The Washington Post offers some up-to-date details. The Republicans are awash trying to figure out how to deal with the phenomenon of Donald Trump. But the Democrats must face a possible and certainly well-deserved criminal indictment of their candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Near the beginning of a recent interview, an FBI investigator broached a topic with longtime Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills that her lawyer and the Justice Department had agreed would be off limits, according to several people familiar with the matter.
Mills and her lawyer left the room — though both returned a short time later — and prosecutors were somewhat taken aback that their FBI colleague had ventured beyond what was anticipated, the people said.
Investigators consider Mills — who served as chief of staff while Clinton was secretary of state — to be a cooperative witness. But the episode demonstrates some of the tension surrounding the criminal probe into possible mishandling of classified information involving the leading Democratic presidential candidate. In the coming weeks, prosecutors and FBI agents hope to be able to interview Clinton herself as they work to bring the case to a close.
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“In France, we keep saying that we have tried everything—except what has worked elsewhere,” Alain Juppé tell supporters. I support Alain Juppé and his efforts to reform France’s economy. Here The Wall Street Journal lists some of Juppé’s proposals to reform the country harangued by years of socialist and statist policies.
The 70-year-old former Prime Minister vowed to cut corporate taxes to 30% from 38%, eliminate the so-called Solidarity Tax on Wealth, cut 250,000 civil-service jobs, reduce social-security charges and scrap the 35-hour workweek, among other measures.
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Gold is here to stay. Make sure you own some. As I’ve said in the past, I don’t worry too much about the short-term action of gold. And I don’t buy it to make money. I buy it to hedge against the unexpected. It’s an insurance policy for my portfolio if you will.
Is there any insurance for a reckless Federal Reserve the world over?
No one knows exactly how this race to the bottom by Central Banks will end. But it is clear that they don’t have much regard for maintaining the value of their currencies. “It makes a great deal of sense to own gold. Other investors may be finally starting to agree,” Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer wrote in an April 28 letter to clients. “Investors have increasingly started processing the fact that the world’s central bankers are completely focused on debasing their currencies.”
There was a time when I was at Babson where you wouldn’t laugh at the idea of investing your client’s retirement money in T-Bills. Now we’re paying the government, after inflation, to lend them money. Where in the world does that make sense?
It makes sense to the pols in Washington, D.C. and where they go to retire, at Goldman Sachs. Good ‘Ole Goldman came out with an investor note on May 10 revising downward their expectation for gold. What caught my eye is their belief that the Fed will probably tighten in September and may move in July. Really? In an election year? Not happening.
Team Yellen will do whatever it takes to make sure their girl wins in November. Raising rates is not likely. Make sure you own some gold.
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 Donald J. Trump’s victory is not as much an endorsement of Mr. Trump as it is a rebuke to professional Republicans in D.C., writes Peggy Noonan in the WSJ.
… almost every conservative and Republican in Washington—in politics, think tanks and journalism—backed a candidate other than Mr. Trump. Every one of those candidates lost, and Mr. Trump won. After November, think tanks and journals will begin holding symposia in which smart people explain How We Lost The Base.
Those who oppose Mr. Trump should do it seriously and with respect for his supporters. If he is not conservative, make your case and explain what conservatism is. No one at this point needs your snotty potshots or your supposedly withering one-liners. I confess I have lost patience with many of those declaring they cannot in good conscience support him, not because reasons of conscience are not crucial—they are, and if they apply they should be declared. But some making these declarations managed in good conscience, indeed with the highest degree of self-regard, to back the immigration proposals of George W. Bush that contributed so much to the crisis that produced Mr. Trump. They invented Sarah Palin. They managed to support the global attitudes and structures that left the working class jobless. They dreamed up the Iraq war.
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My friend Chris Preble, Cato Institute vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, explains to Americans what sort of foreign policy a Clinton administration might bring to the table.
Clinton’s enthusiasm for military intervention was not shaken by the foreign policy debacles of the recent past. When consulting military officers for advice, she gravitated toward those urging the use of force and shied away from those who raised concerns.
If Clinton defeats a candidate who scorned her interventionist instincts, expect her to claim an electoral mandate to do more, in more places, than her predecessor. Expect her to generally lean toward acting abroad when others counsel caution, and to forcefully make the case for war when she meets public resistance. And expect the members of the foreign policy establishment to cheer her on.
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Violent crime, after falling for two decades, has risen in some U.S. cities since the beginning of 2015. According to BBC, the blame of the rise may be from the “Ferguson Effect,” in which protests to perceived police brutality sometimes turned violent.
The murder rate in NYC has gone up by 20% from 2014 to 2015. Murders in Baltimore are up 37% and 50% in Houston. In L.A., murders are down 2%, but violent crime is up by 27%.
James B. Comey, the director of the FBI, recently admitted, “I am in many ways more worried ’cause the numbers are not only going up, they’re continuing to go up, in most of those cities, faster than they were going up last year.”
While Mr. Comey does not know the reason for the rise in crime, he expressed concern that in areas of some cities the people dying are almost entirely black and Latino men. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that there really are bad people standing on the street with guns. The young men dying on street corners all across this country are not committing suicide or being shot by the cops. They are being killed, police chiefs tell me, by other young men with guns. … I don’t know what the answer is, but holy cow do we have a problem.”
Read here in the WSJ’s Notable & Quotable, Mr. Comey’s view on the rise of crime in America, which he feels is not getting the national attention the problem deserves.
I also got a briefing this morning on the quarterly stats for homicide in the nation’s largest cities. I’ve talked to you about this before, and I was very worried about last fall. I am in many ways more worried ’cause the numbers are not only going up, they’re continuing to go up, in most of those cities, faster than they were going up last year.
I worry very much, it’s a problem that most American[s] can drive around. From the Las Vegas trip you can’t tell that more than 60 people have been murdered in Las Vegas this year. From the [Magnificent Mile] in Chicago you can’t hear the sounds of gunshots that have killed more than 200 people so far this year. Lots of other cities, as I’ve said, most of them . . . I think it was 42 or [43] I got briefed on. Most of them have seen an increase. It’s again, happening in certain parts of the cities and the people dying are almost entirely black and Latino men. We can’t drive around that problem. I raise it with you all because I hope it’s being reported on at local levels, but in my view it’s not in the attention of the national level it deserves. I don’t know what the answer is, but holy cow do we have a problem. . . .
I resist the term Ferguson effect, because to me I think that is still what I’m talking about, the viral video effect and changes in the way police may be acting, and in the way communities may be acting, in terms [of] how much information they share with police. Could well be at the heart of this, or could well be an important factor in this. The reason I resist Ferguson effect is, Ferguson at least to my recollection wasn’t about videos. I think it is the potential effect of marginal pullbacks by lots and lots of police officers that is changing some cities. . . .
I’ve heard it from the folks who briefed me. I’ve heard it lots in conversations, privately, with police leaders. That they perceive lots of place[s] in the country a change in the way police are doing their work.
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No one likes to lose money. That’s why when I started building my survival cache over ten-years ago I started with gold.
Back then, I spent little time (same as I do today) worrying about where I felt the short-term price of gold was headed. What I wanted to do was build a physical hedge for my cash.
Cash is king! Try selling that one to your spouse. But cash is pretty powerful. You never know when you’ll need it. Like when there’s a Wi-Fi outage that shuts-down businesses. No Wi-Fi, no credit cards. No Pizza. Cash is powerful to an empty stomach.
But predicting an outage is as fruitless as predicting the future price of gold. And unfortunately over time, your cash gets weaker and weaker the longer is sits around the house collecting dust. It’s pretty lazy.
So, I didn’t want to just take out a pile of cash, lock it up and know I was losing money every year for the rest of my life. Yes, inflation is low. Wait a minute. Hold on. No one told that to folks at our local farmers market, where they sell a carton of a free-range eggs laid by stress free chickens that have never been told “no” in their life. Or to the folks at Kerrygold and their grass fed butter (it’s worth every penny).
What I set-out to do was to create a 50/50 hedge for any gold/cash storage. For example, ten years ago and I wanted $5,000 cash so I matched it with a purchase of $5,000 worth of gold.
The idea being that with my cash and gold collecting dust, I wanted to at least have a chance to win the war against my lazy cash. And I did. Both are still collecting dust.
It’s a simple strategy no doubt. But it has worked for me. The key is not to not buy the gold for appreciation. If you do it will drop by half the next day. It’s simply an unwritten law of investing.
Think about it as a way to be your own banker. All your cash is backed up in your safe with gold.
You become your own government. Your own gold standard. The ruler of your kingdom. That is until the next farmer’s market.
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Catrina Rorke explains to The American Conservative readers the promising prospects for Green Growth:
Prices for photovoltaic solar, wind, and battery-stored power are coming down quickly, reflecting advances in manufacturing, materials, and installation. If the experience of smaller lithium-ion batteries is any example, prices for large-format battery technology may drop by an order of magnitude in the next decade. Human ingenuity is making renewable energy cheaper to harvest, mobilize, and store for use when needed.
Distributed renewables present great opportunities for rapid availability in areas presently without reliable sources.
More from Rorke in the video below:
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What sort of foreign policies would be good for the 320 million people who comprise the United States? If we aren’t going to break up the country, we at least ought to figure out what benefits this group, on net.
Few phrases have been used to obscure so many bad ideas as “the national interest.” Despite that fact, the term is indispensable and ought to make clear what objectives are worth threatening or fighting wars over. “I would kill a man in defense of X, and you should be willing to, too” is another category of policy argument. Or at least it should be.
The origins of the concept of a national interest owe a lot to the creation of the nation-state. Religious and local identities predated the concept, of course, but it was the creation of the state–the ultimate “imagined community”–that brought about the concept of a national interest. The French concept of “raison d’État,” or “reason of State,” attempted to distinguish the State as supreme over other forms of authority, particularly religion. Cardinal Richelieu gave the idea currency during the Thirty Years’ War especially, when Catholic France allied with the Protestant side during the conflict in pursuit of a balance of power.
Thus the purpose of the concept was to rise above other forms of allegiance, and to create a national loyalty which rose above other interests. Use of the term “national interest” has been fraught since its creation.
The worst thing that happens with respect to the term “the national interest” in the contemporary United States is when its invocation by an authority is taken to prove its presence. The national interest is a grubby concept that should be fought over viciously. A lot is at stake.
But if consensus is the most dangerous condition, a large number of hands pulling at the concept has its downsides, too. This concept pervades the Federalist papers, most prominently in the Federalist 10 discussion of faction:
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
Even here, however, there is an undue romance about the concept of “permanent and aggregate” interests of “the community.” A nation is constantly changing, with the impulses of passion or of interest shifting along with the people who comprise the nation and in our case, even the territory that makes up the nation itself. But Federalist 10 went on to argue–in response to arguments like that of the anti-Federalists–that in fact the larger the nation got, the better things would be when it came to checking special interests. Make the United States bigger, Madison wrote:
and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other
This hyper-pluralist view overlooks the fact that large nations contain a number of narrow interests which have no counterpoise. The nation is so large that special interests can be indulged without great cost relative to its size, and having the use of even a small portion of the great nation’s funds and its administrative apparatus is a prospect that is impossible to resist for such a group.
Given the United States’ size and the number of unchecked special interests, then, it is inevitable that Washington will pursue a number of policies that do little more than serve the desires of a narrow few. When these policies incur great costs that win the attention of a larger number of citizens, the public must be reminded that these costs result from the indulgence of a narrow interest, and that if better attention had been paid earlier, the costs could have been avoided.
The national interest, as the term is used today, is mostly nonsense. Still, the concept is indispensable. We should learn to bound it and debate it better.
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