Monday, March 20, 2017

Trey Gowdy never asks Comey about Treasury's possible role in outing General Michael Flynn

Muslim attacker at Orly Airport is a dead hypocrite

Notice how quickly the French get the toxicology report finished, here:

Yelling that he wanted to kill and die for Allah, according to the Paris prosecutor, Ziyed Ben Belgacem can be seeing trying to wrestle away the soldier's assault rifle near the small cluster of people. ...

Earlier Saturday, a police officer was shot in the face with birdshot when officers stopped Belgacem for a traffic violation.

Authorities say Belgacem, a 39-year-old Frenchman, had a long criminal record of drug and robbery offenses.

Autopsy toxicology tests found traces of cocaine and cannabis in Belgacem's blood, according to the Paris prosecutors' office. He also had 0.93 grams of alcohol per liter of blood when he died Saturday, the prosecutors' office said. That is nearly twice the legal limit for driving in France.

In an interview Sunday with French radio Europe 1, a man identified as the suspect's father said that Belgacem wasn't a practicing Muslim and drank alcohol.


James Comey couldn't find any information to support "Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower"

Yeah, that's because the FBI didn't do it. Plausible deniability.

Congress should subpoena Jack Lew.

All is not lost: Some kids are still impervious to liberal indoctrination, and liquor laws


ABC's cross-eyed Terry Moran is an object of ridicule in American homes


We told you in October 2012 that the income tax makes big government POSSIBLE


As an invention of progressivism the income tax eventually worked a revolution in government by allowing government to grow to gargantuan size with a ready pool of available cash, stolen by force from the population's income. And it is no coincidence that the first major expenditure financed by the income tax was US entry into The Great War. Not long after which came The Great Depression. If progressive ideas were good ones, no one seems to have paid much heed to the early evidence to the contrary.

Every effort by the people since the introduction of the income tax to obtain deductions, exemptions, credits and other incentives in the tax code should be understood by conservatives as wholesome reactionary, counter-revolutionary, rear-guard opposition to what the income tax represents, but today you can hardly find a conservative who will even entertain the idea of overthrowing the income tax, let alone any other of the so-called "achievements" of the progressive era. In fact, some so-called conservatives have become veritable cheerleaders for the income tax. Rush Limbaugh, for one, can't seem even to imagine an America without one for the first 137 years of its existence. An originalist in name only is he.

The problem with so-called Reagan conservatism, then and now, is that it makes peace with the tax code, just as it does with the social welfare state, including Social Security and especially Medicare. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan actually campaign on just such a platform of preserving Medicare for future generations. As Reagan compromised in the direction of liberalism in the 1986 tax reform, so will they.

Brian Domitrovic and Larry Kudlow aren't the first to tell you the income tax made big government possible

Their book, JFK and the Reagan Revolution, released in September 2016, makes the point well, as does this article in Forbes:

And sure enough, with the income tax presenting itself as patriotically taxing the rich—at times with utterly fictional 91 and 94% top rates, from the 1940s until the 1960s, as Larry Kudlow and I marvel at in our recent book, JFK and the Reagan Revolution—government was able to grow where government under the tariff could not. The income tax supervised the rise of the federal government to well over a fifth of national output—from 3% during the era of the tariff. ... The dishonesty at the heart of the income tax was the key that unlocked the financing of big government, by the little guy no less.

We've been making the same point, more or less, since at least 2011, and especially in March 2016 here:

[Mark Levin's] tariff rant this evening ignores that the America of his precious founders was a tariff regime until the dreaded income tax of 1913.

The America of the founders was also a limited government for that reason until that very day.

But open wide the avenue for revenue, and you open the maw of the Leviathan and crawl into it.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Funniest headline of the weekend: Women's Strike a Huge Bust


Equally funny comment: "Most women blew the whole thing off."

And: "Who were the big boobs that thought this might actually succeed?"

Maureen Dowd, upper-class bunko artist

Maureen Dowd, the ever clever mistress of written fraud, makes it appear as if Nunes says Trump must be taken literally as commander in chief, but makes sure not to quote him saying as much:

Even Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave up the Sisyphean effort of defending Trump’s tripe. He said that if you took Trump’s remarks “literally” — as we expect to do with our commander in chief’s words — “clearly the president was wrong.”

The fundamentalism is all hers.

Fundamentalist Maureen Dowd calls her own newspaper's claim of Trump wiretaps "unhinged" from which the Times hasn't backed off since publishing it


For two weeks, [Trump] has refused to back off his unhinged claim that his predecessor tapped his phones during the election. ... Even Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave up the Sisyphean effort of defending Trump’s tripe. He said that if you took Trump’s remarks “literally” — as we expect to do with our commander in chief’s words — “clearly the president was wrong.”






Friday, March 17, 2017

Five 9th Circuit judges say fellow 3-judge panel usurped Trump's constitutional presidential rights


Aside from the procedural defects of the process, the five panel jurists then noted the deep legal problems with the panel’s order: its a-historicity, it’s [sic] abdication of precedent, and its usurpation of Constitutionally delegated Presidential rights. Mirroring much of the Boston judge’s decision, the five judges then detail and outline what other critics, skeptics and commentators have noted of the prior panel decision, including critical commentary from liberal law professors and scribes Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz, and Jeffrey Toobin. The original 3-judge panel “neglected or overlooked critical cases by the Supreme Court and by our making clear that when we are reviewing decisions about who may be admitted into the United States, we must defer to the judgment of the political branches.” Of particular note, the five panel judges note how the 3-judge panel decision in “compounding its omission” of Supreme Court decisions and relevant sister Circuit precedents, also “missed all of our own cases” on the subject. The 5 judges conclude the panel engaged in a “clear misstatement of law” so bad it compelled “vacating” an opinion usually mooted by a dismissed case.

At $1.1512 trillion, Trump's 2018 budget request is actually 1/2 percent higher than Obama's projected


Story about pre-emptive first strike against North Korea is total crap, Rex Tillerson never used the term

The dishonest media put the words in his mouth, but Tillerson never used them.

It's an effort to paint the Trump administration with the stink of George W. Bush.

Foreign Policy acknowledges preemption is only hinted at, here.

All the Obama wiretapped Trump news that's fit to print


Thursday, March 16, 2017

Wilders' Dutch Freedom Party gains 5 seats over 2012, ruling People's Party loses 8, media say Wilders defeated


Clearly Bernie Sanders has not been paying his fair share in taxes


Obama's legacy of student loan dependency: America has 2 million too many enrolled in college

In 1990 7.3% of the civilian noninstitutional population was enrolled in college or graduate school.

In 2016 that has grown to 8.1%.

The difference in 2016 comes to almost 2 million.

That's one reason why college tuition has exploded, along with the student loans to fund it.

Loans outstanding in 2016 are FIFTY-ONE TIMES their size in 1997.

The current balance of $1.05 trillion is an artifact of the Obama disaster, financing "education" for the chronically unemployed.

Just ask the kids using their loans to finance Spring Break. 


Trump orders review of Obama's crazy CAFE standards

From the story here:

Mr. Trump on Wednesday announced plans to re-examine the fuel mandates, taking a step back from Obama-era environmental regulations. ... The standard for passenger cars stayed at 27.5 mpg from 1990 until 2007. In 2009, the government set a fuel economy standard of 34.1 mpg for cars and light trucks by 2016. In 2012, it set a new target of 54.5 mpg by 2025. The number can change depending on the mix of vehicles customers buy. Right now, it stands at 51.4 mpg because people are buying more SUVs and trucks.