George Rebane

Trump and Putin without Zelinsky will provide us a new perspective on pissing in the wind.  Don’t know why The Donald is setting himself up for a failure in Alaska.  Putin can’t back-off giving back conquered Ukrainian territory, and the West can’t afford to have Putin have another success in restoring USSR’s boundaries.  And any agreement for a temporary unresolved cease fire will only allow the thug to refit and refurbish his troops for the next push deeper into Ukraine.  Rebane Doctrine calls for massive new sanctions and the arming of Ukraine with weapons that can reach deep into Russia (e.g. Moscow and St Petersburg) along with strong public encouragement from the US and our allies to use that weaponry to make the war very expensive for Putin.  To communicate with him, we have to speak his language.

Trump plans to tax US exports – what?!!  Have no idea how this harebrained idea has gotten purchase in the White House.  Tax Rule #1 – when you tax something more, you get less of it.  In this case we have Nvidia initially being told not to sell its chips to China for national security reasons.  Then Trump tells Nvidia that our national security will be served with such exports as long as the feds get 15% tax off the top line.  And all along we’ve been told that we want our importers to pay us tariffs, and we want the US to be the top exporter in the world.  Well, Mr President, taxing exports is not exactly how to pull that off.  BTW, has anyone heard who all pays what share of our import tariffs?  Me neither.

Trump is not winning the federalizing urban law enforcement argument.  Our leftwing politicians and media are howling that all that is an unnecessary autocratic takeover of local governance.  Why?  Well, because the data shows decreasing crime rates.  This no matter that crime levels are still too high and decreasing too slowly.  No one on the Right seems to understand and correctly counter with the important difference between levels and rates (i.e. time rates of change of levels).  For example the DC murders/100K population is second in the nation for equivalent size cities.  Led by Fox News, without a countering argument, the rightwing media just replays the video clips of the Left repeatedly pointing out that no special law enforcement intervention is necessary since “crime rates are coming down”  (itself a nonsensical statement).