The Herald reports:

The GP of a Kāpiti councillor standing trial for indecent assault has been asked to measure the length of the accused’s penis with a wooden ruler.

In open court? 🙂

Earlier in proceedings, the complainant rejected what she felt pressing into her could have been a wallet, phone or insulin kit, rather than male genitalia.

She said what she felt was about four or five inches.

Under cross examination defence lawyer Mike Antunovic asked Cammack to measure the length of Scott’s penis in a separate room. That measurement is suppressed.

He also asked another witness to measure Scott’s wallet which was about four and a half inches long.

This seems a novel defence strategy. Basically it appears to be “That wasn’t my penis, that was a wallet” pressed against you.

Now the complainant has said it was around four to five inches long which is the size of the wallet. But for this defence strategy to work, you need the penis to be not that size. So are they hoping the penis is much larger than five inches or much smaller than four inches?

Also doesn’t the umm circumstances count? I imagine it is highly unlikely your penis will be aroused when being measured by a GP in a secluded court room. But it may have been at the morning tea.

There will be a lot for the jury to ponder!

Stuff reports:

The Government pulled plans to put major restrictions on deep sea trawling after the fishing industry threatened legal action.

Officials and scientists from New Zealand and Australia had been working on the joint proposal since 2012 and it was finally due to go in front of an inter-governmental body in Peru in late January. 

It was designed to protect the stocks of orange roughy in the high seas and prevent the destruction of delicate seabed life like coral and sponges.

But just weeks before the meeting, the High Seas Fisheries lobby group – which includes Talleys and Sealord – wrote to the Government threatening legal action. 

Deepwater Group, a second lobby group which included Sanford, also demanded an urgent meeting. Their lawyer Bruce Scott followed up with a personal phone-call to Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters’ office.

Within weeks, the proposal – to be voted on by the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation – was abruptly withdrawn from the agenda. The move raised eyebrows among diplomats from other countries because the joint NZ-Australia proposal was already two years late.

NZ First donors will again be very pleased with the return on their investment.

Whenever an issues comes up which involves a choice between the environment and donors to NZ First, the Government goes for placating the donors to NZ First.

If this was happening in a National-led Government, the Greens would be calling it corruption and condemning the Government as environmental vandals.

Instead though not a peep, as the Greens also need Winston happy to retain their baubles.

The Herald reports:

Racing legend Sir Patrick Hogan’s bid to get votes for NZ First is under scrutiny by electoral officials because of an advertisement in a racing newspaper.

In September Hogan and wife Lady Justine Hogan took out a full-page advertisement in The Informant urging the racing industry to support NZ First because of its racing policies.

The Electoral Commission said it had not received any complaints about the ad but was looking into it.

Under electoral rules, anyone who publishes an advertisement encouraging others to vote for a political party must get written authorisation from that party and the party must include the cost of it in its election expenses return.

NZ First’s return did not list anything in the section requiring “third party” advertising to be disclosed.

A spokesman for NZ First said its return was accurate. “The New Zealand First Secretary did not authorise any third party advertisements.”

Electoral law specialist Andrew Geddis said if Hogan took out the advertisement without getting approval it amounted to an “illegal practice” under the Electoral Act, which was a fine of up to $10,000 if there was a conviction.

It seems pretty clear cut. Hogan clearly authorised the advertisement and NZ First has said they did not authorise the advertisement. So Sir Patrick would appear to be in breach of the Electoral Act.

I’m surprised that no one ever told him you can’t just run full page advertisements saying Vote for X, unless X has agreed to it.

Megan McArdle writes at Bloomberg:

The University of Washington released its second study, this one covering the increase from $11 an hour to $13. And this study found huge effects: For every 1 percent increase in their hourly wage, low-wage workers saw a 3 percent reduction in the number of hours worked. As a result, they lost about $125 in earnings a month, clawing back the entire gain from the earlier hike and more.

The earlier increase from $9.47 to $11 did not see a drop in wages. This larger increase did. This is to be expected.

Take a NZ context. An increase from say $17 to $17.50 will see little impact. But an increase to say $25 would see a huge impact.

The key element appears to be the level of the minimum wage compared to the median wage. And in NZ this is already one of the highest in the world. So the increase this year of 75c will probably see little impact but the $3.50 increase over the next three years will I suspect have a significant impact.

The Business Insider reports:

Journalists’ brains apparently show a lower level of executive functioning, which means a below average ability to regulate their emotions, suppress biases, solve complex problems, switch between tasks, and show creative and flexible thinking.

This is according to a new study led by neuroscientist and leadership coach Dr Tara Swart, who selected 40 journalists from newspaper, magazine, broadcast, and online platforms to analyse.

The research was conducted over seven months, where the participants took part in simple tests relating to their lifestyle, health, and behaviour.

An interesting study. Someone should apply for funding to replicate it in NZ!

Each subject completed a blood test, wore a heart-rate monitor for three days, kept a food and drink diary for a week, and completed a brain profile questionnaire.

The results showed that journalists’ brains were operating at a lower level than the average population, particularly due to dehydration and their tendency to self-medicate with alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods.

Would be interesting to also do a study of parliamentary staffers!

Radio NZ reports:

The release of the $935,000 consultants’ report on a downtown stadium on Friday was the third time RNZ had to resort to the Ombudsman’s Office to extract public information.

The information was eventually found to have been wrongly withheld by Auckland Council.

The Council knows it is illegally withholding information. They just make people appeal to the Ombudsman as a delaying tactic.

All three directly involve the mayor Phil Goff.

The Goffice is responsible for the refusal to release.

The council argued initially that the report was only a draft, and therefore not required to be released under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA).

Wrong, said Ombudsman Leo Donnelly in an opinion he sent to Auckland Council and released to RNZ.

“There is no basis for a blanket withholding of drafts under LGOIMA until they are completed and finalised,” he wrote.

“To have a standard approach of withholding draft reports until they have been fully signed off, leaves the process open to exploitation by agencies who want to hold off release of information until it is most convenient.”

A smart Ombudsman. You can indefinitely delay info being released if you are allowed to do so on the basis it is draft.

Andrew Geddis tweets:

(Thread – and attention @ElectoralCommNZ). This @NZStuff story is interesting. It recounts how NZ First has changed the tax rules for the racing industry following their election time support, including advertising by Patrick Hogan (see below).https://t.co/Hcb9kDgQeE pic.twitter.com/uF5sBYfNyf

— Andrew Geddis (@acgeddis) May 19, 2018

Andrew has done a series of tweets on this. Together they read:

It recounts how NZ First has changed the tax rules for the racing industry following their election time support, including advertising by Patrick Hogan

That’s OK so far as it goes. Politics is a partly transactional business, be it Northland bridges or free tertiary study. However, the Electoral Act requires that before publishing an ad expressly calling for a vote for a political party, you must get its written permission.

If you get that permission, any spending on that ad becomes a part of the Party’s overall election expenses, and must be declared by the Party post-election. But in the case of Hogan’s ad, NZ First has made no such post-election declaration.

So, 3 possibilities … (1) The description of the ad is wrong – unfortunately, I can’t find an image of it on line to verify that it does in fact “encourage racing participants to party vote NZ First” (and so requires party authorisation).

(2) Patrick Hogan published the advertisement as described without getting the necessary authorisation in writing, thereby committing an illegal practice at the last election. This is an offence with a potential $10,000 fine.

(3) If Hogan was given the requisite authorisation by NZ First, then the party has filed a false declaration because it has failed to include the expense in its post-election declaration. That may be a corrupt or illegal practice, depending on how the failure occurred.

It goes without saying that the Electoral Commission must investigate this. NZ First has a history of filing incorrect election returns.

The advertisements backing NZ First are a de facto donation to the party, so it shows that the Budget was about rewarding their donors/supporters.

Jacinda Ardern said NZ First Ministers can’t be Minister of Fisheries due to their donations from the fishing industry. Yet she makes Winston Minister of Racing despite figures in the racing industry running advertisments campaigning for NZ First.

How can Ardern justify one situation, and not the other?

The ABC reports:

Disgraced Darling Range MP Barry Urban has resigned from the WA Parliament after a powerful committee recommended he be expelled for repeatedly lying about his past.

The Legislative Assembly’s Procedure and Privileges Committee made the rare recommendation in a report examining the truth of statements Mr Urban made in the Parliament.

The report found Mr Urban lied to the public and Parliament for years about his police service and his education history.

Among his background details rubbished by the committee was Mr Urban’s claim he served as a war crimes investigator in the Balkans.

Seems a real Walter Mitty type. Not only lied on his CV, but repeated them in Parliament.

His false claims include:

• He had a degree from the University of Leeds;
• He had a Certificate of Higher Education in Policing from the University of Portsmouth;
• He had completed nine out of 10 modules of a Diploma of Local Government;
• He was seconded from West Midlands Police in 1998 and served with the United Nations mission in the Balkans, where he provided security for a team investigating war crimes;
• He was posted a service medal by UK authorities;
• He subsequently lost such medal;
• He was entitled to wear such a medal; and
• He was under a genuine but mistaken belief that he was entitled to wear a replica police overseas service medal.

He wasn’t technically expelled as he resigned before they could.

Stuff reports:

Palmerston North people have spoken and more than two-thirds who voted were in opposition to creating separate Māori wards.

Results from a binding poll came in on Saturday night, with 14,567 voting against wards for the city council and 6530 voting for. 

The percentage was 68.87 against and 30.88 per cent for.

I’m pleased. I don’t think separate wards are a good way to increase Maori representation. I think they are divisive, even if well intentioned.

In Manawatū District, voters came out more than three-to-one in opposition to creating separate Māori wards.

Results came in on Tuesday, with 7062 voting against, and 2038 in favour.

Some 43 per cent of electors cast a vote, with 18 votes counted as blank and one “informal”.

That’s 75% against.

And Sunlive reports:

Voter turnout in the Western Bay was around 40 per cent of eligible electors.

•   •  21.5 per cent of electors who voted were for Māori wards
•   •  78.2 per cent of electors who voted were against Māori wards

And further:

In the Whakatane District a total of 5856 electors, 56.39 per cent, have voted against Maori wards, with 4504, 43.37 percent, in favour.

Whakatane is almost a majority Maori area (43%). If Maori wards can’t get passed there, they are unlikely to anywhere.

This is of course why some in Government wants to change the law to take the decision away from ratepayers and voters. They think the people make the wrong decision, so they must be stripped of the power to decide if they want race based seats or not.

The Herald reports:

An Auckland Councillor has lambasted plans for a new national stadium, calling it a “mayoral vanity project”.

A pre-feasibility study conducted by consulting firm PwC estimated it would cost between $1.1 billion and $1.5b to build a rectangular rugby stadium in downtown Auckland.

Wow that is almost as good value as a monorail!

But John Watson, a councillor for the Albany ward, told NZME the city didn’t need a new stadium, couldn’t afford one and would rarely be able to fill it.

“The stadium debate was had and it was had back in 2009 and now we seem to see these consistent attempts to resurrect these grandiose plans at a time when Auckland’s got other priorities and when, ironically enough, our existing stadiums have had huge investments of capital to put into them in the interim,” he said.

Politicians like to build monuments to themselves.

Russell Brown writes:

During last year’s election campaign, Labour leader Jacinda Ardern pledged an additional $38 million – annually, it appeared – for a public broadcasting sector whose budget had been frozen for nine years of a National-led government. It was welcome news and in keeping with past Labour rhetoric. It came packaged with a new, multimedia vision for Radio New Zealand.

And it is now a broken promise.

Curran fairly basked in the appreciation of the audience as she reiterated the promise that there would be $38 million in new funding, to be shared between RNZ and NZ On Air. But, she said, beaming as if it was a feature not a bug, she couldn’t tell us what the split would be.

The kind explanation would be that, per the policy, funding was to be distributed by a new Public Media Funding Commission, whose shape and composition was yet unknown. But the minister’s inability to say how much the two country’s two major public broadcasting organisations would receive has meant that those two organisations have been unable to properly plan their year ahead.

This is a salient point. If you don’t know how much funding you will have, then it is very difficult to plan.

As delivered today, the Budget contains only $15 million in new funding for public broadcasting services – and it’s still not clear where the money will go. 

So actually Radio NZ for now has the exact same budget as under National!

Now, hold on. The advisory group is going to determine where the new funding will go? Wasn’t the advisory group established to advise on the goals and composition of the Public Media Funding Commission, which was going to allocate the funding?

One problem here is that the advisory group quite evidently isn’t constituted to allocate funding itself. 

Sounds like the advisory group is now going to do the job of the entity the group is meant to be setting up.

As Jacinda Ardern herself said back in September when she announced the policy, RNZ “has been chronically under-funded since 2007.”

I fully expected this Budget to be a relatively conservative one, and that Grant Robertson would use it to demonstrate his capacity for restraint and responsibility. So maybe we write off the missing $23 million to that. But offering RNZ nothing in rescue funding until an advisory group has decided something, some time in the next year, is not competent, prudent, fair or in keeping with Labour’s rhetoric.

That’s a pretty harsh critique of the Government – incompetent, unfair and imprudent.

The broadcasting element of this government’s first Budget really is a shambles.

What I would be doing is selling off TVNZ (while you can) and putting the money from that sale towards funding public broadcasting.

Newsroom reports:

In a scene that could have been from a film, police in Wellington last night removed a beeping black box from a packed cinema. 

The box was chained to a seat in the Roxy Theatre by anti-Israel group, Peace Action Wellington to disrupt the screening of Ben-Gurion, Epilogue, a documentary on the former Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. 

Josh Cameron sums up how reprehensible this is:

You put a fake bomb in a crowded theatre filled mainly with elderly Jewish people and you wonder why you are being condemned? https://t.co/yEwALKUbML

— Josh Cameron (@JoshCameron00) May 16, 2018

Off memory Peace Action Wellington is run by one of the nutjobs who used to run around the Ureweras with guns, practicing armed revolution. At least it was a fake bomb this time!

Guyon Espiner writes:

But inside this was a blue budget not a red one. It’s a description neither Labour nor National would like bestowed on Budget 2018 but this was a triumph of neoliberalism or at least a continuation of it.

Oh, not if you listen to the words of ministers, urging us to see this as rebuilding the frayed social fabric after years of neglect. But don’t listen to the words. Look at the numbers.

For years Labour has gone on about Health being underfunded by $2 billion a year. And in this budget they actually increased Vote Health by less than National did in 2017! Their rhetoric was just that.

Not only has Finance Minister Grant Robertson delivered a surplus of more than $3 billion, rising to more than $7 billion by 2021, he is actually going to spend less than National has been spending as a percentage of GDP.

Government spending – or core crown expenses in the jargon – will be 28 percent of GDP. That is lower than the figure for almost all of National’s three terms in office.

As a fiscal conservative, I’m pleased with this. However quality of spending matters also. They are wasting billions of dollars on free tertiary fees. I’d much rather that money went into areas of real need.

The glaring omission in this Budget was spending for Māori Development. I’ve written in this column before that the government strategy seems to be mainstreaming rather than targeted assistance for Māori. But even given that strategy the allocations are breathtakingly small.

Buried at the back of the Budget press pack is a release outlining just $37 million for Māori Development over four years, initiatives for housing, land development and youth not in work or education.

When you consider the Crown spends nearly $90 billion, it’s striking that the might of the Labour Māori caucus – there are five ministers’ names on that press statement – can only deliver $9 million a year.

Now Labour holds all the Maori seats and has got rid of the Maori Party, they can go back to take Maori for granted.

This looked like National’s tenth Budget rather than Labour’s first.

Some National budgets were effectively Labour lite budgets. This is a National lite budget.

Shane Cowlishaw writes:

As we enter the second half of the Government’s first year in office, can it claim to be the more open and transparent regime it promised to be?

So far, no way.

What a surprise.

Earlier this week, the Council for Civil Liberties put out a disappointed press release noting that Justice Minister Andrew Little had written a letter ruling out a review of the OIA.

In response, the Government is excusing itself by claiming it never promised legislative change.

Technically, that may be true. But until recently, some of them were certainly for it.

Back in December, Clare Curran, who is responsible for creating a more open and transparent government, told Newsroom that she would review the act alongside Little.

She also supported giving the Ombudsman the power to issue fines for breaches of the act, a measure that was promoted by Labour in a short-lived member’s bill.

Asked this week whether he supported the idea, Little said no.

They only supported it when it didn’t apply to them.

A very informative article by Matti Friedman, a former reporter and editor in Jerusalem for the Associated Press.

He observes:

The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

An example:

I’ll begin with a simple illustration. The above photograph is of a student rally held last November at Al-Quds University, a mainstream Palestinian institution in East Jerusalem. The rally, in support of the armed fundamentalist group Islamic Jihad, featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men whose stiff-armed salute was returned by some of the hundreds of students in attendance. Similar rallies have been held periodically at the school.I am not using this photograph to make the case that Palestinians are Nazis. Palestinians are not Nazis. They are, like Israelis, human beings dealing with a difficult present and past in ways that are occasionally ugly. I cite it now for a different reason.

Such an event at an institution like Al-Quds University, headed at the time by a well-known moderate professor, and with ties to sister institutions in America, indicates something about the winds now blowing in Palestinian society and across the Arab world. The rally is interesting for the visual connection it makes between radical Islam here and elsewhere in the region; a picture like this could help explain why many perfectly rational Israelis fear withdrawing their military from East Jerusalem or the West Bank, even if they loathe the occupation and wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The images from the demonstration were, as photo editors like to say, “strong.” The rally had, in other words, all the necessary elements of a powerful news story.

On the day that the AP decided to ignore the rally, November 6, 2013, the same bureau published a report about a pledge from the U.S. State Department to provide a minor funding increase for the Palestinian Authority; that was newsworthy. This is standard. To offer another illustration, the construction of 100 apartments in a Jewish settlement is always news; the smuggling of 100 rockets into Gaza by Hamas is, with rare exceptions, not news at all.

Only news that makes Israel look bad is regularly reported.

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. (There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN.) Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. …

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.

Group think.

Around this time, a Jerusalem-based group called NGO Monitor was battling the international organizations condemning Israel after the Gaza conflict, and though the group was very much a pro-Israel outfit and by no means an objective observer, it could have offered some partisan counterpoint in our articles to charges by NGOs that Israel had committed “war crimes.” But the bureau’s explicit orders to reporters were to never quote the group or its director, an American-raised professor named Gerald Steinberg.* In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.

And this is why trust in media is so low.

Hamas’s strategy is to provoke a response from Israel by attacking from behind the cover of Palestinian civilians, thus drawing Israeli strikes that kill those civilians, and then to have the casualties filmed by one of the world’s largest press contingents, with the understanding that the resulting outrage abroad will blunt Israel’s response. This is a ruthless strategy, and an effective one. 

Highly effective.

The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying.

Media manipulation.

He also writes on the recent events in Gaza:

The booming economy has given Labour enough tax revenue to spend up large. Hundreds of initiatives have been funded. However some of the big ticket items are not what people may have expected. DHBs are only getting $549 million a year more and Labour had been insisting they were underfunded by $2 billion or more.

A few promises have been delayed such as cheaper GP visits, winter energy payments and Police numbers.

What is interesting is almost a total absence of media releases or initiatives on growing the economy, unless you count Shane Jones provincial grants or Winston giving more tax breaks for racing.

The key economic and fiscal data for 2019 is:

• Economic growth of 3.3% forecast
• Unemployment projected to be 4.4%
• Inflation 1.4%
• Core crown expenses 28.5% of GDP (well under the 30% cap)
• OBEGAL surplus of $3.7 billion

The increase between 2017/18 expenditure (largely based on National’s 2017 Budget) and 2018/19 increase for key votes is:

• Social Security and Welfare – up 3.2% in 2017/18 and up 10.9% in 2018/19
• Health – up 5.9% in 2017/18 and up 5.2% in 2018/19
• Education – up 4.9% in 2017/18 and up 5.2% in 2018/19
• Law & Order – up 10.1% in 2017/18 and up 3.3% in 2018/19
• Defence up 5.5% in 2017/18 and up 4.9% in 2018/19
• Environmental protection up 47.8% in 2017/18 and down 17.8% in 2018/19
• Core crown expenses up 7.0% in 2017/18 and up 6.1% in 2018/19

So the increases in health and education are actually much the same as in this current year. The big increase is in welfare.

Also of interest is Treasury are forecasting a drop of 900 tertiary students from 2018 to 2019. So they’re spending $2.8 billion on free tertiary fees and the projected impact is 900 fewer students. This must be the most wasteful policy ever.

Overall the Budget is reasonably solid in terms of fiscal indicators. But that was always going to be the case for the 2018 Budget. The more challenging ones are likely to be in 2019 or 2020 as the impact of public sector pay rounds will have flowed through by then.

One pleasing initiative is that the Government has taken up the Green Party policy to have an independent entity cost political party policies, so that voters know the likely cost of what is being promised.

The most ridiculous policy is Winston forcing the Government to make horse purchases tax deductible if the horse is good looking.

No I’m not making it up. That really is the policy. A horse can be deemed tax deductible “by virtue of its bloodlines, looks and racing potential”. IRD is going to need a new division that can assess how good looking a horse is, and hence whether it can be tax deductible.

The Herald reports:

Michigan State University agreed to pay US$500 million (NZ$724m) to settle claims from more than 300 women and girls who said they were assaulted by sports doctor Larry Nassar in the worst sex-abuse case in sports history, officials announced Wednesday. …

The university and lawyers for 332 victims announced the deal after negotiating privately with the help of a mediator. Under the agreement, US$425 million would be paid to current claimants and US$75 million would be set aside for any future claims. Lawyers will also be compensated out of the US$500 million pool.

Michigan State was accused of ignoring or dismissing complaints about Nassar, some as far back as the 1990s. 

Sickening that he got away with this for over 25 years. His 140 years minimum jail sentence seems inadequate.

From Hansard:

Jenny Marcroft: How can members of the public and Kiwiblog readers track progress towards the 1 billion trees target?

Hon SHANE JONES: We have a new website. That website is being developed in association with one of New Zealand’s most successful businessmen, Sir Stephen Tindall. That is like a tree counter, and, as each tree counts, greater the popularity will be not only for the forest sector and for careers but also for the modest proponent, Matua Shane Jones!

Nice to see NZ First MPs noticing the tree counter.

At the time of writing this post, the Government needs to have planted 57,610,567 trees to be on schedule to make their target of one billion over ten years.

The actual number planted is five.

Marc Thiessen writes:

If you want to understand why Donald Trump is president today (and why he could very well win a second term), look to the Democrats’ hysterical response to two of Trump’s major foreign policy achievements over the past week.

Last Thursday, the president traveled to Joint Base Andrews to greet three American hostages whose release he had secured from North Korea. Unlike his predecessor, Trump did it without sending the offending regime an unmarked plane loaded with hundreds of millions in hard currency. The return of these American captives should have been a moment of celebration and bipartisan unity.

So how did Democrats respond? By blasting Trump for the way he welcomed the U.S. hostages home. The pretext for their outrage was Trump’s comment thanking Kim Jong Un, who he said “really was excellent to these three incredible people” — by which Trump obviously meant releasing them. No matter. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) took the Senate floor to attack Trump for his “troubling” remarks. “Kim Jong Un is a dictator” who “capriciously detained American citizens,” Schumer declared, channeling Captain Obvious, and warned that, by praising Kim, Trump “weakens American foreign policy and puts American citizens at risk around the world.”

Seriously? How do Democrats take a positive event such as the release of American hostages and turn it into an excuse to attack Trump? Apparently, Trump Derangement Syndrome is so debilitating that Democrats can’t bring themselves to say “Good job, Mr. President,” even when he brings our hostages home. 

A very fair point. There are times when the opposition party should praise th President. When Obama got Osama bin Laden, killed you didn’t have senior Republicans condemning him for it.

Before, Democrats complained that Trump was too belligerent toward Kim; now, they’re upset that he is too effusive. This is absurd. Trump is laying the groundwork for a high-stakes nuclear summit with Kim; of course the president is not going to publicly criticize him. People in Middle America listen to the Democrats’ reactions and think: Can Trump do nothing right in these people’s eyes?

Total opposition is never a great strategy.