

bynot

 

 

January 20th can’t come soon enough.

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2016 Ends With A Whimper: Stocks Slide On Last Minute Pension Fund Selling

When we first warned 8 days ago that in the last week of trading a “Red Flag For Markets Has Emerged: Pension Funds To Sell “Near Record Amount Of Stocks In The Next Few Days”, and may have to “rebalance”, i.e. sell as much as $58 billion of equity to debt ahead of year end, many scoffed wondering who would be stupid enough to leave such a material capital reallocation for the last possible moment in a market that is already dangerously thin as is, and in which such a size order would be sure to move markets lower, and not just one day.

Today we got the answer, and yes – pension funds indeed left the reallocation until the last possible moment, because three days after the biggest drop in the S&P in over two months, the equity selling persisted as the reallocation trade continued, leading to the S&P closing off the year with a whimper, not a bang, as Treasurys rose, reaching session highs minutes before the 1pm ET futures close when month-end index rebalancing took effect.

10Y yields were lower by 2bp-3bp after the 2pm cash market close, with the 10Y below closing levels since Dec. 8. Confirming it was indeed a substantial rebalancing trade, volumes surged into the futures close, which included a 5Y block trade with ~$435k/DV01 according to Bloomberg while ~80k 10Y contracts traded over a 3- minute period.

The long-end led the late rally, briefly flattening 5s30s back to little changed at 112.5bps. Month-end flows started to pick up around noon amid reports of domestic real money demand; +0.07yr duration extension was estimated for Bloomberg Barclays Treasury Index. Earlier, TSYs were underpinned by declines for U.S. equities that accelerated after Dec. Chicago PMI fell more than expected.

Looking further back, the Treasury picture is one of “sell in December 2015 and go away” because as shown in the chart below, the 10Y closed 2016 just shy of where it was one year ago while the 30Y is a “whopping” 4 bps wider on the year, and considering the recent drop in yields as doubts about Trumpflation start to swirl, we would not be surprised to see a sharp drop in yields in the first weeks of 2017. Already in Europe, German Bunds are back to where they were on the day Trump was elected.

So with a last minute scramble for safety in Treasurys, it was only logical that stocks would slide, closing the year off on a weak note. Sure enough, the S&P500 pared its fourth annual gain in the last five years, as it slipped to a three-week low in light holiday trading, catalyzed by the abovementioned pension fund selling.

The day started off, appropriately enough, with a Dollar flash crash, which capped any potential gains in the USD early on, and while a spike in the euro trimmed the dollar’s fourth straight yearly advance, the greenback still closed just shy of 13 year highs, up just shy of 3% for the year. 

Meanwhile, the year’s best surprising performing asset, crude, trimmed its gain in 2016 to 52%.

The S&P 500 Index cut its advance this year to 9.7 percent as it headed for the first three-days slide since the election. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was poised to finish the year 200 points below 20,000 after climbing within 30 points earlier in the week. It appears the relentless cheerleading by CNBC’s Bob Pisani finally jinxed the Dow’s chances at surpassing 20,000 in 2016. Trading volume was at least 34 percent below the 30-day average at this time of day. A rapid surge in the euro disturbed the calm during the Asian morning, as a rush of computer-generated orders caught traders off guard. That sent a measure of the dollar lower for a second day, trimming its rally this year below 3 percent.

Actually, did we say crude was the best performing asset of the year? We meant Bitcoin, the same digital currency which we said in September 2015 (when it was trading at $250) is set to soar as Chinese residents start using it more actively to circumvent capital controls, soared, and in 2016 exploded higher by over 120%.

For those nostalgic about 2016, the chart below breaks down the performance of major US indices in 2016 – what began as the worst start to a year on record, ended up as a solid year performance wise, with the S&P closing up just shy of 10%, with more than half of the gains coming courtesy of an event which everyone was convinced would lead to a market crash and/or recession, namely Trump’s election, showing once again that when dealing with artificial, centrally-planned market nobody has any idea what will happen, or frankly, what is happening.

Looking at the breakdown between the main asset classes, while 30Y TSYs are closing the year effectively unchanged, the biggest equity winners were financials which after hugging the flatline, soared after the Trump election on hopes of deregulation, reduced taxes and a Trump cabinet comprised of former Wall Streeters, all of which would boost financial stocks, such as Goldman Sachs, which singlehandedly contributed nearly a quarter of the Dow Jones “Industrial” Average’s upside since the election.

The FX world was anything but boring this year: while the dollar soared on expectations of reflation and recovery, the biggest moves relative to the USD belonged to sterling, with cable plunging after Brexit and never really recovering, while the Yen unexpectedly soared for most of the year, only to cut most of its gains late in the year, when the Trump election proved to be more powerful for Yen devaluation that the BOJ’s QE and NIRP.

The largely unspoken story of the year is that while stocks, if only in the US – both Europe and Japan closed down on the year – jumped on the back of the Trump rally, bonds tumbled. The problem is that with many investors and retirees’ funds have been tucked away firmly in the rate-sensitive space, read bonds, so it is debatable if equity gains offset losses suffered by global bondholders.

And speaking of the divergence between US equities and, well, everything else, no other chart shows the Trump “hope” trade of 2016 better than this one: spot thee odd “market” out.

So as we close out 2016 and head into 2017, all we can add is that the Trump “hope” better convert into something tangible fast, or there will be a lot of very disappointed equity investors next year.

And with that brief walk down the 2016 memory lane, we wish all readers fewer centrally-planned, artificial “markets” and more true price discovery and, of course, profits.  See you all on the other side.

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Obama Response to Alleged Russian Hacking Undermines Confidence in U.S. Government

With just three weeks left in office, President Obama announced a series of measures, including limited sanctions and the expulsion of Russian intelligence operatives from the country, that the U.S. would take against Russia in response to its alleged hand behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

Obama imposed sanctions on a number of individuals and two intelligence agencies, the FSB and the GRU, as well as companies accused of aiding in hacking. House Speaker Paul Ryan called the sanctions long overdue. The president also amended an executive order from 2015 (EO #13964) concerning the executive branch’s authority to deal with cyberattacks and hacks aimed at the “critical infrastructure sector,” distributed denial-of-service attacks, and corporate and financial espionage. Obama has added a fourth condition under which the U.S. government has authority to respond to cyberattacks: When they “tamper with, alter, or cause a misappropriation of information with the purpose or effect of interfering with or undermining election processes or institutions.” That expansion should deeply trouble us all, especially since the federal government has not shown why it ought to be trusted to be responsible for the cybersecurity needs of non-governmental agencies.

Along with the measures, the administration released a report (PDF) from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) purporting to prove Russia’s role in the hackings. The document does not explicitly refer to Podesta nor the DNC, instead it refers to a “U.S. political party.” Most of the document is not about the election-related hacks but rather a laundry list of preventative measures network administrators can take.

The FBI and DHS joint report does explain how the DNC was hacked but offers little new information about that. In more technical language, the document explains that hackers sent out a thousand phishing emails, looking for someone to click on an attachment and thus provide them access into the targeted system via malware. We know from New York Times reporting that John Podesta’s emails were compromised in just such a way.

Similarly, the report doesn’t even really pretend to document that the Russian government was directly involved in the hackings; rather than offering independent verification, it asks readers to rely yet one more time on the FBI and DHS, two agencies that have done little to inspire full confidence among Americans. As former George W. Bush campaign heavyweight and ABC News’ chief political analyst, Matthew Dowd, put it on Twitter: “Lets be clear: U aren’t an American patriot & don’t respect Constitution if u believe Putin more than our President and intelligent services.” Perhaps believing the president is in Article 12 of the Constitution? You don’t have to be an America hater to distrust the president or intelligence services. The United States was, for example, sure that North Korea was behind the hacking of Sony, and then decided it wasn’t. The machinations of the intelligence community are notoriously lacking in transparency, making a substantive evaluation of its claims exceedingly difficult.

The administration argues that the hacks of the DNC and Podesta were “intended to influence the election, erode faith in U.S. democratic institutions, sow doubt about the integrity of our electoral process, and undermine confidence in the institutions of the U.S. government,” but it does not explain how. None of the emails released by Wikileaks from the DNC or Podesta’s email account have been challenged as forgeries or faked. Insofar as the emails from the DNC illustrated that Democratic Party bigwigs were in fact skewing the primary process to benefit their favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, over Bernie Sanders, any loss of faith in the DNC ought to be blamed on the DNC and not on whoever might have hacked their emails or released them to Wikileaks. (Wikileaks, for its part, has denied receiving the email batches from Russian sources.) Those revelations combined with worries in the Sanders camp about how much the legacy media was in the tank for Clinton, with the larger result that many Americans had less faith in the DNC (and its former chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) and major newspapers and news channels. But none of the emails themselves suggested anything untoward about the actual voting process—no illegal tampering with voting machines or voter rolls or anything of the kind.

If we’re being honest (rather than purely partisan), the administration’s slow-moving and cryptic responses to the alleged Russian hacking has itself sowed doubt “about the integrity of our electoral process” and undermined “confidence in the institutions of U.S. government.” Within recent memory, we’ve been treated to revelations that Obama kept an unconstitutional “secret kill list,” and that major intelligence bosses have lied under oath; whatever else you might say about the way that director James Comey handled the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s private server during the election, you can’t say it made you feel more sure about an outfit with a decades-long reputation for spin and outright deception.

The president says in the coming weeks, the administration will release more reports on the history of election-related interference, including cases from previous election cycles. That the Obama administration waited until its last month in office to make these disclosures certainly works to undermine confidence. The context-free coverage of “election hacks,” meanwhile, makes it seem like something more than the hacking of emails happened this election cycle. A remarkable 50 percent of Hillary Clinton voters said in a recent YouGov poll that they believed Russia had tampered with vote tallies to help Trump. President Obama has specifically denied such claims, yet the imprecise language used by government officials and reporters has helped to, in the words of the administration, “sow doubt about the integrity of our electoral process.”

While citing election-related crimes, the Obama administration also lodged other complaints about Russia—namely that U.S. diplomatic officials in Russia were being harassed by police and security services. But the entirety of the claim about hacking appears to involve only the DNC and John Podesta emails. Those emails were not forged. Rather than respond to the hack transparently, the DNC and Podesta attempted to shift the discussion to the source of the leaks. But the source of the leak is irrelevant to the content of the leak.

Indeed, it’s hard to look at the freakout over who might be responsible for leaks that provided voters with useful information about the way their political leaders operate and not wonder if it’s being done to delegitimize unwanted results (remember how outraged everyone was when Donald Trump refused to proactively abide by the results of the election?). Wikileaks has long been the target of a campaign to delegitimize it as a source. At The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald notes how a recent interview with Julian Assange was misleadingly summarized by The Guardian in an article that went viral and spread “false news” about Assange across the world. The Guardian claimed that Assange said there was no need for a Wikileaks in Russia because the country had a free and open press, an obviously false statement. Instead, in the actual interview, Assange talked about the problems of penetrating Russian sources because his organization doesn’t have Russian speakers on staff and other reasons.

In the interview, Assange dismissed the idea that Wikileaks was trying to help Trump by releasing the DNC and Podesta emails. “What is the allegation here exactly?” Assange asked. “We published what the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, and Hillary Clinton herself were saying about their own campaign, which the American people read and were very interested to read, and assessed the elements and characters, and then they made a decision. That decision was based on Hillary Clinton’s own words, her campaign manager’s own words. That’s democracy.”

Russia said it would not retaliate by expelling U.S. diplomats from Russia or imposing sanctions of their own. Instead, Russia President Vladimir Putin invited the children of American diplomats to the annual children’s Christmas party at the Kremlin. Trump praised Putin’s decision to “delay,” tweeting that he knew Putin was “very smart.” You don’t have to believe that Putin is “very smart,” or even a decent human being to continue to question Obama administration’s claims about Russia “hacking” the election. And you certainly don’t have to be as disturbingly incurious as Donald Trump seems to be about Russian intelligence operations—he’s said it’s “time to move on to bigger and better things,” an unthinkable response from him if the country in question was, say, China. No, you only have to have lived in the United States for any length of time, especially in the 21st century, when government officials have been caught redhanded lying to the public and Barack Obama has failed to deliver on his promise to run the “most transparent administration ever.” This is the man, after all, who has been called “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” by legendary journalist James Risen. It will take more than a few reports and press statements to regain the confidence of Americans. Indeed, it might even take the kind of transparency and sharing of information that he once promised to deliver.

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Here Are Some Of The Ridiculous New State Laws That Will Take Effect January 1st – Happy New Year!

Back in September we wrote about what we thought for sure would be the wackiest new state law passed in 2016.  The law came from the state of California (of course) and demanded a 40% reduction in methane gas from cow flatulence by 2030.  Here’s what we had to say about the bill:

In yet another attack on California businesses, yesterday Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill (SB 1383) that requires the state to cut methane emissions from dairy cows and other animals by 40% by 2030.  The bill is yet another massive blow to the agricultural industry in the state of California that has already suffered from the Governor’s passage of a $15 minimum wage and a recent bill that makes California literally the only state in the entire country to provide overtime pay to seasonal agricultural workers after working 40 hours per week or 8 hours per day (see “California Just Passed A $1.7 Billion Tax On The Whole Country That No One Noticed“).

 

According to a statement from Western United Dairymen CEO, Anja Raudabaugh, California’s Air Resources Board wants to regulate animal methane emissions even though it admits there is no known method for achieving the the type of reduction sought by SB 1383.

 

“The California Air Resources Board wants to regulate cow emissions, even though its Short-Lived Climate Pollutant (SLCP) reduction strategy acknowledges that there’s no known way to achieve this reduction.” 

This guy even invented a handy backpack for cows to store their farts…not such a dumb idea anymore, now is it?

Cow

 

But Californians aren’t the only ones that will be facing some wacky new laws in 2017.  As The Hill points out, Illinois residents who prefer to spear catfish with a pitchfork will be in full compliance with state laws after Sunday, but Oregonians who want to release sky lanterns are shit out of luck.

Meanwhile, Illinois adopted a new State Artifact, the pirogue, while California passed a ton of other amazing bills including one that allows hair dressers to serve wine to their guests, provided they don’t charge for it, of course, a new requirement that autographed memorabilia being sold for more than $5 come with a “certificate of authenticity,” and one that allows you to break into a hot or cold car to save an animal, as long as you call authorities first.

When the new year rings in, Illinois will also have an official State Artifact — the pirogue, a long, narrow canoe used by Native Americans. The pirogue will take its place alongside the official state snack food (popcorn), the official state fossil (the Tully Monster), the official state dance (the square dance) and the official state insect (the monarch butterfly).

 

California’s most contentious legislative fights over the last year involved new measures on gun control and climate change. But members also found time to allow barbers and beauticians to serve their patrons beer and wine, provided they don’t charge for it.

 

Sacramento also decided to impose stricter rules on those who would sell autographed memorabilia. Any signed item being sold for more than $5 will have to come with a certificate of authenticity once January rolls around.

 

And California state employees will no longer be reimbursed for out-of-state travel to places that allow discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation or gender identity. That law, passed after North Carolina and other states passed measures requiring transgender people to use the bathroom of their birth sex, is likely to impact everything from state employees who want to travel to a conference to the University of California system’s football schedule.

In New England, cider brewers in Maine will be able to increase the alcohol content of their batches to 8.5% from 7% while New Hampshire banned bestiality…and while we knew there wasn’t much to do in “The Hampshire” we had no idea this was actually a problem.

In Maine, brewers will be able to up the alcohol in their cider to 8.5 percent, from 7 percent. In Colorado, some grocery stores will be able to sell beer, wine and liquor. In Pennsylvania, a state with notoriously stringent alcohol laws passed in the wake of Prohibition, beer distributors will be able to sell six packs for the first time.

 

New Hampshire residents need to be much more careful with laser pointers. Beginning Sunday, it will be a crime to knowingly shine a laser at an aircraft or automobile. The Granite State is also outlawing bestiality, which has somehow remained officially legal in New Hampshire until Sunday morning.

Finally, here are the states where Doritos consumption is set to sky rocket in the new year.

Other states will liberalize marijuana laws on January 1. Revelers on the Las Vegas Strip will be able to legally possess marijuana for recreational purposes when the clock strikes midnight, and those with medical conditions will have access to marijuana in North Dakota, Florida, Arkansas and Montana. And in Michigan, medical marijuana dispensaries will finally gain legal status, years after the state approved medical sales.

 

Three other states — California, Massachusetts and Maine — passed marijuana legalization measures in November. The new laws have already been implemented in California and Massachusetts, and Maine will join them later in January.

And you thought politicians were useless…

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Israel First Or America First

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Donald Trump has a new best friend.

“President-elect Trump, thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support of Israel,” gushed Bibi Netanyahu, after he berated John Kerry in a fashion that would once have resulted in a rupture of diplomatic relations.

Netanyahu accused Kerry of “colluding” in and “orchestrating” an anti-Israel, stab-in-the-back resolution in the Security Council, then lying about it. He offered to provide evidence of Kerry’s complicity and mendacity to President Trump.

Bibi then called in the U.S. ambassador and read him the riot act for 40 minutes. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer charged that not only did the U.S. not “stand up to and oppose the gang-up” at the U.N., “the United States was actually behind that gang-up.”

When Ben Rhodes of the National Security Council called the charges false, Dermer dismissed President Obama’s man as a “master of fiction.”

Query: Why is Dermer not on a plane back to Tel Aviv?

Some of us can recall how Eisenhower ordered David Ben-Gurion to get his army out of Sinai in 1957, or face sanctions.

Ben-Gurion did as told. Had he and his ambassador castigated Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, as the Israelis dissed John Kerry, Ike would have called the U.S. ambassador home.

Indeed, Ike’s threat of sanctions against Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s government, which had also invaded Egypt, brought Eden down.

But then Dwight Eisenhower was not Barack Obama, and the America of 1956 was a more self-respecting nation.

Still, this week of rancorous exchanges between two nations that endlessly express their love for each other certainly clears the air.

While Kerry has been denounced for abstaining on the U.N. resolution calling Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem illegal and an impediment to peace, this has been U.S. policy for years.

And Kerry’s warning in his Wednesday speech that at the end of this road of continuous settlement-building lies an Israel that is either a non-Jewish or a non-democratic state is scarcely anti-Semitic.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history, has warned his countrymen, “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-Democratic.”

“If the bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote” added Barak, “this will be an apartheid state.” Of John Kerry’s speech, Barak said, “Powerful, lucid … World & majority in Israel think the same.”

Defense Secretary-designate Gen. James Mattis warned in 2013 that Israeli settlements were leading to an “apartheid” state.

After Joe Biden visited Israel in 2010, to learn that Netanyahu just approved 1,600 new units in East Jerusalem, Gen. David Petraeus warned: “Arab anger on the Palestine question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnership with governments and people in the region.”

Yet facts and reality, however unpleasant, cannot be denied.

The two-state solution is almost surely dead. Netanyahu is not going to remove scores of thousands of Jewish settlers from Judea and Samaria to cede the land to a Palestinian state. After all, Bibi opposed Ariel Sharon’s removal of 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza.

How will all this impact the new Trump administration?

Having tweeted, “Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching,” and having named a militant Zionist as his ambassador, Trump is certain to tilt U.S. policy heavily toward Israel.

Politically, this will bring rewards in the U.S. Jewish community.

The Republican Party will become the “pro-Israel” party, while the Democrats can be portrayed as divided and conflicted, with a left wing that is pro-Palestine and sympathetic to sanctions on Israel.

And the problem for Trump in a full embrace of Bibi?

Britain and France, which voted for the resolution where the U.S. abstained, are going to go their separate way on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, as is the world.

Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf Arabs will be pressured by their peoples and by the militant states of the region like Iran, to distance themselves from the Americans or face internal troubles.

And once U.S. pressure ends and settlement building in the West Bank proceeds, Netanyahu, his hawkish Cabinet, the Israeli lobby, the neocons and the congressional Republicans will start beating the drums for Trump to terminate what he himself has called that “horrible Iran deal.”

Calls are already coming for the cancellation of the sale of 80 Boeing jets to Iran. Yet, any U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal, or reimposition of sanctions on Iran, will further split us off from our European allies. Not only did Britain and France vote for the Security Council resolution, both are party, as is Germany, to the Iran deal.

Having America publicly reassert herself as Israel’s best friend, with “no daylight” between us, could have us ending up as Israel’s only friend – and Israel as our only friend in the Middle East.

Bibi’s Israel First policy must one day collide with America First.

via http://ift.tt/2iNn5DZ Tyler Durden

Trump Praises Putin: “Great Move On Delay – I Always Knew He Was Very Smart”

If there was any confusion how president-elect Donald Trump –  who for the past few days has been urging Americans to “get on with our lives” beyond the topic of Russian sanctions – felt about Putin unexpectedly taking the “high road” and refusing to retaliate tit-for-tat to Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats, he cleared it up moments ago when at 2:41pm he tweeted: “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!”

Or, said otherwise, “Obama is not very smart” something which the Russian embassy in the US found notably enough to Retweet (in this particular case, we are confident Retweeting means endorsing).

While it remains unclear if Trump will eliminate the anti-Russia sanctions implemented by Obama as soon as he enters office in three weeks, we expect many more op-eds and articles lamenting the bromance between Trump and Putin by Jeff Bezos’ blog and other “unfake” media.

And case in point, here is Hillary Clinton sycophant John Harwood, who mysteriously still has a job at CNBC following the reputation crushing Podesta email revelations, slamming Trump’s tweet as “breath-taking: one day after POTUS sanctions Russia for criminal interference in US election, President-elect praises Putin as “very smart”

via http://ift.tt/2iNgRUt Tyler Durden

New Television Shows for the New Year: New at Reason

'The Mick'If you were thinking Fox’s The Mick was an homage to former New York Yankee centerfielders, then congratulations, you’re already achieved 2017’s first big disappointment and can stop wasting time hoping that this year will somehow be better than the last. If, however, you’ve been wondering when the stealth obscenity “see you next Tuesday” would slip across the broadcast television DEW line, or waiting for the medium’s first Rosemary Kennedy joke, then this is the year—and perhaps the show—for you.

You know you’re about to watch something special when a network press release describes the lead character as “foul-mouthed [and] debaucherous.” (Yeah, I didn’t know it was a word, either.) That would be the title character Mick, short for McKenzie, a two-bit street hustler who makes her screen entrance by strolling through a supermarket, not just eating food off the shelves (Cheez-Whiz chased with Reddi-Whip right out of the can), but shaving under her arms and powdering her hoo-ha. Television critic Glenn Garvin takes a look at the show, along with police procedural Ransom.

View this article.

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