Yeah right Rush, Obama's such a radical leftist he made the Bush tax cuts permanent and made the Heritage Foundation's individual mandate the centerpiece of Obamacare

You are a ding dong.

Biden in the cat bird seat: Just as Bernie tanked after promising criminals will get to vote, Warren has tanked after hedging on Medicare for all

Ezra Klein, here:

One lesson of the past few weeks is that the Medicare-for-all debate has become a minefield for Democrats — and it’s not clear that any candidate has a safe path through it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has dropped 14 points since October 8, when she briefly led the Democratic field in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Most attribute her decline to her handling of Medicare-for-all — the financing plan she released made her the target of attacks from the moderates, and then the transition plan she released, which envisions a robust public option in the first year of her presidency and only moving to Medicare-for-all in year three, left single-payer advocates unnerved about her commitment to the cause.

The Democrat left has been its own worst enemy.

In addition to alienating working people by going soft on crime, the people who bear the brunt of it,  Bernie has notably lost ground with the working class by flipping on immigration restriction. Every new immigrant drives down their wages when immigrants are not taking their jobs outright.

For her part, on top of hedging on Medicare for all, Warren has rolled out a veritable cornucopia of crazy in this campaign, including a ban on all fracking in the US and ending the Electoral College. Combined with the recent lying about the little details of her life, voters justifiably doubt her sincerity on these larger issues and suspect that she cares about little except getting the power into her hands.

Hence the default candidate still on top, Joe Biden.

America's political institutions are still so structured that even when radicals like Obama do win, those institutions frustrate their aims. The upside of this is that harmful radicalism is usually stopped in its tracks. The downside is that mediocrities and grotesques are produced.

Just as Obama was content to let his Clinton retreads handle the Great Financial Crisis resulting in the still poor full time employment, moribund GDP, unaffordable housing and low interest rates catastrophic to income portfolios of the present time, Obama provided zero leadership on healthcare reform. This resulted in the competing Democrat House and Senate versions which consumed his first year in office, and eventually produced the Affordable Care Act camel, a horse designed by a committee. He sure did enjoy watching basketball in the private residence, though, and went on to make the Bush tax cuts permanent after winning re-election in 2012. Some radical, huh?

The same thing has happened with Trump. Although promising us the moon about immigration, healthcare reform and foreign wars, he instead delivered tax reform mostly for the corporations and huge spending increases for the military industrial complex, which is the basic consensus of the Republican caucus in Congress, foolishly hoping that they would give him a little somethin' somethin' in return.

Nothing doing. Even trade realignment will disappear when Trump does.

Trump's problem is that he never had a political faction holding any seats in Congress to drive his agenda. He just assumed the existing members would adopt his positions, which is pretty damn naive considering how he attacked and alienated them all throughout 2015-2016. Instead, Trump has steadily moved away from his own positions and adopted theirs, for his own political survival.

Trump's porous bollard fencing instead of the real wall he promised is simply the most public symbol of this, going back as it does to the George W. Bush administration.

The only radical realignment we have seen is the realignment of the radicals with their respective parties, and Election 2020 will be the same old, same old fight between them.

Those who won't realign get discarded.

This is the tyranny of the legislative. And the only way to remedy this is to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, the great mistake of 1951. Only the threat of a Trump or an Obama perpetually in the White House will restore the balance of power between the three branches of government and advance the interests of the people who vote for the president.

As things stand, the best we can hope for is a president desperately stacking the courts to increase his power in a tyranny of the judiciary, which is hardly the remedy intended by the founders and is unacceptable to Americans loyal to the constitution and the nation as founded. The three stooges of the law schools on display at the impeachment hearing yesterday are proof enough of that. 

Betsy's right: High crimes and misdemeanors means offenses committed while in high office

It's not the severity of the crime which makes it high, but it damn well better be a crime. Democrats haven't been able to come up with one despite turning themselves and the country into pretzels.

And Trump's tax returns from the past and his dalliances from the past and why he named his son "Barron" are all completely irrelevant, as is everything else he's done while not in office. Those things matter only at election time.

Here's Betsy:

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the framers considered grounds for impeachment. On Sept. 8, George Mason suggested that bribery and treason were too narrow, and proposed adding "maladministration." But James Madison objected, explaining that "so vague a term will be equivalent to" saying the president serves at the pleasure of the Congress. The framers did not want to duplicate the British system, which made the executive dependent on Parliament. Mason's idea was dropped, and the framers instead agreed to the more specific term, "high crimes and misdemeanors," where "high" meant offenses committed while in high office, such as embezzling public funds.

America was an extremist country until 1913

So says this nut, Adam Grossman:

As a Libertarian, some of [Harry] Browne’s economic proposals were extreme—including, for instance, abolishing income taxes. 

Well now, since the total public debt is today $23.076 trillion and climbing inexorably, I'd say the extremism is all post-1913. Measured in trillions, the public debt in 1913 was less than $0.00 trillion. 

Isn't it obvious that income taxes have become irrelevant?

We spend in deficit every year and simply keep adding to the total owed. Might as well just stop collecting income taxes altogether, since we've decided we can borrow indefinitely. We never pay as we go, let alone make payments on what we owe.

Why are taxes even necessary anymore, since nothing has ever had to be paid for, or paid off?

Income taxes are dispensable.   

Trade wars started in 2018 instead of 2017 by default, the same reason immigration wars started after he lost the House

Trump never had a strategy for getting what he ran on, but the GOP had a strategy for getting what it wanted.

Trump should have leveraged this situation to his advantage. You give me my immigration checklist, my trade checklist, I'll give you corporate tax reform and defense spending. Instead, the phony Art of the Deal author caved and gave them everything without getting anything.

Trump wasted the first entire year on repealing and replacing Obamacare, the latter being the fool's errand Trump in his hubris added after securing the nomination. Did he not pay attention to the clash between Democrats in 2009 over the House healthcare plan vs. the Senate plan? It took a Herculean effort to get a compromise, all without Republican input. Like he could get Republicans united for something similar, after ripping them all to shreds in 2016.

Total doofus, surrounded by doofi.

The only thing he's getting right is that he doesn't need anybody to conduct the trade war. Doesn't really matter when he conducts it, but Republicans would have been begging him to end it much earlier if he had started it much earlier. And that is the definition of the art of the deal.

Too bad he didn't think of it.

y/y change US imports of goods from China: Sum Ting Wong long before this

Elizabeth Warren wants to cancel your health insurance culture AND your income tax culture and replace them with socialism

[T]his time, a wholesale government takeover of health insurance would actually be a step toward socialism, which is still viewed more negatively than positively by Americans overall. “You don’t win with a message of socialism in a swing state like Florida,” said Bill Nelson, a former Florida senator and Biden surrogate.

More here.

Nobody wants to buy 1800 sq. ft. either in the Chicago burbs when the property taxes exceed $7,000, more than doubled from a decade ago

The trend for growth of part-time work since 1968 has been much stronger than for full-time, saving business the cost of paying benefits such as paid holidays, sick time, retirement and health insurance

PART-TIME

FULL-TIME

Note the huge jumps in the percentage working part-time due to the Clinton tax increases after his election in 1992 and after the Great Recession in 2008.

Full-time has still not recovered to the two decade experience pre-Great Recession.

How soon they forget, even Ann Coulter: Trump squandered his victory momentum in the first six months on repealing and replacing Obamacare, and got BUPKIS, then took the Republicans' corporate tax cuts for his own because he needed a victory

It took Trump until the end of June 2017 to realize clean repeal should have been his gambit instead of repeal and replace, and by the end of July it was all over. The Senate went on summer vacay and came back to give Trump their own tax bill, not his (but did he ever have one?). Republicans hung Russia-conspiracy-embattled Trump out to dry, and played his hubris like a fiddle.

Having lost the House, Trump unwisely turned again, this time to trade war, which if he were going to fight one he should have saved for his second term. There are always casualties in war, as we're seeing with farmers and small businesses tied to the China supply chain. It's stupid to kill your voters.

Ann Coulter has repeatedly said solving immigration solves every other problem, including jobs, which is what Trump should have made his first term focus. But as we've come to see, Trump can't focus.

Infrastructure spending is a side show compared with all the money saved by fixing immigration. It seems Ann Coulter's forgotten this, too.

The growth in retail was a one-off in late 2017, early 2018, and the long term trend remains down

At 1.6% year over year in July 2019, we're still nowhere near the high 2s of last year which actually still disappoint because those failed to match previous more robust growth spurts even under Obama.

The Trump tax cuts went to the wrong folks. Too bad they weren't really his, but his Republican handlers'. Think of them as NeverTrump's revenge: "We'll sandbag this guy with tax cuts which will help our friends but hurt his re-election chances".

The consumer is running on empty and emptier.

And all Democrats want to see is Trump's tax return

Notice how five of the seven 30-year bond yield dives are a feature of the recent period since the 2000 bubble

And notice how all the episodes of great stress are post-1986 tax reform.

The chickens . . . are coming home . . . to roost!

WaPo/Minneapolis Star Tribune can always be counted on to soft-peddle Democrat crimes, including tax fraud, marriage fraud, immigration fraud and incest by not using those words

The joke state which once gave us Gov. Jesse Ventura follows up with the punchline Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Hey IRS, when are you going to investigate Rep. Ilhan Omar of MN for filing false tax returns in 2014 and 2015?

Memo to Erick Erickson: One of Justin Amash's so-called pro-life principles is that it's OK to abort up to 3-days from conception

Which has been public knowledge since at least March 2013, at the start of the third year of his tenure, but y'all too damn lazy to think about that, or too damn hypocritical to care. I vote both.

Why not up to 4 days?

Why not 4.2?

Why not 42, since 42 is the answer to everything?

How about through the first trimester?

The second?

How about after delivery on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's desk?

It's laughable to insist Amash has principles when all they are is positions, but it's even funnier to say he's an originalist:

Whether you like Justin Amash or not, he is inarguably one of the more principled members of the Republican conference in the House of Representatives. Amash is willing to take unpopular stands in the name of principle. He is willing to defy his party because of those principles. Amash is one of the more easily predictable members of Congress in how he votes because of his principles. Amash believes in the rule of law, limited government, and an originalist interpretation of the constitution.

Originalism is such tosh. The original Constitution had no income tax, accepted slavery, provided a mechanism for the natural growth of representation, knew nothing of women's suffrage, had legislatures elect senators, and knew only sound money. Justin Amash is not known for any of these causes. He's known only for thwarting the causes of others, Republicans' mostly. All he cares about, maybe, is the Constitution as it is, not as it should be, and as real conservatives know, the current Constitution is a mess, otherwise luminaries like Mark Levin wouldn't be proposing a raft of amendments to fix it.

All this hubbub is about is Amash's Trump hatred.

Which is why NeverTrumper Erick Erickson has weighed in on Amash's side.

Justin Amash has never abandoned his principles, and neither has the Devil

If Justin Amash cared one wit about the Constitution, he'd have spent the last ten years in Congress trying to restore the natural growth of representation guaranteed by Article One of the Constitution which a tyrannical legislative took away from the people by the Reapportionment Act of 1929, fixing the number of districts at 435. Justin Amash has been quite content with this power to lord his opinion over many many hundreds of thousands of people whose views he couldn't care less about, when the founders imagined a ratio of one representative to 30,000 people. You'll never hear about that from Mr. Do Everything By The Constitution. Likewise only direct taxes were Constitutional until 1913, but you'll never hear about "originalism" from Mr. Constitution, only that "What is is holy, and we must do it that way." He's an ignoramus who says is means ought, posing as a genius. All he cares about is his view, the "right" view, and getting re-elected in order to keep imposing it.

 

Cook County Illinois Inspector General's investigation may have new Democrat Governor Pritzker taking classes from former Governor Rod Blagojevich in prison

Source: Feds Probe Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, First Lady For Property Tax Appeals On Gold Coast Mansion:

The county watchdog said all of that amounted to a “scheme to defraud” taxpayers out of more than $331,000. ...

The property tax scandal picked up steam just a month before the November 2018 gubernatorial election, when the Chicago Sun-Times published news of a confidential memo from Cook County Inspector General Patrick Blanchard. ...

The confidential Sept. 28, 2018 report by the inspector general characterized the Pritzkers’ tax appeal as a “scheme to defraud” taxpayers. Blanchard also connected the scheme to possible violations of state and federal law, including perjury and mail fraud.

 

Tax cuts were real despite average refund in 2019 coming in $56 lower than last year, $50K earners saved $48 a week with lower withholding under tax reform

The IRS stats are in: Here’s how tax refunds look compared to last year

Your Paycheck Could Increase Very Soon -- Here’s How Much You Can Expect

 

Got a text message at 5:49 AM telling me Michigan has accepted my tax return

I got up and made coffee.

The problem with this analysis, now standard, is that libertarianism co-opted conservatism

The three-legged stool of "conservatism" in the age of Reagan consisted of a libertarian leg, a social conservative leg, and a foreign policy hawk leg. The libertarian leg came to dominate (the money interest), as is typical, which discarded the conservative leg except when it needed it, at election time (traditional values agenda), and put the foreign policy leg to work in its interests (global free trade).

This has happened before. The proponents of the professional, managerial state in the early 20th century similarly co-opted the rural Christian farming population to pass the "progressive" agenda, in the name of Christian fairness, of women's suffrage, popular election of senators, the corporate and income taxes to make business and the rich pay their fair share, and Prohibition, in exchange for political power.

The gulls in this game have always been the core Christian population. They are being replaced now, however, by a new class, the Latinos.

The 3-D chess masters will have to run the future scenarios. Yo no hablo espanol. But I expect them to be less charitable when jilted.