Friday, February 24, 2017
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Steve Bannon poses as our new Albert Jay Nock, says Trump's third goal is the deconstruction of the administrative state
Good stuff, except the real enemy is the income tax. Leave the income tax in place and a new behemoth administrative state is just another administration away.
Here.
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
With its new motto "Democracy Dies in Darkness" maybe WaPo should switch all its publishing to Confide
That way its stories would evanesce into the ether and no one would ever be able to blame it again for its partisanship and lying.
Supreme Court ruling in 2011 requiring releases from Calif. prisons to ease overcrowding results in officer slaying on Monday
The story is here.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who dissented here, called it "perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our Nation's history":
Today the Court affirms what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our Nation's history: an order requiring California to release the staggering number of 46,000 convicted criminals.
What? Roe v. Wade, which resulted in the deaths of millions of innocents, was less radical? Overturning millennia of marriage law and the statutes of 30 states was less radical? Obliging people to engage in health insurance commerce was not a repudiation of centuries of contract law?
Antonin Scalia was right to dissent in this one, but come on, Solomon he was not.
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
WNBA 98% lesbian, average attendance at a game is 7,655, NBA averages just shy of 18,000
So says WNBA star Candice Wiggins, here, who was
"harassed for being straight". . . “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women. It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules they [the other players] could apply.”
And you thought guys liked watching lesbians.
Trump outraised Obama, and Hillary and Bernie combined, from small donors
From the story here:
Mr. Trump raised about $239 million from small donors during the campaign, compared to $137 million for Mrs. Clinton and about $100 million for Mr. Sanders, according to the report from the Campaign Finance Institute.
Mr. Obama had raised about $219 million from small donors during the 2012 race and about $181 million during the 2008 campaign. Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, raised about $58 million from small donors that year.
Monday, February 20, 2017
I don't believe Milo is gay, I think it's all an act and he's just trying to make money like Ru Paul, who isn't a tranny
If Milo is gay, I say release the movie and prove it.
If he does, report back here and tell me what you saw (comments subject to editing) because I won't watch it, even if it becomes the last movie on earth.
Trump's right about the lending slowdown
In the 15 quarters ended 3Q2016, total loans in all sectors have grown by a measly 14.5%.
Compare the 15 quarters ended 3Q1986 when the measure grew by 53%.
The fact of the matter is lending hit the big brick wall in 2007. It has recovered but not to anything like the post-war rate where total credit market debt outstanding doubled every 6 to 11 years. Under Reagan it doubled in 6 years.
Ten years out from 2007, we're currently about $34 trillion behind the outside range with a year to go. We aren't going to make it.
Why that is has to do with the broken housing model more than anything else, and the failure to find anything else to replace it.
With overcapacity everywhere else in the economy, it doesn't seem likely anything will be found to take housing's place, either, except housing.
Maybe someone could revive "A Dodge in every garage and a chicken in every pot"?
Obama certainly failed to understand the central importance of housing to the economy, and Trump talk now of $1 trillion in infrastructure spending is laughably unimaginative, the equivalent of taking a wizz in the ocean.
Infrastructure spending isn't conceivably up to scaling the $34 trillion lending deficit we face.
Students revolt against Moochelle's school lunches throwing away $1 billion worth of food a year
From the story here:
Penn-Trafford High School is among more than 500 schools that have dropped out of the NSLP since strict nutrition regulations were imposed on schools through the Healthy Hunger Free Act championed by former first lady Michelle Obama.
The changes drove down school food sales nationwide for the first time in years and created an estimated $1 billion in additional food waste as students across the country revolted against the rules.
Obama had 950,062 on his deportation list as of May 21, 2016, he just wasn't deporting them
Hm. Imagine that.
From the story here:
The 680 seized in recent sweeps by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agents represent just .07 percent of the 950,062 with deportation orders as of May 21, 2016. ... ICE has custody of just 11,006, or 1 percent, of the 950,062 ordered deported.
Dan Alpert is kooky, says economy will go nuts if Trump spends on infrastructure: Let's try cutting spending by $200 billion a year instead
Here:
“If you spend $200 billion in this economy in additional government infrastructure spending, rebuild bridges, airports and railways, especially if it’s well targeted. This economy is going to go crazy. It’s going to do great.”
Outlays in fiscal 2008 were $2.9825 trillion.
Between 2009 and 2016, outlays for the eight years, beyond that level, have come to $4.86 trillion. $200 billion or even $1 trillion isn't going to amount to doodleysquat if nearly $5 trillion has done nothing.
Cut federal spending and lower the tax rates and see what the people do with the money instead.
Laugh of the Day: Over 100 "Day Without Immigrants" protesters fired from their jobs
From the story here:
More than 100 protesters across the country were fired from their jobs after skipping work to take part in last week's "Day Without Immigrants" demonstration. Restaurants and day cares were among the businesses in states like Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma and New York where bosses fired workers after they didn't show up for work in order to protest. ... At Ben's Kosher Delicatessen Restaurant & Caterers in Long Island, New York, 25 workers were fired Friday when they returned to work, according to Telemundo 47. Police escorted the workers from the restaurant — most of whom were undocumented and have worked there for years.
Obama pollster Cornell Belcher gets one thing right: Hillary failed to hold the Obama coalition
Or as we say, 5.1 million former Obama voters in 39 states from 2008 didn't vote for Hillary in 2016.
Do Belcher's math. He estimates from exit polling data that about 7% of the non-white millennial electorate voted third party, allowing Trump to squeeze in. Hillary's total of 65.85 million popular votes supplemented by the 5.1 million in 39 states who didn't vote for her is 70.95 million, 7% of which is 5 million.
Belcher, who is black, racializes the whole thing from there, complaining that Democrats failed to make the race about race. But obviously these non-white millennials still voted for whites, so it wasn't about race for them either. It was about young progressives being unable to bring themselves to vote for two loathsome candidates, one of whom turned out to be more loathsome to more people than the other.
As they say in the legal profession, hard cases make bad law. Election 2016 was a hard case, and we shouldn't draw the wrong conclusions from it as both Democrats and Republicans still seem to be doing.
Belcher, here in Salon:
Demographics are destiny. What happens to a centrist Democrat quite frankly who can’t hold that Obama coalition? Donald Trump is a president who did not win a plurality of the public. In fact, one of my reports was leaked to the New York Times, saying that millennials were rejecting the binary choice of the lesser of two evils.
When you look at the exit data, you have 8 or 9 percent of younger African-Americans voting third-party. You have 6 or 7 percent of younger Latinos voting third-party. Hillary is almost off Barack Obama’s winning margins by the same percentage of our young people voting third party. So that’s how [Trump] squeaked in.
Again, Trump didn’t expand the Republican tent. He didn’t bring in all these millions upon millions of new Republican voters. This was about Democrats losing, more so than Trump remaking the electorate and winning in some sort of profound and new way. It should not have been a winning percentage, right? ...
When you look at battleground state after battleground state, Hillary was off Obama’s margins by five or six points and Trump was, at best, one or two points up in Michigan or Wisconsin or Florida. Again, it wasn’t like he was four, five points better than Mitt Romney. It was that she was five or six points below what Barack Obama did.
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