Category: Seiler

President Trump caused a ruckus again, this time by telling people at a rally in Alabama that NFL owners should fire players who knelt for the National Anthem. If sports fans leave stadiums when this happens, he said, “I guarantee things will stop.” Then he called for fans to boycott the game. That caused even more players to kneel. Meanwhile, attendance and TV ratings have been dropping faster than the players’ knees. The kneeling protests are against police maltreatment of blacks – some of it real, some, such as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, exonerated even by President...

Americans sure get in a tizzy these days. What happened to the people that methodically destroyed Hitler and Tojo in less than four years, then calmly faced down the Soviets in the Cold War? The latest “threat” is from the ridiculous Kim Jong Un of North Korea. This time, supposedly, he’s years or months away from launching a nuclear-tipped ICBM at the American mainland, or at least Guam and its U.S. military bases. The Bezos-Amazon-Washington Post headlined, “North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say.” But as Justin Raimondo noted, the Post quoted only a single sentence from...

  Nowadays American history in high school consists of unrelenting attacks on our country as a racist, sexist, etc., hellhole. But back when I took the class at Wayne Memorial High School back in 1971, we learned about how horrible the old spoils system was, and why our country leaped into the progressive future with Civil Service Reform. Although he didn’t use the term, the spoils system largely was instituted by the great President Andrew Jackson. It was a way to get an unresponsive bureaucracy to perform its duties. If a functionary treated citizens badly, he knew they could vote...

  Most people, especially left-wingers and neocons, still don’t “get” President Trump. Yet the clues are right before our eyes, if you just look. Numerous books and articles describe who he is, and how he operates. A big problem for left-wingers, neocons and others is that they expect politicians to be a certain way, even though they know Trump never has held elective office. They expect him to be like one of the Bushes, or the Clintons, or Obama, or even Reagan or Jimmy Carter. They expect him to be someone who “plays the game” of politics. And they expect...

What’s With Republicans and Taxes? By John Seiler Why haven’t Republicans cut our taxes? It’s their signature issue. And now that they control both Congress and the White House for only the third time in a century, why haven’t they enacted their signature issue? Their past actions in this situation aren’t all that good, either. In the 1920s, the Harding-Coolidge Administration and Republican congresses certainly cut taxes, putting the roar into the Roaring Twenties. But that’s it. Nothing during times when Republicans controlled both the Oval Office and the Capitol Dome. Only split government has brought decent tax reform. Republicans...

Events are confirming what I wrote on this site six months ago, that there’s no way the Russians could have rigged our election because it’s just too complex. It would involve not just putting up anti-Hillary, pro-Trump stuff on social media, but knowing what to put up, and when to do it. Elections are more about intuition than anything else. Trump intuited he would win if he campaigned for working-class voters in October in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Hillary’s bad tuition sent her to Silicon Valley to collect bucks from the digital oligarchs. The latest developments: This past week, former...

Granted, the presidency is one tough job. Even eight years isn’t long enough to master it. The job includes the ability to launch 7,000 nuclear weapons and wield the world’s largest conventional military. Then there’s the economy, which if it crashes mean you’re not going to be re-elected. It also includes the ability to use presidential powers to achieve policy and personal ends. As Bill Clinton once put it in typical fashion while in the White House, “I reward my friends and (expletive) my enemies.” Trump is a proud man. And one of the more entertaining parts of last year’s...

Now the alarmists call it “climate change,” which can mean anything from California enjoying even better weather than it already does to a meteor slamming into Los Angeles and extinguishing all life on earth (small “e,” please). But they really mean “global warming,” the phrase used to scare us until the late 2000s, when it became clear it wasn’t happening. I’ve been a skeptic – or denier, as the alarmists say – all along. I remember the 1970s global cooling scare. A 1975 Newsweek article warned of “The Cooling World”: “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have...