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The long effort to undermine the Trump administration — 38 Comments

1. This is typical behavior for Obama: Find an issue that people are somewhat upset about; teach them to scream louder; take credit for any changes. See Altgeld Gardens. He doesn’t actually ever want to do the hard work of solving problems. He has just gone back to his career as community disorganizer. BLM is probably his crowning achievement, even though no black lives were improved.

2. I have noticed that democrat ex presidents just can’t resist being in the spotlight, sort of like Chuck Schumer.

3. expat — Indeed.

4. Undermining can go both ways.

   https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/30/politics/trump-cancels-federal-employee-pay-raises/index.html

5. I’m so tired of Barack Obama. Please just go and stay away.

6. Mark:
   Not likely.

7. Anonymous doesn’t fit this “seamless” narrative. The writer is pro-Trump, or at least he was until discovering that the President is incompetent. To the extent that there is an ideological motive involved, It’s coming from the right.

   This aligns with Woodward’s reporting. For example, Gary Cohn is said to have taken an unsigned document from Trump’s desk, a copy of which Woodward publishes, in order to prevent him from withdrawing from the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Cohn figured that Trump would just forget about it.

   Here we see a “soft coup”. But the motives behind it revolve around free trade and national security, all wrapped up around the belief that Trump has no idea what he’s doing and does not have the capacity to learn.

   We anti-Trumpers would suspect more. Cohn, according to Woodward, “could not believe that President Trump would risk losing vital intelligence assets crucial to U.S. national security”, especially when North Korea is threatening to annihilate us. It’s almost as if he’s trying to divide and conquer…his own side. Putin’s puppet indeed.

   But as far as I know, neither Cohn nor Anonymous go there. But those who do, like President Obama, are not too pleased with the Pro-Trump soft-coup. Obama said as much in his speech.

8. Woodward’s ‘reporting’ has included in the past a contention that he had 12 hours of interviews with Wm. J. Casey on the man’s deathbed and somehow never encountered the man’s wife, the man’s daughter, the nursing staff, the medical staff, or hospital security. Demonstrating that the news media is a dishonest cabal who cover for each other, they all pretended he wasn’t lying, even when Sophia Casey made plain it was all fiction. The media are properly despised.

9. He doesn’t actually ever want to do the hard work of solving problems. He has just gone back to his career as community disorganizer. BLM is probably his crowning achievement, even though no black lives were improved.

   Solving problems would require drone striking Democratic Party clients and proceeding along lines which have salutary effects but which do not provide emotional validation for Democratic Party mascots. It also requires a skill set he doesn’t have. Is there any evidence that Obama understands financial statements or understands ordinary statistical analyses? Is there any that he has satisfactory instincts about individual or institutional behavior? What he knows is the world of NGO office plankton, where you collect a salary but are not subject to operational measures of competence. He spent 12 years collecting a salary from the University of Chicago, but published not one scholarly paper. Nobody dares call him a lightweight.

10. “It’s all part of a seamless whole, otherwise known as the “soft coup.” neo

    “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

    “The rise of Trump is a repudiation of 30 years of bipartisan treason and failure.” Roger Stone

    “all wrapped up around the belief that Trump has no idea what he’s doing and does not have the capacity to learn.” manju

    “As success converts treason into legitimacy, so belief converts fiction into fact, and, nothing is but what is not.” – Samuel Laman Blanchard

    “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

11. He doesn’t actually ever want to do the hard work of solving problems. He has just gone back to his career as community disorganizer. BLM is probably his crowning achievement, even though no black lives were improved.

    Black Unemployment Rate:

    https://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers_LNS14000006_2008_2018_all_period_M08_data.gif

12. Manju – where are the axis scales and numbers on your graph?? They don’t show when I go to the link.

13. Manju:

    How cute, a graph without scalar units! It must prove that BHO, PBHN, was indeed the savior, and solution to black unemployment. I’m convinced, *not.

14. Lord ha’ mercy, miss Martha, I ain’t seen them Demcrats as upset ’bout losin’ an election since I was a shavetail lieutenant at Fort Sumpter in 1861.

15. Manju on September 8, 2018 at 6:47 pm at 6:47 pm said:
    Here we see a “soft coup”. But the motives behind it revolve around free trade and national security, all wrapped up around the belief that Trump has no idea what he’s doing and does not have the capacity to learn.
    * * *
    Some people like what he’s doing.

    https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/12/thank-god-trump-isnt-a-foreign-policy-expert/

    “One must jettison the abstractions of modern intellectuals in order to make politics possible again. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than on matters of foreign policy. As Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla has written (No Victory, No Peace), as our increasingly miseducated rulers sought abstract impossibilities, the quest for “everlasting peace” over the last century has increasingly given us “never-ending war.” As Codevilla explains in “On the Natural Law of War and Peace,” at least “[s]ince Korea in 1950, the U.S. government has explicitly disavowed seeking military victories.”

    Despite the fact that the New York Times itself seems to acknowledge that the Trump administration’s North Korea “maximum pressure” policy has thus far been “one of its first, and arguably most successful initiatives,” if you are a non-deplorable person you were supposed to be deeply, Jake-Tapper-with-a-furrowed-forehead worried about President Donald Trump’s intelligence, expertise, temperament, and discipline at Tuesday’s summit in Singapore.”

    https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/trump-acumen-iraq/

    BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 942, September 7, 2018

    “EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: President Trump is described, even by the few commentators who are relatively friendly towards him, as having no clear strategy in international affairs. This assessment does not hold true across the board. In the Middle East at least, his strategy is very clear..”

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/09/in-america-it-is-reality-vs-fantasy.php

    “I was in D.C. to testify before the Joint Economic Committee on the effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on Minnesota’s economy. Those effects have been magnificently positive, as they have been on the national economy.”

16. Some people didn’t think Obama’s administration had the capacity to learn.
    I do think most of them knew what they were doing; they just didn’t learn how wrong they were.

    https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-sum-of-all-tears/
    Column: The clueless architects of Barack Obama’s terrible Iran deal
    BY: Matthew Continetti
    September 7, 2018 5:00 am

    “International business consultant Wendy Sherman was the chief American negotiator of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal agreed to by President Obama in 2015 and abrogated by President Trump earlier this year. She has a new book out, Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power, and Persistence, and in the space of 14 Tweets promoting it the other day she managed to combine basically everything I dislike about Washington.”

17. Some people do think Trump knows what he is doing, and his opponents just don’t like the results.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/trump-foreign-policy-demands-reciprocity-keeping-commitments/

    “Critics of Donald Trump claim that there’s no rhyme or reason to his foreign policy. But if there is a consistency, it might be called reciprocity.

    Trump tries to force other countries to treat the U.S. as the U.S. treats them. In “don’t tread on me” style, he also warns enemies that any aggressive act will be replied to in kind.

    The underlying principle of Trump commercial reciprocity is that the United States is no longer powerful or wealthy enough to alone underwrite the security of the West. It can no longer assume sole enforcement of the rules and protocols of the post-war global order.”

    http://carolineglick.com/never-trumps-insane-foreign-policy/

    “George Orwell once quipped, referring to a conspiracy theory that American soldiers had been brought to England in World War II to put down a working-class rebellion rather than to fight Nazi Germany: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

    His insight is certainly valid in connection to the “Never Trump” intellectuals today.

    Case in point is a recent article published by Never Trump super-intellectual, the Brookings Institute’s Robert Kagan.

    Earlier in the summer, Kagan wrote an oped in the Washington Post where he laid out his best case against President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

    Not to put too sharp a point on things: It was unhinged.

    Titled “Trump’s America does not care,” Kagan made a contention that was wrong and then made two additional assertions which were also wrong — and which, even worse, contradicted one another.

    Kagan’s basic contention was that Trump has transformed the United States from a moral actor and a great power into an immoral actor and a “rogue power.”

    Trump did this, apparently, by committing the unpardonable offense of basing his foreign policy on U.S. interests.

    It used to be that outside the confines of a marginal groups of Communists and their fellow travelers, no one in Washington would ever argue that it is immoral for the United States to use its foreign policy to advance its national interests.

    But at a time when Trump Derangement Syndrome spreads like the plague through intellectual circles, Kagan wrote that under Trump, the “United States [behaves like a] rogue superpower, neither isolationist nor internationalist, neither withdrawing nor in decline, but active, powerful and entirely out for itself.”

    And what has happened as a result of Trump acting entirely on behalf of his nation? How has Trump’s America First foreign policy transformed America into a rogue superpower?

    For the answer, we come to Kagan’s two further assertions.

    First, Kagan said that it is immoral for the U.S. to use foreign policy to advance its national interests as Trump is doing.

    Second, Kagan wrote that the U.S. is only allowed to advance its national interests by adhering to the post-World War II alliance system the U.S. constructed 70 years ago (because it advanced the U.S’s primary national interest at the time of defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War).

    Before considering the veracity of these assertions, it is important to mention that they cannot both be true. Obviously, if it is immoral for the U.S. to use its foreign policy as a means to advance its national interest, then it is immoral for the U.S. to advance its interests through the Cold War alliance system.

    As it works out, neither of Kagan’s assumptions is true.

    …
    The fact that Trump is accomplishing real things that Kagan and his comrades used to support – like moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, forging a new alliance with U.S. Arab allies directed against Iran, and closing advantageous trade deals with Europe – merely causes Kagan to double down in his rejection of Trump’s foreign policy.

    While inexplicable in the real world, Kagan’s response to Trump’s successes is sensible in the closed intellectual universe he and his fellow Never Trump intellectuals have inhabited since the Republican National Convention two years ago.

    …
    The postwar international system was predicated on the Soviet Union’s emergence as the U.S.’s primary foe. The Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. And at least since 2001, the U.S.’s primary foe has been a loose- and fast-changing alliance of jihadist governments and terror groups that operate globally.

    Why an alliance system built around fighting an enemy that no longer exists is the best system to use to fight a completely different enemy is anyone’s guess. Regardless, the notion that it is immoral to downgrade or sideline an alliance system built on fighting an enemy that has been gone for 27 years is simply wrong.

    It is too early to tell if Trump’s America First foreign policy will succeed. But it is progressing in a promising trajectory. Indeed, if Trump’s policies in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Europe are even partially successful, he will be remembered as the most significant – and successful – U.S. statesman in the post-Cold War era.

    Perhaps the best sign that Trump’s foreign policy is succeeding – or at least promising — is the frothing-at-the-mouth quality of the critiques his foreign policy attracts. Attacks like Kagan’s show that Trump’s America First foreign policy is the only game today in Washington.

    And, given the dismal intellectual and practical failures of the foreign policies of both the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administration, it is a good thing for America and for global security that Trump has the field to himself.”

18. Federal civil servants in DC and suburbs may all be corrupt Democrats, and some of them in “Flyover Country” are, too, but in what they dismiss as Flyover” is mostly populated by Normals, and that includes the federal employees. It was, for just one example, IRS employees who brought to light Lois Lerner’s shenanigans regarding non-profits with a Rightward lean. It was also Federal employees who exposed the corruption in the Extra Child Tax Credit provision that allowed Mexicans to claim as dependents almost anyone related by blood, marriage, or imagination, although, if the whistleblowers had been successful, there would have been fewer IRS employees needed in one regional service center.

    I can’t really believe that many Forest Service and Park Service rangers line up behind the craziness emanating from the Eastern Seaboard. The corruptocrats may find some sympathy among industrial union members, concentrated in a few states However, it is pretty clear that those workers put Trump over the top in Electoral College votes.

    IIRC, it was in his novel Perelandra, thaT CS Lewis made the point that the Devil is not smart, not the cutting edge, but, rather the source of chaos and confusion. So, it is not so surprising to me that his real-world followers too, not enhance rational discourse, but produce more confusion.

19. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/obamas_sore_spot_trumps_soaring_economy.html

    “Obama during his terms repeatedly dismissed tax cuts, which a Republican Congress put in front of him and he refused to so much as consider. He’s still spouting the line that tax cuts all go to the rich, and he claims there is no connection among the Trump tax cuts, the falling black, Hispanic, youth, and female employment rates. And that 4.2% GDP boom, coming up in the second year of President Trump’s administration? He says that’s his.

    It’s such garbage.

    Note also that he still believes the same tired leftist canard that if you cut taxes, you will run deficits because taxpayer behavior never responds to incentives. Investor’s Business Daily, which is the expert on these matters, notes that tax receipts went up 9% for the government as the U.S. economy boomed. That’s bad news for Obama’s beliefs, but hasn’t stopped his lies.

    Here’s the hard reality: Obama could have had Trump’s economy if he had signed on to tax cuts. One wonders if it eats at him that he didn’t. Like any Democrat, he thinks tax cuts are a “scam” because he thinks allowing people to control their own money is a bad thing, and all of their moneys are his. Yet the economy is an “it” – it’s not a partisan thing. It behaves exactly the same way whether a Republican cuts the taxes or a Democrat cuts the taxes. It simply goes up. Want an economy to improve, cut taxes. This isn’t complicated.

    He failed. And President Trump’s amazing success, that success that may well propel a red wave come November if voters want to keep things like this has got to eat at him as he feebly insists that the economy is all his.

    This is wretched. What a nasty, bitter little man, trying to take credit for an economy he never understood. “

20. https://spectator.us/2018/09/deep-state-throat-swallowed/

    What the Deep Throat State just swallowed
    The New York Times’s op-ed confirms everything the President has said about his enemies.
    Roger Kimball

    “If only, if only President Trump had the wisdom to consult well-moored (and moral!) folks like this unnamed benefactor who is (he tells us) working diligently to ‘preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.’

    What a guy! Giving the devil his due, our upholder of virtue acknowledges that many of President Trump’s — at least, his administration’s (let’s not let the devil get too much credit) policies ‘have already made America safer and more prosperous.’ Indeed. He might have added that in the 18 months since he took office, Donald Trump has presided over the most astonishing successful presidency in modern history, maybe ever.

    I won’t bother to recite that litany. Suffice it to say that it begins with judicial appointments, moseys on through the economic growth, unemployment, and stock market numbers, passes by stunning consumer confidence reports, makes a stop at the revitalisation of our military, and certainly takes in many daring foreign policy gambits, from the decision (finally) to move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem to the revocation of the disastrous Iranian deal through which the Obama administration covertly funded the mullahs’ efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.

    There’s a lot more to that list, by the way, and I suspect the author of this curious op-ed is fully aware of this painful fact. Which is why he is at such pains to take the only viable way out of his dilemma. Donald Trump has been unexpectedly, ostentatiously successful. That reality is too painful to admit without a filigree of negative counterpoints. Solution: say he is a bad man. Call him names. Accuse him of being without principle. Up the ante and say the principles he lacks are ‘first principles.’ That sounds so much worse.
    …
    I have no doubt that the author or authors of this repellent, moralising piece of humbug is correct that various bureaucrats in the White House and elsewhere are ‘working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda.’ That’s what the permanent bureaucracy does to anyone who challenges its hegemony. Has anyone done more to frustrate that hegemony than Donald Trump?

    Donald Trump was elected because he promised to do something about business as usual in Washington. He has a long way to go to cleanse those Augean Stables, but he has made a tremendous start, which is precisely why the occupants of those stables are so alarmed.
    …
    With every week that passes, Donald Trump ticks off another campaign promise fulfilled. It was what he was elected to do. Those who elected him like winning. And more and more people who were anti-Trump at the outset are looking around and liking what they see. The former newspaper that Donald Trump calls the ‘failing New York Times’ is a monument to impotent irrelevance. This latest prank unfolds just as Brett Kavanaugh is about to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. The dogs are barking, but the caravan moves on.”

21. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/flashback-obama-prosecuted-staff-leakers-gave-lie-detector-tests-paranoid

    Flashback: Obama prosecuted staff leakers, gave lie-detector tests, ‘paranoid’
    by Paul Bedard
    | September 07, 2018 09:52 AM

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/fec-dem-out-to-get-trump-claims-he-broke-law-obama-was-cleared-of

    “On the heels of charges by a Republican lawyer’s group that she is biased against Trump, the incoming Democratic chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission is claiming that Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign violated rules against soliciting foreign donations.

    But in making her case Friday, Commissioner Ellen Weintraub was criticized by election law experts because she cleared the Obama campaign of taking possibly over $1 million in foreign contributions in a past case.

    In fact, one election law expert said that she is “out to get” Trump. “

22. A reminder that the “first principles” that are so lauded by the op-ed writer keep changing.

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/09/todays-academic-cowardice-report.php

    “The Truth and Justice Reconciliation Commission he mentions here was a body Canada formed to express its collective guilt for its bad treatment of indigenous peoples of Canada in previous decades—deeds such as sending indigenous children off to government schools, ideas that were of course generated by the best “progressive” thought of a previous era.”

    Cosmosis • 2 hours ago
    So the take-away is that whatever passes for A good liberal idea today will be painted as conservative in 50-100 years once it fails miserably, a new liberal group will then start a movement to right that wrong, leading to yet another. Wash rinse repeat. Imagine if governments were less involved in everyone’s daily lives, this cycle might break.

    streetwiseprof • 7 hours ago
    Mehta is an Indian name, and by his picture he is clearly Indian. If he held certain opinions, he would be considered a “person of color” and those opinions would be considered beyond challenge. Indeed, anyone challenging him would be called a racist. But since he holds the wrong opinions, his identity is no protection. In fact, they make him a traitor and a heretic who must be made an example of.

23. Manju – where are the axis scales and numbers on your graph?? They don’t show when I go to the link.

    https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000006

24. Note also that he still believes the same tired leftist canard that if you cut taxes, you will run deficits because taxpayer behavior never responds to incentives. Investor’s Business Daily, which is the expert on these matters, notes that tax receipts went up 9% for the government as the U.S. economy boomed.

    Jesus. Christ.

25. Manju:

    Thanks for the data on the graph. Note that it only took BHO, PBHN (Praised Be His Name), eight years (use your fingers and toes) to get back to the unemployment rate that existed before BHO, PBHN took over from President Bush (AKA, our previous Hitler). You would think that the unemployment rate would have exploded upward and the other economic indices would have cratered after BHO, PBHN, left the stewardship of this ship of fools to that “usurper” ( or your own preferred expletive). Those things don’t seem to have happened, you might say it is inconceivable, but life is like that.

26. I just keep reminding myself who chastised us “normals” to suck it up and accept the “New Normal” of the Obama era, the creation of Isis, the non-shovel-ready jobs, the unstimulating Stimulus package, the worsening of race relations, Fast and Furious, IRS shenanigans, Benghazi, the Libyan fiasco (Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Powers putting their “macho” heads together.) No thanks, Obama. You get no credit for the good and all credit for the bad. OK, share some of the bad with GWB. BTW, I just recalled one of the worst things Hillary ever said, laughing proudly as she compared herself to Caesar as if she herself triumphed in Libya. “We came, we saw, he died.” (With her cackle.) I can’t remember ever hearing any American “victor” being so crude publicly.

    Sorry if I am rambling. Recent shoulder surgery and pain and meds have made me a bit befuddled.

27. There may well have been other “resistance” movements opposed to other past Administrations, but if they were, as far as I am aware of, they have never been revealed, or publicized.

    From what I can see, this resistance is a full blown attempt at a coup d’etat and, given that it is, it should be treated very seriously, and the harshest possible measures should be taken against it’s members and their actions.

    If we want to remain a democratic Republic, governed by a Constitution, and the Rule of Law equally applicable to everyone, and not a banana republic where those who are the most violent, Machiavellian, and ruthless rule– where might makes right, we need to destroy this coup attempt.

    Examples need to be made.

    No one who has plotted to carry out such a coup d’etat should escape the severest punishment.

28. This attempted coup d’etat has to be slapped down, and slapped down hard, or it will happen again, and again.

    We can’t possibly have a stable government, or country, if coups are so possible and thinkable that they are the first resort that people think of; a regular feature of our political system.

29. Manju on September 9, 2018 at 7:20 am at 7:20 am said:
    Manju – where are the axis scales and numbers on your graph?? They don’t show when I go to the link.

    https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000006
    * * *
    Great site, especially since it allows you to change the time frame.
    I played with it, running the data back before Obama – interesting to see the ups and downs, especially just after a presidential election.
    Curiously, black unemployment (and unemployment in general; see the links below) has an odd trend in spikes and declines.

    There was a huge spike after Nixon resigned; Ford brought it down a bit and Carter a bit more, but it started up again during the Iran hostage crisis, and there was another huge spike building up after Reagan was elected.
    It came back down to the level he started with at about the same slope, then continued down until Bush pere’s “Read my lips” taxes went into effect.
    Bill Clinton, of course, is famous for triangulating his policies so that he worked a leftist social side and a rightist economic side, achieving an all-time low (for 1972-2017, matched in 9/17).
    Bush fils terms were anomalous, almost certainly because of the War on Terror, showing a “hump” rather than a “spike” in the unemployment rate.
    Obama’s election was followed by another huge spike like Reagan’s, although the peak was lower (reflecting the different starting points?), but his descent was not a reverse of the ascent, as it was with Reagan’s, indicating perhaps that the job situation was systemically bad, rather than a one-time reaction to uncertainty.

    So far there has been no Trump spike; Reagan’s occurred 2 years after his inaugaration, and Obama’s at the one-year mark. As of 8/18, the rate is 6.3%.
    So, to coin a phrase, we’ll see.

    My skepticism meter reminds me that there were a lot of stories during Obama’s tenure that the administration was manipulating the unemployment rate by changing the underlying metrics — although the BLS has always removed “people no longer seeking work” from the equation, there was an aggressive effort by the Obama administration to increase the number in that category, by pushing many into the “disabled” category.

    Whether that’s true or not, I don’t have the raw data to judge, but the third link shows the labor graph with “missing” workers included, and it tracks the BLS graph for all workers, although with higher absolute numbers.

    The Quartz article (second link), in its final graph, shows the most evidence for the manipulation hypothesis (all workers): up until 2009, the two kinds of “unemployment” run parallel, with the “missing workers” line, of course, much higher; the trends after 2009 both run downwards, but the gap between them widens significantly, and is very disparate by 2014 when it ends.

    * * *
    Here’s how the BLS gathers their data.
    https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.pdf

    Here’s a relatively recent discussion of the long-standing counting problem.
    https://qz.com/877432/the-us-unemployment-rate-measure-is-deceptive-and-doesnt-need-to-be/

    If the US unemployment rate included everyone who says they want a job, it would be nearly double
    By Dan KopfJanuary 5, 2017
    “Along with GDP growth, the unemployment rate is the most recognized economic statistic in the United States. It’s too bad it is so misleading.

    “The unemployment rate declined to 4.6 percent in November…” are the very first words of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ news release about the November 2016 survey data. That must seem incredibly wrong to many Americans. And that is because it is, in fact, not true that 4.6% of Americans who want a full-time job don’t have one. The unemployment rate is something more specific and less meaningful.

    As measured by the BLS, the unemployment rate is defined as the percentage of unemployed people who are currently in the labor force. In order to be in the labor force, a person either must have a job or have looked for work in the last four weeks. A person only needed one hour in the prior week to be considered employed.

    This leaves out a ton of relevant people. According to the November 2016 data, over 5.5 million Americans said they want a job, but don’t have one, and are not considered a part of the labor force. If these people were included in the unemployment rate, it would jump to 8.2%.
    The BLS is not attempting to be deceptive. These folks are left out of the calculation because more than half of them have not done anything to find work in more than a year. Another 10% of this group say they are not available for work at the moment.

    Yet to leave this group out significantly underestimates employment issues in the US. For example, the unemployment rate completely ignores the nearly 600,000 “discouraged workers” who say they are no longer looking because they don’t think they can find a job. It disregards the many students who would like a part-time job but have given up looking, and caretakers who would take a job if the compensation was high enough.

    Among the group of people that the BLS considers out of the labor force, there is too much variety in their “labor force attachment” (the economic term for the likelihood a person will return to the labor market) to simply disregard them. This is not a new argument. More than three decades ago, the Nobel prizewinner James Heckman and his coauthor Christopher Flinn pointed out that labor force participation is a matter of degree, not binary.
    …
    When Hornstein, Kudlyak and Yange looked at subgroups within these employment types, they found that the “unemployed” who had not had a job in over six months were no more likely to find a job in the next month than those who said they wanted a job but are not counted in the labor force. Does it really make sense that BLS considers one group in the unemployment rate calculation, but leaves the other out?

    Hornstein, Kudlyak and Yange don’t think so. They developed a new statistic: the nonemployment index.

    Instead of ignoring those that BLS considers out of the labor force, the nonemployment index includes them. The index is calculated by weighting each type of nonemployed group by their likelihood of transitioning to the labor market in the next month. In other words, instead of not counting people out of the labor force, they are counted as one-third or one-tenth of a person depending on their subgroup.

    The following chart shows the nonemployment index versus the unemployment rate over the last 20 years. The nonemployment rate is consistently higher, and has not fallen quite as quickly since the Great Recession. If part-time workers who were interested in full-time work were included, the nonemployment index would rise by about 1%.”

    Here’s an updated report.
    https://www.epi.org/publication/missing-workers/
    “Updated July 7, 2017

    In a complex economy, conventional measures sometimes fall short.
    In today’s labor market, the unemployment rate drastically understates the weakness of job opportunities. This is due to the existence of a large pool of “missing workers”–potential workers who, because of weak job opportunities, are neither employed nor actively seeking a job. In other words, these are people who would be either working or looking for work if job opportunities were significantly stronger. Because jobless workers are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work, these “missing workers” are not reflected in the unemployment rate.

    As part of its ongoing effort to create the metrics needed to assess how well the economy is working for America’s broad middle class, EPI tracks “missing worker” estimates, updated on this page on the first Friday of every month immediately after the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its jobs numbers. The “missing worker” estimates provide policymakers with a key gauge of the health of the labor market.”

30. Manju on September 9, 2018 at 8:31 am at 8:31 am said:
    Note also that he still believes the same tired leftist canard that if you cut taxes, you will run deficits because taxpayer behavior never responds to incentives. Investor’s Business Daily, which is the expert on these matters, notes that tax receipts went up 9% for the government as the U.S. economy boomed.*

    Jesus. Christ.
    * * *
    Really? That’s all ya got?
    Blasphemy is not a persuasive argument.

    *AesopFan on September 9, 2018 at 12:45 am at 12:45 am said:
    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/obamas_sore_spot_trumps_soaring_economy.html

31. Caveat to my commentary above: in one of my grad school classes on how to do political (and other social science) research, one of the texts was “How to Lie with Statistics.”

32. AesopFan, the employment to population ratio now exceeds the median of the last generation and is the highest it has been in nearly 10 years. The condition of the labor market is satisfactory.

33. By a reporter that claims trump picked on him…

    It is, on the face of it, the most scathing piece of invective you could read. An essay from a senior official on how he or she and others are engaged in a concerted effort to protect America from Trump’s excesses.

    That’s one way of putting it. The other is to say that this is an effort to subvert the President’s agenda and the will of millions of Americans who voted for him.

    My jaw doesn’t drop easily after 20 months of covering the Trump presidency, but it was slack by the time I finished reading the final sentence of this op-ed on the President’s shortcomings.

    He is ‘impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective’. And Mr or Ms Anonymous goes on: ‘He engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.’

    This treacherous article concludes with the self-justification that he or she is part of the ‘quiet resistance’ putting ‘country first’. But listen to an alternative argument. The country went to the polls. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump, and by the rules of the electoral college he was the duly elected President.

    And furthermore, no one can say he’s not doing what he promised. Renegotiating trade deals, tougher immigration laws, confronting North Korea, cutting taxes, exiting the Iran nuclear deal, winding back regulations, are exactly what he promised during the campaign. – Jon Sopel

    now that i posted, neo will put up a new post…
    its amazing statistically how often it is
    (you only have to run some program code on the posts and times… heh)
    Kind of like the fat people that find out they walk in their sleep and eat…

34. When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

35. like clockwork!!! just what i said above… fatty just opened the refrigerator asleep

    funny…

    Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate. The Democrats lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through federal judges and bureaucrats. Every time a federal judge issues an order saying the president of the United States can’t scratch his own back without the judge’s say so, that’s the civil war.

    If Democrats are in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. His power is unlimited. He’s a dictator.

    But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the president can’t do anything. He isn’t even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty his predecessor illegally invented. A Democrat in the White House has “discretion” to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn’t even have the “discretion” to reverse him. That’s how the game is played. That’s how our country is run. Sad but true, although the left hasn’t yet won that particular fight.

    When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren’t even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws. Under Obama, a state wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.

    The Constitution has something to say about that.
    
    Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.

    That’s not a free country.

36. The DS and pedophiles and cabal have to undermine Trum. Why? Because of Jeff Sessions and Space Force.

37. This is the first article art quoted above. It has a rather nice metaphor at the beginning, about volcanoes; some advice that has already been shopped around the punditocracy; and some interesting speculations that are new to me.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6147225/JON-SOPEL-Trumps-enemies-proving-conspiracy-theories-TRUE.html

    “As Sarah Sanders noted, while it may not always be pretty, Trump’s economic policies are paying dividends, with 200,000 new jobs created, salaries growing at their fastest rate in nine years, and unemployment at a historic low of 3.9 per cent.

    So what legitimacy does the writer have in declaring that he or she is the guardian of US democracy? For better or worse, the ballot box is where elections are decided and in November 2016 the American people spoke.

    If you are that unhappy about the administration’s direction of travel, you have the choice of resigning and fighting the Trump agenda at the next election.

    Or you stay and argue your corner. But if you lose the battle while fighting from within, your duty as a public servant is to enact the policy that has been agreed.

    here are two other things Trump said repeatedly during the campaign, which were designed to appeal to those who always love to smell conspiracy: there was a ‘deep state’ – powerful, but secret forces at the heart of the establishment – and that Washington was a swamp that needed to be drained.

    Lurking around every neo-classical column were bad actors whose allegiance was to the status quo, who would thwart the newly elected President and scupper him as if their lives depended on it.

    At the time, I thought it was tendentious in the extreme, designed to show that Trump was the non-politician in the race, the change-maker and people’s tribune taking on the deeply entrenched elites.

    Yet the New York Times article can be seen as the very definition of the deep state.

    Maybe I’ve been watching too much of the political thriller House of Cards on television, but I’ve started thinking conspiratorially about whether the article might have been penned by Trump himself as a means of justifying a crackdown on those around him, while demanding greater, unfettered power in decision-making. I can’t see him writing those nasty things about himself. It is now likely we’ll see the President becoming even more distrustful of those around him and allowing even fewer people to be brought in to decision-making, which must be a bad thing for government.

    Another thought: if you are part of a deep state conspiracy, don’t you just keep your mouth shut about it, rather than advertise what you are doing in the New York Times? I know that in spycraft, hiding in plain sight can be mighty effective. But this? I’m not sure it strengthens your hand.

    Mr or Ms Anonymous, has probably never heard of the late Sir Alan Walters, Margaret Thatcher’s economic adviser for a while as she sought to fight off Cabinet demands for Britain to join the precursor to the single currency.

    He was thought to have Svengali-like powers over the Iron Lady. Some in her Cabinet wanted him banished – and they eventually succeeded. But not before she came up with the memorable phrase, designed to allay fears: ‘Advisers advise, Ministers decide.’

    The problem for Mr or Ms Anonymous is that you weren’t elected to decide. Donald Trump was.

    * * *
    Artfldgr on September 10, 2018 at 12:37 pm at 12:37 pm said:
    When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.
    * * *
    Indeed.

38. Art’s second article was by Daniel Greenfield aka Sultan Knish, always worth reading. A few more excerpts follow.

    https://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2018/01/this-civil-war-my-south-carolina-tea.html

    “But it’s not guns that make a civil war. It’s politics.

    Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.

    How do civil wars happen?

    Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.

    That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.
    ..
    The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this.

    The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.

    Trump didn’t really win the election. Bush didn’t really win the election. Every time a Republican president won an election this century, the Democrats insist he didn’t really win.

    Now say a third Republican president wins an election in say, 2024.

    What are the odds that they’ll say that he didn’t really win? Right now, it looks like 100 percent.

    What do sure odds of the Dems rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win.

    It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.

    That’s a civil war.
    …
    Whether it’s Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land.

    This is what I call a moving dictatorship.

    There isn’t one guy in a room somewhere issuing the orders. Instead there’s a network of them. And the network moves around.

    If the guys and girls in the network win elections, they can do it from the White House. If they lose the White House, they’ll do it from Congress. If they don’t have either one, they’ll use the Supreme Court.

    If they don’t have either the White House, Congress or the Supreme Court, they’re screwed. Right?

    Nope.

    They just go on issuing them through circuit courts and the bureaucracy. State governments announce that they’re independent republics. Corporations begin threatening and suing the government.

    There’s no consistent legal standard. Only a political one.
    …

    A better term than Deep State is Shadow Government.

    Parts of the Shadow Government aren’t even in the government. They are wherever the left holds power. It can be in the non-profit sector and among major corporations. Power gets moved around like a New York City shell game. Where’s the quarter? Nope, it’s not there anymore.

    …
    We’ve been having this fight for a while. But this century things have escalated.

    They escalated a whole lot after Trump’s win because the network isn’t pretending anymore. It sees the opportunity to delegitimize the whole idea of elections.

    Now the network isn’t running the country from cover. It’s actually out here trying to overturn the results of an election and remove the president from office.

    It’s rejected the victories of two Republican presidents this century.

    And if we don’t stand up and confront it, and expose it for what it is, it’s going to go on doing it in every election. And eventually Federal judges are going to gain enough power that they really will overturn elections.

    It happens in other countries. If you think it can’t happen here, you haven’t been paying attention to the left.
    …
    This is a civil war between volunteer governments elected by the people and professional governments elected by… well… uh… themselves.

    Of the establishment, by the establishment and for the establishment.

    You know, the people who always say they know better, no matter how many times they screw up, because they’re the professionals. They’ve been in Washington D.C. politics since they were in diapers.

    Freedom can only exist under a volunteer government. Because everyone is in charge. Power belongs to the people.

    A professional government is going to have to stamp out freedom sooner or later. Freedom under a professional government can only be a fiction.Whenever the people disagree with the professionals, they’re going to have to get put down. That’s just how it is. No matter how it’s disguised, a professional government is tyranny.

    …
    Its [the left’s] network, the one we were just discussing, it takes over professional governments because it shares their basic ideas. Professional governments, no matter who runs them, are convinced that everything should run through the professionals. And the professionals are usually lefties. If they aren’t, they will be.
    …
    And before the shooting starts, civil wars are fought with arguments. To win, you have to understand what the big picture argument is. It’s easy to get bogged down in arguments that don’t matter or won’t really change anything.

    This is the argument that changes everything.

    Do we have a government of the people and by the people? Or do we have a tyranny of the professionals?
    …
    The left uses identity politics. It puts supposed representatives of entire identity groups up front. We’re taking the country back for women and for black people, and so on and so forth…

    But nobody elected their representatives.

    Identity groups don’t vote for leaders. All the black people in the country never voted to make Shaun King al Al Sharpton their representative. And women sure as hell didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.

    What we have in America is a representative government. A representative government makes freedom possible because it actually represents people, instead of representing ideas.

    The left’s identity politics only represents ideas. Nobody gets to vote on them.

    Instead the left puts out representatives from different identity politics groups, there’s your gay guy, there’s three women, there’s a black man, as fronts for their professional government system.

    When they’re taking back the country, it’s always for professional government. It’s never for the people.

    When conservatives fight to take back the country, it’s for the people. It’s for volunteer government the way that the Founding Fathers wanted it to be.
    …
    The stakes are as big as they’re ever going to get. Do elections matter anymore?

    I live in the state of Ronald Reagan. I can go visit the Ronald Reagan Library any time I want to. But today California has one party elections. There are lots of elections and propositions. There’s all the theater of democracy, but none of the substance. Its political system is as free and open as the Soviet Union.

    And that can be America.

    The Trump years are going to decide if America survives. When his time in office is done, we’re either going to be California or a free nation once again.

    The civil war is out in the open now and we need to fight the good fight. And we must fight to win.”

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