WHY THIS COLLEGE PROFESSOR SUPPORTS DONALD TRUMP
Thursday, October 20th, 2016
What it’s like to be a college professor who supports Donald Trump
On campus, it’s led to hostility or silence.
This election is unlike any other in our nation’s history. Like many other voters, I have struggled to determine the right course of action in this general election.In Cleveland, I urged voters, “please, don’t stay home in November. Stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket whom you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.I’ve made this decision for two reasons. First, last year, I promised to support the Republican nominee. And I intend to keep my word.Second, even though I have had areas of significant disagreement with our nominee, by any measure Hillary Clinton is wholly unacceptable — that’s why I have always been #NeverHillary.Six key policy differences inform my decision. First, and most important, the Supreme Court. For anyone concerned about the Bill of Rights — free speech, religious liberty, the Second Amendment — the Court hangs in the balance. I have spent my professional career fighting before the Court to defend the Constitution. We are only one justice away from losing our most basic rights, and the next president will appoint as many as four new justices. We know, without a doubt, that every Clinton appointee would be a left-wing ideologue. Trump, in contrast, has promised to appoint justices “in the mold of Scalia.”For some time, I have been seeking greater specificity on this issue, and today the Trump campaign provided that, releasing a very strong list of potential Supreme Court nominees — including Sen. Mike Lee, who would make an extraordinary justice — and making an explicit commitment to nominate only from that list. This commitment matters, and it provides a serious reason for voters to choose to support Trump.Second, Obamacare. The failed healthcare law is hurting millions of Americans. If Republicans hold Congress, leadership has committed to passing legislation repealing Obamacare. Clinton, we know beyond a shadow of doubt, would veto that legislation. Trump has said he would sign it.
I Was an Oil Spill Scapegoat
I helped to cap the Deepwater Horizon well. The Justice Department then turned my life into a legal nightmare.
ByNov. 9, 2015
I’m not a drug dealer, violent criminal or money launderer. I’m an engineer. In 2010 I helped stop the BPoil spill after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig left a damaged well spilling crude directly into the Gulf of Mexico
On the morning of the raid I left early for work, so I was not at home when it occurred. My wife was alone and had to deal with the shock of a squad of FBI agents ripping through our home. We’ve seen it a hundred times on “Law and Order.” They raced through our house and badgered and interrogated my wife.
What had I done to merit this? I had worked as hard as I knew how for nearly 90 straight days to help stop the Deepwater Horizon spill. Plugging the well, as fast as possible, was the focus of my life.
I was in for a rude awakening. Facts were not what the investigators wanted. They wanted a conviction. They wanted to prove to the public that their lengthy, expensive investigation was successful. And success meant conviction. I had banked on the truth saving me, but the truth was not enough.
Meanwhile, federal debt held by the public has doubled, so a return of interest rates to their postwar norms, roughly 5% on a five-year Treasury note, will send the cost of servicing the debt up by $439 billion, almost doubling the current deficit.
Large banks, under aggressive interpretation of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law, are regulated as if they were public utilities. Federal bureaucrats are embedded in their executive offices like political officers in the old Soviet Union. Across the financial sector the rule of law is in tatters as tens of billions of dollars are extorted from large banks in legal settlements; insurance companies and money managers are subject to regulations set by international bodies; and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, formed in 2011, faces few checks, balances or restraints
Since the Obama recovery began in the second quarter of 2009, public and private projections of economic growth have consistently overestimated actual performance. Six years later, projections of prosperity being just around the corner have given way to a debate over whether the U.S. has fallen into “secular stagnation,” a fancy phrase for the chronic low growth seen in much of Europe.
This is just another in a long line of excuses. America’s historic ability to outperform Europe is well documented; we call it American exceptionalism. It has always been based on the fact that the U.S has had better, more market-driven economic policies and our economy therefore worked better. But, as the U.S. economy is Europeanized through higher taxes and greater regulatory burdens, American exceptionalism is fading away, taking economic growth with it. (more…)
The latest reckoning with reality is the end of the obsession with “peak oil,” which for years had serious people proclaiming that we were entering an era of permanent fossil fuels scarcity. It didn’t work out that way.
That’s a central lesson from this year’s dramatic fall in the price of oil, which reached $69.49 a barrel of Brent crude on Thursday from a June high of $112.12. As recently as early November, when oil hovered at $80, OPEC officials warned they would intervene to hold the price at $70. But Saudi officials conspicuously refused to support an output cut at last week’s OPEC meeting, and Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi has made clear that he’d be comfortable with lower prices.
The short-term Saudi calculation is to drive oil prices down to squeeze their geopolitical adversaries and higher-cost producers. That goes especially for their adversaries across the Persian Gulf in Iran, which depends on oil exports for over 40% of its revenues, and where the regime had designed its budget based on $100 oil.
The Saudis also hope to slow the explosive growth of U.S. production, which, thanks to the tapping of domestic shale resources through the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, has risen to some nine million barrels a day from five million in 2008. By some estimates, the price of oil needs to be as high as $90 a barrel for oil extracted from “tight” deposits such as shale, though oil market research firm IHS believes most tight oil wells have a break-even cost of between $50 and $69 dollars a barrel.
But even if the Saudi move slows U.S. drilling, the International Energy Agency forecasts that U.S. production will still surpass Saudi Arabia’s output of 9.7 million barrels a day, and overtake Russia’s 10.3 million, perhaps sometime next year. This would make America the world’s largest oil producer, which it was from the dawn of the oil age through 1974. Thanks to the fracking boom, the U.S. surpassed Russia as the world’s largest natural-gas producer in 2013. (more…)
These bills provide an obvious and potentially bipartisan starting point for the new Congress—and, for President Obama , a chance to begin the final years of his presidency by taking some steps toward a stronger economy.
These bills include measures authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which will mean lower energy costs for families and more jobs for American workers; the Hire More Heroes Act, legislation encouraging employers to hire more of our nation’s veterans; and a proposal to restore the traditional 40-hour definition of full-time employment, removing an arbitrary and destructive government barrier to more hours and better pay created by the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
We’ll also consider legislation to help protect and expand America’s emerging energy boom and to support innovative charter schools around the country. (more…)
TWO VERY IMPORTANT VIDEOS – BERNARD LEWIS – HISTORIAN AND MIDDLE EAST EXPERT AND FORMER CIA DIRECTOR JAMES WOOLSEY – OIL MONEY AND SAUDI ARABIA’S STRANGLEHOLD OVER GLOBAL AFFAIRS
Steve Coll, a writer for the New Yorker, suggests in a piece posted on the magazine’s website that “Kurdish oil greed,” whose partner Mr. Obama now becomes, has been a primary factor in making Iraq a failed state. That’s apparently because of the Kurds’ unwillingness to reach a revenue-sharing deal with Baghdad. For good measure, he refers readers to a Rachel Maddow video, featuring Steve Coll, that argues that the U.S. invaded Iraq to gets its oil in the first place.
John B. Judis, a veteran editor of the New Republic, in contrast is relatively sane under the headline “The U.S. Airstrikes in Northern Iraq Are All About Oil.” While nodding toward Mr. Obama’s stated humanitarian justifications, he insists oil “lies near the center of American motives for intervention.”
There are a few problems with this argument. Oil exists in the hinterland of Erbil, all right, the capital of a stable, prosperous and relatively free Kurdistan that President Obama now is trying to protect from the Islamic murderers of ISIS.
But oil also exists in northwestern Iraq—in fact, vast amounts of oil around Mosul, whose fall did not trigger Obama intervention. Oil is in Libya, where the U.S. quickly took a hike after the fall of Gadhafi. Oil is in Canada, where Mr. Obama, who just fatally risked his legacy with his core admirers by dispatching forces to the Mideast, can’t bring himself to choose between his labor and greenie constituents by deciding to approve or veto the Keystone pipeline.
Oil apparently explains nothing except when it explains everything. (more…)