Maureen Dowd: Hillary's private server a metaphor for the paranoid style

The liberal Pot calling the Conservative kettle black.

Maureen Dowd, here:

"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.

It takes a lunatic to know a lunatic: Rand Paul says Trump supporters have lost their minds

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.

Trump in first by 7.1 points in RCP average ahead of Walker, Jeb Bush a distant third

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.

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

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. 

Trump is now +6.2 points ahead of WALKER as Jeb slips to third in Real Clear Politics average

Trump widens lead over Bush to +5.8 in RCP average for GOP nomination

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." 

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?

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?'"

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.

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.' 

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