100 Days And Counting

                One hundred days is 3% of an eight-year presidency, or 6% of four years for you liberal optimists who may not have a calculator handy. The first 100 days is one of the presidential measuring sticks the media has used consistently, however, since FDR had to remake almost everything economic during the panic of The Great Depression.

                It seems to me President Trump has had a really busy and productive first 100 days. Oddly a check of CNN, Fox and Wikipedia come up with three different sets of numbers (by 3-7 things) of the number of bills and executive orders the President cranked out from the White House. Wikipedia included a category called “Presidential Memorandums” which may explain some of the difference.

                CNN’s take is that Trump’s first 100 days have been more failure than success. Fox’s is the opposite. Wikipedia makes no evaluation but the list will make your head spin.

                From seemingly little things I had either forgotten about or never knew, like a suspended reduction of Federal Housing mortgage insurance premium rates to some more substantial things I did know like approving the Keystone and Dakota pipelines.

                My personal favorite—an executive order—is the decree that no new Federal agency regulation can be added without first removing two old ones.  I fist-pump and cheer whenever I reread that one.

                One can say with reasonable accuracy that in 100 days of the Trump Presidency there have been 30 executive orders issued and 28 (or 32?) new bills signed into law, 13 of which were roll backs of Obama regulations. (Insert smiley face emoticon here.)

                CNN declares the Presidency “a failure in the midst of party turmoil,” citing “crushing defeats” on immigration reform, The Wall on our southern border, and the repeal of Obamacare.

                I’m willing to bet the book isn’t exactly closed on any of those three topics and running the country isn’t like a sporting event where 100 days signals the end of a contest, pick up your seat cushion and thermos and go home.

                Media Research Group says the news coverage of the first 100 days of Trump’s Presidency have been skewed 89% toward the negative. There have been a total of 18 minutes of national news coverage on Trump’s jobs creation and 10 minutes on treaty negotiations and improved foreign relations with the likes of Egypt, China, Israel and others.

                If that’s wrong it’s because the MRG put out bad information. I didn’t make it up. We don’t do the Associated Press or CNN thing here without telling you we are.

                Negative reporting 89% of the time keeps the Left’s political thought circular, indeed, but it’s not a real stretch to suggest maybe a teensy bit of media bias, do ya’ think?

                Take for instance the first time a Supreme Court Justice has been approved in a president’s first 100 days since 1881. Positive, right? Mostly all we heard in the news (and not for very long before they moved on to something more real) was that the republicans cheated and invoked a nuclear option provision to vote Neil Gorsuch in with less than 60 votes. The first time a Supreme Court Justice had ever been approved in such a manner.

                Conveniently forgotten was that it was Harry Reid, that liberal poster boy and progressive rascal, that invented the Senate’s “nuclear option” to get over 100 Federal judges installed during Obama’s presidency.

                I wonder if we traded one Supreme Court appointment for 100 some odd Federal appointments if we’d have had the perfectly constitutional and legal Presidential Executive Order on immigration stayed twice in minor Federal courts?

                Eventually we will spank their little bottoms in in The Supreme Court and a more sane immigration policy for a part of the world that regularly exports death will become effective but it will have to be later, rather than sooner, it appears. Like I said, it’s not a sporting event.

                And no, we didn’t get Obamacare fixed yet and who knows for sure what’s going on there. I suspect repairs, repeals and revisions are inevitable as The ACA will suffocate in its own vomit if we don’t do something.

                According to Rand Paul the profits in the health insurance industry went from $6 billion per year to $15 billion per year under Obamacare and I am cynical enough to believe with that much money involved not all the Representatives and Senators, not to mention the silly fellow it’s named after, have got pure motives. (Ok, that was sort of an AP-like thing.)

                President Trump says he is frustrated by some of the mechanisms of government and I’d imagine after running a multi-billion-dollar business empire, being dependent on about 500 guys and gals that can’t agree on lunch, let alone the future of U.S. healthcare, is more than a bit perplexing.

                Unlike CNN I don’t fault the President for that. He got Congress off center. He just didn’t envision that would mean they would walk blindly into their own unique roadblock, whether because of childishness or criminality or political grandstanding.

                This whole wall thing is kind of baffling to me too.  The democrats are declaring a victory because the President withdrew a request for its funding out of the budget. Indeed, even Rush and Hannity nearly lost their minds over the notion Trump didn’t try to ram the funding through and the possible suggestion (by others) that maybe the wall wouldn’t be built.

                I have said all along, and I doubt I’m alone, it doesn’t matter to me if we physically build a solid wall from the Gulf to the Pacific as long as we secure the border, right? So, this past week Brandon Judd, president of the Border Guards Labor Union, said that illegal border crossings were at a 17-year-low as a result of merely enforcing existing laws. Rand Paul, addressing the same issue, cited a 14-year-low.

                I’ll take either number, personally. All I want is to be safe and to quit giving benefits reserved for Americans to those who don’t even have the decency to knock on the door before they come in. Maybe we need a wall. Maybe not. Either way I’d count a 17-year low as a win, but then I’m not part of any real media and certainly not the one putting out negative information about the President 89% of the time.

                I don’t really have space to properly credit President Trump for the 11^th hour phone calls from the heads of Mexico and Canada asking for an opportunity to renegotiate NAFTA. If that happens, and it probably will, the media, who may know less about business than most politicians, will probably count that as Trump going back on his word about eliminating NAFTA.

                He doesn’t call me and tell me stuff but I’m guessing Trump is thinking he is getting exactly what he wants, which is fair reciprocity for United States businesses in their dealings with our North American partners. Sure he’d have tossed NAFTA if he had to and he still might. But doesn’t it make more sense to simply renegotiate it and make all sides feel like winners if possible rather than enter the hostile but still better U.S. trade position that would have resulted otherwise?

                Does anyone else think the first real businessman President in U.S. history with a personal wealth around $5 billion before he got elected might have known it might end up this way? Anyone out there personally negotiate a lot of deals at this level?

                Oh, and did anybody notice after his visit here President Xi of China told North Korea they were on their own if they don’t knock it off? China has also quit shipping them coal and in the last week or two moved 175,000 troops to their border with North Korea. (I didn’t get the attribution for that jotted down. I was driving. Sorry.)

                Way over 1,000 words sorry. But I do think I’ll stick around and watch another 100 days. It’s actually kind of fun watching media heads explode.