John T. Reed’s news blog

Donald Trump says he would be a much tougher negotiator on international trade. People say they don’t care about details of what Trump says. All they need is he is not a politician. I’m sorry, but life does not permit such heuristics. Not being a politician is not enough. A non-politician can be a disaster, too. There’s more to the job than just not being sleazy. The Great Depression was caused by the pending, then actual, enactment of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff compounded by the Fed not printing enough money after the stock market crash. Other countries retaliated by enacting their...

Copyright 2011 by John T. ReedI have written on several occasions that liberals think good intentions and occasional tiny progress are a 100% substitute for results:Now that mind set has gone beyond just being a substitute for results. Obama has decided it is also, along with impatience, a 100% substitute for constitutional authority. Recess appointment Barack Obama on 1/4/12 appointed a head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who had previously been not approved by the U.S. Senate. Obama appointed him anyway claiming it is a recess appointment. The Senate says it is not in recess and their basis is...

Copyright 2010 by John T. ReedChoose Congress from the phone bookOctober 14th, 2010 by John T. Reed, Updated 3/21/15William F. Buckley, Jr. famously said,I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.I think he’s right. Although I would put it this way,We would be better off with a Congress composed of citizens chosen randomly for single terms the way grand juries are chosen than the current professional-politician Congress. Buckley was being a smart ass. I’m dead serious.Congress chosen randomly from each...

Copyright 2015 by John T. ReedI was just reading Charles Murray’s new book By the People. I decided to set it aside and watch a DVR of John Stossel’s program from tonight. To my surprise, the theme was we the people civil disobedience—Murray’s shtick, and his first guest was Murray talking about this book.I heard Murray talk about this last July at Freedom Fest where he and I were speakers. Stossel was there, too. And we all three will be there (Planet Hollywood in Vegas) again this July 8-11. Stossel now does one of his shows from there each year....

Copyright 2008The Reverend Jeremiah and Obama’s speech about “race” have inspired many to say we need a “dialogue on race,” that is, blacks and their relationship to whites. For the record, blacks are not the only people who have a race, but too many of them seem to think they are. The fact that Obama uses the word “race” when he is really talking about relations between blacks and whites shows how distorted his perspective on the matter is.‘Benign neglect’The phrase “dialogue on race” is fuzzy psychobabble. In the late 1960s, Nixon urban affairs staffer Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a memo...