Something down is up in Russia

Normally traffic from Russia represents over 10% of my blog audience, going back years, but in the last week that has dropped off the cliff to zero.

It's like somebody turned off the spigot.

Reuters provides clues here:

"The large Moscow street protests of 2011 and 2012 illustrated the connection between economic growth and demands for greater political participation by the chief beneficiaries of Russia’s then-prosperity. Now, as the collapse in oil prices and Western sanctions undermine the economy, the mood inside Russia could hardly be more different. The creative class in big cities like Moscow is depressed and increasingly disengaged from political life. Some have given up and are just leaving the country. The combination of economic crisis, heavy propaganda, patriotic mobilization and hybrid war inside Ukraine have produced conformism, passivity and insensitivity."

CBS/NYT poll drags down Trump in Real Clear Politics average on eve of debate two, fewer than 30% of those polled were Republicans

Trump climbs above 30% for first time in Real Clear Politics poll average out this morning

Joke of the day: Rick Perry said he had three reasons for ending his campaign for president . . .

. . . but he could remember only two of them.

h/t Chris Plante

Warming over 100 years from 1990 predicted by IPCC is falling short by 62% due to 18 year, 8 month pause

Reported here:

"From January 1979 to August 2015, the trend was just 1.21 K/century.

"In 1990, the IPCC had predicted near-straight-line warming of 1 K to 2025, equivalent to almost 2.8 K/century. Of this warming, more than 0.7 K should have happened by now, but only 0.26 K has actually occurred. ...

"The UAH and RSS satellite data both show the Pause, though the terrestrial tamperature datasets have all been altered in the past year with the effect of concealing it."

Gold King Mine disaster video released by the incompetent EPA: let's dig here and see why it's leaking!

Link here for the video.

When you plug leaks at other old mines nearby, the water has to go somewhere. Minor toxic leaks are obviously preferable to releasing by accident 3 million gallons of heavy metal contaminated water into the Animas River.

WaPo story continues the Hillary e-mail shell game: It's her CURRENT server which needs to be examined

Reported here tonight by WaPo:

'“Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped,” company spokesman Andy Boian told The Washington Post. “All the information we have is that the server wasn’t wiped.” ... All the e-mails from Clinton’s tenure at the State Department were on the server when the device was taken over in June 2013 by Platte River Networks, four months after Clinton left office. A company attorney has said that all of Clinton’s e-mails were then migrated to a new server. The e-mails were removed from the second server in 2014, with Clinton’s lawyers storing those they deemed work-related on a thumb drive and discarding those that they determined were entirely personal. Copies of 30,000 work e-mails were turned over to the State Department in December and are being released to the public in batches under the terms of a court order.'

All the e-mails were migrated to the current server in June 2013, five months after Hillary's January 23, 2013 testimony before the Oversight Committee and nine months after it asked for her emails about Benghazi on September 20, 2012. They were combed, sorted, some distributed to the State Department in December 2014 and everything  supposedly "deleted". But all that is theoretically recoverable from the current server, which evidently remains in Chappaqua, NY.

Some might also be recoverable from the New Jersey server. And there might be backup servers no one has yet learned about, but it is the current server which needs to be examined.

But just try getting in to Bill Clinton's stuff.

Hillary is still exploiting him for all he's worth, and right now his sacrosanctity is worth everything.  

Ex-Gore-Democrat Rick Perry drops out of Republican race for president for a second time

Story here.

Santorum, Jindal and Graham should drop out, too.

Does anyone know if Pataki is still in?

Who? Gilmore? What?

Update:

Counting Perry, there have been no fewer than 37 running for the Republican nomination.

It's the 14th anniversary of 9/11 and we're still waiting for a president who will send in the troops to kill everybody and break everything

Everybody. Everything. Yesterday.

Hooah you maggots.

With nine days to go before Greek elections, Syriza recaptures the lead in the latest ProRata poll

The latest Greek election poll result appears here today, showing left wing Syriza back on top with 28.5% of the vote and center right New Democracy roaring back strongly in second with 23.5% as more undecided voters in the last two weeks have made up their minds. Syriza had been taking a beating in various polls over the fortnight.

Nationalist Golden Dawn remains in third with 6.5%, unchanged from the end of August. The communist KKE and socialist PASOK are duking it out for fourth place with 4.5% of the vote each, while the Syriza rebels who formed Popular Unity have lost support and fallen below the 3% threshold necessary to get representation in the parliament. Two weeks ago Popular Unity had been polling at 3.5% but evidently as time has passed voters have realized these former compatriots of Alexis Tsipras really do mean to dump the Euro and go back to the Drachma, and want none of it. 

Greeks overwhelmingly continue to favor remaining in the Euro, but really like Tsipras over Meimarakis of New Democracy 37% to 25%.

The election is a week from Sunday.

Ben Carson: I got where I am because, unlike Donald Trump, I'm HUMBLE!!!!!!!!

Carly Fiorina ripped Barbara Boxer's hair as "so yesterday" back in 2010

Video here.

If she can dish it out, she should expect to get it, too, especially from Donald Trump.

Jeb Bush the snake: omitted plan to cap itemized deductions in Wall Street Journal tax op-ed

Reported here:

"But the full plan includes one very significant change not mentioned in the Wall Street Journal op-ed where Bush announced his plan—one that would likely raise more than a trillion dollars in revenue over a decade, and secretly accomplish a policy goal sought by everyone from President Obama to Paul Ryan. The change: Bush wants to limit itemized deductions sharply, capping them at 2 percent of aggregate gross income, and eliminate the deduction for state and local taxes entirely. (The exception would be the deduction for charitable giving, which is politically toxic to attack, and would still be unlimited.) ...

"But it’s the politics of the cap that make it really interesting. If you look at who would actually be affected, it appears that the cap is a very benign-sounding way to do something politically difficult: limit the mortgage-interest deduction. Of the $54 billion a year the cap would raise according to the Feldstein estimate, $46 billion comes out of the mortgage interest deduction."

Trump in first with 29.8% in new Real Clear Politics poll average, 13.8 points ahead of Carson in second, 21.5 points ahead of Jeb Bush

Trump questions Ben Carson's job-creation experience, Carson goes nuclear and plays the religion card

Ben Carson has gone sectarian, which comes as no surprise in view of his Seventh Day Adventism, which has its roots among the Millerites and the Methodists of the 19th Century.

What is surprising is that it is in response to criticism from Trump about Carson's job-creation experience. Trump questioned whether Carson has the right stuff in that area, and Carson's first inclination is to question Trump's faith. Pretty thin-skinned of Carson, playing the religion card like that. It's reminiscent of Obama playing the race card. Not a good sign in a chief executive.

Asked to name a favorite Bible verse in a Megyn Kelly interview, Carson named two but tellingly stumbled over one of them.

Video here at about the 2:25 mark where Ben Carson haltingly quotes Proverbs 22:4 as "With humility and the fear of the Lord, that's where life and wealth come from." The King James puts it this way: "By humility and the fear of the LORD are riches, and honour, and life."

Funny he left out "honor".

Evangelicals will question whether this was an honorable thing for Ben Carson to say in a political context yesterday, where sectarian arguments between candidates are generally frowned upon:

"The biggest thing is that I realize where my success has come from, and I don't any way deny my faith in God," said Carson. "And I think that probably is a big difference between us." That was his entire answer. A reporter asked Carson to expand on that response, and on whether he didn't believe Trump's expressions of faith have been sincere. "I haven’t heard it, I haven’t seen it," said Carson. "You know, one of my favorite, Proverbs 22:4, it says: 'By humility and the fear of the Lord, our are riches and honor and life.' And that's a very big part of who I am. Humility, and fear of the Lord. I don’t get that impression with him. Maybe I'm wrong."

Pretty ugly to question Trump's sincerity, but to accuse him of denying his faith? That's wacky. Consider the source.

Make America Great Again: Make Babies

Births per 1000 population in 2013 fell to 12.4, less than half the 1957 level of 25.3.

The preliminary estimate for 2014 is 12.5 per 1000 population, as of June 2015.

Is Trump great or what: Jeb says his brother W spent too much

Here:

'“He should have brought the hammer down on the Republicans when they were spending way too much, because our brand is limited government,” Jeb said. “He didn’t veto things, he didn’t bring order and fiscal restraint.”'

Donald Trump is having an amazing impact on the election campaign: we're talking about illegal immigration and rising crime, sanctuary cities and defiance of federal law, stupid treaties and the stoops who write them, and Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are so desperate that she is apologizing (not sure for what) and he is violating the family loyalty oath.

Now that's progressive Republicanism.

Speaking of Ben Carson, it's odd that such a smart guy has a crackpot religion

It was Mormonism's turn in 2012, now it's on to Seventh Day Adventism.

Ben Carson's Seventh Day Adventism keeps the Sabbath on Saturdays, believes in the investigative judgment of professed Christians, ongoing somewhere in heaven since 1844, and considers the scores of revelations of the visionary Ellen G. White authoritative, placing the group outside the beliefs of the world's 600 million Evangelical Christians.

But hey, it's a free country, right?

Ben Carson advocated fingerprint locks on guns as recently as October 2014

Fingerprint locks would incapacitate a weapon to everyone save the owner, which pretty much means the Second Amendment is reduced to a self-defense amendment instead of a militia amendment, i. e. an anti-tyranny amendment. Fallen soldiers' weapons would be useless to others.

It's not helpful that the Supreme Court has ruled the right to keep and bear arms an individual right, which plays into the hands of those seeking constitutionality for fingerprint locks.

Can fingerprint condoms be far behind?

Audio of Carson here.

Rush Limbaugh expresses astonishment that Germany will accept 500,000 refugees annually

Limbaugh said in the last half hour that he looked into it and discovered Germany's birthrate is so low they're happy to have the refugees as future workers.

How long will it take this doofus to figure out that our declining labor force is the result of retirees who aren't being replaced because our birthrates were also too low for too long?

The Baby Boom between 1946 and 1966 produced 83.1 million births. Unfortunately Baby Boomers produced just 72.6 million births from 1967 to 1987, a shortfall of 10.5 million or 12.6%.

What it means is there are 500,000 fewer replacements every year on average for retiring Baby Boomers, about 85% of whom more or less survive to retirement age.