There is no labor shortage when many millions sit idle along with 24% of the economy

 CNN, so predictable:

The US needs to find ways to raise the number of workers through larger and more economically motivated immigration policies . . ..

I'm all in for more immigration as long as it's rooftop Koreans

Tucker Carlson chalks up new illegal immigrant reparations scheme to Biden just acting in keeping with his other craziness, but this widely misses the mark

And of course, pretty much every morning, what we had assumed was a joke turns out to be entirely real. It's actually happening. The Biden administration really is that crazy. They really are firing thousands of nurses in the middle of a pandemic, firing thousands of cops in the middle of a crime wave. No, they're not kidding, even in the slightest, when they tell you that's a genuine female four-star admiral standing right there. Joe Biden isn't giggling. He tells you Rachel Levine's promotion is a victory for women everywhere, and he means it when he says it.

More.

Like the full court press by the federal government to exaggerate the January 6 debacle as an insurrection, the "reparations" scheme is designed to do just one thing: Paint the record of Donald Trump in the worst possible light.

One of the most distinctive features about America is how its leadership on both sides fails to take seriously the real problems facing the country while taking too seriously merely imaginary ones.

This is how a nation declines and falls.

Somewhere, out there, there's an iceberg, waiting for its moment.

Something special about white people: STD cases make sixth consecutive new annual high in 2019, but it is not a non-Hispanic White heterosexual people problem according to CDC

Maybe we should cut down on the immigration:

 

 

More than 2.5 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea & syphilis reported in 2019.

Rates for African American or Black people were 5-8 times that of non-Hispanic White people.

Rates for American Indian or Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander people were 3-5 times that of non-Hispanic White people.

Rates for Hispanic or Latino people were 1-2 times that of non-Hispanic White people.

Gay and bisexual men make up nearly half of all 2019 primary and secondary syphilis cases.

Gonorrhea rates were 42 times that of heterosexual men in some areas.

More. 

CDC is capitalizing White people now.

Thank you.

The idea that Steve Scalise is some right wing nut with his hair on fire about Election 2020 is crazy

Scalise thinks several states did not follow their election laws existing at the time and that state legislatures were by-passed in the process of changing such laws, which is prohibited by the constitution,  in the fit of coronavirus hysteria gripping the country in 2020.

These things are demonstrable but blacked out by the powers that be, which could care less about following Article 1, Section 4.

Scalise has a good voting record when it comes to immigration issues, but he can hardly be described as Trumpian. His voting record has helped maintain the status quo on spending and he is frequently bemoaned as just another RINO.

He joined with most Republicans after all, including Liz Cheney, to pass a resolution condemning the QAnon wackos in October 2020.

The effort by the media to make Republican reasonableness look radical is outrageous, but that is where we are.

The problem for Scalise and for those who make the same argument, however, is that no Republican state legislature had the gumption post-election to do anything about it. They all acquiesced, just as they had acquiesced to allow state bureaucrats to whom they had delegated authority usurp their prerogatives in the first place.

This abdication of responsibility is what is killing the country, all over the place. Into the vacuum sweep the radical forces which would overturn everything.

We're screwed.

Clinton flunky Judge Emmet Sullivan plays the stooge to let Biden appear to be an immigration hawk as record numbers of illegals flood across the southern border with Mexico

 

A federal judge Thursday blocked the Biden administration from exercising a Trump-era policy that allows the U.S. to quickly expel migrants without giving them the chance to apply for asylum.

More. 

And, like clockwork, the Biden administration has appealed the order! See! He's not a total loser!

The Biden administration’s decision to maintain Title 42 was a blow to many immigration advocates and progressive Democrats who had hoped the federal government would choose to put an end to the policy after Thursday’s ruling. 

Story.

Full time jobs as a percentage of population now average 48.3% through August 2021

 Full time as a percentage of population rose to 49.18 in August after peaking in July, as is typical, at 49.28.

The measure ebbs after summer and flows in the spring, mirrored by a peak oscillation in usually part-time employment in the winter, which is a much smaller part of the population, historically averaging 27+ million in the years before the latest catastrophe.

The 48.3% average to date in 2021 is one full point ahead of the average for 2020 at 47.3%, but remains far off the 2019 average at 50.4%, which itself hardly represented a return to what was normal before the Great Financial Crisis.

Full time work never recovered after GFC I, which exposed the hollowed out character of the US economy after decades of out-sourcing, off-shoring, and mass low-wage immigration.

 

CENTCOM has no comment today about this revelation that it has given a list to the Taliban of the people the US wants evacauated from Kabul

 

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that's prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.

More.

The immigration courts have been understaffed for years, and the problem is only getting worse under Biden

The immigration court currently has 535 judges to deal with its backlog of 1,357,820 cases. The plan calls for hiring an additional 100 judges to deal with this crisis.

The immigration court’s most productive year since fiscal 2008, was fiscal 2019, when it completed 276,970 cases. But it received 546,248 new cases that year, which meant that the backlog increased by 269,278 cases. In the second quarter of fiscal 2021, it received 66,158 new cases and completed 43,652, which increased the backlog by 22,506 cases.

In fact, the immigration court has not reduced the backlog a single time during that 13-year period.

How is a 20 percent increase in the size of the court going to turn this around?

More.

There is no mention in this story that Biden is releasing tens of thousands of illegals into the United States who have been given NO court date, an unprecedented failure to enforce the law. So the magnitude of the problem is much worse than the article lets on.

The Biden administration is deliberately flooding the zone with dependents who will be politically beholden to Democrats for their continued future welfare.

Biden was forever the US Senate's resident clown, and as president he has now brought his clown show to immigration policy

Illegal immigration in the first six months of the Biden administration has EXPLODED. The news is out that there have been ONE MILLION apprehensions at the US border with Mexico just in the first six months of 2021, affectionately spelled "boarder" by the MAGA idiots.

What the news reports don't tell you is that most of this is "catch and release". They aren't deported. Biden is presiding over an invasion of his own making. It's intentional.

Meanwhile in Cubar (h/t Rush), the people are fed up with the free medical care under Castroism, which can't seem to cope with COVID-19. Cuba ranks EIGHTH in the world RIGHT NOW for cases per million, two spots below number six United Kingdom, which also has socialized medicine. The difference is the UK has vaccines which don't work vs. Cubar which has no vaccines which don't work.

Anywho, people want out of Cuba, but BIDEN doesn't want them. Only with the Cubans does he get tough on immigration. The reason, obviously, is that Cubans with the good sense to try to get the hell out of there hate communism and make unreliable future Democrat voters.

The DHS Secretary under Biden is the son of a Cuban refugee, but there he is telling the Cubans fleeing the island that they will not reach the US. It reminds one of nothing so much as the infamous case of Elian Gonzalez in 2000, who was forcibly repatriated to Cuba by another Democrat administration.

Biden is a joke alright, but no one is laughing at the punchline.

It is now common to blame the invention of the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, for the increase in the US slave population

Can anything good come out of Oregon?

This garbage from a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University, is anti-white anti-capitalism rearing its ugly head, not "historical scholarship". It's what Oswald Spengler warned us about in 1934.

Infighting in the Southern Baptist Convention shouldn’t be a surprise – the denomination has been defined by such squabbles for 400 years :

 

In the U.S., Baptists formed a national organization, the Triennial Convention, in 1814. Around the same time, attitudes of Baptists in the South toward the enslavement of Africans began to harden as the 1792 invention of the cotton gin, a machine that made it easier to separate the cotton fibers from their seeds, made enslavement more profitable. By the 1830s, abolitionism took firm hold among Northern Baptists, and both they and Baptists in the South argued they were upholding Scripture through their views on slavery.

 

Blaming the cotton gin for an increase of enslavement appears to be a new, and stupid, argument of the anti-white-anti-capitalist industry, advanced since about 2009, in tandem with the advent of the Obama era when hostility to capitalism began to become more widely racialized, along with everything else.

 

The claim, as per the Wikipedia article on the cotton gin, is that "The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the cotton production figures cited don't match the population "production" facts:

 

"Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850." You are led to believe with this sleight of hand that slave population was dramatically increased by 2.5 million (357%) to accomplish that 280% production increase in cotton.

 

That isn't the case.

 

From 1830 to 1850 slave population increased by 1.2 million, from 2 million to 3.2 million, or 60%, not 357% obviously. Automation meant fewer slaves were needed, not more. The increase in slave population over the period has nothing to do with the invention of the cotton gin. 

 

Importation of slaves to the US had been halted from 1808 by act of Congress. By 1850 fewer than 305,000 had been brought to America. Slave population increased in the US naturally through reproduction over the period, by 60%, in contrast with the free population which increased in the US by about 84% (from 10.85 million to 19.99 million) through both reproduction and immigration between 1830-1850.

 

You can't even make the argument that slaves were bred to serve, however aspirational that might have been for a very small minority of white race schemers of the plantation enterprise. The data shows whatever the intentions were, they didn't succeed, and slave population increased at a rate lower than the free population.

 

You could make the argument that the invention of the cotton gin enabled slave owners to get by much longer with fewer slave laborers*, some of whom enjoyed better working conditions as a result, thus perpetuating the economics of slavery in a situation where increased supply of that labor had been cut off, but that's not the argument they are making. They aren't smart enough to make it.

 

 

*Cotton production per slave increased from 188 pounds in 1830 to 445 pounds in 1850.

Good a day as any to remember that Alan Greenspan in 2007 explicitly advocated for immigration to suppress the wages of skilled laborers

Greenspan: Let more skilled immigrants in :

"Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world," he said. "If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income."

Yeah, the problem isn't millionaires and billionaires concentrating wealth in their hands, it's the goddamn skilled laborers who must be stopped, the engineers, scientists, doctors and teachers, the crane operators, CDL truck drivers, machinists, drafters, plumbers, craftsmen, cooks and accountants.

 

Mark Krikorian hits on the sorry truth about Trump and Elise Stefanik

MAGAworld pans Stefanik :

...

“She ties with a couple other Republicans for the worst career voting record on immigration in New York,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the anti-immigration Center on Immigration Studies, ticking off a few of her previous positions: a yes on H-2B visas, the Farm Workers Modernization Act, and the Hong Kong Refugee bill, and a no on Trump’s child border separation policies.

“Obviously, Republicans in New York are likely to be more liberal, just because that's the environment they're in,” Krikorian said. “I think everybody understands that. But even by the standards of New York state Republicans, she's bad on immigration.” ...

Krikorian, whose institute is not weighing in on the conference chair election, noted that while Cheney’s downfall was sparked by her criticism of Trump, what had truly tanked her was her ideology, bolstered by her family name: The Wyoming congresswoman’s neoconservative beliefs have no place in today’s GOP.

Stefanik’s positions weren’t much more palatable to the party base, in Krikorian’s view.

“Trump, in his gut, does think we should get out of Afghanistan, he does think there's too many illegal aliens coming over the border,” he observed. “It's not that he doesn't believe any of that stuff. It's just that he's kind of a narcissistic guy. And if people flatter him, he's for them, regardless of what they believe. And so the question is: Do you go for Trumpism? Or do you go for Trump?” 

The system which protects us from tyrants has done so only because we are, when all is said and done, still loyal to it. There was never any danger of a tyranny from Trump, who was easily the weakest president in living memory.

But Trump's character is clearly of the sort Aristotle warned us about. The thing is, we do little worrying about the proliferation of wretches like Stefanik who eventually make the rise of actual tyrants, dangerous men of strong, determined, and ruthless character, more likely.

"And for this reason tyrants always love the worst of wretches, for they rejoice in being flattered, which no man of a liberal spirit will submit to; for they love the virtuous, but flatter none."

Real Clear Politics article floats open borders lunatic Mick Mulvaney for new Heritage Foundation president

 Somebody put a fork in it already.

Story.

LOL, it's funny hearing Jason Lewis fulminate about immigration on the Rush Limbaugh Show when all he could get was a C+ from NumbersUSA on the issue in his one term on The Hill

 

Well, I found one guy with the temerity to point out what a phony baloney plastic banana good time rock n rolla Rush Limbaugh was on immigration

From a good thread discussing possible replacements for Rush Limbaugh.

Commenters get it that playing reruns hosted by loyalists ain't gonna cut it.

Cumulus Media's Westwood One is challenging the time slot of Rush Limbaugh with Dan Bongino.

That should force EIB's hand to up their game.

Meanwhile under George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh licked his finger, checked the wind, and said what he said. Which was Rush's typical behavior. As Rush told 60 Minutes, he was there to see how much money he could make advertisers pay to be on his show. That meant keeping and growing a Republican audience. Rush was never about principle. He was just about convincing you that he was in order to keep you listening.

 

Libertarian survey: Republicans are sharply divided over Trump, the QAnon child sex conspiracy, and the use of force

Among Trump voters 53% view themselves as GOP supporters vs. 47% who view themselves as Trump supporters. 

29% of Republicans believe Trump was fighting a global sex trafficking ring whereas 30% do not. 43% of Republicans were . . . uncertain about this, which is kind of shocking when you consider that . . . Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.

55% of Republicans support the use of force to stop the decline of the traditional American way of life and its values, but 43% oppose this. A clear majority of Republicans, however, oppose using violence to achieve political ends even when elected leaders fail to act to "protect America", whatever that means.

The survey, a project of the libertarian American Enterprise Institute, notably fails to ask any questions about immigration, which was the beginning, middle, and end of the Trump 2016 run for the presidency and also his most colossal failure.

It's more expedient for libertarians who want to fling open the borders, in league with Democrats, to have Trump "major in the minors" and paint him in the worst light at those things than to expose the widespread popular support for immigration restriction at which he failed.

That issue lurks underneath the survey's result which found that:

There is bipartisan agreement that the American system of democracy is failing to address the concerns and needs of the public. Nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) Americans agree that American democracy serves the interests of only the wealthy and powerful. Seventy percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans hold this view.  

After the ballots are counted: Conspiracies, political violence, and American exceptionalism

In January 2021 just 47.4% of the civilian population had full-time jobs, compared with 2020's average of 47.3%

Biden reportedly said in response to the employment situation summary today:

"At that rate it's going to take ten years to get back to full employment. That's not hyperbole that's a fact."

The fact is employment has never recovered to pre-Great Recession levels, and Biden is as little likely to fix that as were Obama and Trump.

The Reagan era tax reforms hollowed out the labor economy. 

Before Reagan, high marginal tax rates on ordinary income steered that income into capital investment, gains from which received preferential tax treatment if held long enough. The investment grew the economy, providing good jobs for Americans and tax revenues for government at all levels. The arrangement distrusted rich people to do the right thing with their money, but rewarded them if they did.

Reagan libertarianism changed all that.

We were sold the idea that lower taxes on high ordinary incomes would still result in capital investment because we could trust people to do the right thing with their own money.

Guess what? Libertarian trust of human nature turned out to be as false as liberal trust of human nature. 

Under the influence of libertarian free trade dogma and growing globalization, that investment went abroad where there was far cheaper labor, lower taxes and less regulation. Profits soared for the few, bringing the number of billionaires from less than fifty in the 1980s to nearly 800 today. Meanwhile the good jobs gradually disappeared and income inequality soared.

Ordinary people today cannot afford cars, educations, health care, and houses as a result.

Add in cheap labor competition from immigration at a clip of 1 million a year and you can understand how Trump was so popular, however incompetent and narcissistic he was.

Trump may be gone, but the people remain screwed by these problems and by the time serving politicians and 2.8 million federal bureaucrats working for pensions who stand in the way.

Returning to the status quo ante might fix it, but it would take a generation to start feeling it. And who among us has the vision and the cojones to pull it off?

Certainly not the women and snowflakes who cry crocodile tears of fear on the House floor. Certainly not the sailors on board the Chafee who are in a panic because the cooks are infected with COVID.

The country is rotting from the inside out. All it will take to bring it down is . . . a series of unfortunate events.

Fred Upton, Republican chucklehead, MI-6, waits until the very last hours of the Trump administration to declare: "But it is time to say: Enough is enough”

What courage! What principle! What restraint!

Upton joined nine other Republicans in the US House, including my own freshman congressman Peter Meijer, Republican chucklehead, MI-3, and all the Democrats, 222 of them, to impeach Trump a second time 232-197. Four Republicans did not vote.

The roll call is here. Upton is quoted here.

Upton, 67, has spent his life as a useless heir to a Whirlpool fortune estimated under $10 million. Once an aspiring journalist with a B.A. in journalism, instead he became a staffer to the libertarian Republican Representative David Stockman in the late 1970s and followed him to OMB under Reagan in the early 1980s. He first ran for Congress in 1986, eleven years after graduating from the U of M. He has been a congressional pest ever since, aren't they all?, who has inflicted on the American people such things as lightbulb bans, eventually styling himself as a moderate.

Meijer, now 33, is embarking on a similar trajectory, but with a gappy resume. Reportedly worth $50 million from the Meijer grocery store chain, Meijer has landed in Congress also after a decade of searching for himself.

Meijer got in to West Point but ignominiously dropped out after one year, became an Army Reservist, and went to Columbia in 2008 where he salvaged himself with a B.A. in anthropology by 2012. He interrupted this period at Columbia with service in Iraq in 2010-2011 as a sergeant. Post graduation in 2012 he served with an NGO 2013-2015. He took a wife in 2016, and an MBA from NYU, apparently 2016-2017. Then there was a brief stint in 2018 with Ilitch Holdings of billionaire family fame as an "analyst" which ended in January 2019. When Justin Amash left the Republican Party in July 2019, Meijer announced his candidacy.

Just as Upton took up the occasion of the Capitol attack as a moment of historic gravitas which inspired him to rise to impeach Trump, Meijer similarly has over-dramatized it by relating it to the drama of his "combat" experience as an intelligence advisor in Iraq (insert smirk here). He also laughably pondered out loud the danger those in the order of presidential succession were in from the trespassers on January 6. He reminds one of no one so much as the ex-bartender become US Representative, AOC, who has similarly made it a point to appear distraught and blow everything completely out of proportion to the reality in keeping with her modus operandi everywhere. Think of red-lipsticked Alexandria at the border fence a while ago, clad in white, head in her hands, weeping, sporting her $600 wristwatch.

The lefty Michael Tracey has framed such over-the-top demonstrativeness as "unhinged threat inflation" in recent days, which is exactly what we're being subjected to for demagogic purposes. The manipulation of the American people is nothing new, it's just that these young people are probably less aware of it as a technique than they are themselves victims and mimickers of the technique.

No so with Upton. He is the old hand who is too grown up and knowing for this, who knows just when to say just enough in order to receive huzzahs as a statesman instead of the harangues for the seat-warmer he is in reality. 

Somehow the American people are content to let such people put us $28 trillion in debt. We chuckleheads have the chuckleheads we deserve.