The left is having an apoplectic fit over the dagger the Supremes just put into the unaccountable administrative state, aka The Swamp: A massive blow

 What about our careers?!

 

Slate's Jordan Weissmann is scared of Joe Biden's propensity to flirt with cutting entitlements like Social Security and Medicare

[O]ur ex-VP has talked extensively about his desire to return to an era of bipartisan cooperation. And whether we’re talking about Social Security or another major program, the budget is one area in which those instincts are truly scary.

Read the whole thing here.

Democrats threaten with chaos and tyranny, stand for overturning all basic American political institutions and norms

Voting Republican has literally become a vote for survival and is no longer simply a policy preference:

The Electoral College is a civic abomination, Damon Linker of The Week, September 19, 2018

The Supreme Court Is a Historically Regressive and Presently Expendable Institution, Christopher Sprigman in Slate, October 11, 2018

Abolish the Senate. It's the only way to rein in modern presidents., John Bicknell for WaPo, August 30, 2016

Democrats’ ‘Fighting Words’ Take on an Ominous Tone, Carol M. Swain, The Epoch Times, October 12, 2018

Brett Kavanaugh and America's vanishing presumption of innocence, Edward Morrissey of The Week, September 19, 2018

140 House Democrats Refuse to Condemn Illegal Aliens Voting, John Binder of Breitbart, September 26, 2018 

Laugh of the Day: Socialist Jew invested in being white gets the bad news that just being white makes him a racist

Isaac Chotiner: What could a white person in America in 2018 do to not be racist, or do you believe that’s impossible?

Robin DiAngelo: Well, I have to ask you a question I forgot to ask you earlier. What is your racial identity?

Isaac Chotiner: I’m white. My family’s originally from Eastern Europe. 

Seen here.

Slate takes The Atlantic to task for not taking the 1% seriously enough

Here in "Actually, the 1 Percent Are Still The Problem".

Actually, the Reagan 1986 tax reform was the problem, but Jordan Weissmann never mentions it.

This despite his wonderful graph of the top 10% over time showing the 1% take-off after the reform. When it becomes easier for the already rich to take high incomes the ordinary way, like everyone else, because of low top marginal rates, less money ends up getting plowed back into productive purposes like it used to before 1986.

We keep believing the myth that "the rich are different than you and me", but they're not. They're as indolent, undisciplined and blinkered as any middle class family leveraged to the hilt which believes it deserves a house a little larger than it can afford, two car payments, the weekly fine dinner out and the expensive annual winter vacation.

The 1% aren't the problem. You will have them always with you, by definition. The problem is human nature, and government's failure to correct for it.

Say what you will about "Christian" belief, previously it at least curbed the 1%'s enthusiasm, with the stick of high marginal income tax rates and the carrot of low long term capital gains taxes.

National Review's Kevin Williamson looks left and heads to The Atlantic

Where Kevin and his sneering elitism will find a larger audience. Slate's Jordan Weissmann pretends not to get it: "Above all else, Williamson is something fairly rare in U.S. media: an explicit, unrepentant elitist."

How Mexico will pay for THE WALL: OK collects $11m from its 75k illegals sending money home by wire transfer

That's about $147 per head.

With 11 million illegals in the US, that's about $16 billion, enough to pay for THE WALL in a year or two. 

Story here. Map of illegals by state here.

Liberal media love John Kasich, and so does Michigan's libertarian radio talker Steve Gruber

Liberal media love Governor John Kasich of Ohio.

For example:

WaPo:

"Kasich gives touching response to question on gay marriage"

Slate:

"A Republican Presidential Candidate Just Gave One of the Most Stirring Defenses of Medicaid You’ll Ever See"

MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell:

"Kasich's defense of taking the Medicaid money was absolutely a great defense. It could sell with Republican primary voters and it is terrific for a general election candidate."

Fake conservative radio talker Steve Gruber on Lansing's 1240 WJIM loves him too: 

Kasich is still the guy I think has the best resume and a unique style that lends itself well to him winning in the end. The latest polls show him surging in New Hampshire in the post debate surge. Remember New Hampshire is really the first state that matters. Sorry to the folks in Iowa but it is true. ... I see John Kasich rising to the top with his pragmatic approach, conservative fiscal attitude and his ability to work with people from all sides. I think he would be well served to ask Marco Rubio to join him on the ticket. Make no mistake a ticket that locks in Ohio and Florida for the Republicans will be very hard to ignore and I think these two offer a terrific one two punch. Plus you have Rubio’s Hispanic roots as a big bonus.

And here was Gruber's "me love you long time, sailor boy" in June:

Kasich, who is 62 and ready to lead our nation is the man to beat and I believe the most likely candidate to become the 45th President of the United States. I’ve been saying this on The Steve Gruber Show for almost two years but I want to make sure it is in writing as well.

It just goes to show once again that libertarianism has more in common with liberalism than it does with conservatism.

Liberal Stevie, John Kasich doesn't stand a chance!

Robert Shiller Says The Problem Is Insufficient Demand. It's Not.

The estimable Robert Shiller wants the problem to be insufficient demand, when the real problem is everyone in government is doing everything they possibly can to prevent what insufficient demand causes: a lowering of the general price level. In a free market we permit, yeah laud, failure. In ours we loathe it. 

Picked up by Slate, here:

"The fundamental economic problem that currently troubles much of the world is insufficient demand. Businesses are not investing enough in new plants and equipment, or adding jobs, largely because people are not spending enough—or are not expected to spend enough in the future—to keep the economy going at full tilt."

Shiller wants to create demand by raising taxes, whereas free-marketeers want demand to develop the natural way, by letting prices fall. Prices falling means some go bankrupt, except for savers who have wisely prepared for such an eventuality by having NOT spent too much in the past. They survive and are rewarded with cheaper goods and services. If they have saved enough they acquire directly the businesses which produce them. Or if not enough, indirectly through purchase of stocks at lower prices.

Preventing such failure, which is really preventing opportunity, is job one in a credit-driven economy, which is why unleashing capital stored in housing was critical in the 1990s, and why the Fed is doing what it is doing now to keep things "at full tilt" in the hollowed out economy. If it didn't, it would expose all the spendthrifts for what they are, and the entire thing would fail.

One can always hope.

Rep. Ryan Falls In Line: Frames Obama's Reduced Rate Of Medicare Growth As Big Cut

William Saletan for Slate mocks Paul Ryan, here:

Since Mitt Romney tapped you as his running mate, you haven’t stood for fiscal restraint. You’ve attacked it. You warned voters in North Carolina and Virginia that cuts in the defense budget would take away their tax-supported jobs. ... Four days after Romney put you on the ticket, you began parroting his Medicare shtick. You protested that Obama’s $700 billion savings in the future growth of Medicare payments to providers—a spending reduction that any sensible conservative president would have sought, and that you had previously included in your budget plan—would “lead to fewer services for seniors.” You depicted a horror scenario: “a $3,600 cut in benefits for current seniors. Nearly one out of six hospitals and nursing homes are going to go out of business.” You assured seniors that the Romney-Ryan agenda for Medicare “does not affect your benefits.” And you promised future retirees “guaranteed affordability” of health care. In short, you adopted every tactic in the liberal playbook. You framed a reduced rate of growth as a draconian cut. You inflated the likely impact of the reduction. You denounced any loss of services as unacceptable. You promised not to touch seniors’ benefits. And you reaffirmed a fiscally unsustainable guarantee. By my count, you’ve now done this in at least six speeches and rallies. Every day, you’re reinforcing the culture of entitlement and making it harder to rein in retirement programs.

This isn't quite right. There was no fiscal restraint in the Ryan budget to begin with. It simply returned the trajectory of the growth in spending to the status quo ante Obama, which was bad enough. This is why Ryan's budget doesn't achieve balance for decades: it supports the continued growth in spending in programs like Medicare, sans ObamaCare. Obama cuts that growth to help pay for ObamaCare. In other words, it's just business as usual with the Republicans, made to look like fiscal conservatism because it wipes away the really insane spending trajectory threatened under more of Obama.

Bait the conservatives, and switch.

Yea, shame on you, Paul Ryan.

One's a Creep, the Other a Monster

Tim Noah of The New Republic (who admits Edward Kennedy was "criminally irresponsible" in 1969) helps you decide which is the creep, and which the monster, here.

Progressivism can only be said to be making progress, however, when people such as these are flailed while they are alive and still in power.

Heritage Foundation Director Responsible for Healthcare Mandate Idea in 1989

It's one of three dirty little secrets about the Republicans that they are intellectually responsible for the healthcare mandate idea which we have so vehemently opposed but which now stares us in the face in ObamaCare. If ObamaCare were in fact a Bolshevik plot, that must mean the commies own also the Republican Party, not just the Democrat.

A Heritage Foundation director named Stuart Butler presented a paper in 1989 which contains the idea of the healthcare mandate, backed up by some of the absurd reasoning many of us had been attacking in the debate over the Senate healthcare bill, for example, the analogy between car insurance and health insurance.

The link to the full paper is here.

And here's an excerpt on the mandate:

This paragraph sounds like a Newt Gingrich talking point.

Boobs like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity incessantly promote the Heritage Foundation to their audiences, while claiming the mantle of conservatism. But as we all come to learn sooner or later, saying doesn't make it so.

Government compulsion continues to be the nexus of political conflict in America. Unfortunately for us, the Republican establishment is for it as much as our enemies on the left.

For more, regrettably, see here:

It wouldn't have been at all odd for any of these Republicans to support the individual mandate in the past, because it was a Republican idea, hatched by Stuart Butler and some others at the Heritage Foundation. (Documentation here.) Heritage has desperately tried to disavow it, but to no avail. Even James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, apparently present at the creation, concedes the point. You sometimes hear conservatives defend their past support for the individual mandate by saying that something was needed to head off more ambitious health insurance schemes like Hillarycare, but that's another way of saying that whenever a conservative proposes any solution to the health care crisis he or she does so in bad faith. Vote Republican if you like, but don't kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all. Not even Romney would. You might even say especially Romney, since the issue has brought him nothing but grief since the 2012 cycle began.

I'm With Hitch: Secret Scripts and 3D Glasses are Kooky and I Don't Want a President Who Believes In Them

If Rick Perry had any brains, he'd have said as much:

[W]e are fully entitled to ask Mitt Romney about the forces that influenced his political formation and—since he comes from a dynasty of his church, and spent much of his boyhood and manhood first as a missionary and then as a senior lay official—it is safe to assume that the influence is not small. Unless he is to succeed in his dreary plan to borrow from the playbook of his pain-in-the-ass predecessor Michael Dukakis, and make this an election about "competence not ideology," he should be asked to defend and explain himself, and his voluntary membership in one of the most egregious groups operating on American soil.

Read the whole thing here from Christopher Hitchens.

Standards are Inimical to the Left, That's Why Ratings Agencies are the Enemy

As here at Slate.com:

"If everyone hates the credit rating agencies, why won't anyone enforce the Dodd-Frank provision to dethrone them?"

The Liberal Attack on Bill Clinton Continues, This Time From Joe Stiglitz

As picked up by Slate, here, which especially savors a straw man when mixed with a delusion:

[A] powerful ideology—the belief in free and unfettered markets—brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its heyday, from the early 1980s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest of the richest country of the world. ...

A decade ago, in the midst of an economic boom, the United States faced a surplus so large that it threatened to eliminate the national debt.