West Wing Reads 1-7-2020

Appeasement or War? Trump Proves the Iran ‘Experts’ Wrong Again “Rather than seize Obama’s invitation to ‘get right with the world,’ the ayatollahs [in Iran] and Soleimani stepped up their terrorism. They shot down a US drone. They attacked our embassy in Iraq,” Jonathan Tobin writes in the New York Post. “Trump chose to deal with reality as it is. Rather than starting a war, he merely recognized that the ayatollahs have already been waging one against Washington for years. The regime counted on Trump to follow the conventional lie that the only choices are abject appeasement or apocalyptic war.” Click here to read more.

“In a single strike, the president defended American troops and diplomats against attacks, held Iran accountable for killing a U.S. citizen in Iraq and reframed the U.S.-Iran relationship by making it clear the Iranian regime cannot act with impunity,” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) writes today in The Washington Post.

“Wages for rank-and-file workers are rising at the quickest pace in more than a decade, even faster than for bosses . . . Average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers in the private sector were up 3.7% in November from a year earlier,” Eric Morath and Jeffrey Sparshott report in The Wall Street Journal.

“As a new year dawns in America, many of the nation’s manufacturing sectors are experiencing aggressive growth . . . The steel industry in particular offers ample evidence, with America’s steel companies investing some $13 billion in new steelmaking and mills across the nation. This isn’t what many economists predicted, however. And frustrated by the flow of such positive news, the economics profession is looking for other means to wage their war against tariffs,” writes economist Jeff Ferry in The Hill.