Monday, August 17, 2015
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Obama's going to give Iran nukes and George Will is worried about giving them to Donald Trump
Trump comes out swinging with illegal immigration policy paper
Here.
Grab your box of Depends. The Donald means business.
Some highlights:
- Triple the number of ICE officers
- Implement nationwide e-verify
- Mandatory deportation of all criminal aliens
- No more catch and release
- Cut-off federal funds to sanctuary cities
- Criminalize visa overstays
- Deploy ICE with local police in gang raids
- End birthright citizenship
- Increase prevailing wage requirements for H-1B visas to stem the tide of foreign hires at US workers' expense
- Immigrants must prove they are self-supporting
- Terminate the jobs program for foreign youth
- Suspend issuance of green cards to foreign workers until employment improves for citizens
- Make Mexico pay for the wall, or impound remittances derived from illegal wages ($22 billion in 2013) and increase fees on temporary visas of Mexican CEOs and diplomats, on all border crossing cards, on NAFTA worker visas and at all ports of entry from Mexico
- Generally restore the rule of law and order by actually enforcing existing laws
Donald Trump threatens with a big stick, invokes Generals MacArthur and Patton this morning on NBC's Meet the Press
Here:
"General MacArthur, General Patton, they didn't talk, they got the job done. ... They're spinning in their graves when they see everybody talking."
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Donald Trump said Chris Wallace had "blood pouring out of his eyes too" in the same interview about Megyn Kelly
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| Inquiring minds want to know: How much of Washington D.C. can he fire? |
But you didn't know about that because the subsequent coverage made it all about Megyn Kelly.
Here's the full interview with Don Lemon on CNN and Trump says that at about 4:55 in.
So clearly what's on Donald Trump's mind in characterizing the debate is the mercenary character of the debate moderators, and he was completely within reason to suggest that different interpretations emanated from deviant thinking.
h/t Jim Goad here: "Why place things in context when there’s an agenda to pursue?"
New US oil swap with Mexico gives them light sweet crude, us heavier grades bypassing refinery mismatch
According to the story here, perhaps as many as 100,000 barrels a day of light sweet US crude oil will head south to Mexican refineries in exchange for heavier grades for which US Gulf refineries are a better match.
Rand Paul and Chris Christie, Nos. 8 & 9 in the polls, attack No. 1 Donald Trump
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| He's a lumberjack . . . he's OK |
Rand Paul mocked Trump here in the middle of the week while affecting the country style, promptly fleeing the country to do a medical mission in Haiti this weekend. Not quite the same stuff as suspending the campaign to go to Washington to vote for bailouts like McCain did in 2008, but combined with his record of disdain for fundraising and his reaction to the legal trouble hitting his campaign team just before the Ohio debate, running away is what it looks like. Bad optics, so to speak.
And speaking of bad optics, an unsuited Chris Christie here called The Donald unsuited to be the president while wearing a pastel sport shirt, saying a President Trump simply can't tell Speaker Boehner he's fired. Well, not dressed like that.
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| Easter's over governor |
Friday, August 14, 2015
Greeks pass third draconian austerity/bailout package 222 to 64 with 11 abstentions
Looks like Alexis Tsipras' Syriza MPs defected in a big way: 32 No votes this time with 11 abstentions and 1 absent. This could prove fatal to Tsipras' continuance as Prime Minister. The Syriza coalition of the Left with 149 members partners with Independents with 12 in the 300 seat parliament. Tsipras' core support in parliament appears to have fallen to 39%.
The "erratic Marxist" Yanis Varoufakis voted No, after voting Yes and No previously, and reportedly offered to resign his seat so that Tsipras may appoint a reliable vote to replace him.
The Guardian has full coverage here.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Trump's Real Clear Politics poll average drops because Real Clear dropped the CBS poll
I took a screen shot of the poll average this morning at 9:32 thinking Real Clear Politics would replace the CBS poll it dropped, which reduced Trump's lead, but so far today RCP has not done so. Trump goes from 22.8 to 22.5 in the average as a result, and in the spread from 10.8 to 10.7. Did Real Clear Politics change the order also to deceive?
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| Here's the last average including the CBS News poll |
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| Here's the average today with CBS News poll removed |
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Monday, August 10, 2015
Japan will finally restart one nuclear power reactor tomorrow after 4-year shutdown since Fukushima accident
Reported here:
Japan's 48 functioning reactors have largely been shut since the catastrophe at Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011, one of the world's worst nuclear disasters.
Kyushu's Sendai reactor is one of at least 25 expected to restart over the course of the next decade as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe aims for nuclear power to generate 20-22 percent of the country's electricity by 2030, compared to 30 percent before the nuclear closures. Another 20 reactors are in various stages of the restart process, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Megyn Kelly the vampire: blood coming out of her eyes and her wherever
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| Beauty is a witch against whose charms faith melted into blood. |
 |
| He tells her something that makes her blood look out. |
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| Many will swoon when they do look on blood. |
John Kasich supports amnesty for illegals just like Jeb Bush, and Rubio and Walker formerly did but triangulated after being chastened
Reported here in The Wall Street Journal in
"Kasich Backs Path to Legal Status for Undocumented Immigrants: Republican presidential candidate also calls for a guest worker program".
Notice the redefinition of terms we've seen before from countless others. Illegal immigrants are now just undocumented. The idea that we should let "law abiding" people cut in line ignores the fact that they cut in line, that they are already not law abiding people.
Meanwhile a guest worker program supplants millions of already unemployed American citizens and drives down wages for Americans.
Kasich. Going. Nowhere. Fast.
The whopper of the day is from Jennifer Rubin: "The last thing Roger Ailes and company want is to see Trump disappear"
Jennifer Rubin in a piece of agitprop in WaPo here, the same person who told us last December that traditional conservatives, not libertarians, would have the upper hand in the GOP primary.
They do, so far, and boy is she unhappy about it.
Borders, law and order, respect for American power abroad and jobs for American citizens at home are the front-runner's winning themes.
Which is why libertarians, "a small percent of the electorate", are trying to destroy Donald Trump.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Erick Erickson's cheap grace on display: Red State endorsed Alaska Democrats in 2008 and then changed the headline saying so
Here.
And here's the original url showing that's the case:
http://www.redstate.com/diary/The_Directors/2008/10/27/redstate-endorses-mark-begich-democrat-for-s/
It's an old story but just reinforces how Erickson and Red State think that issuing an apology for calling Judge Souter a goat-fucking child molester or changing a headline offensive to pro-lifers is sufficient to show "repentance" or in turn makes one "acceptable" again. More to the point, we could have used the tarnished Stevens' vote against Obamacare in the US Senate in 2010, but Red State would rather punish the country with horrible Democrat legislation than rely on a pro-abortion Republican to stop it.
Straight out of the cheap grace library of evangelicalism, and the loony bin of fanatical politics.
Maybe Erick Erickson can spend some time studying up on the former now that he's in seminary, but for the latter there is no cure.
New York Times and CNBC twist Donald Trump 3rd party statement into threat
Trump said, quoted here:
"If I'm treated fairly by the Republicans, and I don't win, I'm not going to go into doing the third party," Mr. Trump said in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The CNBC headline twists this to
"Trump: Treat me 'fairly' or I'll run 3rd party"
based on The New York Times twisting Trump's statement in the lede:
'A defiant Donald J. Trump suggested on Sunday that he had been singled out for attacks by the hosts of Thursday's Republican presidential debate and again threatened a third-party White House bid if he was not treated "reasonably fairly" by party leaders.'
Trump said if he's treated fairly and loses he WON'T run third party.
The real story here is that Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier had their marching orders from Rupert Murdoch to destroy the anti-free-trader and anti-amnesty Trump in order to make sure a pliant candidate wins the Republican nomination who will do the bidding of the libertarians who have overseen the export of American jobs and the dilution of middle class earning power by importing cheap foreign labor.
Ireland experienced its coldest July since 1988
Reported here:
"Met Eireann's review of July showed it to be cold, wet and windy everywhere with Claremorris, Co Mayo, the coldest since 1965 while Cork Airport, Johnstown Castle, Co Wexford, Mullingar, Co Westmeath and Shannon Airport all reporting their coldest July since 1988.
"Average temperatures were one degree lower than normal right across the country with spots like Markree Castle in Sligo as much as 2.1C below the usual. ...
"Dublin Airport's lowest of 3.9C was recorded on July 15 and turned out to be the lowest temperature on record since the station opened in 1942."
Immigration squish Scott Walker calls Hillary Clinton foreign policy mush
Allahpundit, here, last February:
"So Walker does support comprehensive immigration reform — although we already knew that, given that he was willing to endorse a path to citizenship for illegals on camera as recently as two years ago, when he was already surely thinking of running in 2016. Curiously for a guy who’s running as a conservative hero, he really makes no bones about being an immigration squish."
Scott Walker here yesterday:
“Under Obama and Clinton Putin has found far too many years of mush."
"Everywhere in the world that she has touched is more messed up today than it was when she and the president took office."
Saturday, August 8, 2015
Erick Erickson disinvites Donald Trump, replaces with Bloody Megyn Kelly
Story here:
"I’m not going to have a guy on stage with my wife and daughter in the crowd who thinks a tough question from a woman is because of hormones."
How to make Mexicans pay for the fence, and illegal aliens generally self-deport
Charles C. Johnson has a great idea, here:
"[T]here’s a simple way to get them all to go home: Tax the money they
send back to the home country. One in nine Guatemalans are in the U.S.,
and they sent $4 billion back in 2010. Remittances are big money for
most of Central America. ... The illegals borrowing $5,000 in high-interest debt to
finance their smuggling on a $1,500 income
would think twice if we taxed their ill-gotten gains. Some might even
self-deport or, better yet, refuse to come in the first place. Indeed,
without the $20 billion a year Mexicans in America send home, Mexico would be even more messed up.
"Other countries already tax their foreigners. Why can’t we? We could
even use that taxed remittance money to pay off some of the costs we
incur from illegal aliens—and build that danged fence."
Friday, August 7, 2015
Fox News didn't want Repubicans to discuss the economy and jobs last night because that didn't fit Fox News' agenda
Jim Tankersley noticed the glaring omission from last night's Republican debate, here:
Polls continue to show that Americans care more about the economy than any other election issue. Fox News moderators noted that they had received more than 3,000 economy-themed questions on Facebook before the debate. Which is why it's so baffling that neither the questioners nor most candidates seemed eager to talk about growth, jobs and - as Republicans have been promising to do all election cycle - America's beleaguered working class. ...
"Way too little discussion" of economic growth, the conservative commentator Larry Kudlow tweeted after the prime-time debate ended. "If you're one of the 65 percent of Americans who think the U.S. is on the wrong track," said James Pethokoukis, a conservative writer for the American Enterprise Institute who has pushed Republican candidates to address worker angst, "what have these debates offered?"
----------------------------------------------
Obviously the economy and jobs didn't fit Fox News' agenda last night, which was to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump, who has pledged to end the flood of illegal immigration stealing Americans' jobs, end the farce of free-trade and become the greatest jobs president the country has ever seen.
Fox News, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by the open borders, free-trade libertarian Rupert Murdoch. It has its marching orders. And every candidate who takes money from the libertarian Koch brothers has his and is similarly beholden to the same ideology which demands the cheapest labor possible in service of the almighty bottom line, not in service of the country's citizens. The involvement of Facebook and Debbie Washerwoman Schultz of the DNC were just the bow around the illegal alien amnesty package.
And that's why Donald Trump scares the crap out of them and must be destroyed:
He doesn't need their money to run for president, and won't do their bidding when he wins.
Obama's horrible, awful full-time jobs record
The numbers are out this morning and they are not pretty.
Full-time jobs for July 2015 registered at 123.142 million in the report today, not seasonally adjusted. The previous high for the measure was set, wait for it, way back in July 2007 at 123.219 million.
That means full-time jobs still have not recovered to the peak level set eight years ago. Examine the record of recessions since 1969 and you will see that full-time jobs always have bounced back to pre-recession levels after two to three years ... until now.
In fact there are today still 77,000 FEWER full-time jobs than there were eight summers ago. That means it will likely take until next summer to surmount the 2007 peak. That'll make it nine years, versus two to three normally.
Yes, there are 2.4 million more jobs today than there were eight years ago, but they are all part-time: 26.6 million part-time now vs. 24.1 million then, for an increase of 2.5 million part-time. Subtract the decline in full-time and you arrive at just 2.4 million more net jobs in eight years while the population has grown by 19 million.
Obama crows about the all the jobs he's created, but only out of the depths of their decline which he oversaw and did nothing to stop. Full-time jobs fell in a panic by 6 million in the three months from his election in 2008 to his inauguration in 2009, and by another 5 million in the next year.
Arguably all those jobs went away out of fear over what Obama would do to the economy, which after six full years of his maladministration has grown at its slowest pace in the post-war and 26% worse than for the same period under George W. Bush, a surprising outcome considering that there was nowhere to go but up once the economy had crashed.
If the Obama rate of GDP growth from the first six years of his tenure is sustained through the end of it, Obama GDP will underperform the previously worst record of George W. Bush by over 20%. And more than likely, full-time jobs will continue to suffer as a result.
Trump overwhelmingly in first with 50% in Drudge poll during first Republican debate
Trump first with 50%.
Cruz second with nearly 13%.
Carson narrowly third with 8% followed closely by Rubio.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Governors Christie, Jindal, Perry and Walker allowed establishment of sanctuary cities in their states
So says The Washington Times here:
"[A]t least four Republican governors running for president next year ... have had cities and counties declare “sanctuary” during their tenure, without suffering the dire consequences the candidates now say the federal government should bring to bear on recalcitrant jurisdictions."
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Defunding Planned Parenthood fails in the Senate thanks to Democrats, but Republicans Mitch McConnell and Mark Kirk are also to blame with Lindsey Graham a no show
The roll call vote is here. Three Republicans broke ranks in the 53-46-1 outcome:
Lindsey Graham was a worthless no show, running for president. Ha ha.
Mitch McConnell the Senate Majority Leader should lose his job for voting No.
And Mark Kirk is going to lose to Tammy Duckworth in Illinois next year anyway so he had nothing to lose by voting No.
60 votes were needed to end government funding of the baby butchers, to whom most Democrats pledged allegiance except for Donnelly in Indiana and Manchin in West Virginia, stand up guys who voted No.
Monday, August 3, 2015
Ben Carson: Because of Trump's candidacy fewer people are talking about my lack of political experience
Yeah, well, because Barack Obama is such a terrible president fewer people are talking about how bad Jimmy Carter was.
Ben Carson, quoted here:
"It’s a tremendous aid because fewer people are talking about my lack of political experience now."
Trump: What Hillary Clinton did was absolutely illegal
Quoted here:
"[W]hat she did was absolutely, in my opinion, illegal and I don't think she's going to be allowed to run if they have a prosecutor who's going to be honorable because if you look at Gen. Petraeus, what he did is nothing compared to what she's done. And his life is in ruins."
Newt Gingrich agrees Hillary Clinton should be in jail already
Here:
"She's a disaster because of arrogance and what Trump said was right... If you look at how they treated General Petraeus and you look at what she did with her emails, in any other circumstance she'd be going to jail, not the White House."
EuroGroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem gets a new name: Lightweight Weaselbloom
Yanis Varoufakis, quoted here:
'In the full transcript published on his blog, Varoufakis also laid into the Eurogroup president, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, saying he was key to the Greek deal “not just because he is so intellectually lightweight but, primarily, because he is untrustworthy. For example, he chose to lie to me in my first Eurogroup about procedure. It is one thing to disagree with the Eurogroup president. It is quite another thing to have him lie to you about gravely important procedures.”'
Sunday, August 2, 2015
Drudge excludes No. 2 Walker and No. 9 Kasich from headline photo, includes Pataki whose poll numbers don't even register
And Fiorina and Graham don't even poll 1% on average. Where's the love, man?
CO2 is irrelevant to temperature change: Temperature has been in decline since the late Bronze Age 3200 years ago
Atmospheric CO2 remained stable for most of human history before the last 200 years, "hovering between about 275 and 285 ppm". Nevertheless temperatures were much higher in the past than now and have steadily declined over time even as CO2 has just lately risen.
James Galbraith defends Yanis Varoufakis
“I've never seen anyone work so hard or so selflessly on behalf of his country”.
James K. Galbraith, University of Texas, quoted here on Yanis Varoufakis.
Saturday, August 1, 2015
Maureen Dowd: Hillary's private server a metaphor for the paranoid style
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| The liberal Pot calling the Conservative kettle black. |
"Her strategists worry about surveys showing that voters do not trust her. But her private server is a metaphor for her own lack of trust and a guarded, suspicious mind-set that lands her in needless messes."
July 2015 average temperature anomaly for Grand Rapids, MI is 1.7 degrees F below normal
The July 2015 temperature anomaly for Grand Rapids, MI at 1.7 degrees F below normal means the cumulative anomaly for 2015 increases to 21.4 degrees F below normal from 19.7 degrees F below normal through June and 18.0 degrees F below normal through May.
For a warming planet, we're doing nothing in Grand Rapids this summer to erase the negative average temperature anomaly . . . but there's always August if you are a grower, or hope if you're a warmist.
The total temperature anomaly for 2014 in GR was 30.3 degrees F below normal, a little over 2.5 degrees on average per month.
The significance of that may be lost on you, but here in Michigan a couple of degrees makes all the difference between being Michigan and being Wisconsin. On the other side of Lake Michigan at this latitude, average temperature is historically two degrees colder than here on average. There they are exposed to the cold drying winds which come off the plains in winter. Here we have the warming effect of Lake Michigan in winter as it gives off its heat and the attendant snows, unless it's frozen solid like a brick. And that makes all the difference to berry, grape, apple and other growers who proliferate on the warmer side of the lake and depend on the warmth and the snow cover to protect their plants.
Friday, July 31, 2015
It takes a lunatic to know a lunatic: Rand Paul says Trump supporters have lost their minds
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| Look who's crazy now. |
Seen here:
"I think this is a temporary sort of loss of sanity. But we're going to come back our senses and look for somebody serious to lead the country at some point," he said.
------------------------------------
This from the guy who imagined the Republican Party was ready to become a more self-consciously libertarian big tent party. Rand Paul is currently running a distant seventh for the Republican nomination with 5.5% support.
Greek PM Alexis Tsipras proves once again he's a stand up guy, says he directed Yanis Varoufakis to develop Plan B
The Telegraph reports here:
'This morning, Alexis Tsipras has come out in defence of Yanis Varoufakis. The PM has spoken about the plans the former finance minster was in charge of, to look into developing a parallel payments system, in public for the first time. He has confirmed he had full knowledge of the blueprint, and ordered Mr Varoufakis to take charge. But he denies that they amounted to a full blown "Grexit" plan.'
Yanis Varoufakis, the former Finance Minister, previously in parliament had stood up for Tsipras by reluctantly and surprisingly voting Yes to proceed with the EuroGroup Summit plan Tsipras had agreed to in Brussels.
Perhaps now parliament will abandon, as it should, any effort to prosecute Varoufakis who like every other member enjoys immunity.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is rightly exasperated by the oligarchy's attempt to criminalize Yanis Varoufakis
Here:
'It has come to this. The first finance minister of a eurozone country to draw up contingency plans for a possible euro exit is under investigation for treason.
'Greece's chief prosecutor is examining criminal charges against a five-man "working group" in the country's finance ministry for the sin of designing a "Plan B", a parallel system of euro liquidity and bank payments that could - in extremis - lead to a return of the drachma.
'It is hard to see how a monetary union held together by judicial power, coercion and fear in this way can have a future in any of Europe's ancient nation states.
'The criminalisation of any Grexit debate shuts off the option of an orderly return to the drachma, even though there is a high probability - some say a near certainty - that the latest EMU loan package for Greece will prove unworkable and precipitate the country's exit from the single currency within a year. As a matter of practical statecraft, this is sheer madness.'
Warren Buffett, the king of contraception funding, thinks women waste their brains having children
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| Two peas in a pod dedicated to deciding against life. |
If you want to know why America is dying, look no further than Warren Buffett, a man at war with human nature, who frankly doesn't care that without fertility there will be no one left to consume.
From the story in Bloomberg, here:
“Buffett alone will give more than all of the other foundations combined in reproductive health,” she said. “We already are this year [2008], and that will continue.” [Judith] DeSarno declined to comment for this article, other than to say, “I am incredibly proud of this work and the dramatic decrease in unintended pregnancies.” ...
Quietly, steadily, the Buffett family is funding the biggest shift in birth control in a generation. “For Warren, it’s economic. He thinks that unless women can control their fertility—and that it’s basically their right to control their fertility—that you are sort of wasting more than half of the brainpower in the United States,” DeSarno said about Buffett’s funding of reproductive health in the 2008 interview. “Well, not just the United States. Worldwide.” ...
In the 1960s, the [Buffetts] set up what was then called the Buffett Foundation, which focused on nuclear disarmament and reproductive health, including helping to fund Planned Parenthood as well as the development of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill. In the late ’70s, the duo entered into an unusual arrangement—they remained married, but Susan moved to San Francisco.
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Libertarian calls Bernie Sanders a National Socialist because he's not for open borders
Here:
"[T]he far left really agrees with the far right about keeping out foreigners. ... Bernie wants to scapegoat immigrants for the failures of wage controls and the welfare state so that people won’t see through his lame socialist agenda. But no warmed over nationalist socialism can replace the creative power of free people."
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Ronald Reagan was a moderate and a demagogue
According to moderate Bruce Bartlett, here, who voted for Obama at least once:
"Although the far right’s mythology paints the Reagan years as the triumph of their ideas, the truth is that he governed very much in the moderate tradition of postwar Republican presidents. Reagan raised taxes 11 times, gave amnesty to illegal aliens, pulled American troops out of the Middle East, supported environmental regulations, raised the debt limit and appointed many moderates to key positions, including on the Supreme Court. But he skillfully kept his right flank protected by using thundering conservative rhetoric, even as he violated his own stated principles on a regular basis."
Ivana Trump goes on the record today saying The Donald will make an incredible president
Quoted here in The New York Daily News:
“Incidentally, I think he would make an incredible President,” Ivana Trump, who divorced her husband in 1992, added.
Donald Trump takes Laura Ingraham to school on her support for the Iraq War
This morning in the second half hour on her own show, Donald Trump told Laura Ingraham that she had made a mistake supporting the Iraq War, stating that he was opposed to it from the beginning.
Trump's opposition to the Iraq War will alienate most Republicans, except for the Buchanan Brigades (which can't number many more than 500,000).
The position will, however, be popular with independents who tend to vote Democrat, the much ballyhooed middle.
When it comes to third party candidacies, what party does Bernie Sanders represent, and why doesn't anybody talk about it?
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| Self-described Socialist polls 17.5% for Democrat nomination. |
Seen here:
"[W]hat happens if the USS HRod begins taking on water. What would Democrats do? Is there an emergency "break the glass" option if real questions of Clinton's electability arise? It seems extremely unlikely that any one issue could bring Clinton down, but what if she begins to suffer 'death by a thousand cuts'?
"Would Vice President Joe Biden and/or Sen. Elizabeth Warren jump in? Or would/could someone not being currently mentioned throw a hat into the ring, like say, Sen. Sherrod Brown or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg? Presumably Bloomberg would need to join the Democratic Party, but then again, has Sanders joined yet?'"
Monday, July 27, 2015
Leonid Bershidsky has it exactly backwards: Syriza's Left Platform turns out to be Greece's true conservative party, they just don't realize it
Here right out of the gate, and the rest of it is also quite as silly, not in the least because it asks the EuroGroup to devise the mechanism by which those already in the Euro will be shown the exit:
'Elect far-left politicians to run a country and they will still plot a revolution. That, apparently, is what ministers from the Syriza bloc were doing while negotiations with creditors were taking place. Though none of the crazy things they planned came to pass, Greece's radicals may someday be tempted to carry out a Syriza-style "Plan B." Euro-zone officials need to prepare for this eventuality and work out an exit procedure -- one that might still be needed.'
Yes, Greece's radicals. They went for the root alright, back to the drachma.
No, the real revolution was enticing Greece with the Euro because the Euro took the decision making about money out of the Greek people's hands. Revolting against that now is technically reactionary, but only in chronology, the new hobgoblin of little Hegelian minds. In reality preparing to go back to the drachma is an attempt to undo the revolution which the Euro wrought in Greece in the first place.
Greek dignity means having its own currency, just as it has its own glorious history, its own cooking, its own weather, language, culture, borders and so on. The drachma they can value and devalue on their terms, not someone else's. When the left in Greece and the rest of Europe wake up to the central importance of this fact, maybe the nightmare of this Euro farce will finally come to an end.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Paying off the $18.1 trillion national debt in 30 years . . .
Financed at 3.5%, it would require annual payments of $977.4 billion to retire the $18.1 trillion national debt in 30 years.
This assumes deficit spending (projected to average $512 billion annually, already factoring in increasing revenues going forward to 2020) would cease in order to balance the books and cap the debt.
Together debt repayments and cessation of deficit spending imply cutting current allocations by a total of $1.5 trillion annually, leaving just $1.7 trillion to fund government outlays in fiscal 2015 projected to soar to $3.8 trillion.
Out of control and misplaced spending therefore amounts to 55% of projected outlays in fiscal 2015, or $2.1 trillion.
In the already low GDP environment, a 55% fiscal contraction is utterly unthinkable to anyone in either political party, the equivalent of an 8.5% hit to the current dollar GDP at $17.69 trillion.
The revenue projection for fiscal 2015 is just $3.2 trillion, but will be the highest ever.
Average annual federal deficit projection 2015-2020
$512 billion, which will add $3.07 trillion to the national debt in six years.
Obama has added $6.3 trillion to the national debt 2009-2014, $1.05 trillion per year, with plenty of help from Republicans since 2010.
The voters think Hillary Clinton is a lying sack of shit by almost 2-1 in Colorado
The Hill reported here:
'This week’s poll by Quinnipiac University showed large majorities of voters in Iowa, Virginia and Colorado — three swing states Democrats hope to win — do not find her honest and trustworthy. The margin in the Colorado poll between those who don't trust her and those who do was almost 2-to-1.'
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Once upon a time in America there was a thing called conservatism which yelled Stop!
It's still up there, here.
Peter Berkowitz stands athwart history murmuring "slow down" while praying his version of The Serenity Prayer
Here, where else?, but in The Wall Street Journal:
'[Conservatives] should forthrightly reaffirm their commitment to the Constitution’s principles of individual freedom, equality under law, and limited government—all of which presuppose and protect religious faith and traditional morality. They should distinguish among what they can alter, what they must accept and what they should embrace. And they should design principled reforms that can win majority support in a country where diversity ensures that any conceivable national majority will include a significant spectrum of opinion.'
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. -- Reinhold Niebuhr, circa 1943
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