Monday, June 10, 2019
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan's former spokesman calls for increase to Congressional pay
Your man or woman in Congress is already in the top 3% of wage earners in America, but it's not enough, says this guy. Republicans carry the Democrats' water, every damn time.
Brendan Buck, former spokesperson for onetime Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., tweeted his support for a pay raise Friday.
“Congressional member and staff pay should be increased. I know that sounds bad, and makes for bad politics, but it’s just true. No, current member pay is by no means paltry, but it is too low, and it’s having a negative effect on Congress,” said Buck.
USA Today op-ed calls Biden "perfect tool of the oligarchy", might as well be referring to Trump
The best among us may get elected to high office in D.C. with high minded ideals and goals but eventually get co-opted by an insidious system, and gradually become an out-of-touch, often-duplicitous, platitude-mouthing D.C. elite.
Trump signed everything a Republican controlled Congress sent him without getting anything on immigration in return, the basis for his candidacy. Now he's running for reelection on immigration again.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . ..
The fact is, these two guys could run together on the same ticket.
Meanwhile 744 candidates have filed to run for president as of June 3, 2019, including Communist Michael Tyler Shortshit.
You have choice!
Iraq has handed down at least 3,000 death sentences to ISIS fighters so far
Iraq handing out thousands of death sentences in hasty trials for ISIS fighters:
It remains unclear the window of time between the sentencing and the
execution. Interior Ministry sources say it most often takes years for
the President to sign for the execution – most often by hanging – to be
carried out.
The recovery of full time jobs under Reagan hit 50.1% of population in three years, we're still not that far after seven
If I'm repeating myself, let me know.
Sunday, June 9, 2019
If the current jobs recovery just equaled the average of previous cycle highs, we'd have 3.1 million more working full time jobs than we do
Six previous full time jobs recoveries since 1968 have meant 51.1% of the population working full time on average at peak, but we appear to have stalled out at around 49.9%.
It looks like a small difference on paper but amounts to almost 3.1 million more working full time today than are.
Population continues to grow, why not full time employment along with it?
This is not a boom.
Saturday, June 8, 2019
Friday, June 7, 2019
Average hourly earnings increases for the bottom 80% of workers not-seasonally-adjusted are averaging 3.08% in April and May vs. 3.42% in 4Q2018 and 1Q2019
These are good numbers compared with the awful Obama era, but still far off the 4+% levels before the last two recessions.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Greedy and craven U.S. tech companies have helped China control the internet and police its citizens"
The world must stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery. ... [Tank man's] defiance is a lesson for the rest of the world, which must resolutely stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery and nurture democracy there whenever, however, it can.
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Rush Limbaugh tells us western civilization is in jeopardy when one of his advertizers features a woman boasting she dumped her boyfriend because he was a dud in the bedroom
Rush's market is cads and whores.
Western civilization isn't in jeopardy, it's already dead.
I would demonetize you just for writing "When YouTube demonetizes I"
You are an embarrassment to the platform and to the English language, sir.
Chip Roy calls latest House immigration bill a show, political theatre, which is ignoring the invasion
Everything government does is theatre, usually bad theatre, and when it's occasionally mediocre theatre because it's so rarely even that good the politicians abandon all sense of proportion and fall all over themselves telling us how wonderful what they did was.
Trump won't actually do his job. Congress won't actually do its job.
Sounds like a trend.
Link.
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Climate Update for Grand Rapids, MI, May 2019
Climate Update for Grand Rapids, MI, May 2019
Max Temp 79, Mean Max 86
Min Temp 38, Mean Min 32
Av Temp 57, Mean Av 57.9
Precip 5.96, Mean 3.48 (12th wettest May on record)
Snow 0, Mean 0.2
HDD 248, Mean 252
Season to date HDD 6673, Mean 6654
CDD 6, Mean 39
We've had a very wet spring, and now we're seeing caterpillar activity on some pine and apple trees, in addition to vigorous ant activity in our sandy soils. Song birds have a plentiful supply of bugs to eat and are feeding and nesting robustly.
Tuesday, June 4, 2019
Robin Munro: The Tiananmen massacre was not primarily of the students, rather the workers, not in the Square but citywide in Beijing
Remembering Tiananmen Square:
Western criticisms based on a false version of the clearing of Tiananmen Square have handed the butchers of Beijing needless propaganda victories in the U.N. and elsewhere. ... By May 17, the sight of as many as 2,000 idealistic young students collapsing from heat and starvation brought more than a million ordinary Beijing citizens into the square in a moving display of human solidarity. “The students speak on behalf of all of us,” they would tell any foreigner who cared to listen.
Having been passive spectators, the laobaixing now began to act as a bastion of active support for the students, bringing food and other supplies to the square on a round-the-clock basis. This specter of emerging cross-class solidarity led directly to the authorities’ decision to impose martial law in Beijing on May 20. ...
Action groups formed spontaneously throughout Beijing. ... The laobaixing were now in a posture of peaceful, nonviolent but direct confrontation with the government and army, and similar “turmoil”—to use the party’s term—rapidly emerged in dozens of other cities. Moreover, the laobaixing were beginning to articulate their own grievances. ...
However, the birth of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation a few days after the abortive imposition of martial law posed a much greater threat. That is because this group, headquartered in a couple of scruffy tents in the northwest corner of Tiananmen Square, raised an issue that had been taboo in China since 1949: the right of workers to engage in independent labor organization and self-representation. Such a demand struck at the very core of the Chinese Communist state, for the party’s main claim to legitimacy is that it rules in the name and interests of the “laboring masses.” Although its active membership remained relatively small, its formal membership soared during the first few days of June, reaching a peak of more than 10,000 enrollments after three of its leaders were secretly arrested on May 29.
Autonomous workers’ groups quickly sprang up in most of China’s major cities. This was the “cancer cell” that the authorities had feared from the outset would appear if legal recognition were ever to be conferred on the student organizations. In the government’s eyes, if the statue of the Goddess of Democracy, erected in the square at the end of May, represented the arrogant defiance of the students and the symbolic intrusion of “bourgeois liberalism” and “Western subversion” into the sacred heart of Communist rule, the crude red-and-black banner of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, not a hundred yards away from the goddess, represented the terrifying power of the workers awakened.
Both had to be crushed, and the rapidly defecting party apparatus had to be frightened and shocked back into line.
Forget the glowing Wikipedia entry for gay classicist Claude Fredericks of Bennington College, he preyed on students
NICHOLAS DELBANCO: A strange
fellow, Claude Fredericks. He dropped out of Harvard because he refused
to take the swim test or something like that, but he was a genuinely
learned person, an autodidact. Knew Latin, Greek, Japanese. Punctilious
in his self--presentation. And he had an avant-garde printing press,
quite famous at the time, called Banyan Press. It published people like
Gertrude Stein and the poet Jimmy Merrill, who’d been Claude’s lover
early on. ...
MATT JACOBSEN: It was never
unfriendly between me and Claude, but as I fell more deeply in love with
Liz [Glotzer, Jacobsen’s girlfriend and eventual wife], I saw less of
Claude. I realized it was kind of ridiculous to hang out with him, cool
as he was. And he wasn’t going to get what he wanted from me, so he
moved on to greener pastures, started fooling around with another guy
who’d been his student. At the end of the day, Claude was driven by
a—you know—perverse interest in me. And that was wrong. I’m a geezer
now, and I understand how wrong he really was.
Full transcript of John Dowd conversation with Flynn lawyer shows Mueller report's selective quotation intended to insinuate improper behavior when there was none
“Isn’t it ironic that this man who kept indicting and prosecuting people for process crimes committed a false statement in his own report. By taking out half my words, they changed the tenor and the contents of that conversation with [Flynn lawyer] Robert Kelner,” Dowd said of former special counsel Robert Mueller in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
Just 58 Republicans had the temerity to vote Nay on the $19 billion disaster relief bill
You'll notice that Democrat Ilhan Omar didn't bother to vote. Must have been busy washing her hijabs.
The bill showers more money on Puerto Rico, and spends nothing on the disaster at the US/Mexico border.
Monday, June 3, 2019
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Twitter's 12-hour punishment of Erick Erickson for this Elizabeth Warren joke was so grade schoolish
Twitter is treating some of its customers like children because it can. The company lost money every year since 2013, when it went public, until 2018, when it turned a profit of $1.2 billion. The service has about 126 million daily users.
ICYMI Twitter banned the conservative who said conservatives banned by Twitter were reactionaries not conservatives
Helping the ࿕ will not protect you.
A multiculturalist self-excommunicates from National Review
"Glory, glory, hallelujah, His truth is marching on."
Erick Erickson is still too wet behind the ears to appreciate how National Review made purging conservatives from the movement its persona, Twitter just puts that on steroids
Catholics excommunicate. Protestants self-excommunicate. Get with it, Erick.
National Review’s Own Struggle With “Ideological Diversity”:
For Murray Rothbard, the history of National Review was largely a story of exclusion. “And so the purges began,” Rothbard recounted in a 1992 article. “One after another, Buckley and the National Review purged
and excommunicated all the radicals, all the nonrespectables. Consider
the roll call: isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists,
libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch Society, and all those who
continued, like the early National Review, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil-rights revolution after Buckley had changed and decided to embrace it.”
That
policy of excommunication continued to the present. Over the years, the
magazine has fired or stopped publishing figures like Joseph Sobran (an
editor who should have been fired for his anti-Semitism and racism but was not let go until criticizing Buckley in 1993), Peter Brimelow (an editor who was excessively anti-immigrant) and Ann Coulter (who was fired in 2001 after writing a column arguing saying that the United States should “invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”).
Saturday, June 1, 2019
In China, however, things are mostly wrong, very wrong
Chinese dissidents are being executed for their organs, former hospital worker says:
The world is beginning to wake up to the fact that virtually every
organ transplant in China costs the life of an innocent human being.
That’s why countries like Israel, Spain, Italy and Taiwan have already
banned transplant tourism.
There were zero bank failures in 2018, but we got the first one of 2019 last night
The Enloe State Bank, Cooper, Texas, failed last night, the first bank failure in the US since Dec. 15, 2017. A bank failure hasn't occurred in Texas since 2013.
The failure in Texas is estimated to cost the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund $27 million.
The FDIC insures the deposits at 5,362 institutions as of March 31, 2019.
To kick off abnormal pride month, Drudge headlines two stories highlighting gay proclivity for the extreme
An unbelievably lame one from NBC featuring a gay storm chaser who proposes during a tornado (death wish much?), and one from the Advocate featuring supposedly gay Philippine President Duterte, whose regime has encouraged violence in the extra-judicial killings of thousands of drug pushers.
And it's only June 1.
Friday, May 31, 2019
Thursday, May 30, 2019
Disney's threat to halt filming in Georgia over abortion is at least as pathetic as its adult customer base
I hates those meeces to pieces.
Ben Shapiro's "peaceful ethnic cleansing" predates Richard Spencer's by a decade
Transfer is not a dirty word:
Here is the bottom line: If you believe that the Jewish state has a
right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians
and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It's
an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. And it is far less ugly
than the prospect of bloody conflict ad infinitum. When two populations
are constantly enmeshed in conflict, it is insane to suggest that
somehow deep-seated ideological change will miraculously occur, allowing
the two sides to live together.
That's Ben Shapiro in 2003.
Here's Richard Spencer, from 2013:
Real diversity and tolerance apparently go only so far, however. In an address at white supremacist Jared Taylor’s 2013 American Renaissance conference,
Spencer called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.” As an example of how
this could be accomplished, he cited the 1919 Paris Peace Conference,
where new national boundaries were formed at the end of World War I.
“Today, in the public imagination, ‘ethnic cleansing’ has been
associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so),” Spencer
said. “But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of
successful ethnic redistribution — done by fiat, we should remember, but
done peacefully.”
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
65% of voters oppose impeachment proceedings, think immigration is Congress' number one job right now
Poll: Two-thirds of voters oppose impeachment proceedings:
The latest Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll survey found that 65 percent of respondents oppose impeachment proceedings.
John Cleese's three words to sum up why England had to Brexit: Jean-Claude Juncker
John Cleese defiant as he says ‘London ISN’T an English city’, sparking Twitter storm:
The Fawlty Towers star has openly supported Brexit and previously
referred to the country’s debate as “one of the most depressing things
about this country”. ...
John also previously insisted he doesn’t believe Brexit is a “mistake”. He told the Radio Times: “I’m rather delighted that all these
forecasts of doom and destruction have turned out, at this point, not to
have been real.” And elaborating on his reasons why he voted Leave, he added: “I don’t
want to be ruled by Brussels bureaucrats who want to create a super
state. “I was pro-Brexit for that reason. “If I had three words to sum up why we had to get out of Europe, they would be: Jean-Claude Juncker.”
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Monday, May 27, 2019
Memorial Day 2019
They say that in Flanders fields
wasted young lives abound,
sleeping still beneath the ground;
Yet from what I've seen of life
the waste is all around,
though walking the dead above also are found.
-- Johnny
Sunday, May 26, 2019
A reminder that in addition to being the chief polluter of the atmosphere, China is also the chief polluter of the oceans
What are we going to do about China?
China is turning the whole world into a shit-hole.
America needs someone like Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini who wants to fine charities for rescuing illegal immigrants
Next to America's libertarian do-nothings, the biggest enablers of illegal immigration into the United States are in church this morning.
Imagine their indignation if we did fine them. Could possibly be more fun to watch than Hillary supporters on election eve 2016.
Friday, May 24, 2019
LOL, lowly Republican House member stops $19.1 billion disaster relief spending spree Trump caved on
Notice: It's Not Justin Amash.
House Republican holds up $19 billion disaster relief bill expected to pass unanimously:
The bill was expected to pass the House under a unanimous consent process, to which any member may object. ... “Secondly, it’s a bill that includes nothing to address the clear
national emergency and humanitarian crisis we face at our southern
border,” [Chip] Roy [TX:21] said. ... President Donald Trump has declared the situation on the southern
border a national emergency and had previously sought to include
border-related funding in the bill. He later dropped the demand. ... Roy, in a statement later Friday, wrote that “I stayed in D.C. to
object because this kind of swampy practice is what Texans elected me
to stand against.
LOL, Camille Paglia said in 1991 that Naomi Wolf can't do historical analysis, and Wolf has proven it, again
LISTEN: Clinton, Gore Advisor Naomi Wolf's New Book Exposed For Inaccuracies :
Speaking with interviewer Matthew Street about her new book,
“Outrages,” ... Street pointed out
she had completely misunderstood a legal term. Wolf had decided that
there were several dozen executions of men for sodomy but did not
understand that that fact was incorrect because she didn’t understand
the legal term “death recorded.”
Oops.
Paglia in 1991:
And beauty, according to, um, Miss, um, Naomi
Wolf, is a heterosexist conspiracy by men in a room to keep feminism back--and
all that crap that's going on. I call her, by the way, "Little Miss Pravda."
She and I are head to head on MTV this week, in case you want to know! But I won't
appear with her. Oprah's tried to get me on with her: I won't go on with her.
A talk show in Italy wanted to fly me over to appear with her. No. I always say,
"Would Caruso appear with Tiny Tim?" If you want to see what's wrong with Ivy
League education, look at The Beauty Myth, that book by Naomi Wolf. This is a
woman who graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a Rhodes scholar, and cannot
write a coherent paragraph. This is a woman who cannot do historical analysis,
and she is a Rhodes scholar? If you want to see the damage done to intelligent
women today in the Ivy League, look at that book. It's a scandal. Naomi
Wolf is an intelligent woman. She has been ill-served by her education. But if
you read Lacan, this is the result. Your brain turns to pudding! She has a case
to make. She cannot make it. She's full of paranoid fantasies about the world.
Her education was completely removed from reality.
Theresa May to resign as UK Prime Minister on June 7
With no Brexit withdrawal arrangement agreed, the prospect of the U.K. suffering a disorderly exit from the European Union now appears to be a more likely outcome. Britain and Northern Ireland’s official departure date from the European Union is October 31, 2019.
Thursday, May 23, 2019
China signed the Montreal Protocol in the 1980s to ban CFCs to heal the ozone hole but has been violating it anyway
Scientists discover China has been secretly emitting banned ozone-depleting gas:
Scientists found that between 40 and 60 per cent of the total global CFC-11 emissions originated from eastern China.
There Rush goes again, lying about Republican retirements in 2018, blaming them for loss of the House
Just 13 House districts out of 52 flipped parties, 3 Dem to Rep and 10 Rep to Dem. Rush could have used Al Gore's amazing internet and found the correct information in seconds, but he's too damn lazy and stupid.
Here's Ballotpedia's article on the subject:
A total of 52 representatives did not seek re-election to their U.S. House districts:
18 Democratic members of the U.S. House [10 retired from public office]
34 Republican members of the U.S. House [23 retired from public office]
In total, 13 of the 52 districts changed party hands. Ten seats flipped from Republican to Democrat. Three seats flipped from Democrat to Republican.
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