Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Libertarians are so fiscally conservative they don't own any clothes


Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, suing in class action against Trump University, paid Clintons $675,000 since 2009

Reported here.

USA Today says Hillary broke the rules and recklessly disregarded State Department warnings in 2011 as well as the inquiry from the inspector general

Arrogant bitch.

Story "Hillary Clinton broke the rules: Our view" here.

Despicable Paul Ryan, Congress and Obama stiff-arm Puerto Rico bondholders who will end up fronting the inevitable taxpayer bailout

Paul Ryan is the establishment all the way. And he hasn't changed since 2008. He is not Tea Party, he is not Freedom Caucus, he is not for the taxpayer, period.

From the story here:

In essence, the bondholders will front the money for the bailout while taxpayers would have to pay them back for this cash advance.

This is something that Speaker Ryan and his allies, including the Obama Administration, don't want you to know. 

Monday, May 30, 2016

No, Gov. Hickenlooper, if Hillary were a man she'd be in jail already

This guy is as high as his fellow Coloradans.

Video here.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Bob Dole recommends Newt Gingrich for VP

From the remarks here, after the eight minute mark:

"My view is that Donald Trump needs someone who understands Congress, who can help him work with Congress, who understands foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy," Dole said Saturday. "You know someone like Newt Gingrich. You know none of us are perfect, but Newt Gingrich is a good fit for Trump, because he can help him in all of those areas and Trump has to listen."

Friday, May 27, 2016

Libertarian Charles Murray warns the world he's writing a book agreeing with Trumpism, but Trump's still not fit to be president

The response to Murray's article at National Review tells the true state of libertarianism today, and everyday.

With 3842 comments as of this moment, the top comment gets 44 up-votes, indicating an agreement rate of 1.1%.

Libertarians can't agree about their own movement let alone about the country. Meanwhile 11.5 million Republican primary voters agree with Donald Trump.

Here's Murray:

We Establishmentarians, therefore, should all go on the record about our view of Donald Trump. That includes me. I have done so in 140-character tweets, but it’s time to elaborate. Apart from that, I have a specific need to go on the record: While I am already on record with my sympathy for the grievances that energize many of Trump’s supporters, I am thinking about writing a book that is even more explicitly sympathetic with those grievances. I want to forestall any suspicion — especially if Trump is elected — that writing in sympathy with some of the content of Trumpism indicates any form of sucking up to Trump the man.

Chicom People's Liberation Army: Just waitin' for the order to Kill, Kill, Kill

Seen here:

China in recent years has turned to animated short films, rock bands and rap music to promote the Communist Party, government policies and the military. An armed forces recruiting video released earlier this month features a rap-rock soundtrack with lyrics such as "just waiting for the order to kill, kill, kill" over a frantic music-video style montage of aircraft, tanks and guns.


The video is here, at the end of which the message couldn't be clearer. An effort is also underway to make Karl Marx cool to the millennial generation of China, which has lost interest (story here).


Thursday, May 26, 2016

Unbound delegates pledge support for Trump, giving him 1,238 and securing the nomination

The Associated Press had the story, here:

Trump was put over the top in the Associated Press delegate count by a small number of the party's unbound delegates who told the AP they would support him at the national convention in July. Among them is Oklahoma GOP chairwoman Pam Pollard.

Purple Strategies online poll is pure propaganda, calls people making between $30,000 and $75,000 "working class", says they'll vote for Hillary

Aside from online polls being a joke, this one from Purple Strategies for Bloomberg saying people making between $30,000 and $75,000 are "working class" is as phony as they get:

“If he [Trump] can’t improve his performance among these working-class voters, he may need to build a more conventional Republican coalition to win,” said pollster Doug Usher. 


Those are middle class people, not working class, and numbered about 54 million in 2014.

Working class people with whom Trump is wildly popular make up to $30,000 and numbered about 81 million in 2014.

This "poll" is trying to shape perceptions, not measure them.

Monday, May 23, 2016

Lawyers on strike over new taxes in Greece push backlog of cases to the year 2032

Reported here:

Athens lawyer Thanos Koussoulos says self-employed professionals like him will feel the most pain, as the new measures will increase monthly pension contributions, taxable income, and levies on services. "An average lawyer will lose half his income and won't be able to survive," he said, speaking in an empty courtroom. "Every part of society has been affected by these measures, including groups once considered to be privileged. I think it's a good thing they are demonstrating." ... Ironically, the lawyers' strike has added pressure on the government to seek a quick way to raise revenue, as tax cases challenged in court have been held up.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Goodbye libertarian moment, we hardly knew thee: "Man has a proclivity for safety, not liberty"

James E. Miller at Takimag, here:

Man has a proclivity for safety, not liberty. Human history is littered with war after war, conflict after conflict. Whatever liberty we eke out of our constant warring state is always in danger of being lost. As philosopher John Gray noted, “To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.”

As the ancients maintained but we never seem to remember, even when we study them:


WAR IS THE FATHER OF EVERYTHING.

Hooah NRA! Hooah Donald Trump!


Rasmussen: Trump 42% to Clinton 37%


Trump earns 42% support to Clinton’s 37% when Likely U.S. Voters are asked whom they would vote for if the presidential election were held today. ...

Rasmussen Reports will update the Clinton-Trump White House Watch matchup numbers every Thursday morning from now until Election Day in November.

States so far where Trump was bested by McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012

McCain beat Trump in:

Idaho
Kentucky
Oregon
Vermont
DC
Arizona


Romney beat Trump in:

Vermont
DC
North Carolina
Nebraska
Kentucky
Texas
Utah


McCain's total vote in 2008 was 9.9 million.

Romney's total vote in 2012 was 9.8 million.

With six contests remaining in 2016 Trump is already pushing 11.2 million.

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh said Hillary's momentum was "plundering", or something like that

Evidently conflating "plunging" and "floundering".

But the transcript here has been cleaned up, indicating Rush said "plummeting" when that's not what he said.

For once his transcriptionist is covering for him.


Friday, May 20, 2016

With 7% of the vote still not counted, Oregon Republican turnout in 2016 bested 2012 by 26%, 2008 by only 3%

So far Donald Trump in 2016 was bested by John McCain in 2008 in the popular vote only in Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon, Vermont, DC and Arizona. With six contests to go Trump has 11.1 million popular votes versus 9.9 million total votes for McCain in 2008, the most recent analogous contest.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

I'd post on the total popular vote in Oregon, but 7% of it remains out on the Republican side two days since the primary

You probably didn't see it but voters prepare a ballot which is mailed to them ahead of time and then they drop it on election day in designated secure boxes all around the state.

How hard can that be to tally everything in a timely manner?

Maybe tomorrow, man.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

The perverse Kevin Williamson says presidents aren't in charge of the economy after Hillary says she'll put Bill in charge


Which of course means he has to discredit Reagan's economic achievement (by never mentioning it), which came because Reagan reduced the top bracket from 70% to 50% and for a brief shining moment to 28%.




Monday, May 16, 2016

Drudge has anothr crappy spellur workin' the nite shit


There's something you don't see everyday: Takimag makes the lineup at Real Clear Politics

And you should read it. It's the inside story of the terrorist attacks in Paris from the band leader of Eagles of Death Metal.

He claims the terrorists were in the building hours before the attacks, having seen them himself.

What's up with John McLaughlin's hair?


Sunday, May 15, 2016

Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of Mao's Cultural Revolution

From the story here:

Millions of people were persecuted, publicly humiliated, beaten or killed during the upheaval, as zealous factionalism metastasized countrywide, tearing apart Chinese society at a most basic level. ... The Cultural Revolution is considered to have begun May 16, 1966, when the Communist Party's Politburo purged a number of leading officials. Over the following decade, Mao deposed two heirs apparent, his "Little Red Book" of sayings was elevated to the level of holy scripture, and millions were imprisoned, sent to labor camps or exiled from the cities.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Prove it Paul Ryan: "My plan is to support the nominee," he said on March 1st

Quoted here in The Washington Post.

Hey Mark Levin you big dope: Tariffs were the main source of all Federal revenue from 1790 to 1914

That's why the federal government stayed SMALL from 1790 to 1914.

IT'LL NEVER BE SMALL YOUR WAY (just a little smaller

STARVE THE BEAST! A spillover effect we can all appreciate.

West Virginia and Nebraska Presidential Primaries, Final results


Laugh of the Day: If you have principles, you should at least know how to spell it consistently


Newt Gingrich endorsed Donald Trump last night

It obviously didn't push Paul Ryan over the line today, but it did push Hannity.

Story here.

Sean Hannity endorses Trump, too bad Paul Ryan still hasn't

Just now on the show.

What was that again about Trump targeting civilians in ISIS being a war crime?


Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Obama's hired liar, Ben Rhodes, exploited the foreign policy ignorance of today's young newspaper reporters to spin a tale of a new political reality in Iran when there was none

From the story here:

The job [deputy national security adviser for strategic communications] he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” ...

Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. 

So, Zuckerberg's Facebook lies about what news is really trending

From the story here:

As we learned from a bombshell Gizmodo report, liberal elites conspire to hide dissenting viewpoints from the public. Stories that appear in Facebook’s hugely influential “trending” box, one of the most important news sources in the world, are subjected to an ideological-correctness test.

The dirty rotten New York Times smears Trump as if he had a self-conscious policy of violent racism


He said his huge rallies, where outbursts of violence and racist taunts have vexed many Republican leaders, and his attacks against adversaries on Twitter and in television interviews would continue because he believes Americans admire his aggressive, take-charge style.

See how that works? First state the charge as if it were a fact, and then artfully bury the charge in the subordinate clause so that it reads as if what that says would continue, too. It's technically not so stated, of course, to maintain the appearance of innocence, while ramming the shiv in his back.


Dennis Prager denies we were founded as a nation, remains ignorant of the first line of the Declaration of Independence

Where else? In National Review here:

But America was founded to be an idea, not another country. As Margaret Thatcher put it: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”

This, of course, couldn't be more wrong, the crackpot idea of libertarians everywhere, not the least of which has been Charles Murray ("four million people founded a new nation from scratch"), offended as they are by the Declaration's opening separate but equal clause:

When . . . it becomes necessary for one people . . . to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them . . ..

Separate. Equal. Under God. America.

Trump wins in Nebraska besting McCain in 2008 but not Romney in 2012: The influence of #NeverTrump Senator Ben Sasse?

Nebraska turnout in 2016 bests 2008 by almost 31% but lags 2012 by not quite 4%

Trump romps in West Virginia primary even after suppressing the vote and Cruz suspends, turnout 54% higher than 2008, 62% higher than 2012