Rush Limbaugh thanks Mark Meadows today when it was Meadows who helped stop the immigration showdown in October

Neither Meadows nor Limbaugh (Ted Cruz supporter) really want the wall.

And Trump obviously doesn't either, otherwise he wouldn't have treated the issue like he has, in sharp contrast to his campaign for president.

Here's the grifter today taking money from you suckers:

Nancy doesn’t even run the House yet, and she’s out there saying Trump couldn’t get the votes — and he did, and it was because of Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan and the Freedom Caucus. They did their special order earlier this week and they let the president that know they would have his back. It’d be easy for the president to think that he’s isolated, but it was I think a very important thing that they did to make it a point to go to the floor of the House and special orders to make sure that everybody knew — not just the president — that they, significant number of Republicans in the House, would have his back.

Justin Raimondo, a libertarian with class; Justin Amash, not so much

James Pinkerton for The American Conservative completely falls for Hillary's "new" immigration views

Hillary Clinton: Conservatives Were Right on Mass Migration:

[H]ere in the U.S., conservatives—as distinct, of course, from libertarians—are now able to say, “Even Hillary Clinton and John Kerry agree on the need for border enforcement.” And in political terms, that’s not a small victory.

 Commenter Blitzkrieg spoke for many when he opined that Pinkerton "missed the point entirely".

When it comes to divide and conquer, libertarians are the easiest to defeat because they're already divided

Something something about hang together or hang separately.

Despicable libertarian judge Bernard Friedman appointed by Ronald Reagan dismisses cases against Muslim clit cutters in Detroit

This is the same libertarian, anti-conservative, judge who overturned Michigan's 2004 Marriage Act in 2014. He threw out the cases on the grounds the law passed under the Commerce Clause had nothing to do with commerce because Muslim clit cutting isn't a large market with a measurable impact on commerce. It will have when the country is full of Muslims. What a damn fool.

Why must we still live under the thumb of judges, let alone under those appointed in the 1980s?

 Judge dismisses female genital mutilation charges in historic case:

In a major blow to the federal government, a judge in Detroit has declared America's female genital mutilation law unconstitutional, thereby dismissing the key charges against two Michigan doctors and six others accused of subjecting at least nine minor girls to the cutting procedure in the nation's first FGM case.

The historic case involves minor girls from Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota, including some who cried, screamed and bled during the procedure and one who was given Valium ground in liquid Tylenol to keep her calm, court records show.

The judge's ruling also dismissed charges against three mothers, including two Minnesota women whom prosecutors said tricked their 7 -year-old daughters into thinking they were coming to metro Detroit for a girls' weekend, but instead had their genitals cut at a Livonia clinic as part of a religious procedure.

U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman concluded that "as despicable as this practice may be," Congress did not have the authority to pass the 22-year-old federal law that criminalizes female genital mutilation, and that FGM is for the states to regulate. FGM is banned worldwide and has been outlawed in more than 30 countries, though the U.S. statute had never been tested before this case. 

"As laudable as the prohibition of a particular type of abuse of girls may be ... federalism concerns deprive Congress of the power to enact this statute," Friedman wrote in his 28-page opinion, noting: "Congress overstepped its bounds by legislating to prohibit FGM ... FGM is a 'local criminal activity' which, in keeping with long-standing tradition and our federal system of government, is for the states to regulate, not Congress." 

Currently, 27 states have laws that criminalize female genital mutilation, including Michigan, whose FGM law is stiffer than the federal statute, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, compared with five under federal law. Michigan's FGM law was passed last year in the wake of the historic case and applies to both doctors who conduct the procedure, and parents who transport a child to have it done. The defendants in this case can't be retroactively charged under the new law. ...

"There is nothing commercial or economic about FGM," Friedman writes. "As despicable as this practice may be, it is essentially a criminal assault. ... FGM is not part of a larger market and it has no demonstrated effect on interstate commerce. The commerce clause does not permit Congress to regulate a crime of this nature."

Libertarian Senator Mike Lee talks grandly about "conservative" criminal justice reform when all he's after is throwing out federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses

Mike Lee thinks selling drugs (even while armed with a gun!) doesn't hurt anyone when the evidence is pouring in that marijuana is bad for the health of those who use it.

And he obviously hasn't lived with a user. If he had he'd know they make lousy family members and lousy Americans.

Did the young father of two let his children play with his gun, Senator?

Thanks for nothing, Utah!

Mike Lee: A conservative case for criminal justice reform:

For example, when I served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Salt Lake City, Weldon Angelos -- a young father of two with no criminal record -- was convicted of selling three dime bags of marijuana to a paid informant over a short period of time.

These were not violent crimes. No one was hurt. But because Angelos had been in possession of a gun at the time he sold the drugs (a gun which was neither brandished nor discharged in connection with the offense), the judge was forced by federal law to give him a 55-year prison sentence. The average federal sentence for assault is just two years. The average murderer only gets 15 years. While acknowledging the obvious excessiveness of the sentence, the judge explained that the applicable federal statutes gave him no authority to impose a less-severe prison term, noting that “only Congress can fix this problem.”

Marijuana legalization is the spearhead of America's anti-conservative libertarian tide and ultimately of America's decline

Eventually there will be no place left to hide from marijuana users in America. And they are going to be the end of America as we once knew it. Marijuana legalization is coming to every state in the country, for the reason that a shared version of libertarianism is now America's dominant ideology, irrespective of political party. The consequences of extreme individualism are about to assert themselves like never before. Formerly, self-control and self-denial as practised by countless millions of America's original inhabitants and their descendants had been key to making America the great country which it became. Those values made possible the hard work and savings which were the necessary predicates of that greatness. But all that is in the rear view mirror now. As Baby Boomers squandered  the achievements of their parents, their children have learned from them only too well and have drunk deep from their well of narcissism. People like this will never make the country great like it was. A country full of laid back mellow folks  will never work hard and save, nor even acknowledge its need to do so. It is not a coincidence that the most hated men in America in 2012 and 2016 didn't even drink.

Marijuana Won The Midterm Elections :

Michigan voters approved a ballot measure making their state the first in the midwest to legalize cannabis. Missouri approved an initiative to allow medical marijuana, as did Utah. Voters in several Ohio cities approved local marijuana decriminalization measures, and a number of Wisconsin counties and cities strongly approved nonbinding ballot questions calling for cannabis reform. While North Dakota's long-shot marijuana legalization measure failed, cannabis also scored a number of big victories when it came to the results of candidate races. ... In Illinois, Democrat J.B. Pritzker won the governor's race after making marijuana legalization a centerpiece of his campaign. ... Minnesota Gov.-elect Tim Walz (D) wants to "replace the current failed policy with one that creates tax revenue, grows jobs, builds opportunities for Minnesotans, protects Minnesota kids, and trusts adults to make personal decisions based on their personal freedoms." ... In New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham (D), who won the governor's race, said legalizing marijuana will bring “hundreds of millions of dollars to New Mexico’s economy." In New York, while easily reelected Gov Andrew Cuomo (D) had previously expressed opposition to legalization, he more recently empaneled a working group to draft legislation to end cannabis prohibition that the legislature can consider in 2019, a prospect whose chances just got a lot better in light of the fact that Democrats took control of the state's Senate. In Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers supports decriminalizing marijuana and allowing medical cannabis, and says he wants to put a full marijuana legalization question before voters to decide. He ousted incumbent Gov. Scott Walker (R) on Tuesday. ... Last month, a national Gallup survey found that 66 percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, including a clear majority of Republicans.

 

My no good dirty hippy Michigan Republican Party is libertarian, not conservative

The robocalls from the Michigan Republican Party are going out this weekend, urging the voters to vote against liberal proposals to "reform" gerrymandering and to allow "automatic" and same day voter registration.

The calls notably mention these as proposals 2 and 3, but never mention proposal 1 which aims to legalize possession, use and cultivation of marijuana.

It's just like term limited Republican Governor Rick Snyder's robocalls urging votes for lowly state senate and house candidates without once mentioning Republican Bill Schuette for governor, John James for Senate, or Tom Leonard for Attorney General, the Donald Trump and NRA endorsed candidates.

To be sure, a Yes vote on proposals 2 and 3 would give Michigan liberals the victories they can't achieve at the ballot box. The strategy is to make an end run around their decades of electoral failure in order to get control of redrawing district lines to favor Democrats. Flooding the zone with their dubious voters is simply the second part of the one-two punch strategy. And if their voters are high on election day, so much the better.

Not recommending a No vote on proposal 1 is simply more proof that the Michigan Republican Party isn't conservative and doesn't deserve the votes of conservatives. After decades of the war on tobacco, somehow smoking marijuana is suddenly supposed to be OK when the evidence is pouring in that it's not.

Combined with the large number of anti-Trumpers among their ranks, Michigan Republicans doubly don't deserve our votes when they run as libertarians in Republican disguise. There's a party for that. It's called the Libertarian Party. They should join it, especially you, Justin Amash, you faker.

We can't vote for Democrats, but we can vote US Taxpayers Party in many instances, and failing that, for hamburger condiments like ketchup, mustard, pickles and onions.

And on the proposals, I'll make it easy for you. Just vote No on all of them, including the Early Childhood proposal and the Caledonia operating millage. 

The damage done to conservatism by Conservatism Inc. is Orwellian

The very essence of conservatism used to be all these things, American culture, history, nation, heritage, family and faith, spokes on the wheel of its organic whole. But the libertarians have co-opted all that away and replaced it with an ideology of materialism which has erased the memory of it to the extent that the two, conservatism and libertarianism, are now indistinguishable in the popular imagination.

The "Conservatarians" are as condescending toward Trump voters today as Hillary's voters were yesterday

To Hillary, Trump voters were deplorables.

To conservatarians, Trump voters are the WrestleMania vote, the ignorant gulls who fill Trump's rallies around the country to this day.

Jon Gabriel of Ricochet and Stephen L. Miller count themselves conservatarians, here.

Like Frank Meyer's fusionism which tried to combine libertarianism and traditionalism, conservatarianism also conceives of itself as a libertarian mixture, but with social liberalism not traditionalism.

As such, however, this simply represents the failed status quo, which has been only too happy to use the traditional right at election time since Reagan but otherwise has paid but lip service to it once in power. Its main interest on the one side claims to be fiscal probity, but vainly imagines that its reprobate self even wants smaller deficits. Under Bush 43, debt to the penny soared from $5.7 trillion to $10.7 trillion. In truth, conservatarianism only affects conservatism. Its real interest is in Bacchus. 

Does a spring pour forth from the same opening fresh water and brackish? -- James 3:11

Nay, nay.

Democrats easily had stopped Kavanaugh had Senator Reid not deep sixed the filibuster rule

We'll see if Kavanaugh is truly the strong borders judge some have touted him to be.

Given the enthusiasm for him from the Bush camp, I'm not optimistic.

I would consider it a victory if at the very least Kavanaugh abandoned Justice Kennedy's radical libertarianism, but only time will tell.

Justice Anthony Kennedy is to blame for much of the polarization now evident everywhere in America

From Paul Kengor's Anthony Kennedy: Reagan’s Worst Mistake:

The Kennedy pick was supposed to calm the waters after the storm generated by the Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg nominations. ... His subsequent 30 years of judicial decisions literally redefined things as basic as life and marriage. His calamitous three decades on the court will be followed by an endless maze of legal-cultural wars and church-state battles dealing with the disastrous dust-up of what he unleashed. ... Kennedy led the majority with one of the most breathtakingly outrageous statements in the history of jurisprudence: “At the heart of liberty,” averred Kennedy, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

In short, Anthony Kennedy spearheaded America's turn into the Libertarian Party in convention, but where no one can agree about anything.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's extreme libertarianism made him the enemy of anything "civic"

From Bruce Frohnen's Anthony Kennedy’s Jurisprudence of Extreme Individualism:

Justice Kennedy’s view [is] that each of us must be “left alone” in a radical sense to define all that is important for ourselves. ... The paradigm motivating Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence is of an individual who must be protected by the courts from all outside pressures. ... For many decades, Justice Kennedy has stood for the proposition that courts should protect individuals from interference from the outside—whether by the government or by the associations (religious or otherwise) they choose to join—in their “mystical” notions of personal identity. The price of this fanciful theory of human liberty and the ability of individuals to define reality for themselves, is the breakdown of social order, the deaths of millions of innocent children, and the further marginalization of God and religion from public life. ... This accidental jurist has caused very real damage to our nation’s institutions and its very soul.

The Rush Limbaugh lie of the day: "Drain the swamp" is why Trump was sent to Washington

"Drain the swamp" was a late development in the campaign, courtesy of the libertarian Steve Bannon and former Cruz campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, also a libertarian. Arguably if Trump had dropped that rhetoric and pretended to make nice with the Establishment after he'd won we'd see far more of the things Trump ran on accomplished by now than we do.

Trump distinguished himself from every other candidate in the primaries by making the border with Mexico the central issue from the time he walked down that elevator until mid-August 2016, which, when solved, would help to solve many other problems, like drugs, disease, and crime. After Bannon and Conway came on board replacing Manafort, however, that message began to be played down, to the point that Trump's campaign nearly cratered in the Arizona town hall in late August with Sean Hannity when Trump wavered badly on the issue, polling the crowd for its opinion. That was not the same man we had been seeing for an entire year.

Rush Limbaugh is also a libertarian, and characteristically doesn't give a damn about the border. He never has. He just licked his finger and checked the wind in his support of border security under Trump. But illegal immigration was never on Rush's radar, just as it wasn't on Ted Cruz' either. Rush was for that dual citizen, remember?

Here is Rush today, still trying to co-opt the Trump base:

That’s why at every Trump rally, what is the No. 1 sign they see, outside of Make America Great? What’s the number one sign you see at a Trump rally, Mr. Snerdley? (interruption) Nope. “Drain the swamp.” “Drain the swamp” is the No. 1. “Build the wall,” No. 2. (“Lock her up” is really a chant.) But “drain the swamp” is why Trump was sent there, and declassifying these documents would be a giant step for mankind in draining the swamp. 

Wikipedia gets some things right:

In the final month of his campaign, Donald Trump used the phrase "drain the swamp" in his rallies, pledging his supporters to "make our government honest once again." Trump said he originally "hated" the phrase, but when people reacted positively to it, he began "saying it like I meant it".

Mark Meadows is a libertarian open borders fanatic posing as a Trump supporter when he's really supporting his GOPe

From the story here:

Chairman Mark Meadows of North Carolina has argued that entering into a spending battle that could shutter the government in October would be unwise without a cohesive plan, appearing to side with GOP leaders who fear a shutdown before midterms would upend their House majority. ... “I don’t see a deliberate plan on how we secure our border happening by the end of September, and so having that debate over the next three months is probably more prudent than trying to have it in the next week and a half,” Meadows said.

Like just about everyone else on the left, Joel Kotkin continues to twist himself in pretzels to avoid calling our system what it already is

State capitalism.

It is the socialism of the right, despite what names people may give it. The fascist model in which business and government cooperate now more, now less was not defeated in World War II. The superior American version simply defeated the German one, and eventually also the left's inherently weaker version in Russia.

It has triumphed globally, brought to the fore in America by the libertarian resurgence under Ronald Reagan, imitated by the jealous Euro project, and notably exported to China, where it was eagerly embraced as no threat to Marxism. To the genuine Marxist, remember, free-trade is welcome because it hastens the global revolution. Belt and Road participants, take note.

The experiential groundwork for global state capitalism was laid long ago by the King and Bank of England in their joint enterprise known as the Thirteen Colonies. Everyone imitates this now in principle if not always in particulars. But everywhere it flourishes it is facilitated by the same thing, the central banking systems which coordinate their activities through rules administered under Basel III. The contemporary exemplars of state capitalism fancy that they are substantively a world away from Hitler's Germany, because, well, the Jews. We don't kill Jews, insist these experts at mass abortion and Uyghur mass re-education. 

It's the historical resonances which bother the left in using the phrase, but the underlying facts aren't different in substance. Materialism today means not having to say you're sorry for treating people like depreciated or unappreciated assets. Older workers in the West are routinely tossed aside for being too costly. Potential younger competitors are hamstrung by a culture of costly credentialing prerequisites. When such people become worthless enough, it isn't unlikely that in some places they could stop being considered people altogether (typically where atheism reigns) so that they could be slaughtered wholesale with the same relative efficiency already applied to the unborn. The tech already exists to do this. The only question is when will the people exist who are possessed of enough nerve.   

Here's Kotkin on this so-called "new, innovative approach" which looks like nothing so much as the old Soviet Union, with its hostility centered on the middle class, its dreary blocks of drab apartment buildings, the dim pall of surveillance and conformity lurking everywhere, complete with its own privileged new class in service to the party .01 percent:

Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands — notably tech and financial moguls — while seeking ways to ameliorate the reality of growing poverty, slowing social mobility and indebtedness. This will be achieved not by breaking up or targeting the oligarchs, which they would fight to the bitter end, but through the massive increase in state taxpayer support. ... [T]he tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on Wall Street — have [sic] a far less egalitarian vision. ... [T]hey see government spending as a means of keeping the populist pitchforks away. ... Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest apartments. ...  They appeal to progressives by advocating politically correct views . . .. Faced with limited future prospects, more millennials already prefer socialism to capitalism and generally renounce constitutionally sanctioned free speech . . .. [I]ncreased income guarantees, nationalized health care, housing subsidies, rent control and free education could also help firms maintain a gig-oriented [slave] economy since these employers do not provide the basic benefits often offered by more traditional “evil” corporations . . ..  [T]he oligarchy, representing basically the top .01 percent of the population, are primarily interested not in lower taxes but in protecting their market shares and capital. ... The losers here will be our once-protean middle class. Unlike the owners of corporations in the past, oligarchs have no interest in their workers become homeowners or moving up the class ladder. Their agenda instead is forever-denser, super-expensive rental housing for their primarily young, and often short-term, employees. ... The tech moguls get to remain wealthy beyond the most extreme dreams of avarice, while their allies in progressive circles and the media, which they increasingly own, continue to hector everyone else about giving up their own aspirations. All the middle and upwardly mobile working class gets is the right to pay ever more taxes, while they watch many of their children devolve into serfs, dependent on alms and subsidies for their survival.

Martin Wolf for The Financial Times likes business historian Adam Tooze's important new book CRASHED: HOW A DECADE OF FINANCIAL CRISES CHANGED THE WORLD

See Martin Wolf, What really went wrong in the 2008 financial crisis?

Tooze has been making the rounds at places like Bloomberg (and especially here) and CNBC promoting the theses of the new book, and was notably interviewed yesterday on Bob Brinker's radio program "Money Talk" (the dismissive summary of the interview provided here is notably blind to Tooze's importance, weakly observing how Tooze maintains that "money has no tangible underpinning", which is about all that grabs the attention of libertarian fundamentalists).

Those more popular presentations give only a tantalizing hint of the narrative power this trained historian brings to the story of the 2008 panic.

To see that in action there is an important lecture available here which Tooze gave at the American Academy in Berlin earlier this year, on March 13th.

"Conservatives" will doubtlessly recoil at Tooze's characterizations of the role played by them during the financial crisis. That those conservatives are really the GOP's libertarians is a distinction the significance of which seems lost on Tooze.

That said, the value of Tooze's perspective goes far beyond the subject of the warring factions of libertarian fundamentalism and neoliberalism, however important those are for understanding our times.

For one thing, Tooze is almost unique in describing in such vivid detail the dominating role now played by the "dollar" in the global economy (American analyst Jeffrey Snider being the notable but obscure exception). It takes an historian. This is, of course, the eurodollar, the proper understanding of which permits Tooze to show how the financial crisis in the United States centered in the mortgage market was globalized via international banking through London and Frankfurt independently of the wishes of the state actors. It also reveals to him that the most important global economic relationship has not been the US with China but the US with London.

Same as it ever was. The king and his colonies still rule the world, with a little help from the Bank of England.

For another, Tooze's work shows the degree to which the global economy has been captured by the bankers in providing these eurodollars, who acted unilaterally behind the scenes, first in the US (Ben Bernanke) and regrettably only later in Europe (Mario "whatever it takes" Draghi), to provide liquidity swaps in the trillions of dollars during the financial crisis while politicians argued about how states should deploy mere billions.

One inescapable conclusion ten years after the financial crisis is that citizens of states are in larger measure no longer masters of their own destinies, and haven't been for a very long time. They are today really ruled by technocrats in charge of central banks who work now more, now less in concert with their host governments to manage economic flows. The danger of this global state capitalism is that it might one day slip back into the outright fascism it so closely resembles.

To the millions of unemployed who were not bailed out in the crisis and who lost their homes and their hope in the United States and in the PIIGS, or to the hundreds of thousands of Muslims now in Chinese reeducation camps, it already has.

The crisis for neoliberalism does not come from capitalist fundamentalism. It comes from its growing list of victims.

Author finds cost of housing and daycare to be the main drivers of the middle class "squeeze"

From the transcript of the podcast here:

Middle-class life is 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. ... The main problem is the cost of housing. ... The second problem was the cost of daycare. A lot of it had to do with wages that were just not keeping up with other kinds of expenses. ...  [R]eal estate is no longer a place to live, but it’s an investment vehicle. That has driven up the cost of housing for ordinary people or the precarious middle class, as I call them. 

Unstated here is the new necessity of two incomes once women entered the labor force in quantity after the 1960s under the influence of feminist ideology. For the first twenty years of the post-war this was not so. When you dramatically increase the size of the labor force, the cost of the labor naturally comes down. The result was that women entering the workforce increased their average real income, but only just enough over time to pay for the cost of daycare, a wash. Meanwhile real male incomes stagnated.

Women working in large numbers naturally put pressure on the future growth of the labor force as well. Because they were not having the children who would become the country's next workers, a future labor shortage was inevitable as the post-war 4-child families transformed into 2-child families.

Enter the pressure to increase immigration, wink at low-labor-cost illegal immigration, and export jobs, a new era of which was inaugurated under George H. W. Bush in 1989, who doubled the level of legal immigration overnight, and under his son George W. Bush in 2001, who presided over the export of 3 million manufacturing jobs, a trend continued under Barack Obama who exported 3 million more. Manufacturing jobs had been the most important anchors and hubs for middle class jobs in American communities, the absence of which turned college from an option into a necessity in order to maintain what was formerly possible with only a high school diploma. Increase the demand for college, and you increase its price, and with it the pressure on stagnating pocketbooks.

Housing prices rose dramatically from the late 1990s in consequence of the fateful decision under Bill Clinton to unleash the savings hidden in the nation's housing stock for sixty years. Clinton signed in 1997 the libertarian Republican legislation rewriting the tax laws which had forced homeowners to stay in their homes or move up to avoid large capital gains tax hits. Large economic forces were behind this, not the least of which was the growing sense of the unsustainability of the middle class consumption culture without a new source of savings. 

The birth of the housing ATM under Reagan in the 1980s had no doubt prepared the way for these developments, who infamously did away with the tax deductibility of credit card interest while increasing the same for home equity lines of credit. The effect was to get the children of the Baby Boom to think of their homes as mere commodities which could be exploited to extract value. The liquidity unleashed by the Clinton legislation ten years later hit the economy like a tidal wave, driving prices higher and higher into the now infamous housing bubble as homes were churned by flippers and families alike. It took just ten years of that to drive the economy into the worst panic it had experienced since the Great Depression.

Reversing these horrible developments would require a civilizational transformation of values which in the past only Protestant Christianity seems to have been able to provide. Feminist ideology, like all ideology, has done nothing but take away. The revaluation of values necessary in our situation would have to begin with women insisting on fidelity and marriage once again. Women are biologically predisposed to the self-sacrifice needed. To get the men to go along they will need a Lysistrata, but she's probably not Camille Paglia.

Communism works in only one place.  

Conservatism upside-down: Russell Kirk chair in history at Hillsdale held by professed libertarian

Bradley J. Birzer, here:

"I have never considered myself a classical liberal, but I have always considered myself libertarian."

Russell Kirk, of course, was neither, but especially not libertarian.

And at public universities also it is common for atheists to chair religion departments.

Sandy Pensler grows even more desperate in Michigan Republican race for US Senate, enlists Rand Paul for robocalls

I got that call this afternoon, just days after getting one from Rick Santorum urging a vote for Pensler. Clearly this is Pensler's play for the libertarian vote after the earlier play for the Catholic vote.

Pensler is counting on his expensive ad campaign overcoming Trump's endorsement of his challenger, John James, and on the fractured nature of Republican politics in Michigan to eek out a win, which is a phenomenon of its libertarian leanings.

And as everyone knows, libertarians are a contrary bunch who can hardly come to agreement about anything among themselves, let alone unite anyone around their views once in office. Pensler himself has alienated Polish-Americans with his holocaust remarks. He fits right in with the libertarians.

The right thing to do in this context is vote for John James.