Imagine how many different people are actually running the presidential show behind the scenes of decision-making.
Monday, June 17, 2024
CNBC ramps up pro-Biden stories, trots out professors of philosophy, religion, and sociology, who directly depend on the student loan pipeline, to rationalize forgiveness for me but not for thee
The chutzpah of these people sometimes all the time. Get a haircut and get a real job.
In the investment world, we call this "talking up your book", about which CNBC knows a lot.
Sunday, June 16, 2024
Platitudinous Glenn Loury thinks like a Marxist in his old age: Workers of all races have a common bond, he says
This kind of politics is universal.
The lapdogs lick it up here.
Glenn Loury last worked in a factory, when, in 1972? More than 12% of the civilian population had a manufacturing job back then. Today fewer than 5% have one. But in neither case was there anything universal about being working class.
What have miners, sailors, tailors' apprentices, metalworkers, waiters, bank officials, ploughmen, and scavengers in common with one another?
-- Oswald Spengler
Saturday, June 15, 2024
Joe Biden's restraint in the Red Sea against Yemen's Houthis is a disgrace: 77 cargo ships attacked since Oct 7, container traffic down 67%, tanker traffic down 50%, US out $1 billion so far
Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Iran-backed Houthi rebels have lobbed missiles, drones and other weapons at commercial vessels and warships nearly every day. Although most of the weapons have been shot down, at least 77 cargo ships have been hit, and one British-owned ship carrying 20,000 tons of fertilizer aboard was sunk. ...
The Biden administration has limited its military response to the Houthi attacks, hoping to avoid being drawn into a wider Middle East conflict.
More.
As we write the coal-carrier MV Tutor has been hit and abandoned in the Red Sea with one crew member believed to be drowned after being trapped in the flooded engine room.
People who say Trump's character counts make me want to puke: JFK has to be the biggest POS to ever win the White House, and his brothers right along with him
'I know what's going on,' she told Finnerty. 'All these reporters — and they're almost always men — think I'm strange, that I must live off in my own world not to see what he's up to. I know exactly what he's up to.'
There were so many women.
Jackie suspected that even Lee, her sister, had slept with Jack once. She knew about Jack and Pamela Turnure, her own press secretary. She knew about Jack's euphemistic 'pool parties' held almost daily in the White House — often attended by his brothers Ted and Bobby and various lackeys — and the young secretaries who'd join them. Women ran up and down the back stairs whenever Jackie was away, leaving behind blonde hairs and bobby pins.
One she didn't know about was 19-year-old Mimi Beardsley, who worked in the White House secretarial pool. Jack had invited Mimi to the White House residence, gotten her drunk, and taken Mimi's virginity on the bed he shared with his wife. In that same bed, Jackie once found a pair of women's knickers. 'Would you please shop around and find who these belong to?' she asked Jack coolly. 'They're not my size.'
More.
Estimated-tax-penalties balloon by four times in 2023 due to higher interest rates and a greedy, lazy IRS which just got tens of billions in new funding from Joe Biden but can't get its software updated
The average estimated-tax penalty in fiscal-year 2023 climbed to about $500 from about $150 in 2022, according to Internal Revenue Service data. Meanwhile the number of affected tax filers rose to 14 million from 12 million. Overall, the agency assessed $7 billion in estimated-tax penalties in 2023, nearly four times the $1.8 billion it assessed in 2022. ...
Filers who don’t pay in enough tax throughout the year owe a penalty in the form of an interest charge on their underpayment that’s set quarterly. In 2021, the year that prompted most of the 2022 assessments, the IRS’s rate on underpayments was a rock-bottom 3%. The penalty is based on the short-term Treasury rate plus three points, and it climbed to 6% as rates rose in 2022. That pushed up charges on underpayments assessed the next year.
In 2023 the rate rose to 8% for the fourth quarter. It’s still there–so underpayment penalties will continue to sting taxpayers who owe them. ...
The IRS’s computers can impose undeserved penalties on some estimated-tax filers, because they automatically treat income as though it’s earned equally throughout the year. So if a filer does a fourth-quarter Roth IRA conversion and pays tax on it at that time, the system will assume the income was earned all through the year but the tax was only paid in the fourth quarter.
More.
Friday, June 14, 2024
Peggy Noonan: The Alitos did nothing wrong, and the dishonest activist is nothing but a Stalinist rat
But there was something quite inhuman in what the left-wing activist did. She treated human beings as if they were mere means to her end. She acted out admiration to perform reputational harm. She presented herself falsely to inflict damage. That the content she produced was disseminated by honest grown-up journalists is to their discredit.
She claims to oppose polarization but fans it, further alienating those who already lack trust in institutions like the court and professionals like journalists. She presents another warning to those who hold or are adjacent to high office: You can’t assume good faith on the part of fellow citizens who seek you out.
More than that, it is deeply Stalinist. In Stalin’s time private life was dead, and private comments too. Neighbor spied on neighbor and reported back subversive comments to the Central Committee. People became spies, rooting out ideological error.
More.
Thursday, June 13, 2024
Trump has learned nothing, floats wacko bird pie-in-the-sky elimination of income tax
The federal government now needs about $6 trillion in revenue annually for the budget, social security, and medicare.
Imports of goods and services last year were valued at $3.83 trillion. You'd have to tariff all that at 160% or so to come up with $6 trillion. When pigs fly.
Trump promised big cuts to spending and to the size of the government workforce in 2016. Never happened.
This won't either.
That didn't take long: White House floats commutation of Hunter Biden sentence after saying it wouldn't pardon him or commute it
The White House isn’t ruling out a potential commutation for Hunter Biden after his conviction
The position from the White House is a shift from what it said in September, when Jean-Pierre was asked whether the president would “pardon or commute his son if he’s convicted.” The press secretary responded at the time that “I’ve answered this question before. It was asked of me not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago. And I was very clear, and I said no.”
Hilarious: Biden signs "10-year" security pact with Ukraine for which there are not 67 votes in the US Senate
Will either Joe Biden or this deal survive even 10 months?
Imagine writing "Every little Allied victory hardens the hearts of the Nazis"
The Jerusalem Post is mentally ill.
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
Democrats will just love, love, love this Zero Percent seasonally-adjusted month-over-month inflation chart, again lol
Hey, where'd that 9% inflation from June 2022 go lol?
That low spot in between there is Trump
Obama-Biden, Biden-Harris, have two things in common: Biden and high gasoline prices. OK, three things: Democrat Party. OK, four: tokens of the group most hurt by high gas prices.
No one is above the law except for some of us, like Hallie Biden and the US Secret Service: Yesterday Hunter Biden was convicted of gun crimes, Joe Biden minutes later says families must be held accountable
Apparently Hallie Biden won't be charged in any of this.
Nor the US Secret Service, which swooped in to try and get Hunter's falsified background check paperwork for the gun purchase and make Hunter's little problem go away:
Secret Service agents approached the owner of the store where Hunter bought the gun and asked to take the paperwork involving the sale, according to two people, one of whom has firsthand knowledge of the episode and the other was briefed by a Secret Service agent after the fact.
The gun store owner refused to supply the paperwork, suspecting that the Secret Service officers wanted to hide Hunter’s ownership of the missing gun in case it were to be involved in a crime, the two people said. The owner, Ron Palmieri, later turned over the papers to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which oversees federal gun laws.
Read the whole thing from Politico, March 25, 2021, here.
The Secret Service made the White House cocaine problem go away just last summer.
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Video long suppressed by Democrats shows Nancy Pelosi admitting on January 6th that responsibility for Capitol security was hers
Here.
“We have responsibility, Terri. We did not have any accountability for what was going on there. And we should have. This is ridiculous. You’re going to ask me in the middle of the thing when they’ve already breached…that, should we call the Capitol Police? I mean the National Guard? Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?…They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepared for more.”
After Marine Le Pen trounces Macron in EU Parliament elections, the French Republican leader Ciotti backs alliance with Le Pen
"I think the country has never been so right-wing," Ciotti said. "It expects the right, it expects right-wing action. We can no longer rely on impotence, on communication, on a form of immobilism that has led us to where we are now."
More.
Yeah, because they'll lose Alberta when it joins The Great American Redoubt in Idaho lol
The story never mentions that most Canadians hate Trudeau, same as Trump does.
Why Canada Is Worried About a US Civil War...
Donald Trump’s policies and personal behavior toward Canada — including trashing Trudeau after a previous G7 meeting in Quebec — have left a painful mark.
There's video everyday since late 2022 on the site formerly known as Twitter showing Joe Biden completely out of it, but this finally makes it up at Drudge lol?
Video of Biden Appearing to Freeze at Juneteenth Event Raises Questions...
This is completely unfair. Watch the video and you'll see a black guy in the row behind Biden and to his left just about as stiff as Joe.
The alarming stuff is the gibberish coming out his mouth here here and here.
Monday, June 10, 2024
Sunday, June 9, 2024
The Israeli and American hostages of Hamas are in the Palestinians' own homes and apartments in Gaza
This one was a so-called journalist for Al-Jazeera and the US-based Palestinian Chronicle.
Beltway Republican David Winston for Roll Call wants 2016 to have been about the economy when it was about illegal immigration
This slight-of-hand reasoning is how Trump got co-opted by the GOP in 2017 in the first place, and it's how they're going to co-opt him again should he win. Beltway Republicans love, love, love immigration, so the top issue cannot, must not, be that.
In 2016, the economy was the top issue, just as today . . ..
Here.
Trump's controversial 2015-2016 message was immigration, immigration, immigration for 14 straight months, until Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway got a hold of him in August 2016.
Trump barely won.
Trump's unfavorables were indeed high, but not because Hillary drove them there as Winston says. People forget that Trump did that all by himself. He ended up underperforming John McCain 2008 in 12 states and DC.
Trump was an insurgent candidate who exploited division within the GOP to capture the nomination. The 2016 primary popular vote for Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich exceeded Trump's 13.3 million.
That division has subsided, but it has never gone away, and Winston is one of the other side's smooth operators who still want to change the subject to anything else but the issue staring everyone in the face, from working class Americans now competing with 8 million new illegals for wages to upper class suburban denizens of Massachusetts being told to cope with hordes of new students in public schools they never designed to accommodate this flood.
That's the issue confronting voters, not Trump's Kangaroo Kourt Konviction, about which David wrings his hands.
If there's any vengeance in American politics about which we should be upset in 2024, Joe Biden's open southern border is surely it.
On Senility
"You can tell it's still a completely male-dominated society because no one today ever speaks of anility."
-- Imam John
Saturday, June 8, 2024
There was a big drop in the Oceanic Nino Index reading for March-April-May 2024
From 1.2 to 0.8.
The current El Nino has persisted for twelve consecutive measuring periods, averaging an anomaly of 1.358, a moderate event according to the scale (1.0-1.4).
There are two periods left in the current 2023-2024 season.
Friday, June 7, 2024
Native born Americans aren't getting the jobs over the last five years, foreign born workers are
Native born employment is up 0.97 million in 5 years in May 2024, foreign born employment up 3.21 million.
Full time employment appears to have stalled in May 2024
Full time as a percentage of civilian population appears to have stalled in May 2024 at 49.73.
Jan-May average 49.43, lowest since 2021.
Level is 2.46 million down from Jun 2023 peak.
Thursday, June 6, 2024
Chicago Tribune Editorial Board wrings its hands over 450k Illinoisans with concealed carry permits now firing back, calls the right to self-defense "taking the law into your own hands"
Worryingly, we’re seeing more signs of that phenomenon in Chicago, with three separate episodes over the last weekend in which would-be victims proved to be both armed and willing to fire at their assailants. Four people who police said were attacking these concealed carry holders were shot and wounded, all of them critically, according to a report by Block Club Chicago.
More.
Yeah, citizens doing the job the cops and the courts won't do is horrible.
Hey, concealed carry holders, go back to the range and improve your aim, will ya?
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
Dwight David Eisenhower: Peak America on this day in 1944, and Peak $SPX Return in 1969 when he died
America also landed on the moon in 1969.
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
Breaking from AP Hamas: Biden to slow illegal immigration to 1 million a year from 2 million by executive order!
The only true sentence in this story from AP Hamas:
Biden’s order is aimed at trying to head off any potential spike in border encounters that could happen later this year, closer to the November elections.
Biden's scores of executive orders on Day One of his administration created this catastrophe of 10 million illegal aliens in the first place, as even AP Obama knows but won't say:
Administration lawyers have been planning to tap executive powers outlined in Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives a president broad authority to block entry of certain immigrants into the U.S. if it is deemed “detrimental” to the national interest. It is the same legal rationale used by Trump to take some of his toughest actions on migration as president.
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