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Let’s just disclose this right upfront: we had some pretty big technical issues during the production of this show (Skype went down during the Andy McCarthy segment — Andy is preparing a criminal complaint against them on our behalf) and James Lileks could not get his computer to recognize his mic (he blames a cheap Chinese dongle — oh, the humanity), so apologies, this is another Lileks-defecient show (kudos to @hangon for winning the Lileks Post of The Week honors for his post The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking). That said, as previously mentioned, we’ve got the great Andy McCarthy (you must buy his new book Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency) on all of the legal machinations around impeachment, and political consultant to the stars (and NR contributor) Luke Thompson on why Trump did nothing wrong in his phone call with Zelensky and some expert analysis on the Senate races coming up next fall. Also, Peter Robinson is worried about Liz Warren; and finally, does the window seat control the window shade or should there be darkness throughout the cabin? We hash it out, but tell us your thoughts in the comments. Special note to Ricochet members: don’t forget to vote in this week’s Long Poll to the right (or below if you’re on a mobile device) of this post. What? You’re not a member? JOIN TODAY.
Music from this week’s show: Shot With His Own Gun by Elvis Costello
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The Democrats are giving us a gift. Will we be wise enough to seize the opportunity to nominate someone else? It is not for nothing that we have been known as the “stupid party.”
Trump has done a lot in the area of deregulation.
The problem isn’t deficits or debt per se but the level of government spending
i think 2/3 of the federal budget is for social security, Medicare and Medicaid. They are non discretionary.
Flat tax or a consumption tax
Keep wishing, Gary.
Candidate suggestion?
And https://twitter.com/va_shiva Dr Shiva gave her a run for her money in 2018 (the fake Indian running against the real Indian …)
Highly recommend his twitter feed. The dude is scary smart.
Gary, do you mean Michael Reagan? (Ron Jr. and Patti are liberals.)
Or do you propose to raise Ronald Reagan from the dead?
That’s more plausible than trying to reuse Ronald Reagan’s 40-year-old platform.
You think the Democrats are trying to help the Republican Party by impeaching Trump? I had no idea they were so altruistic!
Oooh, necromancy!
Gary I have explained this over and over to you. The debt to GDP ratios started getting bad under Ronald Reagan. He did three things. He overhauled the tax code, he defeated inflation, and he beat the Soviet Union. The latter didn’t do a damn thing for the average person. Most of the economic growth back then was simply the baby boom pushing through. Republicans have never been very conservative.
David Horwitz is right about everything. Same with Angelo Codivilla.
I cannot recommend enough watching the David Stockman interview on real vision. Nobody has ever been conservative. Everything moves left all of the time.
So is Bill Kristol and Mona and that whole crowd on that Niskanen Center list. Why would they use that goofy place as a vehicle for their ideas anyway?
Don’t listen to anybody that criticizes Trump unless they have strong libertarian sensibilities.
There is absolutely no value added from politicians guessing at tax brackets and deductions and shoving them down our throats. Feel free to argue with me. What a scam.
Half of the people that hate Trump acts like the Republican Party has a bunch of people in it like Representative Thomas Massie. It’s never been that way.
Reagan got surrounded by a bunch of bad people—Bush people and Wall Street types—in his second term. He was on the right track, but he just had too much on his plate, mostly from trying to crush the Soviet Union. LBJ, Nixon, and Carter had really screwed things up, too. We didn’t have all of the cultural problems back then, either.
I got most of that from David Storkman. He’s totally toxic in the GOP, because listening to him would assure a deep recession and a Democrat takeover. That is the dynamic. It’s a hell of a situation.
I’m not the final word on this, but I don’t get why people are so confident about analyzing elections.
The Trump campaign spent $50,000 on Minnesota in 2016. They only lost by 1.5%. The average is 6%, and it has been as high as 10%. Republican POTUS election loss margin. Nobody saw that coming.
Comment on the poll. Instead of “Foolish and reckless but not impeachable” the real issue is Trump lacks civic knowledge and civic executive experience. Knowledge of government. It drags him down, but that’s what the people voted for.
I wish somebody would start a post on why Trump should be impeached right now. Take a poll. I see that the daily beast, CNN, MSNBC “Republicans” are really fired up about it.
Name the specific “crime”.
$42,000,000 and counting investigating Trump and his family. They just closed the charity investigation in the Southern District of New York. None of them went anywhere. Hunter Biden deserved a FISA warrant and Carter Page did not.
It’s like The Death Of Stalin.
The only reason we know about this Ukraine stuff is the whole whistleblower thing was done illegally.
He didn’t handle it per the statue and POTUS’s conversations with foreign dignitaries aren’t covered. It’s a policy issue and Trump isn’t in the intelligence community. It’s outrageous.
We have a long way to go, but it looks like Manafort might get off on fruit of the poison tree theory. Ukraine probably fake documents at the request of the Clinton campaign. We’ll see.
So they lose by an even bigger margin?
The American voter has made it *very* clear that they don’t care about deficits or limited government.
Please watch that video I keep posting. I just watched it again for the fourth or fifth time last night.
Right after the Soviet Union fell the whole West should have gotten on top of their unfunded liabilities and started shrinking their governments. China never should have been let into the WTO. The central banks really needed to quit supporting the economy after that. They did the reverse. It’s a disaster.
The problem is on auto pilot. It can’t be dealt with directly until there’s another economic accident.
Not wishing but predicting.
Mark Sanford, who is running. Ben Sasse or Nikki Haley who are not running.
Sasse is not in tune with anything right now. I notice that a lot of those anti-neocon types really dislike Haley, but I have no big opinion. Sanford someday maybe. His ex-wife seemed pretty cool to me, though.
Can you get David on next week? lol
You get him/her nominated, and I will vote for him/her. Meanwhile, I will vote for whoever the Republican nominee is, no matter how awful you or Jonah Goldberg think they are, because to do otherwise – to allow ANY democrat to win – is REALLY awful.
If a Democrat gets POTUS, the ACA will force single-payer.
Eight years of voting on the repeal of the ACA and nothing.
That much socialist control of the healthcare system is going to be a very bad situation one way or another.
They would probably have to control the Senate too.
It might be entertaining, though, if Democrats get the presidency in 2020 but Republicans take back the House and maybe even get stronger in the Senate.
The down side is that a Republican Senate would probably approve any/all judicial nominations, including to the Supreme Court, just because – unlike Democrats – they think it’s the right thing to do.
What I’m saying is the GOP has to keep doing something to slow the ACA down. I get that I’m not being very specific.
All of those liars in the senate and the house. They should have just stood down if they didn’t have a plan. They could have waited another year.
But really, ACA could be gone if not for that lout McCain.
This is what gets me. The people that hate Trump have all of this stuff in their heads about how politicians ought to be and whatever.
They had eight years to fix this situation. Eight years to get ready. And then nothing. Trump is not the problem. He is the symptom.