150 big spending House Republicans gave away the store in December 2015 in exchange for lifting the oil export ban

The Roll Call vote is here.

Since the vote on Dec. 18, 2015 what we got in return is US debt to the penny increasing by $2.33 trillion through 4/9/18, or 12%, and the price of a gallon of gasoline climbing by 65-cents, or 33%.

Way to go, Brownie!

Hungary completes second border fence with Serbia in less than two months for 120m Euros

The second fence was begun in late February, according to Politico here.

The 3-meter high 155km barbed barrier is already finished, according to Reuters here.

That's 96 miles in two months for the equivalent of $149 million.

That would come to $3.1 billion for the equivalent of 2,000 miles of US barbed barrier with Mexico. To match the Hungarian pace the US would need to finish the 2,000 miles in 3.5 years.

Somebody tell Trump the election is 2.5 years away.

Fine, Mueller's had bupkis all along, but unscrupulously rummaging through information privileged between client and attorney might lead elsewhere

That's why someone has to stop Mueller.

Law and order costs money, which implies taxation and government

And that's this morning's reason why I'm a conservative, not a libertarian.

We wouldn't need to increase law and order if men were increasingly demonstrating that they were angels, but because they are not, we do. Simple as that.

Now, on to my coffee.

Violence on the right: Takimag author floods the zone with the bilge of his own irrationality

He's no different than Antifa. Giving up on reason is never the answer.

Here:

Anyone who, like me, has spent a lot of time in discussion and argument with other people can easily see how little the rational avails. ... And that is precisely why we need a civil war. ... There are so many bad ideas, and such moral rot, that only war can rid us of the many pathologies that obviate culture and democracy alike. Only war can bring us to a state of affairs in which people, having serious problems to face, will have a more reasonable perspective and stop griping about safe spaces, white supremacy, toxic masculinity, and all the tiresome rest. Only war will send our politicians the message that Americans will not abide their cynical manipulations and refusal to do what is best for us.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, But down in the bilge, and with just one foot, Pumping away was Chris DeGroot, says Johnny.

Levin calls for Sessions to step down as AG in wake of FBI raid on Trump's personal attorney

Says Trump "can put Dershowitz in there for all I care."

Dershowitz for his part called the raid dangerous for the future of attorney-client privilege.

The whole thing makes us want to puke. The affair is completely out of control, and there's no one in the amusement park to turn off the ride.

Don't be fooled: Our communist enemy Xi Jinping Pong is still after our high-tech

Quoted in the story here:

"We hope developed countries will stop imposing restrictions on normal and reasonable trade of high-tech products and relax export controls on such trade with China."

Disqus' Jewel Box and Channel Z don't believe in freedom of speech anymore than Takimag does

Hillary's pal in California Party of Censorship introduces bill requiring fact-checking before posting

Publius Decius Mus exits the Trump Administration

Michael Anton.

Story here.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: Holocaust survivor born in 1938 or 1939 warns America under Trump feels like 1929 Berlin

Here in "Holocaust survivor: America under Trump feels like 1929 Berlin".

The story references Newsweek as the source, here:

At 79 years old he is among the youngest of the Holocaust survivors still alive. But Jacobs can remember life in the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald; what the Nazis did to him, his family, his friends. ...

“It feels like 1929 or 1930 Berlin,” Jacobs says, ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day 2018 on Thursday.

Laugh of the Day: What happens to your ad copy when it's proofread by the Chinese

New lightweight cookware "provides price control of the cooking process".

Precisely. Price control is always at the top of my list when I'm trying not to overcook the scrambled eggs.

So-called Alt-right Takimag commits suicide, drops popular Disqus Comments after three month slide in Alexa traffic rankings

And that's after the big decline from the summer of 2017 after the loss of the popular Gavin McInnes. Replacement with a dark, combative author in his place hasn't helped, either.

The celebrated comments section, a veritable maelstrom of unparalleled wit, wisdom and waywardness, was unceremoniously ended over the Easter weekend, scattering its loyal denizens like ants.

They have been welcomed by Disqus' Jewel Box and Channel Z, but will be m o d e r a t e d.

Rotza ruck.

The dumbest headline of the day comes from The New York Post

Headline:

GOP’s tax cut isn’t a gift to the rich, analysis finds

Paragraph six of the story:

The biggest beneficiaries of the new tax structure are those earning between $300,000 to $733,000, according to the analysis. They’ll see an average tax cut of about 3.4 percent, taking home an extra $11,200 this year on average.

I guess the Post doesn't know that 90% of individual wage earners make less than $100,000 per year.

Loretta's been having lunch again, a lot of it

Immigration raid sends shockwaves through packing industry happy to hire people from shit-hole countries

Neil Munro reports for Breitbart, here:

The raid is sending shock-waves through the meatpacking industry which is being caught between marketplace pressure to keep costs low and the federal laws barring the employment of cheap foreign migrants.... For many years, the industry has relied on a mix of immigrants, illegal migrants and legal refugees from Syria, Somalia, and other unfortunate countries. The resulting marketplace pressure is pressuring reluctant meatpackers to raise their salaries. ...

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Fake jobs boom: Just 23,000 full-time jobs were added in March 2018

We're still missing about 6.2 million full-time jobs . . .

. . . and the pace of additions has slowed to recession-like levels.

YouTube shooter was Iranian refugee, follower of Baha'i faith

The LA Times reports here:

Aghdam entered the country as a refugee roughly two decades ago, a family member said. In one of her videos, she said she was born in Urmia, Iran — where she and other members of her Baha'i faith face discrimination — and that her family had spent a year and a half in Turkey.

Trump plays hardball with China, latest threatened tariffs impossible to match

Bloomberg reports here:

President urges levies on $100 billion more of Chinese goods . . . Were China to want to match Trump’s latest threat, it wouldn’t have enough American goods imports to target. It could take other measures like curbing package tours or student transfers to the U.S., or hamper American companies operating in China.

And just like that The Atlantic fires Kevin Williamson

Reportedly, here, after learning that Williamson advocates that women who abort their babies should be hung for homicide.

Sounds more like a convenient "discovery" after The Atlantic realized it had made a mistake hiring him in the first place. One almost gets the feeling that Williamson was set up.

Meanwhile The Atlantic tolerates women who actually kill their unborn children, but not someone who merely thinks that's a capital offense.

John Gray identifies the apocalyptic faith animating Antifa

Here, in The Times Literary Supplement:

The hyper-liberal demand that public spaces be purged of symbols of past oppression continues a post-Cold War fantasy of the end of history.

Adam Winkler: The British colonies in America were created and governed by corporations

Discussed here at TNR as if this were news to them:

Winkler’s approach is different from the outset. He does not see corporate behemoths as a deviation from the ideal of a land of small entrepreneurs. Nor does he see the corporate form—the structure that allows a business entity to have a degree of independence from those individuals who found it—as inherently menacing. The British colonies, he points out, were settled by private organizations such as the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company, entities that had stockholders and were governed by charters—essentially, by corporations. “Democracy and constitutionalism,” as he puts it, “were intimately tied up with the corporation from the very beginning.”

Kevin Williamson laments the passing of classical liberalism, the soil in which libertarians got rich

Well, at least we finally know whose side Kevin is really on. His own. 

Here:

[L]ibertarianism has benefited from the fact that American elites are notably more libertarian in their views than is the median American voter. That dynamic was explored by the economist Bryan Caplan under a typically bold title (“Why Is Democracy Tolerable?”) with a typically needling conclusion: “Democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich … Democracy as we know it is bad enough. Democracy that really listened to all the people would be an authoritarian nightmare.” ...

[T]he United States is for the moment left with two authoritarian populist parties and no political home for classical liberalism at all.

Coulter after The Oval: I don't think we're getting The Wall

Here:

COULTER: . . . I said you're not doing what you promised to do.

Where's the end of NAFTA? Where's the wall? Where are the deportations? What are you doing talking about the DREAMers?

CARR: To which he responded? 

COULTER: [Does Trump impersonation] I appointed Gorsuch.

That's all we're getting.

Winnie Mandela, vicious animal, meets her maker at 81

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for March 2018

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for March 2018

Max temp 56, Mean Max temp 66

Min temp 17, Mean Min temp 7

Av temp 34.3, Mean Av temp 34

Precip 1.16, Mean precip 2.45

Snowfall 4.9, Mean snowfall 9.1, Snowfall season to date 71.7, Mean Snowfall season to date 63.6

Heating Degree Days 943, Mean HDD 955, HDD Season to date 5599, HDD Mean Season to date 5850

Using HDD, the cool season to date has been 4.29% warmer than the mean.

Trump blames Mexico, our own laws and his powerlessness, the Limbaugh Theorem in action

“opposing everything that’s happening, even the things he is causing to happen. He is on a perpetual campaign.”

Laugh of the Day: Snow for Easter

Snow for Christmas

snow for Easter

livin' in Michigan

frosts my keister

Maybe David Hogg would be accepted by more colleges if he learned how to write the English language

The redundant "only" is also indicative.

Treated I bad did they.

You sound like Yoda.

A gypsy detects a fascist in David Hogg

Trump promised The Wall, celebrates a fence

Story here.

Trannies for Kevin Williamson: National Review thinks Ta-Nehisi Coates' favorable opinion of Kevin Williamson is a good thing

David French, here:

If Ta-Nehisi Coates can see the virtues of his work, then perhaps there’s room for you [progressives] to open your minds. National Review’s loss is The Atlantic’s gain, but even more importantly, the marketplace of ideas benefits from his transition.

Coulter at Columbia: I knew Trump was a shallow, lazy ignoramus, and I didn't care

At a debate with Mickey Kaus.

Story here.

Trump lazy? Now you've gone too far, Ann Coulter, too far!

National Review's Kevin Williamson looks left and heads to The Atlantic

Where Kevin and his sneering elitism will find a larger audience. Slate's Jordan Weissmann pretends not to get it: "Above all else, Williamson is something fairly rare in U.S. media: an explicit, unrepentant elitist."

After three revisions, 4Q2017 real GDP still comes up short at 2.9% annualized

That's up from 2.5% in the second estimate, but still down from 3.2% in 3Q.

That means that despite the holiday shopping season and all the expenditures of hurricane recovery, the economy still slowed down in the fourth quarter of last year. It should have been the best quarter yet if the economy were truly on the upswing.

To make matters worse, 1Q2018 is shaping up to be a horrible 1.8%.

BBC calls convicted, mostly Pakistani, grooming gang 'Oxford Men', which ought to outrage the elite university's graduates everywhere

Laugh of the Day, Stormy Daniels edition: If you want Trump to screw you repeatedly, you have to be one of his voters

If Trump wants his own version of the Iran-Contra scandal, this is as good a way as any to do it

While Rush Limbaugh keeps trying to find a way to rationalize Trump's signature on the omnibus, Laura Ingraham minced no words

On her radio show this morning she called this a betrayal.

And that's what it was.

In other words, Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes was a giant nothing burger

Robert Shiller: Great Depression tariffs did not plausibly, directly affect economic growth in a major degree

Everywhere we turn we hear the opposite. It's standard operating procedure to blame protectionism for the Great Depression. Shiller knows it can't be demonstrated from the data. Hence the psychological argument. 

Quoted here:

Shiller said he did not believe there would be a significant inflationary effect to the U.S. from steel and aluminum tariffs, but he warned that heated trade rhetoric from both sides could send the American economy reeling into a recession.

"When you ask about the size of the impact on the economy, I think a lot of it is more psychological than direct, unless they really slam on tariffs," he said. The Yale economist pointed to the "most famous tariff war of all" during the Great Depression, which he said did not "plausibly, directly" affect economic growth "in a major degree," but it may have helped "destroy confidence" and willingness to plan for the future.

"It's exactly those 'wait and see' attitudes that cause a recession," he explained.

Actually, there's about 100.8 billion people not on Facebook

Because they're dead.

Laws restrain only the lawful

Seen here in the comments.

Freedom who loves must first be wise and good

Freedom who loves, must first be wise and good;

But from that mark how far they rove we see,

For all this waste of wealth, and loss of blood.

-- John Milton (1608-1674)

CNBC story on conservative anger with Trump deliberately omits the centrality of differences over illegal immigration policy

That's what Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter are all about, after all, but CNBC just dances around this as if it didn't really exist.

Ann Coulter only tweets almost every day a "border wall lack-of-progress" update.

Conservatives are outraged also that Trump would trade a wall for DACA-type amnesty. DACA is illegal. Obama's executive order was unconstitutional. Trump acts like it's no big deal, just like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin becoming dictators for life is no big deal to him, either.

It's a propaganda technique: Pretend something doesn't exist, and it doesn't. It's called marginalization. The communist Alinsky made it one of his rules for radicals. To talk about what your enemy wants to talk about is to assist your enemy by publicizing his issues, so don't do it.

See for yourself here.

The kids are a little late to the game: The violence against children began when we chose abortion over them

There were 167 votes against the omnibus in the US House: 90 Republican, 77 Democrat

The House Roll Call is here, the Senate here. There were 32 votes against in the Senate: 23 Republican, 8 Democrat, and Bernie Sanders.

For all the previous action on HR 1625, see here.

87% of the Michigan Congressional Delegation, both Republican and Democrat, voted "Yea", except for good guys House Republicans Justin Amash and Jack Bergman.

Notable "Yea" votes included Republican goodfellas:

Kevin Brady of Texas, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, Duncan Hunter of California (ouch), Darrell Issa of California, Will Hurd of Texas, Peter King of New York, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Kevin McCarthy of California, Michael McCaul of Texas, Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, Devin Nunes of California, Peter Roskam of Illinois, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, of course, Steve "Bullseye" Scalise of Louisiana, and Joe "You Lie!" Wilson of South Carolina.

Say it isn't so, Joe!   

The line of the week was Rush Limbaugh's: "Whenever you see the word omnibus, think trash can"

Here:

So on this, for example, this omnibus, whenever you see that word, folks, just think of a trash can. No! In fact, think of a Christmas tree with anything you want gift wrapped underneath it. That’s what omnibus means.

He had it right the first time. A conservative's trash can is a liberal's Christmas tree.

Mark Levin yesterday said he thinks we've reached the point of no return

If that's true then it's down to us or them.

Michael Savage yesterday said it feels like we lost an election

It still does.

Like all the other Baby Boom presidents Trump has squandered his power and opportunities

And his closest enemies sat quietly by and let him do so, convincing him that war is the father of everything.

Winning means you have political capital.

In Washington you either spend that as soon as you get it or you lose it.

For not delivering Trump is already finished, but he will be the last to know.

Trump will never sign another bill like this because by that time Democrats will be in charge and be busy with something more important

Trump gives in and signs spending bill, shows us his Bezos Balls

Republican spending bill re-empowers agencies, not just courts, to decide if someone is competent to buy a gun or possess one

Reported here:

Unfortunately, the spending bill passed Thursday allows the ban to be reinstituted because it reauthorizes the 2007 National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Improvement Amendments Act. This act allowed government agencies, not just the courts, to determine if someone is mentally incompetent to buy or possess a gun.

House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said during testimony late Wednesday that he was “disturbed” that the bill would undo part of Republicans’ good work. But by Thursday morning, the House leadership had decided to go ahead with the measure.

Despite the name Fix-NICS, the bill is likely to cause more problems than it is worth.

Nancy Pelosi is quite content for Trump to think he's getting his wall, and urges him to sign the spending bill

Quoted here:

". . . if you want to think you're getting a wall, you just think it and sign the bill."

Call 202-456-1111 and tell Trump to veto the spending bill

House Freedom Caucus urges Trump to veto spending bill

Reported here.

Spending bill is a giant FU to Trump, prevents him from using any of the new border wall prototypes

Reported here:

But, crucially, the bill specifically prevents the Trump administration from using any of the new wall designs it commissioned and tested in California last year. All money has to be spent on “operationally effective designs deployed as of the date of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017” — a bill Trump signed on May 5, 2017.

If President Trump cared less about his wall than about a wall, this wouldn’t be an issue. But everything we know about the president indicates that’s not the case, and that this is a blow to his ego — he reportedly upbraided congressional Republicans this week for not supporting it, claiming they “owed” him for his support for the tax bill and his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. The bullying tactics do not appear to have worked. ...

Trump wanted 1,000 new ICE agents; he’s getting barely 100, and none of them are the field agents responsible for arresting unauthorized immigrants. (Instead, ICE is getting more staff for investigations and mission support.)

And when it comes to immigration detention, Congress isn’t just refusing to give the White House the 20 percent increase in detention Trump asked for — it’s rebuking ICE for overspending and expecting Congress to bail it out. 

h/t Mickey Kaus

Asian stock indices cratered overnight in the wake of Trump's imposition of tariffs on China

Jobs Americans won't do: Ruthlessly efficient Hungarian soldiers, prisoners, unemployed built 110 mile razor wire border fence in mere weeks for $80 million

Reuters, dateline Sarok, Hungary, Sept. 23, 2015:

Built in a matter of weeks by soldiers, prison laborers and cadres of the unemployed, a vast new wall along Balkan frontiers is a monument to the ruthless efficiency with which Prime Minister Viktor Orban has mobilized Hungary against migrants. ...

While Europe dithered over a collective response, Hungary took matters into its own hands, shutting off the route with a new fence along its entire 175 km (110 mile) border with Serbia, topped with razor wire and guarded by helmeted riot police.

It was erected at a cost of 22 billion forints (about $80 million), a rare example of efficiency in a country which built its last underground metro line ten years behind schedule at triple the projected cost.

The government says it put the military in charge of the construction so that it could act more quickly. By swiftly mobilizing state resources, the authorities also managed to turn the fence into a national project, immensely popular at home even as it is denounced by European partners. ...

In just days since it shut the Serbian frontier, Hungary has already moved even faster to shut the border with Croatia, which is inside the European Union but outside the Schengen zone.

A 41-kilometre temporary fence was thrown up within four days. Work is already underway on a permanent barrier, with machines clearing the land, fence posts driven into the ground and razor wire rolled out.

Equivalent cost for 2,000 mile US southern border wall using soldiers, prisoners and the unemployed for labor: $1.45 billion. Actual US estimates of the cost run north of $20 billion and of the timeline to complete many years.

Where there's a will, there's a way, but we obviously don't have the will, or the imagination, Trump included.

Senate passes massive spending bill in the middle of the night, sends it to Trump

CNBC reports here:

The Senate passed a massive $1.3 trillion spending bill in the early morning hours of Friday, sending it to President Donald Trump's desk for his signature.

Congress approved the more than 2,200-page legislation swiftly with a midnight Friday government shutdown deadline looming. The plan was released only Wednesday night. The House approved the bill Thursday afternoon by a 256-167 vote with bipartisan backing. ...

[Trump] reportedly threatened to veto it days ago, but tweeted his support for it Wednesday night after a discussion with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. ...

It would put $1.57 billion in new funding toward fencing along the border with Mexico and border security technology such as aircraft and sensors. Trump had sought billions more in funding for a physical barrier on the border after he promised to build a wall as a candidate.

Limbaugh predicts the omnibus spending bill will make Trumpists go wobbly

Well, they should since it's a total betrayal.

Hey Trump, last chance before November to show your balls are real

Veto the spending package.

Republicans fund Planned Parenthood and Sanctuary cities, but not The Wall

Republican profligates happy to spend an obscene $1.3 trillion, but none of it on The Wall

Fully-funding The Wall would come to just 1.7% of this gargantuan spending bomb. Republicans don't give a damn about border security, so I no longer give a damn about Republicans. Our new country isn't going to be great.

Facebook users have only themselves to blame

Bloomberg, here:

Reporters were calling this a breach, but it wasn’t, because users freely signed away their own data and that of their friends. The rules were clear, and Facebook followed them.

Like Obama before him, Trump congratulating Putin for his fraudulent win simply normalizes the acceptability of Putin's dictatorship

Like the French, we just shrug.

Laugh of the Day 3.0: Facebook outraged it was deceived!

Outraged, I tell you.

From the story here:

Facebook said Tuesday that CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg and their teams were "working around the clock to get all the facts and take the appropriate action moving forward" regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

"The entire company is outraged we were deceived," Facebook added. "We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information and will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens."

Obama campaign 2012 hoovered up Facebook data too, but was lauded for it

So says Investor's Business Daily, here:

In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends.

According to a July 2012 MIT Technology Review article, when you installed the app, "it said it would grab information about my friends: their birth dates, locations, and 'likes.' "

The campaign boasted that more than a million people downloaded the app, which, given an average friend-list size of 190, means that as many as 190 million had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent.

If anything, Facebook made it easy for Obama to do so. A former campaign director, Carol Davidsen, tweeted that "Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing."

More at the link.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: "Stepford wives cost me the election"

Joanna stabs "Bobbie"

Hide the knives, folks, Hillary's on the hunt!

Liz Peek: Hillary's latest excuse: Stepford wives cost me the election

FedEx package screening fails, bomb in shipment headed to Austin explodes at San Antonio sorting center

The story is here but is stupid for focusing on race and Donald Trump's supposed lack of an adequate response. The victims of the tripwire bomb were white.

Laugh of the Day: Constituent asks Long Island Dem. Representative "What's the Second Amendment?"

New York values, folks.

From the story here:

Rep. Tom Suozzi made the remark to constituents at a town hall last week, saying that folks opposed to Trump might resort to the “Second Amendment.” “It’s really a matter of putting public pressure on the president,” Suozzi said in a newly released video of the March 12 talk in Huntington. “This is where the Second Amendment comes in, quite frankly, because you know, what if the president was to ignore the courts? What would you do? What would we do?”

A listener then blurts out, “What’s the Second Amendment?” The left-leaning Democrat says, “The Second Amendment is the right to bear arms.” The spectators laughed — some nervously. Republicans were not amused.

Joe diGenova is joining the Trump legal team

Joe long predicted Hillary would be indicted because the FBI had too many good people in it for it to turn out otherwise.

It turned out otherwise.

The story is here.

Obviously Trump softened his anti-immigration positions in August 2016 after Bannon took over because that's what the data analytics told them to do

Remember?

Trump turned on a dime in August 2016 after Bannon assumed leadership and it immediately got him in hot water with his core supporters after the Hannity Town Hall in Arizona. But it didn't matter to Trump. Trump knew that was the way to broaden his base because most Americans are forgiving and morally weak, supporting amnesty for the DACA "children". It didn't hurt, either, that softening those positions dovetailed with the libertarianism of the Mercers and their money. Trump was telegraphing to the libertarian money men of the Republican Party that he was in fact "flexible".

There's no there there, folks.

And there's no Wall, either, only a snake (remember the story of the snake?) who is willing to bite by trading a DACA amnesty for The Wall.

Spare me the bleating about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: When are you going to get upset about Fusion Centers?

It's been eight years already.

Story here.

The Christopher Wylie story is fascinating but isn't really bombshell news: Ted Cruz used the same firm Wylie worked for

We reported on the story about Cruz from WaPo here already in December 2015.

The really hysterically funny thing about it all, once again, is how Facebook and its millions of idiot users are the real chumps. 

From the story here:

. . . Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process.

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says.

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

“Is it fair to say you ‘hacked’ Facebook?” I ask him one night.

He hesitates. “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”

Xi Jinping re-erected for rife

Story here.

Trump fired Tillerson, Goldstein and McEntee on Tuesday, now Sessions fires McCabe last night

Just a coincidence, right?

Story here.

Xi Jinping pong

Just think, it could have been her neck

It's becoming increasingly clear that "The Art of the Deal" means trading your own mother for what you want

For the cost of California's LA to San Fran bullet train, we could have THREE border walls

One with Mexico, one with Canada, and one with DC.

Hillary blames married white women for her loss, and James Comey's re-opening the investigation into her

In India, quoted here:

"Democrats, going back to my husband and even before, but just in recent times going back to Bill and our candidates and then President Obama, have been losing the vote, including white women. We do not do well with white men and we don't do well with married white women," Clinton said.

"All of a sudden white women, who were going to vote for me and frankly standing up to the men in their lives and the men in their workplaces, were being told, ‘She's going to jail. You don't want to vote for her. It's terrible, you can't vote for that.' So, it just stopped my momentum and it decreased my vote enough because I was ahead. I was winning, and I thought I had fought my way back in the ten days from that letter until the election. I fell a little bit short," Clinton said.

Trump to name the brain dead Kudlow to replace Gary Cohn at National Economic Council

The brain dead Kudlow, who served during the Reagan Administration but can't remember a better month for jobs than the 313,000 reported for February 2018, is reported to be Trump's choice to head the National Economic Council.

The story is here.

Once again the libertarian pests throw an election to the Democrats

They live for this sort of thing.

If it were a jobs boom we wouldn't STILL have a deficit of 6,437,680 jobs in February 2018

The difference between civilian employment at 60% of civilian non-institutional population in February 2018 and the 62.6% average before the Great Recession is 6,437,680 jobs.

Call me when Trump gets it up.

The broadest measures of unemployment in February 2018 have fallen below the average before the Great Recession

Hooah Jim Geraghty!

Here:

Government doesn’t louse up everything, but it sure louses up a lot of what it promises to deliver:

from the Big Dig to Healthcare.gov;

from letting veterans die waiting for health care to failing to prioritize the levees around New Orleans and funding other projects instead;

from 9/11 to the failure to see the housing bubble that precipitated the Great Recession;

from misconduct in the Secret Service to the IRS targeting conservative groups;

from lavish conferences at the General Services Administration to the Solyndra grants;

from the runaway costs of California’s high-speed-rail project to Operation Fast and Furious;

from the OPM breach to giving Hezbollah a pass on trafficking cocaine.

The federal government has an abysmal record of abusing the public’s trust, finances, and its own authority. Now some people want it to take on a bigger role? If you want to enact a massive overhaul of America’s economy and government to redistribute wealth, you first have to demonstrate that you can accomplish something smaller, like ensuring every veteran gets adequate care. Until then, if you want to live like a Norwegian, buy a plane ticket.

Trump acts like he had nothing to do with appointing the people who oppose his own policies . . .

. . . just like Obama acted like he had nothing to do with country's unemployment, low GDP and home foreclosures for years after he was first elected.

Now all we need is Joe Biden to admit electing him in the first place was a mistake

There is no jobs boom: Full-time in February 2018 is still 6 million behind where it ought to be

For the ten years before the Great Recession, full-time averaged 51.4% of civilian non-institutional population.

In February 2018, we're still down in the basement trying to climb our way out. After ten years! Currently just 49.1% have full-time jobs.

The pre-recession rate applied to the present population level would yield six million more working full-time than there really are. We should have 132 million working full-time. Instead we have 126 million.

There is no jobs boom, just more of the same slow recovery. At this rate it'll still take many more years for full-time to recover to pre-recession levels. The odds of a recession intervening first are high.

There is no jobs boom visible in full-time work: Growth is only consistent with the recent past

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

The story is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can't remember, either.

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

Therefore we will lose it, sooner rather than later.