Wednesday, July 5, 2017
John Batchelor: The professors are lying about the Medicaid "cuts"
Here, where we learn that the Obamacare Medicaid expansion actually was UNFAIR because it is far more generous, by 100%, to childless, non-disabled, non-elderly adults earning less than $16,000 a year than it is to poor children, the disabled and seniors who were already on Medicaid.
The Republican Senate plan cuts that back 50%, equal to the existing, traditional reimbursement for poor children, the disabled and seniors on Medicaid.
Equality. It's a bitch brought to you by Republicans, not Democrats.
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
AEI is full of crap: This country was formed for "ourselves and our posterity", not for the sake of ideas, or hordes of future immigrants
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The American Revolution: Not an upheaval, but a return, a restoration
From the story here:
First, there were those who admired the English constitution that they had inherited and studied. Believing they had been deprived of their rights under the English constitution, their aim was to regain these rights. Identifying themselves with the tradition of Coke and Selden, they hoped to achieve a victory against royal absolutism comparable to what their English forefathers had achieved in the Petition of Right and Bill of Rights. To individuals of this type, the word revolution still had its older meaning, invoking something that “revolves” and would, through their efforts, return to its rightful place—in effect, a restoration. Alexander Hamilton was probably the best-known exponent of this kind of conservative politics, telling the assembled delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787, for example, that “I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced.” Or, as John Dickinson told the convention: “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanism of the English constitution…. Accidents probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given a sanction to them.” And it is evident that they were quietly supported behind the scenes by other adherents of this view, among them the president of the convention, General George Washington.
The revolving revolution of 1776
From an op-ed in The Washington Times here:
"This was the object of the Declaration of Independence," [Jefferson] wrote in a letter to Henry Lee in May 1825. "Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take."
In that vein, the "revolution" was conservative and indeed conforms to Edmund Burke's original use of the word with its common meaning of something revolving. A full revolution returns affairs to an original condition.
It wasn't about being original in the sense of being new; it was about telling the world who we are as Americans. "Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion," Jefferson added.
Tens of thousands of refugees stuck in Italy
From the story here:
With France and Switzerland closing their borders to migrants since last year, the tens of thousands in Italy have nowhere to go. The EU came up with a plan to relocate around 160,000 asylum seekers stuck in Italy and Greece but so far only 12,000 have been resettled. Italy says it can no longer be expected to deal single-handedly with the vast number of asylum seekers, most of them economic migrants, streaming across the Mediterranean. ...
The Italian government has warned that after years of taking in hundreds of thousands of migrants, the country is now at breaking point.
Italy's jobs debacle continues while stupid leaders let in refugees by the millions
From the story here:
Italy's chronic unemployment problem has been thrown into sharp relief after 85,000 people applied for 30 jobs at a bank – nearly 3,000 candidates for each post. ... It is not the first time that huge numbers of young Italians have applied for a small number of posts. When the region of Umbria advertised 94 public administration jobs in 2015, more than 32,000 people applied. A hospital in Milan that needed to recruit 10 nurses was inundated with more than 7,000 candidates.
Employers immediately panicked after Obama was elected, shedding jobs by the millions
From November 2007 through October 2008, there were 19.6 million first time claims for unemployment.
Not good, but nothing like what followed.
Immediately after Obama was elected, the figure jumped by over 52% in November 2008 and never looked back. For the first twelve months after Obama's election, jobless claims jumped by 56% to 30.6 million.
The average per month jumped from 1.6 million per month to 2.6 million.
And in the first eight months since Trump was elected?
The average is 1.1 million per month.
Happy Independence Day!
Monday, July 3, 2017
Rahm Emanuel just lies about economic growth in Chicago: He's presiding over decline, not growth
Here:
Cities with reliable, modern mass transit are more economically competitive, have higher productivity, fewer carbon emissions and a better quality of life. And as we have seen in Chicago, mass transit not only connects people to opportunities, it also fuels growth. Modernizing our existing mass transit is one reason Chicago’s economy has expanded faster than the economies of New York and Washington, and faster than the national average for the last five years.
Grand Rapids, Michigan, climate update for June 2017
Mean average temperature was 69.5 degrees F in June 2017 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The mean is 67.6.
The lowest minimum temperature was 46. The mean is 43.
The highest maximum temperature was 93. The mean is 91.
Precipitation was 4.88 inches. The mean is 3.55.
Snowfall was zero. Seasonal snowfall 2016-2017 ends at 60.1 inches. The mean is 66.6.
Heating degree days came to 22. The mean is 54. The season ends with 5635, the fifth warmest on record. The mean is 6703. Seasonal maximum is 7712. Seasonal minimum is 5253.
Cooling degree days to date come to 162. The mean to date is 139. Seasonal maximum is 1200. Seasonal minimum is 316.
Fake wrestling doesn't exist, you see: Disinformation radio news media keep referring to Vince McMahon in 2007 Trump wrestling video as "a man"
The C-students in the media, all descended from Piltdown Man and with faces made for radio, don't want anyone to make the connection with fake news and maybe laugh at Trump's joke. This is about VIOLENCE against the media dontchaknow!
Ohio Man, Pennsylvania Man, Michigan Man, Asian Man, and Gun Man all get arrested for terrorism according to news reports but have absolutely nothing in common. Hm. What could it be?
And now Vince McMahon is just A Man and can't get no respect!
He might as well be Muslim Man.
Sunday, July 2, 2017
There's no business like the loan shark business: Federal student loan rates jump 18.4% effective July 1
The 10-year Treasury pays barely 2.3% but the Feds will now gouge students over 93% more than that.
From the story here:
For new loans disbursed from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018, undergraduates will pay 4.45 percent. That's an increase from this year's rate of 3.76 percent. ... [Graduate students] will pay 6 percent for a direct unsubsidized loan — which begins accruing interest as soon as the borrower takes out the loan — an increase from 5.31 percent this year. Finally, rates on direct PLUS loans, which both graduate students and parents of undergrads can use, will rise to 7 percent from the current 6.31 percent. ... Last year, the average college graduate owed $37,172, up 6 percent from 2015, according to data from Student Loan Hero. ... Total student debt in the United States is now over $1.4 trillion — the majority of which is from federal loans.
I got your frickin' CBO score right here
Government at all levels now costs 36% of GDP.
We can't afford another pencil.
We can't afford another pencil.
Reuters gets it exactly backwards on $1.42 billion Taiwan arms deal: It pressures China to help on North Korea
Trump is playing chess with China, which has been provoking the free world by building illegal islands in the South China Sea and militarizing them. Arguably Trump needs to move even more pieces in their direction on the board.
Here:
China's anger over the U.S. plan to supply Taiwan with weapons risks undermining Trump's attempts to press China to help on North Korea. ... The sales, which require congressional approval, would be the first since a $1.83 billion sale that former President Barack Obama announced in December 2015, also to China's dismay.
Reuters should stick to reporting the news instead of opining about it.
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Friday, June 30, 2017
CNBC's Jake Novak says Trump finally came to his senses with Obamacare "clean" repeal tweet
Here:
[I]n a tweet Friday morning, President Trump strongly suggested the Republicans just repeal Obamacare and worry about the replacement later. Thank you for finally coming to your senses, Mr. President!
Dan Bongino for Sean Hannity brings on Mark Meadows to talk about Obamacare repeal, and do they discuss Trump's clean repeal tweet?
No. Zip, zero, nada, bupkis.
Unbelievable.
Worthless.
This is talk radio malpractice.
This is talk radio malpractice.
OK, we're basically 0-5: Neither Michael Savage nor Dan Bongino on Hannity are leading with Obamacare repeal
We'll see about Levin in three hours.
It's pretty disappointing that conservative talk radio can't follow President Trump's talking points even when he spells them out on Twitter.
Trump has made a YUGE move to the right and everybody's just shrugging their shoulders today.
Not to be outdone by P. J. O'Rourke, libertarian Mark Perry also genuflects toward the hypocritical French today
Namely toward Frederic Bastiat, here, who wrote against "legal plunder", never once mentioning that the estate off of which Bastiat derived his living had been stolen from the aristocracy during the French Revolution.
Mark Perry is not just a one-off, either. Bastiat is a hero to libertarians generally. For example, to Rep. Justin Amash, who not coincidentally owes his fortune to the family business in tools, which are manufactured in China, not the united States.
Protestations against legal plunder, my foot.
And Mark Belling also wastes our time defending Trump in L'Affaire Joe Mangina
Filling in for Rush Limbaugh today.
Trump hands off the rhetorical baton on repeal of Obamacare, and so far today 3 talk radio hosts have dropped it.
Trump moves far right on Obamacare, morning talk radio gives us crickets
Both Laura Ingraham and Chris Plante had more important things to talk about today than President Donald Trump expressing willingness to forego Obamacare replacement for simple repeal.
Idiots.
P. J. O'Rourke discovers the limits of individualism, gets wet for (French) state capitalism
Here.
When regular capitalism won't do, there's always the comparatively smaller French state capitalism:
"An individual could not build a rocket like these, no matter what his wealth or how much time he was allotted."
Hey, P. J., would it be too much to ask you at least to admire our own?
Yes, it would be from a frog-licker.
Justin "Might as well be a Democrat" Amash also voted against "No Sanctuary for Criminals Act"
Amash and six other Republicans (Curbelo of FL, Diaz-Balart, Donovan, King of NY, Reichert, Ros Lehtinen) went down to defeat with 188 Democrats.
HR 3003.
Here.
Republicans Chaffetz, Gosar, Long, Mark Meadows, Nunes, Scalise, Smith (NJ) and Stivers did not vote.
If you're a big fan of John Locke, you're not a conservative
Read What is Conservatism? to understand why.
The servile Kim Strassel has no fight in her, thinks the Senate healthcare bill simply comes down to pre-existing conditions
From the story here, where Strassel counsels bowing to federal mandates, which means bowing to the left-wing extremist who bankrupted America:
Republicans lost this argument nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Obama won. More than 90% of Senate Republicans understand this.
Which is another way of saying that protections for pre-existing conditions are here to stay, and conservatives face a choice. They can work with their colleagues to minimize the costs of the mandates (there are innovative ways to do this) and build in different free-market reforms to lower premiums. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the current Senate bill will reduce premiums by about 30%, and the GOP can and should build on this.
Yes, the simple solution is always to bow, to submit, whether to the king, or to Allah.
Real Americans don't settle for easy.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Obama expanded Medicaid on the backs of taxpayers who also buy health insurance, making them pay twice
Betsy McCaughey, here:
Who's picking up the tab for this vast Medicaid expansion? You. Worse, you pay twice -- once as a taxpayer, and then again as an insurance consumer. Families with private insurance pay $1,500 to $2,000 or more in added premiums yearly already to keep Medicaid afloat. The more Medicaid expands, the higher their premiums will go. That's because Medicaid shortchanges hospitals and doctors, paying less than the actual cost of care. They make up for it by shifting the costs onto privately insured patients. Ouch.
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
For some unknown reason The American Conservative decided to remind us today about the crack-up of Bruce Bartlett
They reran his 2012 piece detailing his several intellectual crises, in which the libertarian finally gave up and became the liberal, although he denies it.
Nostalgia on the editors part, no doubt, for wound-licking in defeat.
Obama October 2016: The idea the election is rigged "happens to be based on no facts"
Imagine that. No facts! Even though his intelligence community says there are facts! So sure was he that Hillary would win.
Here (the provided transcript occasionally fails to represent exactly what Obama actually said):
"I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place. It is unprecedented. It happens to be based on no fact. Every expert regardless of political party... who has ever examined these issues in a serious way will tell you that instances of significant voter fraud are not to be found. Keep in mind elections are run by state and local officials."
Just words, no doubt.
Laugh of the Day 2.0: Obama said no serious person would suggest you could rig America's elections
Except for Trump, after which Hillary took the bait, as did the DNC, and then the Obama intelligence community and the entire establishment media, all blaming Russia for interfering and causing Hillary to lose in the process.
Here, in the Rose Garden three weeks before Election 2016:
Obama echoed those sentiments Tuesday, saying there's "no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America's elections." ... "It doesn't really show the kind of leadership and toughness that you'd want out of a president. You start whining before the game's even over? If whenever things are going badly for you and you lose you start blaming somebody else? Then you don't have what it takes to be in this job," Obama said.
You said it, buddy.
How to reform Medicaid before Obamacare is even repealed and save $48.3 billion: Kick out all the illegal aliens
 |
| We don't need no stinkin' Medicaid |
That's 6.12 million illegals receiving Medicaid out of 70 million total receiving Medicaid in 2015.
Medicaid outlays in 2015 came to $552 billion, or $7,886 each.
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
The French are building a wall . . . around the Eiffel Tower
And you thought no one had their priorities straight.
Monday, June 26, 2017
Supreme Court to hear Trump travel ban case in October, lifts injunctions giving Trump a big victory
From the story here, nineteen lines in:
The action by the court is a victory for President Trump in the biggest legal controversy of his presidency so far.
Sunday, June 25, 2017
There's no way Republicans will take away Medicaid from 25 million people, 11 million or whatever
Just a fact, not a statement of approval.
Saturday, June 24, 2017
If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal
If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal of Obamacare's individual and corporate mandates instead of the stinker bill now being proposed by the Republicans in the Senate.
That way those of us who can obtain real insurance like we did before will obtain it again but at a cheaper cost than now, and those who can't will still have Medicaid, but funded by dead certain payrolls instead of the hodge podge of state and federal funding now.
Because of Obamacare, those who have insurance are subsidizing at enormous expense to themselves those who have become covered since 2009 under the plan, mostly under Medicaid. Medicaid alone has swelled by 25 million people thanks to Obamacare. It's a massive income redistribution scheme from those who have insurance to those who don't, which is manifestly unfair. There are easily 48 million people in this country making less than $15,000 a year who have no skin in this game yet qualify for Medicaid.
The answer, short of returning to the status quo ante where millions are kicked off of Medicaid, is to make more people pay their fair share. This means taxing every dollar of compensation with a Medicaid tax, just like we do with Medicare. The burden should be born by everyone, including those now receiving Medicaid.
Currently we have about 55.5 million enrolled in Medicare, supported by a 1.45% payroll tax. It isn't enough support, but there it is.
Medicaid on the other hand has exploded under Obamacare to coverage of 75 million, but state budgets, like individuals' budgets under Obamacare's outrageously expensive health insurance, are breaking badly under the burden. 33 will fall short of revenue targets in the current fiscal year.
The proportional Medicaid payroll tax rate implied by 75 million program participants is at least 1.95%.
This is Trump's opportunity to put Medicaid on a sounder footing.
Republicans won't like this plan because it involves a new tax, even though many people are already paying this tax to one degree or another depending on their tax obligation in their state of residence. The revenues, insufficient as they are, are already collected at the state level, but variably.
So it's not really a new tax. It's a new collector.
Democrats ought to love this idea, for the obvious reason. It codifies the nation's "obligation" to the poor's healthcare in the form of a tax, just as Medicare codifies the nation's obligation to the elderly's healthcare. With it they can claim Obamacare is still the law of the land in some form.
Pelosi and the House Democrats are well positioned to deliver this in the form of a bill to send to the more evenly divided Senate because Paul Ryan and a coalition of 75 or so liberal Republicans could get it over the goal line, just like they did so many times before in league with the Democrats, making an end run around the House conservatives.
The Senate would go for the bill because it is simply more liberal all around. Democrats there would vote for this, along with liberal Republicans.
Trump needs to get this done and off the table.
We've been arguing about it now in earnest for 8 years already and are just plain sick of it.
Enough already!
Repeal Obamacare root and branch, and institute a Medicaid tax.
Friday, June 23, 2017
California, home of the 9th Circuit which shot down Trump's travel ban, bans travel to 8 states
From the story here:
California is restricting publicly funded travel to four more states because of recent laws that leaders here view as discriminatory against gay and transgender people. All totaled, California now bans most state-funded travel to eight states. The new additions to California’s restricted travel list are Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota. They join Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee as states already subjected to the ban.
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Wind energy turbines kill 368,000 birds annually, but kitties kill far more
Reported here in early 2015:
Now, federal wildlife officials are cracking down on wind farms caught killing bats and birds. A peer-reviewed study issued last summer estimated turbines kill as many as 368,000 birds annually. ... House cats kill at least 1.4 billion birds annually, and possibly up to 3.7 billion birds, according to a 2013 federal study. And a single natural-gas flare at a liquid natural gas plant in Canada killed an estimated 7,500 birds in a single night.
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Uh oh, Trump gives up on China doing anything about North Korea after just two months
Trump met with Xi Jinping in April, here, after which he expressed the hope that China would lean on Fatboy.
Didn't work, but he sure didn't give it very long now did he?
Tucker Carlson skewers the libertarianism of Bret Stephens, who thinks you are nothing but a widget in the machine of global capitalism
Here:
He also shows little care for Americans as anything besides units of economic productivity, widgets to fuel the machine of global capitalism that pays Bret Stephens many thousands a year to write mediocre opinion columns in a dying newspaper.
Finally somebody at National Review gives libertarianism the what-for and really, truly gets it
Here:
The alliance that has united conservatives and libertarians in common cause against bureaucratic bloat and its soft despotism is crumbling; indeed, it could never be maintained. The identity confusion that manifested as the splintering of the Right into neo-conservatives, paleo-conservatives, crunchy conservatives, tea-partiers, Trumpists, and all the rest is, in large part, the tension between the conservative and the libertarian minds. The individualism and myopia of the libertarian vision of society — atomized individuals self-defined and free from every native context in a world where everything is earned and nature mastered — is at fundamental odds with the conservative reverence for ties to family, place, and history, with its hope for nature in harmony, man’s with himself and the rest of creation. ... the fissure widens and the semantic gap between “liberal” and “libertarian” shrinks . . ..
Monday, June 19, 2017
SECDEF Mad Dog Mattis is mad as a hatter: Imposes mandatory transgender training on the US Army
From the story here:
As part of the Pentagon’s attempt to create an accepting environment for transgenders, the Army held a session Tuesday teaching officers and others how to implement existing military policy, particularly how to “assist soldiers who have a medical diagnosis indicating that gender transition is medically necessary through the gender transition process,” USA Today reports. ...
Conservative leaders have asked Secretary of Defense James Mattis to rescind directives allowing transgenders to serve, as “costly and distracting social engineering” that is standing in the way of combat effectiveness and readiness.
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Pat Buchanan remembers a score of violent leftist attacks in America, and more
Here:
The campus violence and urban riots of the decade, from Harlem to Watts to Newark and Detroit, to Washington, D.C., and 100 cities after Dr. King’s death, were not the work of the Goldwater right.
F. H. Buckley doesn't have a clue how to kill the administrative state
Here. And I won't bore you with any of the impotent suggestions.
The only way to kill the administrative state is to cut off its food supply, which is taxes in quantity. That's why it took so long to get to the administrative state: The constitution effectively outlawed taxes in quantity by outlawing any taxation save for direct taxation and excises and tariffs.
We could start by abolishing withholding, on our way to abolishing the income tax. But frankly, this will require a revolution, including in thinking. And you won't find anything revolutionary from F. H. Buckley.
Real conservatives know that without the income tax there would be no administrative state to speak of. Fake conservatives pretend that we can have limited government short of abolishing it.
Friday, June 16, 2017
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Flashback: The New York Times Jan. 9, 2011, updated for today
Here, updated for today, but not by The New York Times:
It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans Democrats or Tea Party members Bernie Sanders' most devoted supporters. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans Democrats and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats actual incidents of violence against peacefully assembling Republicans, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right left have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants cops, or welfare recipients white people, or bureaucrats small business owners. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government Republican Party is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.
Where are all the Democrats calling for calm, denouncing violence?
Same crickets we hear from Muslims after terrorist attacks.
Camille Paglia crafts an anti-elitist zinger, aimed at our modern day Puritans, calls Comey an effete charlatan
From the interview here:
These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.
Recession omen: 33 states to miss revenue targets, highest number since 2010
From the story here:
Thirty-three states will miss revenue projections in Fiscal Year 2017, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. That’s the highest number of states to miss revenue targets since 2010, during the middle of the recession, when 36 states missed projections.
In total, states anticipate revenues falling short by $12 billion. Most of the shortfall comes from sales tax collections, which are projected to be down $6.6 billion. That troubles some economists because sales taxes are traditionally the most stable revenue sources for states.
Your kid probably isn't working this summer like he should be, because of the minimum wage and cheap immigrant labor
The population level of teenagers in 2017 has recovered to 1978 levels, but only 29% are employed in May 2017 vs. 47% in May 1978.
The minimum wage has made it too expensive to hire your kid to recover shopping carts at the grocery store, and soaring immigration means your kid competes against Francisco to cut the grass and Sanjay to sell ice cream.
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Full Oceanic Nino Index data trend shows the Pacific Ocean is definitely cooling slightly
Not quite 0.1 ONI value point since 1951. Data for 2017 shown is for ten months, all the rest twelve.
You know what a baseball field full of dead Republican Congressmen would have meant to the shooter?
A complete and utter shutdown of legislative business which would have made it impossible to move any of the Trump agenda forward at all.
After all, that's been the goal of the Democrats all along.
This leftist shooter simply thought he had found a more definitive way to delay and obstruct Trump. The Party of Violence strikes again.
Someone better find out if he had help, as in . . . conspiracy.
Sounds totally rational to me. Sinister, but rational.
Mollie Hemingway throws together a litany of James Comey's many misdeeds and mistakes
But stops short of calling Comey a law unto himself for some reason, which is what he is.
The article reads like it was written to meet a deadline, and suffers for it.
The best reminder in the story is that under Comey the FBI destroyed evidence, just like Hillary did, for which they both should be in prison:
[U]pon learning that two Clinton staff members had classified information, the FBI didn’t subpoena those computers but gave the employees immunity in return for giving them up. The FBI severely limited their own searches for data on the computers and then destroyed them. A technician who destroyed evidence lied to FBI investigators even after he received immunity, and Comey did nothing. And after the FBI discovered that President Obama had communicated with Clinton on the non-secure server, Obama said he didn’t think Clinton should be charged with a crime because she hadn’t intended to harm national security. As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey noted, “As indefensible as his legal reasoning may have been, his practical reasoning is apparent: If Mrs. Clinton was at criminal risk for communicating on her nonsecure system, so was he.”
Here.
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Big deal: Stories ADMIT Russian election hack attempts FAILED, systems too "disparate"
The latest one is from Bloomberg, here:
One of the mysteries about the 2016 presidential election is why Russian intelligence, after gaining access to state and local systems, didn’t try to disrupt the vote. One possibility is that the American warning was effective. Another former senior U.S. official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the classified U.S. probe into pre-election hacking, said a more likely explanation is that several months of hacking failed to give the attackers the access they needed to master America’s disparate voting systems spread across more than 7,000 local jurisdictions.
Putin didn't hypnotize over 5 million Democrats to stop them from voting for Hillary. She did that all by herself.
Monday, June 12, 2017
Sunday, June 11, 2017
John Hinderaker discovers false testimony by James Comey before the Senate last week
But Comey’s Senate testimony was untruthful. He told the committee that he didn’t document his important meeting with President Bush, but only “sent a quick email to my staff to let them know there was something going on.” ...
[I]t is crystal clear that Comey rendered a “report” on his meeting that included these extensive, self-serving quotes, and that Comey’s side of the story was preserved in notes–unclassified notes, that sounds familiar!–against any possible future contingency.
In short, Comey’s statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee that “I didn’t feel, with President Bush, the need to document it in that way” was false. He did document his story about his meeting with President Bush, in great detail, in a “report” that was turned into “unclassified notes.”
All the evidence is detailed here.
Michael Goodwin identifies multiple Comey leaks, not just one, calls him a "fountain of leaks"
Here:
He admitted to the Senate he leaked just one memo criticizing Trump over the Gen. Michael Flynn case, asking a friend to give it to The New York Times. In its May 16 story, the paper identified its sources only as “two people who read the memo.”
But that was not the first leak, for the Times had reported five days earlier on a separate, personal Comey memo attacking Trump for demanding “loyalty,” calling its anonymous sources “Mr. Comey’s associates.”
Wait, that wasn’t the first leak, either. On March 5, one day after Trump accused President Barack Obama of wiretapping him at Trump Tower, the Times reported that Comey was furious at the charge. Its unnamed sources were “senior American officials.”
All three stories carried the byline of Michael Schmidt, as did others describing intimate details of Comey’s dealings with Trump. Clearly, Schmidt had very, very good sources close to Comey.
The Washington Post also had “Justice Department officials” as anonymous sources for a bombshell report saying Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions failed to disclose two meetings with the Russian ambassador.
In calling Comey a “leaker,” Trump may have made the first understatement of his life. My bet is that Comey was a fountain of leaks, and didn’t show interest in prosecuting others because of his own guilt.
Saturday, June 10, 2017
NYT article suggests politics to blame for growing high anxiety, but declining turnouts for elections say otherwise
While election turnout soared during the 2008 financial crisis, overall the trend is down in the post-war, and flat since 1968. People care and don't care about politics about as much as they ever have.
Here:
The political mess has been “a topic of conversation and a source of anxiety in nearly every clinical case that I have worked with since the presidential election,” said Robert Duff, a psychologist in California. He wrote a 2014 book, “Hardcore Self-Help,” whose subtitle proposes to conquer anxiety in the coarse language that has also defined a generation.
Liberal Jonathan Turley says Comey was describing his own conduct in strikingly unethical terms
Here:
Comey asked why Trump would ask everyone to leave the Oval Office to speak with Comey unless he was doing something improper. Yet, Trump could ask why Comey would use a third party to leak these memos if they were his property and there was nothing improper in their public release.
In fact, there was a great deal wrong with their release, and Comey likely knew it. These were documents prepared on an FBI computer addressing a highly sensitive investigation on facts that he considered material to that investigation. Indeed, he conveyed that information confidentially to his top aides and later said that he wanted the information to be given to the special counsel because it was important to the investigation.
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