The Daily Beast reports Marco Rubio camp is source, not Trump, for Ted Cruz cheatin' regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays story

Here:

Breitbart News, the notoriously Trump-friendly conservative outlet, was also pitched the story of Cruz’s extramarital affairs, according to a source close to the publication. That source said an operative allied with Marco Rubio—but not associated with his official campaign—showed the publication a compilation video of Cruz and a woman other than his wife coming out of the Capitol Grille restaurant and a hotel on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But the outlet opted not to report on the video, which demonstrated no direct evidence of an affair.

“We got it from a Rubio ally,” said the source. “It was too thin, so [Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matt Boyle] decided not to run it. There was no way to verify the claims.”

The howler of the day comes from Pamela Anderson: Intellectuals were at the Playboy Mansion, you know, like politicians

What a train wreck this woman is.

Here:

"I loved being at the Playboy Mansion. Intellectuals were at the Playboy Mansion. You were talking to the best artists and musicians and actors and politicians." ... I ask Anderson about rumors she might want to segue into politics one day. “No, I don’t!” she laughs. “Politicians are evil. No, no, no, no, no. Just look at some of Vivienne Westwood’s blogs. Politicians are criminals."... She previously threw her support behind President Obama, but hints at her frustrations as she looks toward November’s election. “I think politicians’ hands are tied a lot of the time,” she says. “I’m a Democrat. You have to vote. I love Bernie, but I don’t think he’ll get the nomination. I still think Hillary has a better shot. I think she’s going to be the President. A female President would be pretty awesome. We need that kind of energy in the world.”

Intellectuals? Politicians? Evil? Criminals? Obama? Bernie Sanders? Hillary? Energy?

Awesome.

Well, at least we know Pamela can read:

P. J. O'Rourke explains why trouble making the mortgage, plundering a retirement account and buying stuff he can't afford all qualify Marco Rubio to be president

Here:

"Rubio owns houses that he has trouble paying for. We, the American people, own two houses (of Congress) and the White House that we have trouble paying for.

"Rubio emptied his retirement account to meet current expenses. This is exactly the way Social Security works.

"Rubio bought a boat he couldn’t afford. The U.S. Navy does so all the time.

"When it comes to dealing with the federal budget, Rubio has the kind of experience that counts."

Destroying Trump means even disgraced Rolling Stone becomes a credible source

The Daily Beast, here:

'Asked what she thought of the comment and of Trump’s explanation that he was referring to her “persona” when he told a Rolling Stone reporter to “look at that face. Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?" Fiorina paused and then went in for the kill.

'“I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” she said.'

Feminism uber alles, even if all you've got is a made up story about campus rape.

Retired admirals can swallow gays in the military, but not Donald Trump

A couple of retired lawyer-admirals are fit to be tied over Trump's attack on John McCain, according to this story in The Daily Beast, which purports to represent the feelings of the military generally:

"And it wasn’t just them—veterans groups and veterans themselves have taken deep offense to Trump’s remarks, especially given Trump never served in the Vietnam War, as the Arizona senator did. Trump instead received a medical deferment in 1968."

Did anyone, anywhere in the military, retired or otherwise, similarly rise up to denounce the Gay Putsch?

I STILL CAN'T HEAR YOU MAGGOTS!

The fact of the matter is, this country doesn't need a house cleaning of just its political class, but of its officer corps as well. Obama has thought so, too, getting rid of the men we most need, the patriots who believe in moral absolutes, in killing the enemy and winning, and replacing them with women, faggots and attorneys. You know, people like himself.

Jonathan Turley call your office, Sally Kohn has already decided Christians deserve no dignity

Professor of Law Jonathan Turley, here:

'But if we are to protect the dignity of all citizens, we need to be careful that dignity is not simply a new way for the majority to decide who belongs and who does not in our “Nation’s social order.”'

Lesbian activist Sally Kohn, here:

'Will anti-gay Christians be politically and socially ostracized? I sure hope so. Just as those orthodox Christians who still believe in strict, traditional gender roles have been increasingly mocked as absurd.'

Sally Kohn affects traditionalism by residing in Brooklyn, New York, with a partner Sarah Hansen and "their" daughter Willa.

P. J. O'Rourke is a know nothing, about the dress of Donald Trump and of George Washington

Here:

Show me one candidate who has the dignity of Washington . . ..

[T]ypical of modern Americans is Trump’s bad taste. ... He puts his own individual stamp on gaucherie. And we like it. We’re a country that cherishes being individuals as much as we cherish being gauche.

Trump’s suits have a cut and sheen as if they came from the trunk sale of a visiting Bombay tailor staying in a cheap hotel in Trump’s native Queens and taking a nip between fittings. Trump wears neckties in Outer Borough colors. And, Donald, the end of your necktie belongs up around your belt buckle, not between your knees and your nuts. Trump’s haircut makes Kim Jong Un laugh.

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Washington abandoned the parodied powdered wig of custom and tied and powdered his own long hair, and to his first inauguration as president he deliberately wore a suit made from brown broadcloth from Connecticut instead of the formal black imported from Britain in order to drive home his Americanism.

To say one likes Trump's gaucherie is completely disingenuous while pivoting to correct it. It shows that P. J. O'Rourke's libertarianism is short on the Americanism and long on the snobbery of cosmopolitan liberalism, the readership of The Daily Beast.

Hysterical Glenn Beck makes hysterical liberals, well, hysterical

It's hard to keep all the hysteria separate at The Daily Beast, where libertarian hysteria meets liberal hysteria and proves what we knew all along: hysteria is a defining feature of both liberalism and libertarianism.

Glenn Beck:

'“I would open it up to all drugs [potentially being legalized],” and leave it up to the states.'

The Daily Beast:

'In Beck’s telling, the main consequence of this police escalation and the war on drugs was not the mass incarceration of millions . . .."

The one exaggerates what society can stand, the other what it can't.

Beer, wine and liquor have a long record of being more or less controllable while opiates do not. No one with much experience of the latter is clamoring for their wider use.

On the other side 2.3 million adult incarcerates barely qualifies as millions in a society of 321 million people. The only people demanding the release of the duly captive are Democrats and other racists.

Surprise: Lefty Michael Tomasky wants to punish the middle class with an increase in the regressive gasoline tax

Here in "Pony Up, Middle Class, for a Gas Tax", recommending Hillary do it in 2017 like her husband did with income taxes in 1993, by lying about it:

"And the rich, even though they’re rich, only have so much to contribute. The top marginal tax rate just isn’t going to get much higher, and the corporate tax rate if anything should be lowered (although as loopholes are simultaneously closed). So you’re going to have to pay a little.

"I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this for a campaign. But let us not forget that the husband of the putative Democratic nominee in 2016 got into office in 1993 and promptly raised taxes, and fairly substantially, on just about everybody."

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Of course, Tomasky doesn't mention Bill Clinton specifically promising in October 1992 NOT TO RAISE TAXES on the middle class, period.

Americans were forced in the aftermath of those tax increases to plunder home equity to maintain their standard of living. Owners' equity as a percentage of the value of household real estate subsequently plunged from 60.88% when Clinton was elected to 57.43% in the autumn of 1997 even as those housing values began to soar in the gestating housing bubble. We won't digress about how Clinton then threw gasoline on the housing fire in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 just as the percentage of owners' equity had hit that new low.

What's noteworthy is how enthusiastic the left is to punish the middle class, now as then. They haven't changed a wit, and neither have their methods. Everyone is paying higher taxes now in the form of healthcare premiums (hello HillaryCare), and if they get their way they'll raise federal gasoline taxes, too.

Of all the taxes which hurt working and middle class people more it's gasoline taxes, euphemistically referred to as user taxes by libertarians. The current federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon generates about $131 of federal revenue for every vehicle driven 15,000 miles annually getting 21mpg. While that's hardly noticeable to your person making $50,000 per year, a mere quarter percentage point, it's like adding almost one percentage point to the taxes of a minimum wage earner making $15,000.

The problem is then greatly magnified by the states, which add on another 29.89 cents per gallon on average, also in the name of transportation funding. Suddenly your 1% tax on the poorest drivers becomes a 2.3% tax.

Any addition at the federal level will only exacerbate this regressiveness. It's not that liberals don't know any of this. They do. It's just that they don't care.

Everyone benefits from roads, not just the users. Everyone should pay for them.

Excellent visual gag from P.J. O'Rourke and The Daily Beast today about Senator Crockagewea

Here, and I made sure that I didn't ruin it for ya.

WaPo claims to be scared Congress has more Tea Party radicals now, but P.J. O'Rourke knows better

And who better to really know than a fellow-traveling Tea Party libertarian?

Here:

[Scott] Brown lost the Senate race to Democrat incumbent Jean Shaheen because Scott once posed nude for Cosmo. “Naked male Republican” is not a thought anyone, Republicans included, wants in his or her mind, even if this particular one happens to be buff.

Most of the Republicans America just elected ain’t. And I’m glad of it. We’re seeing more of the old-fashioned establishment-type Republicans who keep their pants and pantyhose on. And who don’t get them in a wad over every little piece of legislation.

The 114th Congress is not going to be full of people who, every time a bill is brought to a vote, have to go dig up the grave of James Madison and ask Jim if the bill is Constitutional. ...

Never mind that young people, women, Hispanics, and blacks forgot to vote. In two years those young people will have done a lot of growing up. What happens when you’re a grown-up? You vote for someone named Bush. Women will probably forget to vote again. You know how forgetful women are. “Did I lose an earring?” “Where’s my purse?” “I could have sworn I left the car keys right here.” And Republican policies for robust job growth and business opportunity will have moved Hispanics and blacks to the top of the socio-economic ladder. Once you get an in-ground pool, you’re a good Republican.

Anyway, this good Republican can dream, can’t he?

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Ted Cruz and Justin Amash, call your offices.

Stupidest thing P.J. O'Rourke ever wrote

Here:

"Imagine trying to make the Ten Commandments into laws."

Hm. I thought we already had.

Stock markets remain closed on Sundays, Good Friday, Thanksgiving and Christmas. At least five states still explicitly prohibit car sales on Sundays, and most dealers elsewhere are closed anyway. Alcohol sales remain restricted or prohibited on Sundays in many places. Massachusetts still has a one-day-of-rest-in-seven statute. Most banks are closed on Sundays, along with many other businesses. Congress rarely works on Sundays, let alone Monday through Friday.

And then we have these trifles of the law which never seem to go out of style, unless you are a feminist, a banker or a politician:

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

That's the problem with libertarianism. It has no imagination.

Lefty Peter Beinart Calls Republican Surrender A Victory

Here:

If this is Republican surrender, I hope I never see Republican victory. ... Let’s pause for a moment to underscore the point. In early September, a “clean” CR—including sequester cuts—that funded the government into 2014 was considered a Republican victory by both the Republican House Majority Leader and Washington’s most prominent Democratic think tank. Now, just over a month later, the media is describing the exact same deal as Republican “surrender.”

Kook Fringe Republican Comes Out For Gun Control

David Frum, here.

Guns don't kill people, Canadians do.

Libertarian Megan McArdle Makes Me Want To Puke

Because she thinks there is anything which can make abortion humane, here:

"I knew about the Gosnell case, and I wish I had followed it more closely, even though I'd rather not.  In fact, those of us who are pro-choice should be especially interested.  The whole point of legal abortion is to prevent what happened in Philadelphia: to make it safer and more humane.  Somehow that ideal went terribly, horribly awry.  We should demand to know why."

Abortion at any stage is the brutal murder of another human being, the mark of an unrefined, barbarous people, and our country is full of them. To exercise humanity in this situation would be to sterilize every woman who comes into an abortion clinic, and every man who put her there. They should have no right ever again to inflict such pain and injustice on another utterly defenseless human being.

It Takes One To Know One: Carl Bernstein Smells Radicalism In The Air

Carl Bernstein of Woodward-Bernstein fame thinks he's caught a whiff of radicalism in Mitt Romney and the Tea Party, here at The Daily Beast, imagining all sort of vain things about both of them.

By the end of the hysterical tirade he calms down a little and realizes his own progressivism qualifies as radicalism, too, but he'd much rather call his beloved progressivism a "transformational movement". In other words, "progressivism good, radicalism bad", sort of like how liberalism got a bad name and had to be replaced at all costs if liberalism were to continue to retain influence.

The reality is the Tea Party is a reactionary movement trying to forestall the radicalism of Barack Obama. Reactionary movements often are mistaken for radical movements because in order to succeed in their objective they have to get to the root being yanked out of the ground by others, by the revolutionaries, and replant it. As such reactionaries, the Tea Partiers are counter-revolutionaries: "Put It Back!"

This is not to say that reactionary movements cannot be hijacked by ideologues any less than true revolutionary movements are inspired by them. The American revolutionaries are a case in point. They never embraced the idealisms which turned into a class war against aristocrats in France. It is unthinkable that the history of the early American independence movement would have turned out as it did had it otherwise been a movement about liberty, equality and fraternity. Former loyalists were welcomed back. While enthusiasm for the idealism of natural rights among Tea Party activists is reminiscent of this, especially among the libertarian elements, the genesis of the movement was in reaction to Obama's proposed mortgage bailouts of deadbeat homeowners, many of whom were becoming infamous for "walking away". Like a good reactionary, Rick Santelli gave voice to his indignation at these people on national television in February but characteristically planned a Tea Party protest on the beach of Lake Michigan for months later, during his summer vacation. In the interim, he had to go to work.

The people, however, had other ideas about waiting. But unlike real radicals such as the Occupy Wall Street types, their protests were peaceful, orderly, clean, and came to an end, and then transformed themselves into the constructive activity of political action, retaking the US House in 2010 for the Republicans in order to stop Obama. As a political movement, it should be understood in those practical prophylactic terms despite the efforts of Republicans to co-opt the movement. The Tea Party is a movement of Americans who are radical only in the sense that they have rediscovered their roots in the constitution and the world which gave it birth.

The true radicals in the bad sense are those who would extirpate them.  

Romney Doesn't Oppose Obama's Financier Fascism, He's Part Of It

"[D]espite taking office in the midst of a massive financial meltdown, Obama’s administration has not prosecuted a single heavy-hitter among those responsible for the financial crisis. To the contrary, he’s staffed his team with big bankers and their allies. Under the Bush-Obama bailouts the big financial institutions have feasted like pigs at the trough, with the six largest banks borrowing almost a half trillion dollars from uncle Ben Bernanke’s printing press. In 2013 the top four banks controlled more than 40 percent of the credit markets in the top 10 states—up by 10 percentage points from 2009 and roughly twice their share in 2000. Meantime, small banks, usually the ones serving Main Street businesses, have taken the hit along with the rest of us with more than 300 folding since the passage of Dodd-Frank, the industry-approved bill to “reform” the industry. ...

"In a sane world, one would expect Republicans to run against this consolidation of power, that has taxpayers propping up banks that invest vast amounts in backing the campaigns of the lawmakers who levy those taxes. The party would appeal to grassroots capitalists, investors, small banks and their customers who feel excluded from the Washington-sanctioned insiders' game. The popular appeal is there. The Tea Party, of course, began as a response against TARP. ...

"Romney himself is so clueless as to be touting his strong fund-raising with big finance. His top contributors list reads something like a rogue’s gallery from the 2008 crash: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Citicorp, and Barclays."

Read the whole thing from Joel Kotkin, here.

Individual Mandate is Effective and Efficient? So is a Bullet, or Zyklon B.

Jonathan Gruber defends his ObamaCare monster child, here, and he's written a 160 pp. comic book to explain it to the ignorant masses. Just $14 at fine book shops everywhere.

The Daily Beast supplies the word "efficient," which shows the attraction government force has for the left.

Militarized US Police Units Have Grown in Number by at Least 60 Percent Since 2000

From The Daily Beast (link):

The homeland security market for state and local agencies is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2014, up from an estimated $15.8 billion in fiscal 2009, according to the Homeland Security Research Corp.

The rise of equipment purchases has paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams, but reliable numbers are hard to come by. The National Tactical Officers Association, which provides training and develops SWAT standards, says it currently has about 1,650 team memberships, up from 1,026 in 2000.

SPLC Claims 500 Percent Growth in Active Patriot Militias

As reported here, in a story about the recent arrest of members of a so-called militia in Georgia:

“This is only the latest manifestation of the patriot militia movement we have seen grow since 2008,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in a phone interview. “In 2008 we counted 149 patriot militia groups operating in the United States—by 2010 that number had increased to 824—that’s a 500 percent increase. It’s hard not to notice that this jump coincides with both the rise to power of Barack Obama and the subprime mortgage collapse.”

Actually it's a 453 percent increase, but liberals never were very good at math.

For example, an illegal weapons charge against a Hutaree militia member was recently dropped, evidently because the FBI was using a ruler made in China which was short by an inch. We'll have to wait for defense statements on that one when the case finally comes to trial, two years after the arrests in March 2010 in the wake of the passage of ObamaCare.

The Georgia case is four old coots in what we used to call an old-fashioned conspiracy to commit murder, but in this day and age where everything is exaggerated to the superlative degree (I'm great!), the disgruntled federal employees' plot becomes a TERROR PLOT and their self-description as a MILITIA gets taken as seriously as Barack Obama's claim to be a Christian.

If the FBI could hear the conversation around the family dinner table every night since that Commie bastard got elected president, we'd all be in jail thanks to George Bush's anti-terror legislation now in the hands of a leftist ideologue.

The next thing you know the Southern Poverty Law Center will start counting well-armed husbands, wives and children as militias when all they are is FAMILIES.

Onward Christian soldiers!