Donald Trump is already hard at work making long lists of all the things he's not going to accomplish as president, which he'll foolishly fritter away his time on

 Ten points about The Swamp.

Seven points about The War on the Drug Cartels.

Trump's saying all this stuff and we don't even know yet if Republicans will win the US House, where they have 214 seats as of right now and lead narrowly in 8 undecided races. If they win them all they'll have 222 seats, with 218 needed for the majority.

If not, well that'll be the end of all ambition, now won't it?

222 at best is a very narrow margin to accomplish anything anyway, a mere continuation of the status quo where Republicans in the House must tread lightly to keep the caucus unified with a very similarly sized narrow majority (220).

What kind of sweep was this? Once again the Trump movement . . . isn't.

It would be easy to call this stuff hubris from Trump. Let's just say he still hasn't learned anything about how to accomplish anything of relatively permanent value. He has NO priorities when everything is a priority. He is, once again, unserious.

The Senate will be in Republican hands, so we'll at least get more judicial appointments who might advance traditional American principles of law and order.

The scuttlebutt is that the first agenda item in Congress will be making Trump's expiring tax reform permanent.

I can imagine him having to waste the entire first year on this. He'd be better off quickly settling for its extension for another ten years under reconciliation rules, and then move along smartly to immigration and energy reforms before the midterms are upon us in 2026, after which he'll be the lamest of lame ducks.

If there's any hope of boosting GDP and improving everyone's pocketbook they've got to make energy reform the priority. And mere immigration enforcement solves an untold number of other problems which bedevil the country, like illegal drugs, crime, and social spending.

Spending bills will come as they will, and should simply aim to starve the federal government of money to shrink it, as could have been the case last time but nothing changed. The beast grows naturally because permanent spending programs are indexed to inflation. That isn't going to be stopped. Growing the economy to pay the bills is therefore job one.

I'm expecting very little positive from this lot, but I do hope J. D. Vance will emerge at the end of it to take us to a better future.

Democrats who say they fear Trump because he's an authoritarian are absolutely comic. Watch for rogue judges to hamstring him just like last time, and Trump will bluster and fume and things will simply muddle along.

But, of course, unforeseen events like wars have a way of intruding and making mooks of us all. Let's hope Trump can finally make a deal to end and prevent them.

Justin Amash told us he was going to mop the floor with Mike Rogers lol

The loss is sad, but the hubris is sadder.

Trump attacking the Tennessee Governor Republican Bill Lee is another example of Trump's stupid politics

It's hubris.

Greek historian Victor Davis Hanson, born in 1953, flips his lid, laughably blames every single problem in America today on the Baby Boomers in a wildly insane rant, my favorite being . . .

 

 . . . the Baby Boomers destroyed the southern border . . ..

Here.

Immigration policy in the United States was forever radically altered in 1965, by no one born in the Baby Boom.

The average age of a US Representative in 1965 was 51.4, the Congress of which overwhelmingly passed the destructive reform 320-70, which ended the American commitment to social homogeneity prevailing from the 1920s.

This was an act of American hubris, born of victory in WWII. One would think Hanson would know about that.

Their average birth year puts them in 1914, children of the mentally-ill Progressive Era (1896–1917) which gave us the income tax (1909), popular election of senators (1913), prohibition of alcohol (1919), and women's suffrage (1920), all of which were sufferable as long as their was social stability. Well, except for the prohibition.

The biggest problem affecting Baby Boomers is a lazy attention to our own history, and perhaps self-hatred.

Ann Coulter: Ron DeSantis was filled with hubris from 2022 and misread the room, thinking the whole country was his Florida oyster

His 20-point victory in 2022, when Republicans were wiped out in the rest of the country, made DeSantis disinclined to consider the advice of people who were just trying to help him. ... DeSantis was running as if the entire voting population consisted of people with kids under the age of 18. In fact, that’s only about 20% of voters.

More.

I said as much last July, noting that 70% of Americans think having illegitimate children is morally acceptable.

The country is literally demoralized, which explains why it has the leadership it has, except in places like Florida, at least through 2026.

Florida is one of twenty-five states where governors are term-limited.  

I've wanted Trump to just go away since about January 2019, Newt Gingrich since about 2012

Because it's all "just words", as Barack Obama once said.

 

Tonight Is the Most Important Moment in the GOP Primary

Newt Gingrich, NY Sun

 

If someone hits a home run with language, ideas, and/or attitude, a substantial number of disheartened and despairing anti-Trump donors may notice — and decide to write really big checks.

 

Shocking right? A politician asserting the primacy of politics.

 

Well, "the most important moment" doesn't exist. There is a long series of important moments, when the voters have their actual say in the polling booths of the individual primaries and the elections, at which point the politicians had better deliver on the words, or else.

Most of them don't, but we fall for them every time, and they know it.

But this is most certainly true:

Given all the press coverage early in Mr. DeSantis’ candidacy — and the substantial amount of money he raised — his slide has been the biggest Republican story this year.     

 

Yes, it is the biggest story because Ron DeSantis has consistently delivered on his words in Florida . . .

and the voters nationally don't give a flying fig. 

 

Newt should know better.

 

He followed up his words as a congressman during the 1980s with a Speakership in the 1990s consisting of a temporarily successful if mixed bag of policies. Which is why he, along with Mitt Romney, subsequently never made the big time. You can't run against ObamaCare by promising RomneyCare or HeritageFoundationCare instead. Donald Trump in his hubris never learned the lesson either, squandering away his political capital on overturning it in 2017.

The majority of Republicans now remain content with the feckless entertainer who mouths "just words". They have no appetite for the humdrum of an executive who actually delivers and executes real, lasting reform.

 

This remains a not serious country, ridiculously adolescent to the end. 

Trump predicated his entire 2016 campaign on attacking the deep state, the Bush GOP, and Hillary, so he should have been ready to have ZERO allies anywhere, but was not

 Why anyone remains indignant about this, like Goodwin, is beyond me.

A presidential campaign in the US is normally a war, between the two parties. Turning it into a multi-front war, however, as Trump did, was pure hubris on his part.

His catastrophic record of appointments simply amplifies the point.

Trump didn't bring with him into government his own army, let alone get the loyalty of the GOP army he had attacked relentlessly for 18 months. NeverTrump didn't materialize out of thin air. Getting anything accomplished in Washington with your side on your side is hard enough. Trump didn't have even that.

Trump narrowly won the battle of 2016, but utterly lost the war, because he was unprepared.

Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?  Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace.

Trump Stabbed in Back By Deep State

Michael Goodwin, New York Post

Hanoi Jane's hubris is the hubris of us all, left, right, and in between

 Old age is supposed to teach you a little humility, if life before that hasn't taught you any:

What we do or don’t do right now will determine what kind of future there will be.

Says the 85 year old who has been diagnosed with cancer.

Hillary's personnel hubris contributed to her failure to win, Trump's personnel hubris is contributing to his failure to succeed

Both sides tweeting about this at the same time.

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

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.

Jonah Goldberg, Charles Cooke and NATIONAL REVIEW have it all wrong: The Founders' modest goal was to keep CHRISTIANS from killing each other

The Conservative Divide:

The post-liberals think that Enlightenment-based liberalism is the disease afflicting society because it has no answer for how people should live. They have a point: It is not a religion or moral philosophy. But it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, as National Review’s Charles Cooke rightly put it, classical liberalism was a system designed to keep people of different religions from killing each other.

This is hubris, but not American hubris. America wasn't about people of different religions, broadly conceived. To say otherwise remains the Big Lie of contemporary liberalism.

The Founders sought to create a unique home for mostly English Christian diversity, which meant Protestantism in relation to Catholicism, where its citizens would "assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them". 

Classical liberalism in America was as much a creature of Protestant Christianity as it was of the Enlightenment. It wouldn't have existed without the unique history and interaction of the two phenomena. By importing non-Christian religion into the Founders' equation as liberals do today, however, private hostility among Christians has been all but replaced by public hostility toward Christians. Some parties actually want to kill Christians just as much as some Protestants and Catholics once upon a time wanted to kill each other. Some think that's actually their plan.

It's been a recipe for disaster, and we're living it more and more.

It was a difficult enough game of chess before non-Christianity got introduced. The history of Protestant-Catholic relations in America proves that. But now it's 3-D chess, and very few can play that game, or want to.

But the last person who is going to reset this game board, touted by Goldberg, is the atheist George Will, an open borders libertarian who wants any and every immigrant who can get here to come here. Nor, frankly, will the Catholic enthusiasts at First Things Magazine be of much help. They are not inspired by American sensibilities, by definition, and represent Protestantism's fiercest theological opponents and are at the same time Catholic illegal immigrants' most practical defenders. Their loyalty is plain. All the ills of America and the West they blame on both the Enlightenment and Protestantism.

Both of these parties, ostensibly opposed to each other, seem to agree on one thing: reducing the Protestants to minority status.  

The hatred for what we were and what we are, coming from our supposed allies on the right, should astonish more Republican voters.

Jews now have Israel, thanks to the West. They should move there. Muslims have Arabia, and much more. We don't need them here. Catholics have Rome.

America is the once and future home of Protestantism. Everyone deserves a home.

Ann Coulter shows her hubris here, opining about unemployment which she understands little better than Rush Limbaugh

Yes, there was an effort in 2010 and 2011 to track Americans unemployed "260 weeks or longer", but that is irrelevant to the unemployment rate, which has declined so much because so many are no longer counted in the labor force, that's all. That would include the long term "unemployed", who aren't really unemployed because those people get kicked out of the labor force according to the definitions used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

You may not like that. You may not agree with that. But that's what happens. If you haven't looked for work in 4 weeks but have in the last year, you'll still be in the labor force, but after a year you are out if you've given up looking. And presto, when millions can't find work in this shrunken economy, they drop out by not looking any longer, so the labor force shrinks, and thus fewer people get counted as unemployed. It's as simple as that.

A better way to look at it is, How many people have full time jobs?

Since 1968 the average percent of the civilian noninstitutional population employed full time at peaks has been 51.2%. At troughs it has been 48.6%. In February 2019 49.9% had full time jobs.

At 51.2% in February 2019 instead of at 49.9%, however, we'd have about 3.46 million more working full time than we actually have.

That's what is wrong with the Trump economy inherited from Obama.

There remains no economic driver for a jobs boom.

Ann is still right, however. Why on earth would you import more people to America in a situation of labor slack like this?

It's insane, and perverse. It does active harm to people already here who can't find full time work.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump hasn't got a clue about this.

Like I said, we are well and truly screwed.

Liz Peek's talk radio echo chamber: Trump's already solved the jobs crisis

This morning on the Steve Gruber show.

This is the sort of hubris which precedes debacles, especially when the hubris isn't justified by the facts.

The difference between an employment population ratio at 60.5% today vs. 63% pre-Great Recession is in excess of 6 million jobs, or 120,000 votes in each and every one of the fifty states in the union. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by fewer than 80,000 votes total. Failure to expand employment decisively beyond current levels is courting disaster.

Hardly a time for gloating.

Ann Coulter: The point isn't being made enough that the Russia investigation began because of Peter Strzok

Here.

It was the hubris and political animus of a single high-level FBI functionary, Peter Strzok, which sought to stymie the political will of the American people who elected Trump by presenting a phony dossier as credible evidence to a FISA court in order to surveil a presidential candidate.

The whole thing is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Lois Lerner affair, when one person in The Swamp used her position to curtail the free-speech rights of The Tea Party during the 2010 revolt against Obamacare and government bailouts of all and sundry except the taxpayers.

"If a nuclear device leveled DC I don't know if I would shed a tear, unless I heard this pile was out of town at the time."

   

So-called National People's Congress of China votes 2,959-2 to remove term limits for Xi Jinping, with 3 abstentions

The story is here.

So, our two main rivals in the world are now each ruled by perpetual dictators, as they were in the past.

And to think from 1992 some in the West foolishly accepted the idea of the end of history, "that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government."

Not even Francis Fukuyama believed it for more than three years.

Unfortunately the George W. Bush administration, in its ignorant hubris, did.

But here we now are, having squandered the intervening years, and Trump is just fine with the new dictatorships. He admires them no less than Obama did. They are grandiose, like he is, like Obama is. He wishes he could be one of them, too.

When was the last time you heard a statesman from the West call on these rival powers to throw off their chains and embrace freedom?

I can't remember, either.

Freedom as we have known it in the world is in great peril, and we hardly care.

Therefore we will lose it, sooner rather than later.

Laugh of the day: Trump's goal is reportedly 208,333 new jobs every month for 10 years

So says the story at The Daily Caller here.

Har har HAR........dee har har.

After 16 months (November 2016 inclusive through February 2018) the actual monthly rate of gain has been 182,500.

If you prefer from inauguration month instead of election month (January 2017 inclusive through February 2018), 14 months, the actual monthly rate has been 177,214.

February 2017 inclusive, first full month of presidency, through February 2018, 13 months, the rate has been 175,461.

From the post-recession low in February 2010 (not inclusive), exactly 8 years ago, through February 2018 the actual monthly rate of gain has been 192,197.

So by no measure of Trump's performance is he yet anywhere near the actual average performance post-recession of 2007, let alone near his own goal.

The best overall performance in living memory was under Bill Clinton when monthly gains averaged over 242,000 monthly over 8 years. But this coincided with the peaking of the Baby Boom in 1957 clocking in 20 years in the labor force by the end of the Clinton era, in 1999. The Baby Boom fueled the Clinton boom in every way, from jobs to housing to GDP, and also the stock market.

It's been all downhill from there.

Since peak total nonfarm employment in February 2001, just before the recession of that year through February 2018, the economy has added only 75,500 jobs a month. 

Good luck to Mr. Trump, but the demographic odds are not in his favor, on top of the headwinds from his own immigration policy.

In this context Trump's stated goals do not reflect knowledge of reality or self-knowledge, only hubris.

The Anthropocene Follies

Seems some people at Nature want to change the name of the current geological interglacial period now commonly known as the Holocene (the "completely newest period" for you Greek men out there, a very small part of, or the end of the much larger "most recent" Pleistocene and its Ice Ages, depending on who you read) to the Anthropocene (the new human epoch). To some this signifies that if you thought science had long ago killed-off anthropocentrism, you must think again because geology is being pressured to ascribe change to human influence just as has climate science. 

The wags here have suggested some amusing alternatives to the Anthropocene:

• Hubrisocene
• Windowsocene
• Googolocene
• Neocene
• Hollowscene
• Hollowcene
• Misanthropocene (very popular)
• Stultucene (probably the most anthropologically apt)
• Epicene (not that there's anything wrong with that)
• Crimescene
• Hubriocene
• Absurdopocene (has a real ring to it)
• Alarmistocene
• Nihilicene
• Anthroporcene (my personal favorite, but should be Anthropoporcene)
• Bulshitocene
• Horshitocene
• Whorshitocene (tmi if you ask me)
• Algoreopocene (quite)
• Narcissistocene
• Narcissene (not to be confused with Nazarene but gets at the religious underpinnings)
• Narcissicene
• Climeobscene
• Preposterousocene
• Mommymommylookatmeocene
• Bureaucrocene
• Anthropobscene
• Plasticene (for all you Beatles fans)
• Wherethehelldidiputitcene
• Mannthropocene (that's inviting a lawsuit I'd say)
• Sputnikocene (too brief to be measured)
• Incrediblyobcene
• Anthropoidiotcene
• Needtobecene (for the selfie craze)
• Egocene (nice)
• Fantacene
• Herbacene
• Vulcacene
• ChickenLittleocene
• Idiocene.

Perhaps more amusing is how contemporary science still must fall back on a long dead language of the Bronze Age in order to fish out the finest distinctions which only the Greek language can offer. Some animals are indeed more equal than others.

Leftist UK Guardian means to slam USA as fading empire in headline, backtracks in actual article to slam empire of NASA

Well, what would you expect from a has-been empire which still isn't over its eclipse by the USA? They should have figured out how to keep us while they still could, but their hubris got in the way. Terribly sorry, old boy.

Here:

The Empire, of course, is Nasa, a once noble but now creaky agency that has devolved from moonshots to renting rides from the Russians, all in the span of Buzz Aldren’s adulthood.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey commies! Learn how to capitalize. It's called NASA. And what exactly is notable in the history of British spaceflight, anyway?

Hm. Is there something called British spaceflight?

Liberal hubris two months ago about Ebola virus may mean death for many Americans

Flashback to late July when you were on the beach. At the time the mendacious CDC said Ebola wouldn't spread "widely" in the US, not that it wouldn't get here, and you went on with your novel and your drink (dateline NBC here):

“It is not a potential of Ebola spreading widely in the U.S. That is not in the cards,” Frieden told reporters on a conference call. “We are not telling people who are essential to leave.” ... “This is a tragic, painful, dreadful, merciless virus. It is the largest, most complex outbreak that we know of in history,” Frieden said. “We at CDC are surging our response along with others. Although it will not be quick and it will not be easy, we do know how to stop Ebola.” ... “We have quarantine stations at all the major ports of entry,” he said. People cannot transmit Ebola to others unless they are sick, and Ebola makes you so sick that it’s pretty obvious pretty quickly, Frieden said. A traveler will be flagged by the flight crew and if someone gets sick after arrival in the U.S. they will almost certainly seek medical care. “Ebola poses little risk to the U.S. general population,” Frieden said. “Ebola is spread as people get sicker and sicker. They have fever and may develop serious symptoms.” Ebola doesn’t spread through the air like measles. People who get sick are family members or healthcare workers in prolonged and close contact with victims. ... “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” he said. “This is going to take at least three to six months, even if everything goes well.”

-----------------------------------------------------

If they knew how to stop Ebola, then why is it here two months later? Maybe because liberals couldn't get past their first ideological barrier: their commitment to the idea of world citizenship and thus of nations without borders and of free travel between them. Kind of reminds me of free trade, which has infected America with a disease known as unemployment and underemployment.

Stopping the spread of deadly viral disease requires restrictions on international travel, and contact tracing by every doctor, two things no longer routinely practiced in America nor supported by the health authorities. The latter has been considered "discriminatory" since the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. And while AIDS has been more or less contained in the US for other reasons, sexually transmitted disease has not. Half the population carries one.

Your doctor is most likely part of the problem, not part of the solution.