In good faith

There is a another new way to obfuscate. CNN reported the following: Former FBI Director James Comey told internal investigators at the Justice Department that he could not recall McCabe telling him about having authorized FBI officials to talk to a reporter about an ongoing investigation, the sources said. Here is another explanation: Another source familiar with the matter argued that the discrepancy between the two accounts is more about the fact that they are recalling the interaction differently than a dispute about what took place, saying both were acting in "good faith." \ "They recall it differently," the source said. "Andy thinks in good faith he told him, and Comey in good faith says he wasn't told." As long as the person speaking is doing so in good faith it doesn't seem to matter as to the accuracy of what was said.

Equal

Stockton, CA is city that was hit hard by the sub housing market problems of ten years ago and it became the largest city to file bankruptcy. As the economy turned down the crime rate went up and in 2014 there were 71 homicides in a city of 300,000. In Chicago the murder rate is 29 per 100,000. The city is now testing a proposal to give $500 per month to each of its 75,000 poor people. This will cost $450 million dollars per year. While that is a lot of money, Jeff Bezos recently sold one percent of his Amazon stock for $670 million dollars, and he might consider selling another one percent to help out the people in Stockton. Bezos started building Amazon 22 years ago and for the first 12 years the stock did nothing. Since then the stock has grown to where Bezos is now worth over $100 billion dollars. Bezos is not alone. There are numerous examples of young men who had the tech savvy and put in the hard work to become billionaires before age 30. Some people feel that there is something inherently wrong with what they see as unfairness but in the free market system if you can do something that hardly anyone else can do you get a lot of money for doing. If you can throw a baseball over the plate at 100 miles an hour, you get a lot of money. Some people feel that the government should place income limits on people. Remember what George Orwell said in Animal Farm. In socialism everyone is equal but some are more equal than others. In the former Soviet Union there were 300 million people but only 20 million belong to the communist party. They were the more equal.

Deportation

Pedro is one of ten men who paid a coyote $100 to sneak him across the southern border. He works his way to San Diego and if a few months he is arrested for some minor crime. The feds hear about it but before they get there the local authorities release him. The Feds then spend a couple of weeks finding him and deport him through the expedited removal process. He is put on a plane and flown to Central American. This process in only allowed if the person is caught within 100 miles of the border. In a short time Pedro sneaks back into the country and this time works his way up to San Francisco. He is once again arrested and released before the feds get there and they find him and put him detention. Since his is not near the border the Feds cannot use the expedited process so he starts the more formal deportation process. ICE gives notice for Pedro to appears in court in 10 days but he does not show so they go and find him and hold him for his court date. The judge sets bond and Pedro is released and he disappears. If the judge decides not to set bond Pedro remains in jail until the trial date. The court says Pedro must be deported but he can appeal within 30 days. The judge decides to keep Pedro in jail until the appeal. Pedro loses the appeal and his put on a plane and flown to his home in Nicaragua. A few months later and Pedro is back in the US and the whole process starts over. This my friends is our government at work. Trump wants to expand the expedited system beyond the 100 mile limit to include anyone inside the country.

Rocks

There is an old adage that says never bring a knife to a gun fight and now a school superintendent has gone one step further. Blue Mountain School District Superintendent David Helsel made headlines recently after testifying to lawmakers at the state capitol that his students could be armed with rocks in case of an active shooter lockdown. “Every classroom has been equipped with a five-gallon bucket of river stone,” Helsel told lawmakers. “If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance into any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full students armed with rocks and they will be stoned.”

Chinese students

With the trade imbalance with China getting all the news there is another imbalance that need attention and that is the stealing of intellectual property. This is done in various ways but one important way that is rarely considered is college students. There are 300,0000 Chinese going to college in the USA and only 14,000 Americans going to college in China. These students have access to the latest technology and research and they take that home with them when they finish their schooling. In recent years more and more of these Chinese students are returning to their homeland.

Older

If Joe Biden decides to run for president in 2020 he will be 77 years old and I offer him my best but time has way of catching up with you. As an 80 year old male I can attest to the fact that I was doing OK until 75 and then I noticed I was slowing down. When I used to take a 5 mile walk I came in refreshed but now I come in tired. I still don't consider myself as being old but rather someone who is growing older. When you have to resort to those types of semantics you know something isn't right. Younger people do not understand this but it is quite a shock when you hear someone refer to you as that old man. Don't laugh children, someday if you are lucky, you too will be old.

Election

I just finished a book about the Pentagon Papers and came across some rather startling information that is eerily similar to what is going on today. When the Viet Nam War was going badly and Johnson decided not to run for reelection, Humphrey broke with Johnson and came out against the war. At that time Nixon had a large lead in the polls and this changed. His lead further declined when Johnson announced that peace talks would begin. Nixon had contacted a Chinese American woman named Anna Hennault who was an avid anticommunist and convinced her to contact the leadership in South Viet Nam and explain they would get a better deal if they waited for Nixon to be president. They then agreed to stop the peace talks and Nixon once again moved ahead in the polls. What Nixon didn't know was that Johnson had tapped the phones of the South Viet Nam President and knew of the Nixon plot. Johnson contacted Senator Dirksen and asked him to intercede with Nixon to stop the interference. Nixon then called Johnson and said he was not directly involved in any discussion with the South and Johnson accepted that. Johnson was not convinced but it was so close to the election he was afraid to release the information feeling it would be cause undo harm to the election process. He also would have to admit that he was tapping the phone of the South's president. In other words it was a case of an American presidential candidate using a foreign country to interfere with an American election. Apparently President Obama found himself in a similar situation and decided not to make a big deal out of the Russian interference feeling that Hilary would be elected and it would all go away. He also would have to reveal how he knew about the Russian involvement and perhaps there were things going on better left unsaid.

Income gap

The gap between the rich and the poor is greatest in California and one of the reasons has to do with immigration and emigration. Between 2007 and 2016 five million people moved out of California and 4 million moved in but they were quite different in their demographics. The people moving in were high income people from states like New York and Illinois while those moving out were low income earners. The poor working people find it difficult to find affordable housing and things like the cost of utilities and commuting are too high. While the working poor are leaving they are being replaces with non working poor who live on government programs.

Hidden taxes

Many articles point out that half of the working people pay no income tax and that is true but they do pay social security and Medicare tax and a plethora of hidden taxes. Some of these hidden taxes include tax on utilities (water, electric and heating), tax on cell phones, sales tax on non-food purchased, cable TV tax, gasoline tax, tobacco tax, liquor tax and these are all regressive taxes meaning they hurt the poor. A person who earns $200,000 per year is not concerned if their electric bill is $300 instead of $100 but somebody who earns $50,000 is. Even things like toll roads and tipping are regressive and the mandate penalty under Obamacare hurt the low income people. The reason these taxes are popular with politicians is that they raise a lot of money. Another area of concern to low income people are fees and fines. Things like traffic tickets and the cost of car license and drivers license are more of burden on the poor. Most people would be amazed if they could see how much they pay ech year in these not so obvious areas.

Crime list

We live in a society where people do not lie. They obfuscate or they mislead or most recently they lack candor. Political correctness has now moved into the courtroom. This follows the strategy used by those in the know who answer questions by saying, I can't remember. This is closely related to the defense of intent, I didn't mean to do it or this is not what I meant. When all else fails you can refuse to answer (take the fifth) and retire and live happily ever after. I am keeping this list in case I ever get charged with a crime.

Crime

In 1994 Bill Clinton signed the crime bill and since that time crime has gone down. Prier to the signing crime rates were about 600 per 100,000 people but since then there has been a steady decline down to 350 per 100,000. The interesting thing about this is that there are numerous articles on the Internet attesting to the fact that the number of people in prison does not correlate with crime rates because the numbers in prison had been going up before the law was passed. For many years leading up to 1980 the prison population was around 200,000 but then it started to rise. By 1986 it was up to 400,000 and in 1994 the year the law was passed it was 600,000. Since then it has continued to rise and is now at 1,500,000. This is the kind of thing that makes statistics so tricky.

Oligarchs

Russian experts say that Putin is moderately wealthy but that he has a fortune in the names of other Russians known as oligarchs. This was brought to the world stage when a Russian attorney named Sergei Magnitsky was working in the tax department and discovered some serious irregularities. He was later found guilty of tax fraud and died unexpectedly in prison at the age of 37. This caused an international outrage and led to the congress passing the Magnitsky act. The Russians are so upset with this act that they tried to convince people that they had damaging information on Hilary and Trump so they could bargain for the repeal of the act. In December 2012 the US Congress adopted the Magnitsky Act. It enables the US to withhold visas and freeze financial assets of Russian officials thought to have been involved with human rights violations. Russian businessmen and high ranking officials are illegally accumulating large sums of money and the government is looking the other way. It is a quid pro quo arrangement which allows Putin to build assets in other names thus keeping him free from scandal. It has become so widespread that all interested parties are aware of what is going on but no one dares to bring charges against him. One of the oligarchs Nikolai Glushkov was accused of stealing and was given asylum in London in 2006. He became a critic of Putin's and last week he was found dead and the police are suspecting murder.

Investigate

There is now talk of another special prosecutor and when that happens we will have the congress right where we want them. The will be spending the next few years investigating each other and that will keep them out of our hair. There are at least 5,000 federal criminal laws, with 10,000-300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally. In fact, our entire criminal code has become a leviathan unto itself. In 2003, there were only 4,000 offences that carried criminal penalties. By 2013, that number had grown by 21 percent to 4,850. The code has become so big, that the Congressional Research Service and the American Bar Association simply do not have enough staff to adequately categorize every law we have on the books.

More on the walkout

More on the school walkout. At the Middle School I was at there were 75 students out of 1,200 who walked out. I didn't want to ask if there was a racial quality to those who walked out but I hope there wasn't. The teachers in general were not comfortable talking about the issue. I think most teacher are gun shy when it comes to any talk about anything unusual that happens in school. They might misspeak or be misinterpreted. They are walking on egg shells when it comes to anything out of the ordinary.

Walkout

On CNN there was a story about a Minnesota student who did not participate in the walk out and it showed a picture of him sitting all alone in the classroom. I can't say what happened across the state or the country but in my class of 27 students 7 walked out and in the class next to mine 5 out of 34 walked out. I could not see where the students gathered from my room and my small sample was anecdotal but what disturbed me was that all of the minority students in these two classes chose to walk out. Is this just one more way that the county is divided along racial lines?

PA vote

Today's special election in Pennsylvania shows some real progress. Both candidates solidly represent their constituents. Both are personally opposed to abortion, both are against gun control, both are for import taxes on steel and the income tax cuts are played down. This means they have turned their backs on the national ideology in favor of what their district wants. Maybe this will be the start of a tread to move away from the extremes of both parties and the bringing back of the more moderate positions that most people hold.

USA

We often decry the acrimony surrounding US elections but that is the price for having a representative republic where people are free to choose their candidates without interference from the government. China is ruled by a communist government and yesterday they voted to allow the president to serve for life. The government representatives voted 2,960 for and 2 against. This is not a free vote and I wonder what will be the fate of the two who voted no. It is like the old soviet union where they had a one party system and that parties candidate always won. Joe Stalin was in power for over 30 years and was replaced only when he died. During his time in office he killed an estimated 20 million of his own citizens. The United States has many problems but it's great to an American.

Import taxes

Milton Freedman was one of my favorite economist and he was a strong proponent of free trade. The US has leaned in this direction since WW2 and it has brought benefits but at a cost and the cost has been borne mostly by what used to be called the middle class. In the 50's the middle class was expanding because many of the manufactured goods were produced in the US. Home ownership was rapidly growing and all of the appliances were made in the USA. As the concept of free trade grew companies realized that products could be made overseas at lower cost and these were then imported and middle class consumers were able to buy low priced products. These working people were like the frog in the warm water. As they saw the prices of the goods they purchased going down they didn't realize that the price of their labor was also going down. The manufacturing jobs they once enjoyed were disappearing and the higher wages associated with those jobs disappeared with them. For those with college educations this was good since their wages were not tied to manufacturing and continued to rise but for the others it was wage stagnation and this group has now gone decades without any real increase in pay. There are many reasons why production costs are lower overseas and one of the most important is the lack of environmental controls and no protection for workers. When ever this is brought up it is never mentioned that improving conditions overseas will raise prices on imported goods. One prime example is the mining of rare earth metals. These are the elements needed to produce electronics like cell phones, solar panels and windmills. These mines take a heavy toll on the local environment and the US consumer enjoys the benefits. Leveling the free trade playing field takes more than import taxes, it takes better wages and working conditions for overseas workers but the US has very little control over those factors. One area the US does have influence is taxing imports. That is why trade unions favor import taxes and businesses do not.

Classroom

In the past I have mentioned that I have a unique perspective as a sub teacher in that I go to all different types of classrooms and observe the different ways that teachers handle their classes. One of the things I have noticed is the lack of consistency in classroom rules and behavior. Some teachers say no smart phones while others allow them during free time. Some teachers allow food and drink in the class while others do not. Some permit working with other students which includes talking and other teachers prefer no talking. In some classes students leave their seats and in others they are told to remain seated. Some have assigned seats and some sit where they please. One common thing I observe is the student, almost always a male, who gets up from his seat to sharpen a pencil, to spit out his gum in the garbage can, or to through away a piece of crumpled up paper or get a book to read and each time he leaves his seat he will hit another student or knock someones papers or book on the floor. The teacher spends an inordinate amount of time telling this student to stay in his seat or to stop talking or to quit throwing things and other disruptive activities. These are the things I observe when I am team teaching. That means I am in a room with a teacher just to help out and I spend a lot of time watching how the teacher handles disruptions. Teachers are limited in the ways they have to deal with these students. One example was when I went through orientation I was told that if I ask a student to do something and they refuse I should walk away and come back later and ask them again. I was not told how many times I was to do this. One thing that is true for all classes is that it is easier to deal with girls than boys and knowingly or not teachers prefer girls. This is most evident in middle school but also is the case in high school. In the teachers lunch room 75% of the conversation is about student behavior.

Collusion

When Special Prosecutor Ken Starr was assigned to investigate the Clintons in the Whitewater real estate deal he found very little but this led to the discovery of the affair with Monica Lewinsky and the now infamous blue dress. Without this smoking gun Monica would have been sent to the ash heap of history and Clinton would have gone scot free. The impeachment process that followed was a mistake and the accusers paid a price and Clinton ended up with a 65% approval rating. The affair which led to lying under oath caused Clinton millions of dollars in legal fees and the loss of his law license plus personal humiliation which was certainly punishment enough but to impeach based on this seems now, with the benefit of hind sight, a bit much. It was politics run amok and now it appears that Robert Mueller is about to go down the same path. All sorts of shenanigans are being exposed by various individuals along with some questionable activities by some government agencies. Where ever this ends up it will likely be far afield from the original investigation into Russian collusion in the election. The Clinton investigation lasted over four years and the Mueller case will be even longer especially if Trump is re-elected.

DACA today

Today is the deadline for congress to act on DACA and nothing has happened. Recall that President Obama was under some pressure to help the young illegal immigrants who were brought here as children but he said it was up to congress. Responding in October 2010 to demands that he implement immigration reforms unilaterally, Obama declared, "I am not king. I can't do these things just by myself." In March 2011, he said that with "respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case." In May 2011, he acknowledged that he couldn't "just bypass Congress and change the (immigration) law myself. ... That's not how a democracy works." When congress failed to act Obama took measures into his own hands. "In the absence of any immigration action from Congress to fix our broken immigration system, what we’ve tried to do is focus our immigration enforcement resources in the right places," Obama said June 15, 2012. "This is not a path to citizenship. It's not a permanent fix. This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people." No court said this was illegal. Then last fall Trump gave congress six months to take action on DACA and the courts said he did not have the authority to do that. So by today congress was supposed to solve this problem but they failed to do so. Courts can be confusion.

Import tax

Most countries have an import tax but the European Union also has a VAT (value added tax). This tax applied to all products including imports and varies by country from 12% to 17%. In addition the EU places a 10% import tax on cars. This puts American cars imported to Europe at a disadvantage. In 2016, the EU exported motor vehicles worth EUR 192.0 billion. Imports in that same year amounted to 40 % of that value (EUR 77.0 billion), giving an EU trade surplus of EUR 128.2 billion. This is a plan that puts the EU first. The US has a 2.5% import tax on foreign cars and a 25% import tax on trucks. One result is that most foreign trucks are made in the USA. Trump has proposed taxing cars imported from the EU to, as he says, equal the playing field.

Center

Over the years political experts have conceded that an independent cannot be elected president. The two parties are so well entrenched that they have closed the door on any outsider but Trump has come as close as can happen to acting like an independent. The first attempt at this occurred with Bill Clinton when he moved to the center in a process called triangulation. He would take the extremes of each party on a particular issue and bring both to the center and Trump is doing the same thing only more so. The idea is to take the best from the right and the left and discard the rest. Trump used this on immigration and on guns and now on trade. Some members of each party like it and others dislike it. It is a way to break the grid-lock that has a strangle hold on Washington.

California

There is a line from a Country/Western song, “All the gold in California Is in the bank in the middle of Beverly Hills” and it referenced the money from Hollywood stars but there is a new bank today and that is located in Silicon Valley. Nowhere in the country is the gap between the rich and the poor more evident than in California. They have a higher percentage of people in poverty than any state and they are loaded with high tech millionaires. 50% of the States income tax revenue is collected from one percent of its citizens. There are 20 million people working in the state and 200,000 of them pay one-half of the taxes. Now that is even more progressive than the country as a whole where the top 1% pays 45% of the taxes. Total personal income in California is 2.4 trillion and 20% of this goes to the top one percent. They are already paying 60% of their income to state and federal income tax so if we take the remaining 40% and give that to the 20 million who are working then each would receive $9600. Those top one percenters can live off of their saving but they will be less likely to continue to work so next year everyone will be back where they are now. Pre-tax cash incomes in California have been diverging for decades, and economic cycles have reinforced the longer-term trend. Top incomes are 40 percent higher than they were in 1980, while middle incomes are only 5 percent higher and low incomes are 19 percent lower. While redistributing income does not have that much effect the redistribution of wealth would be significant. The top guy at Amazon is worth 120 billion and if that were given to the 20 million working people, they would each get $6,000. It would of interest to see a poll asking if the government should take that and give it to the poor. After all isn’t one billion enough? There are 124 billionaires living in California.

Delta

Delta Airlines has taken what many in the press call a principled stand when they said that NRA members will no longer be given a discount. It seemed as though there were still companies willing to put principles above profit but then it was announced on CNN that only 13 people used the NRA discount last year. This was out of 180 million passengers last year. Now the airline has itself in a pickle as Georgia is threatening to stop a $40 million dollar tax break that was supposed to go in effect. Delta CEO says, 'Our values are not for sale,' after Georgia lawmakers drop tax break It will be interested to see if Delta stockholders are as interested in the CEO’s principles as he is.

Fair trade

One of the many things that cause consternation among the Trump watchers is his lack of political consistency. The latest example is the proposed import tax on steel. Just a few years ago President Obama came up with a similar idea and it was met with loud protest. THE OBAMA administration may have taken a page out of GOP front-runner Donald Trump's book this week after receiving criticism for months for not being tough enough on international trade standards. The Commerce Department announced Tuesday a wide-ranging slew of tariff increases on certain imported steel products, notably slapping Chinese producers with a preliminary 266 percent tariff after they failed to cooperate in a trade investigation. They both use the argument that free trade is good but unfair trade is not.

Openness and tweets

On several occasions Trump has stated that since he came on the scene the new media has received higher ratings and this includes print, radio and TV. There are articles on the Internet stating how Trump saved CNN as their ratings were in decline until he came along. This AM Morning Joe started his show by saying they had seven White House stories to cover anyone of which would have been a two week news cycle just two years ago. Many of these stories were given additional impetus by Trumps tweets. While almost all news outlets oppose these tweets they often times barely beat the leaks that follow. By tweeting ahead of the news the administration becomes one of the most transparent as well as one of the leakiest.