Saturday, February 13, 2016
Everything's fine one minute . . .
. . . and the next you're in the car on an errand and suddenly hear on the radio that Antonin Scalia has died.
When you get home you learn your kid has just come down with a cold.
Then you go into the bedroom to get something and discover the cat has barfed up a hairball on the bed!
Arghhhhh.
Paw said there'd be days like this.
Jeb Bush, the Obamacare pot, calls the kettle John Kasich black for expanding Obamacare in Ohio
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| Tenet Healthcare stock while Jeb Bush was a director |
The Hill reports here:
The “telling thing” about Kasich, Bush said, is that “when he had a chance, he expanded ObamaCare through Medicaid. Governors across this country had a chance to take a stand against ObamaCare, many did. In Ohio it was expanded, and he’ll have to explain that down here, where ObamaCare, people want it repealed, they don’t want it expanded,” Bush added.
Bush made a small fortune as a Tenet Healthcare director from 2007-2014, a company which profited from increased utilization of hospital services under Obamacare. He conveniently sold the bulk of his stock near its peak during his tenure, at the beginning of October 2014. The stock has more than halved since then.
The libertarian Investor's Business Daily: Conservative talk-radio is in favor of Ted Cruz but it's too late
Naming Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Glenn Beck, here in "Are The Right’s Pro-Cruz, Anti-Trump Moves Too Late?":
Rush Limbaugh and other big names in conservative talk radio have come out in favor of Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, but the support comes late in the game.
IBD doesn't mention Laura Ingraham, who is favorably disposed toward Trump because of the illegal immigration problem in the United States, nor Michael Savage, who has actually endorsed Trump, nor Sean Hannity, who pretends like Limbaugh to be non-partisan during the primaries but repeatedly asserts that Marco Rubio will be president one day.
Laugh of the Day: Libertarian Charles Murray says only business elites, the Republican establishment and New Dealers remain true to the American creed!
In The Wall Street Journal, here:
For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”
What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority. ...
Who continues to embrace this creed in its entirety? Large portions of the middle class and upper middle class (especially those who run small businesses), many people in the corporate and financial worlds and much of the senior leadership of the Republican Party. They remain principled upholders of the ideals of egalitarianism, liberty and individualism.
And let’s not forget moderate Democrats, the spiritual legatees of the New Deal. ... But these are fragments of the population, not the national consensus that bound the U.S. together for the first 175 years of the nation’s existence. ... Operationally as well as ideologically, the American creed is shattered.
---------------------------------
Of all the objections to the essay which leap to mind perhaps the most important objection is the way Murray glosses over the religious interpretation of the formation of the American character in favor of the modernist preoccupation with ideology.
The English Dissenters who helped establish our country from the beginning did so finally out of a frustration born of being treated as second class citizens, for whom the chartered rights of Englishmen were denied on specifically religious grounds. The desire for equal status has to be understood from its Christian setting, not from the arid point of view of a seminar in political philosophy. These Dissenters went on to populate our country along with other Christians who set about erecting a society, not a libertarian paradise where everyone did as he pleased. Built on agrarianism and the local Protestant church, it is hard to imagine a place less conducive to letting people be all that they could be.
The Richard Hofstadter reference is telling. A former communist, the liberal historian was a life-long anti-capitalist who had a reputation as an historian as something of a hack because he relied on secondary sources, ignoring the primary.
As every ideologue knows, when the evidence doesn't support your view, just ignore it.
Friday, February 12, 2016
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Little Jebbie Bush's March to the Sea: We will be worse off with Trump than we are now with Obama
Quoted here, destroying whatever possibility there might have been for a truce between the Establishment and Trump:
“We will be worse off than we are now” with Trump as president, Bush said.
That's rich coming from someone who profiteered off of Obamacare while the rest of us were trying to stop it.
Emerson poll, touted as most accurate in Iowa by brain surgeons Limbaugh and Hannity, was 33% more inaccurate in New Hampshire than average
But the Emerson poll was worse, off 18.9%, which was 33.1% more off the mark than the average miss.
Emerson underestimated Trump by 12.2%, Kasich by 17.7%, Cruz by 6% and Christie by 18.9%. It overestimated Rubio by 13.2%, and Little Jebbie by a whopping 45.5%. Average miss: 18.9%.
Republican New Hampshire Primary polling was off on average by 14%
Final New Hampshire result v Real Clear Politics poll average:
Trump 35. 3 v 31.2, underestimated 11.6%
Kasich 15.8 v 13.5, underestimated 14.6%
Cruz 11.7 v 11.8, overestimated 0.9%
Bush 11.0 v 11.5, overestimated 4.5%
Rubio 10.6 v 14.0, overestimated 32.1%
Christie 7.4 v 5.8, underestimated 21.6%
Average miss: 14.2%
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Chris Christie dropped out of the race today, notably on friendly terms with Donald Trump
Reported here:
“I think that Chris did an amazing job in terms of the debate, as a prosecutor, and he’s a friend of mine,” Donald Trump said Wednesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “And he actually called me last night, and we had a long talk, and he’s a little disappointed because he really did do a great job, he did an amazing job during that debate,” he added.
The current El Nino now qualifies as a very strong one, but not as severe as 1997-98
The current El Nino now qualifies as a very strong one because there have been three consecutive measuring periods at 2.0 or greater on the Oceanic Nino Index: 2.0, 2.2 and 2.3.
This is the third very strong El Nino since 1950.
For the current three month measuring period it averages 2.166, in the middle between the similarly measured 1982-83 El Nino averaging 2.033, and the 1997-98 episode averaging 2.266.
The latter event was 11.5% more severe in the current three month period than the '82-'83 episode, and the current event is only 6.5% more severe.
The 1982 episode lasted fifteen months and averaged 1.3 on the index, the 1997 episode lasted thirteen months and averaged 1.56, and the current episode is now ten months in duration averaging 1.41.
Little Jebbie spent $36 million in New Hampshire to come in . . . fourth
Reported here:
Cruz’s third-place finish also reflected badly on Rubio and Bush. Cruz spent less than $600,000 in the state yet finished ahead of fourth-place Bush who, between his super PAC and campaign, spent as much as $36 million on television. Rubio spent about $15 million and finished in a close fifth.
Trump buries #2 Kasich by almost 20 points in New Hampshire, Sanders staggers Clinton by 22
The race was called at 8:05 PM last night with just 4% of the vote counted.
Here are the results this morning with 88% of the vote counted.
Here are the results this morning with 88% of the vote counted.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Supreme Court decision staying EPA power emissions rule means states likely to win in court
So reports The Hill, here:
The decision means that the EPA cannot enforce the rule until the litigation against it is finished.
It also means that the court believes that the states, companies and groups suing the EPA are likely to win their case when its merits are considered.
A big victory for electricity from coal and for Laurence Tribe: Supremes stay EPA rule implementation shutting down 53 plants
The New York Times reports here:
WASHINGTON — In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants. ... “We are thrilled that the Supreme Court realized the rule’s immediate impact and froze its implementation, protecting workers and saving countless dollars as our fight against its legality continues,” said Patrick Morrisey, the attorney general of West Virginia, which has led the 29-state legal challenge. ... In a second filing seeking a stay, coal companies and trade associations represented by Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said the court should act to stop a “targeted attack on the coal industry” that will “artificially eliminate buyers of coal, forcing the coal industry to curtail production, idle operations, lay off workers and close mines.” ... Mr. Tribe added that the plan “will cause the closure of 53 coal-fired plants in 2016 and another three in 2018.”
Laugh of the Day: Marco Rubio partisan Frank Luntz says Trump has to win New Hampshire by a minimum of 15 points
Rush Limbaugh here:
Frank Luntz is the guy bandying it about, that if Trump does not win by a minimum of 15, that he may as well consider it a disappointment.
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