By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | May 23, 2019

If the Democrats are really tempted by impeachment, bring it on.

Since the day after the 2016 election they have been threatening this, placing their chips on the Russian-collusion fantasy and then on the phantasmagoric charade of obstruction of justice. The attorney general accurately gave the ingredients of the offense of obstruction of justice in his four-page summary of the Mueller report: a corrupt act for corrupt purposes in contemplation of a legal proceeding.

The attorney general, William Barr, the then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, and the Justice Department counsel concurred that none of the elements was present in the conduct of the president as recounted by Mr. Mueller. The dream died, except in the febrile imagination of the Democrats, who launched an unfounded attack on the attorney general’s integrity.

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After a decade of justice denied — under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, John Brennan, James Comey, and others — Bill Whittle thinks he now detects a whiff of fear among those in that cabal. Former CIA Director John Brennan, usually a cool calculating man, seems frightened about the probe into how the Russia collusion investigation began. ​

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a blemish on the age that so many of us know the name of the Federal Reserve chairman. In a better world, that government functionary would be as obscure as what’s-his-name, the home plate umpire who got no arguments calling balls and strikes at Yankee Stadium the other night.

Who elected the Greenspans, Bernankes, and Powells to be the arbiters of interest rates, asset prices, the rate of inflation and who knows what else? It wasn’t Alexander Hamilton. Nor was it the Fed’s own founders. If the authors of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act could return to earth to inspect their handiwork, the shock might kill them all over again.

Congress envisioned an institution to function in the context of the international gold standard. This meant a dollar defined as a fixed weight of gold. You should have heard old Carter Glass, the congressional father of the Fed, berate the critics who dared to suggest that he was scheming to replace the gold dollar with a scrap of green paper.

Well, Glass himself is to blame for much of the evil that followed. The legislative preamble to the act that Woodrow Wilson signed describes a bill “to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of discounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States—and for other purposes.”
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These other purposes quickly became the principal ones.

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Liberal cities across America are collapsing into Third World status. It’s not just the fact that San Francisco’s streets are now littered with drug needles and human feces, either. Seattle is also collapsing into rampant homelessness and drug addiction, creating an entire class of impoverished, homeless residents who are breeding grounds for HIV and other infectious diseases.
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Yet Seattle’s liberal city leaders — like all “progressives” — are unwilling to take any action to resolve the problems in the first place. Instead, they enact new policies that make the problems worse while calling it “progress.”

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By Phil Gramm and Thomas R. SavingJan. 1, 2019 3:26 p.m. ET


As the Trump economic revival doubled economic-growth rates over the last two years, interest rates, which had fallen in the final two years of the Obama era, have risen by more than 40%. Today no news cycle is complete without speculation about how much the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates or how the president has blasted the Fed for setting rates too high. The latest saga played out last month, with the Fed raising rates for the fourth time in 2018 even though market rates were down slightly since the last Fed hike, in September. Extraordinarily, this debate is occurring at the very moment the Fed—shackled by its bloated asset holdings and the resulting excess reserves of the banking system—has less ability to control interest rates than it has had in its entire 105-year history.+

When the subprime crisis caused financial markets to freeze up in 2008, the Fed responded by pumping liquidity into the banking system. It also did something that was not widely discussed at the time and even a decade later is almost never taken into account: It started to pay interest on reserves, in essence paying banks not to lend. This effectively converted the reserves of the banking system into interest-bearing securities.

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BY JARED KUSHNER 
APRIL 24, 2019
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IDEAS: Kushner is Assistant and Senior Advisor to President Donald Trump.Jared Kushner was interviewed at The TIME 100 Summit on criminal justice reform, the Mueller report findings, Middle East peace, and more. To watch the interview and read about his comments, click here.

One of the proudest moments of my life was standing beside President Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office to witness him sign the First Step Act, a historic criminal-justice reform bill that would make American communities safer, improve hundreds of thousands of lives and change the way we think about prisons. As I listened to the many advocates who had tirelessly worked to make this day possible I couldn’t help but appreciate the genius of our Founding Fathers. America’s democracy is the greatest governing system in the world. It was designed to be stubborn and slow, yet open to change when enough citizens agree on needed progress. I was later told by the first man who was released from prison early because of the First Step Act that while the speeches at the signing ceremony were beautiful, he and his friends were watching it live from prison, screaming at the television, “Sign the damn bill already!” For them, it was a miraculous moment.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed some 40 world leaders at the Belt and Road forum in Beijing, but his speech may have been aimed at a head of state not in the audience: U.S. President Donald Trump.

Xi spent a large portion of his speech Friday addressing Chinese domestic reforms, pledging to address state subsidies, protect intellectual property rights, allow foreign investment in more sectors and avoid competitive devaluation of the yuan. All four are issues the U.S. is addressing in trade talks with Beijing.
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People love their big paychecks, but they also value their sanity.

One of the most astonishing manifestations of disconnected-from-reality hubris is public authorities' sublime confidence that employers and entrepreneurs will continue starting and operating enterprises no matter how difficult and costly it becomes to keep the doors open, much less net a profit.

The average employee / state dependent reckons that the small business owner / entrepreneur is killing it financially, banking a small fortune in pure profit every month, and that they're doing what they love so they'll continue doing it no matter what. In other words, they're all wealthy Tax Donkeys who can easily afford higher taxes and fees and will tolerate paying more to keep doing what they love.

Wrong on both counts--dead wrong. A far more typical response is the one a house painter emailed me last year: every day, he reported, he wanted to dump his spray rig and power washer in a dumpster and leave the U.S.

The number of small businesses and entrepreneurs hanging on by a thread financially and emotionally is legion. Rather than killing it, they're getting killed by rising rents, wages, labor overhead, taxes, fees, licensing, inspection fees, insurance and so on.
The long hours, financial risks and open-ended responsibilities are ideal conditions for burn-out and bankruptcy.

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