HALF-FULL REPORT 12/30/16

Happy New Year!  We say good bye to 2016 in this last HFR of the year.  And what more fun way to say da svidanya than to watch Zero close out his presidency becoming an object of ridicule by the Russian government?

This morning (12/30), the Russian Embassy in London sent out this Tweet:

That was followed by the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, publicly mock Zero as a “loser, angry and shallow-brained.”  With the inauguration of President Trump in three short weeks, “the curtain falls, the bad performance is over.”

If that prospect doesn’t cause you to raise glass of champagne tomorrow night in celebration, then nothing will.

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I know you’re like me, you can’t wait for 2016 to be over and for the next three weeks to be over as well.  How much more of the Evil of Zero we’ll have to endure until noon on Friday January 20, remains to be seen – but you can expect for it to be all swept away with a stroke of Trump’s pen, issuing an Executive Order voiding all of Zero’s for the last 8 years.

Or at least a very substantial majority of them.  Further, Congress can void any regulations issued by Zero or his agencies within the last 60 days.

There’s a part of me, I must admit, that is glad Zero has gone bananas trying to hamstring Trump with a deluge of stupid rules.  For over eight years, the HFR has been describing Zero as a man filled with hate towards America.  Now that hate has been bared naked for all to see.

And it will just serve to make Trump mad, more than ever determined to throw the Zero Presidency into history’s trashcan.

The most glaringly blatant example of Zero’s hate is his frightening perfidy towards Israel.  This too has made Trump the hero, responding:

Actually, it’s even better than this.  Zero’s perfidy has resulted in calls such as these from Roger Simon: Obama’s Israel Vendetta Opens the Door for Trump to Defund the UN and from Charles Krauthammer: Trump Should Find Way To Get Rid Of United Nations And Turn The Real Estate Into Condos.

 21 days to go – can’t come fast enough.

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Now for the coolest news of the week.  It involves the term disintermediation and a guy named Sean Spicer.

To disintermediate is to remove intermediaries from a supply chain, i.e., cut out the middle men.  Sean Spicer will be Trump’s White House press secretary.  Yesterday (12/29), he was interviewed by Hugh Hewitt.  Get ready to stand up and cheer, because when Hewitt asked if Trump would have him continue to hold formal East Room daily press briefings with the White House Press Corps, Spicer replied:

“Trump doesn’t look to the past and say I’ve got to conform to these precedents. He figures out what’s the best way… whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, he’s closing in like 45 million people that he can have a conversation with, these are new and modern tools… that we can be utilizing to bring more people into the process and have a conversation with the American people and not just limit it through the filter of the mainstream media.”

That is, Trump is going to disintermediate the media.  Make the “Mainstream Media” obsolete via the creative destruction of new technologies.  Spicer continued:

“The point, Hugh, is that business as usual is over. What I mean by that is the President-elect looks at this and says what’s best for the country? How do we put America and Americans first and stop trying to figure out how we cater to pundits, the establishment class, and big donors.  He is putting Americans first and foremost.”

Well, hallelujah!  You’re cheering now, aren’t you?

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As expected, this is causing the Enemedia’s flagship, the New York Times, to get its pink undies in a total twist.  On Sunday (12/25), they issued this pathetic attack on Trump and Spicer.  Now get ready to laugh your head off when you compare this to Spicer’s quotes above:

“Mr. Trump’s unconventional, sometimes hostile, relationship with the news media and his penchant for communicating through unfiltered Twitter posts threaten to upend a decades-old Washington tradition that relies almost entirely on protocol. The result, reporters and editors say, could be a loss of transparency that would hinder the press’s role as a conduit for information to the people.”

Now that’s funny.  Sayonara, presstitutes.

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We all are eager to see whom Trump will name to replace Scalia on the Supreme Court.  This is not a prediction, but I won’t be surprised if it’s Ted Cruz.

But let’s not just focus on SCOTUS.  It turns out that: Donald Trump will be able to fill more than 100 federal court positions when he takes office – which is more than double the number available to Zero in January 2009.

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The must-read of the week is by Ray Dalio, the multi-billionaire who runs Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund with assets of over $130 billion.  Here’s a key excerpt:

“It is increasingly obvious that we are about to experience a profound, president-led ideological shift that will have a big impact on both the US and the world.

 

If you haven’t read Ayn Rand lately, I suggest that you do as her books pretty well capture the mindset. This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies, and it admires strong, can-do, profit makers. It wants to, and probably will, shift the environment from one that makes profit makers villains with limited power to one that makes them heroes with significant power.”

John Galt as Donald Trump?  Cosmic irony and karma for Ayn Rand.

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Here’s a warning, however, on one of Trump’s appointments.  That would be Steve Mnuchin tapped to be Treasury Secretary.  A good friend of mine who got to know him when they were both at Goldman’s tells me he’s a “sour New York liberal” who opposes all of Trump’s tax goals, especially lowering cap gains.

“The appointment is ridiculous,” he tells me, “made strictly out of loyalty, as Mnuchin came out for Trump early.”

He also warned me about Trumpian hubris.  “Donald is a brilliant deal-maker, one of the best.  But any deal takes two to tango.  He’s got to realize there are people like the Mullahs in Iran or the Chicoms in Beijing that think win-lose at their core.  You can’t make a deal with them because they think win-win is like a square circle, it makes no sense, as for someone to win someone else has to lose, it can’t be any other way.  I hope Donald comes to understand this.”

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Perfection is in heaven.  Trump is human like all of us.  He will do things that we don’t like.  But when you compare him with his predecessor, he’s like manna from heaven.

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In addition to the Chicoms and Mullahs, here’s hoping Trump will realize he can’t make a deal with Turkey’s dictator, Recip Erdogan.

This week, his latest outrage was to accuse the US of supporting ISIS, when of course his son Bilal is funding ISIS.

Erdogan is a Jihadi Islamist waging war on the West and Christianity.  Here’s a billboard his government has put up in Istanbul:

Turkey’s membership in NATO needs to be suspended until the Erdogan dictatorship in no longer in power.

If you need another example, here’s a photo of the funeral for two volunteers for the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS – one American, one German – killed by Turkish airstrikes on Kurdish-held Manbij in Syria on December 15.

Erdogan’s military is not in Syria to fight ISIS but to genocide the Kurds.

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We’ll close with a photo from another Moslem country – at least ostensibly, as 50% of the population says they are Moslem but only 2% attend a mosque.  That’s Albania.  It turns out that Albania is the most pro-American country in the world.  And it sure is pro-Trump.

On the morning of November 9 when news has been announced, a huge crowd of Albanians gathered in Skanderbeg Square in the capital of Tirana to celebrate Trump’s victory.

The world is about to change and for the better.  2017 will be a marvelous year to remember.  Happy New Year to you all.