Recommended: Separating Fact from Hysteria on Trump Refugee Order

Those who are emotionally committed to being outraged at anything and everything the Trump administration does can just stop reading here. Those who want some real perspective might find it interesting to read David French’s article in the National Review today: Separating Fact from Hysteria on Trump Refugee Order.

Yes, the implementation of the order was a little ham-handed, in that the immigration service wasn't given advance warning to prepare for the change.  On the other hand if they had been given a few days warning it would have surely leaked and no doubt prompted a flood of last-minute refugees trying to beat the deadline. But the order itself, if you read the article, isn't that much out of line with policy under previous presidents, including Obama. And it doesn't single out Muslims, despite the hysterical claims by liberals; it singles out anyone from those named countries that have ongoing terrorist activity.

The press clearly isn't used to having a president who actually does what he promised to do on the campaign trail, and moreover does it promptly. As one other writer put it, 

Half of America — the coasts and the big cities — is apparently shocked by Trump’s eagerness to start delivering on the promises that got him elected in the first place. They’re not used to a politician who not only means what he said on the campaign trail, but also is not dissuaded by the usual recalcitrant Washington bureaucracy, media nitpickers and congressional back-scratchers.

Doesn’t he know how the game is played? That the rule is to wink at the rubes who make up your base, then quickly join the insider’s game. After all, Republicans like the horse-trading majority leader Mitch McConnell and senator John McCain have fashioned entire careers out of promising their constituents one thing and delivering their big donors something altogether different. Surely, D.C. will corrupt Trump the way it has most everybody else.

Worst of all, they can’t believe the other half of America is actually cheering Trump on as, on one hot-button issue after another, he’s giving them exactly what they voted for, at warp speed.

Global warming misinformation

The New York Times ran a recent story about how 2016 is the hottest year on record, and on the basis of that story, from a supposedly dependable news source, a great many people no doubt believe that 2016 was the hottest year on record. But was it really?

As I mentioned in a previous post, measuring the “global temperature” is really a difficult thing to do, because there is so much day-to-day and place-to-place variability. And things are further confused because there are several different datasets – measures from ground station, measures from satellites, etc, etc.

But the real issue is how accurate those measurements are.  In science all measures are approximations limited in their accuracy by all sorts of things, just like presidential voting polls (and we know how inaccurate those can be).  In real science, measurements are always accompanied by error bounds – by an estimate of how much the measurement might be off. Funny, the New York Times article didn’t mention those.

So the UK Meteorological Office reports a difference between 2015 and 2016 global temperatures of 0.01º C, but with a margin of error ten times larger of 0.1º C, which is to say they estimate the real difference is somewhere between 0.09º C COOLER and 0.11º C WARMER.  Hardly a convincing case that 2016 was warmer than 2015.

The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) pegs the difference between 2015 and 2016 at 0.04º C, with a likely margin of error around 0.09º C.  Satellite data shows the difference between 1998 – the year of the last El Nino warming cycle – and 2016 as about 0.02º C, with a margin of error of 0.10º C, meaning that really there is no convincing evidence from this dataset that the earth has warmed since 1998, let alone since 2015.

2016 might indeed have been the hottest year on record, but these measurements don’t provide evidence for that. All they show is that whatever the difference really was, it was smaller than the likely errors of measurement. So much for good science reporting!

Recommended: Trump Can Fix the Defects in US Foreign Policy

Ted Carpenter has a good piece today in The National Interest: Trump Can Fix the Defects in US Foreign Policy. Whether the Trump team will be smart enough to do this or not remains to be seen, but they at least are not drawn from the same establishment Washington foreign policy teams that have so poorly advised preceding presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, apparently suffering from "groupthink".  And Trump certainly has made it clear he and his team are rethinking American foreign policy.

Carpenter identifies, correctly I think, three main defects in America foreign policy since the end of World War II.

1. Threat inflation - the tendency for American foreign policy experts to see a new Hitler in every tinpot dictator who arises, and a potential world war in every minor expansionist move by these tinpot dictators, and to over-react as if each one were an existential threat to the US. A few may be a real threat to us; most are not.

2. An inability to set priorities -  as Frederick the Great said,"He who defends everything defends nothing."  The US has extensive and expensive security commitments all around the globe, and it is costing us a fortune that could be better spent on other things. We don't seem to be able to distinguish between "nice to have" and "necessary". Nor do we seem to be able to do "tough love" and tell, for example, Europe, with an economy bigger than ours, that they need to step up to the plate and take on their own defense, rather than relying on us for almost everything.

3. An inability to make cost-benefit or risk-reward calculations. As Carpenter says, we don't seem to be able to distinguish between desirable outcomes and essential ones. We have spent 15 years in an expensive series of wars in the Middle East with no discernible improvement in the situation - and it is not the least bit clear why it should have mattered that much to us.

I recommend reading the whole article, because Carpenter makes a good defense for his thesis.

Hyperventilating over Trump

The largely liberal press and the usual talking heads have, predictably, been hyperventilating over Trump’s actions over the first few days of his administration. I suppose that was to be expected, considering how they have behaved all through the election.  But, ignoring Trump’s more inflammatory tweets, how outrageous have his actions to date really been?

He wants to build a wall on the Mexican border, which liberals seem to think is outrageous even though the Obama administration already built some 700 miles of that very same wall. It may be a dumb idea, it may be ineffective (though no one has proposed a more effective approach), but why is it outrageous now when it wasn’t during the Obama administration?

He wants to deport illegal immigrants, which liberals seem to think is outrageous even though the Obama administration deported more illegal immigrants (about 2.4 million of them) than all preceding presidents put together. Why is it outrageous to deport people who enter the country illegally when so many others are waiting patiently, sometimes for years, to enter legally?  Why is it outrageous now when it wasn’t during the Obama administration?

He wants our allies (Japan, Korea, Europe, NATO) to bear more of the share of their own defense. Only 5 of the 28 NATO countries are meeting their treaty obligations to put at least 2% of their GDP toward defense.  The rest don’t bother because they know the US will do it for them. This has been a worry in Washington for years, but no president to date has been willing to step up to the plate and deal with it  Why is it so outrageous now to demand that our allies at least meet their NATO treaty obligations?

He promises to appoint a strict constructionist to the vacant Supreme Court seat last held by Anthony Scalia, a strict constructionist, which is producing the predictable outrage in the press. Why? When Obama replaced liberal justices with liberal justices (Souter replaced by Sotomayor and Stevens replaced by Kagan) it wasn’t outrageous, and those appointments got bipartisan support.  Why are liberals so outraged by the idea of replacing a conservative with another conservative?

He wants to keep jobs in the US instead of outsourcing them to other countries, and has been jawboning corporations to do that. Since he is the president of the US, not of those other countries, why is it so outrageous for him to look out for his own voters?  It may well be an ineffective method to maintain jobs, since automation, not outsourcing, is the real threat, but it doesn’t seem to me outrageous for him to want to keep jobs in the US, especially since that was the main issue that won him the election.

He has said he is for America first, which earned him scathing criticism from the more transnational liberal elite. Why? Do liberals think all other countries aren’t looking out first and foremost for their own national interests? What is the purpose of a national government if it isn’t to look out for the safety and welfare of the people it governs?

He promises to cut regulations. Is that really outrageous? As of 2015 there were more than 81,000 pages of federal regulations in the Federal Register.  Just the regulations added during the Obama administration are costing companies, by the estimate of the agencies themselves, more than $108 BILLION per year to comply.  Now he may or may not succeed in cutting regulations – bureaucracies are remarkably good at protecting their turf – but is it so outrageous for him to try?

He promises to reduce the size of the federal government and to reduce the budgets and staffing of some federal agencies, which seems to be outraging liberals. Why? Both Republicans and Democrats have been promising on the campaign trail to reduce the size of government for decades, though neither has actually done it when in power, so why when Trump says it is it now outrageous?  And just how do liberals think this would be accomplished without cutting the budgets and staffing of federal agencies?

He has killed the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, which has liberals outraged. Why? Hillary had said she too didn’t support it. Would liberals have been outraged if she had been elected and killed it?  Would they have been outraged if, after promising to kill it on the campaign trail (to counter Bernie Sander’s position), she then reneged and didn’t kill it? Or are they just outraged because it is Trump?

He has used executive orders to dismantle many of President Obama’s initiatives, which seems to be outraging liberals. Why? Obama enacted those initiatives in the first place using executive orders (since he couldn’t get them through Congress) and liberals thought he was daring and resourceful. Why, when Trump uses executive orders do liberals think it is outrageous?

Ignoring Trump's intemperate tweets, his actions in the first few days of his administration don't seem that outrageous to me. They are of course mostly conservative actions which liberals don't like (naturally), but they certainly don't seem outrageous.

All in all, I am amazed at the breathtaking hypocrisy of the liberal press and the liberal spokespeople.  As I have said before, I actually support many – perhaps even most - of the liberal positions, but those positions are being very poorly represented by the current crop of journalists and Democratic leaders.

Recommended: Celebs Threatening Trump Doesn’t Help

The Daily Beast has a good common-sense article today: Celebs threatening Trump doesn't help.  The writer is a long-time critic of Trump and the Trump campaign, but even so is dismayed by the post-election liberal "freak out".   As he correctly points out, if Democrats hope to someday recapture the White House and a significant number of state legislatures, and actually have some political power again, they will need to win back a lot of Trump voters, and what they are doing now isn't the way to go about it.

If Hillary had won and Trump supporters had threatened to burn down the White House and smashed windows in Washington during her inauguration, one can imagine the outrage the largely liberal press would have expressed.  Funny how mute they are when the situation is reversed.

Also recommended: The Losers of 2016

Walter Russell Mead just published a companion piece to the one just recommended in the preceding blog: The Losers of 2016.  It too is very good and is highly recommended.

Recommended: The Winners of 2016

Walter Russell Mead had a good piece in The American Interest Saturday: The Winners of 2016. The women's march across the nation this weekend, impressive as it was, highlights the stark divide in the country. FiveThirtyEight estimates that about 80% of the women were from states Clinton won, most of them from big cities.  And of course the march blocked participation by pro-life women. So while it was impressive, it masked the liberal's weakness across the nation, especially among the more religious.  Likewise, more detailed analysis of the voting patterns shows that, yes, Hillary won the popular vote, but only because she won overwhelming in deep blue California. Remove California and she lost the popular vote across the country.

All of which highlights the Democrats' current problem.  Having lost the monolithic support of the working class across the country, the Democratic base is now concentrated heavily in a few urban areas, which doesn't help them win either nationally in the electoral college nor in local gubernatorial or state legislature races. Winning decisively in California wasn't enough to win the nation as a whole.

As I have mentioned before, since the (nominally) Republican candidate won, the Republicans will do little soul-searching after this election, despite the obvious dysfunction in the party. The Democrats, having been beaten by a candidate they should have been able to overcome, are already (finally) beginning to do some thoughtful analysis of why they lost not only this presidential election, but the House and the Senate and so many state offices over the past decade.

But in a sense, both parties have the same problem: they have been seduced into fighting culture wars instead of focusing on the fundamentals of the economy (job growth or preservation, tax policy, infrastructure maintenance, worker education, etc).. And both parties have been captured by their big-money donors, and the issues these wealthy people care about, rather than attending to the day-to-day concerns of the mass of average voters across the country.