Friday, April 21, 2017
Thursday, April 20, 2017
CNBC's resident libertarian calls GOP's new Obamacare repeal bill cowardly and small-minded
From the story here by Jake Novak:
Of course the waiver option is all about shifting the political heat if people start losing coverage. By making the individual states apply for waivers, the Republican Congress thinks it can effectively blame the governors and state legislators if things don't work out in the states that get those waivers. Not only is that craven politics, it's delusional. Anyone who thinks the Republicans in Washington won't own every aspect of the results of this new law if it's enacted is totally clueless. ... In short, we need courage and smarts. And this new Republican plan is cowardly and small-minded.
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Drudge lies with a headline to encourage the Trumpsters who read him
There is no order to curb foreign workers, only an order to reevaluate the program. Actually Trump is slow-walking his promise to end the import of foreign workers who take away jobs being done by Americans.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Alt-right hero Julius Evola was essentially suicidal, at least until 1945
From the translator's introduction by Guido Stucco to Evola's The Yoga of Power here:
The first few years of Evola's life following the end of [WWI] were characterized by spiritual restlessness and by an intense search for an ideological self-identity. Evola began a personal quest for ultimate transcendence, which he believed could be found beyond the ethical and spiritual limitations of bourgeois prejudices. ... At this time his quest led him also to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs. His longing for the Absolute, for radically intense feelings, for what the Germans call mehr als leben, ("more than living") which was frustrated by the contingency of human experience, almost induced him, at the age of twenty-three, to commit suicide. ...
He did not hesitate to espouse an epistemological solipsism (though he rejected the term as "inadequate") whereby the individual stands alone in a world of maya, in which nature, things, and people are nothing but an illusion. ...
In 1945 he was in Vienna when, as a result of a Soviet air raid on the city, he was wounded in the spinal cord by a shell fragment. He later told a friend that instead of taking to an underground refuge, he had been purposefully walking the deserted streets of the Austrian capital. After spending a year and a half in a local hospital, Evola returned to Italy, destined to spend the rest of his life, a long twenty-nine years, in a wheelchair.
If DHS' John Kelly really cared about 4 tons of drugs coming in daily, he'd stop it
General Kelly here in the Boston Globe:
[Transnational criminal organizations] smuggle nearly four tons of heroin, cocaine, meth, and other illegal drugs across our border each day. In 2015, 52,404 people died from drug overdoses. It was the highest number of drug-related deaths our country has ever seen.
If our country really cared about it, we'd have ended opium production in Afghanistan yesterday. But it's been in our power to do for over 15 years. So obviously we don't do it because of the MONEY our corrupt country makes off the operation. And . . . it would be against LIBERTARIANISM, in which everyone believes more than saving Americans from the horrible consequences of drug addiction.
All we have to do is blow up the damn dams we built for those bastards after World War II.
17 MOABs and we're done. Over 90% of the world's opium production would end, just like that.
Trump adviser Jared Kushner's father was put in jail by Chris Christie
Byron York recounts the tale, here:
The short version is: In 2004, Jared Kushner's father Charles, a real estate magnate in New Jersey and New York, pleaded guilty to a tax fraud scheme in which he claimed hundreds of thousands of dollars in phony deductions for office expenses at the partnerships he created to manage the apartment buildings he owned. Kushner, a major donor to the Democratic Party, also pleaded guilty to fraudulently making hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in the names of employees and associates who didn't know their names were being used. Finally, Kushner pleaded guilty to retaliating against a cooperating witness in the case — his sister. He did so by setting a trap in which he hired a prostitute to lure his sister's husband into a sexual encounter in a New Jersey hotel, where the action was secretly photographed and videotaped. Kushner sent the pictures and tape to his sister as revenge, apparently motivated by Kushner's belief that she and her husband were helping U.S. Attorney Christie and his prosecutors. ... [I]n a 2014 interview with the New York real estate publication The Real Deal, Jared called his father's treatment "obviously unjust" and said the experience had soured him on an earlier ambition to become a prosecutor. "If you're convicting murderers, it's one thing," Jared said. "It's often fairly clear. When you get into things like white-collar crime, there are often a lot of nuances. Seeing my father's situation, I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way they pursued him."
Monday, April 17, 2017
Trump White House appears to be backing away from Larry Kudlow/Steve Moore supply side tax plan from the campaign
Another bad sign for economic growth prospects.
From the story here:
"It's a little frustrating that they feel they have to write a new tax plan when they have a tax plan," said Steven Moore, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation who helped formulate tax policy for the Trump campaign.
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Maxine Waters is a discredited has been, got a federal TARP bailout for husband's bank
From the story in March, here:
During the height of the 2008 fiscal crisis, Waters helped arrange a meeting between the Treasury Department and top executives of a bank where her husband was a shareholder. Using her post on the House Financial Committee as leverage, she called Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson personally, asking him to meet with minority-owned banks.
When Treasury followed through, there was only one financial institution present: OneUnited. Had that bank gone under, the New York Times reported, Waters' husband would've lost as much as $350,000. Luckily for the Waters family, OneUnited received a cool $12 million in bailout funds.
After three years of special investigation, the ethics committee eventually ruled that Waters didn't technically break any rules. But that ruling came after unearthing her more than questionable family business practices, like making her grandson, Mikael Moore, her chief of staff.
Friday, April 14, 2017
NeverTrumper Bret Stephens bolts The Wall Street Journal for happier digs at The New York Times
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Bret!
From the story here:
The Journal's editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, said in a memo he is thankful for Stephens' 16 years with the paper.
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Mandela's legacy: Black South African government covers up racist tortures and murders of white farmers
Reported here:
In total, between 1998 and the end of 2016, 1848 people have been murdered in farm attacks — 1187 farmers, 490 family members, 147 farm employees, and 24 people who happened to be visiting the farm at the time. ...
But any form of justice is incredibly rare, and white farmers are increasingly questioning their future. The number of white farmers in South Africa has halved in a little over two decades to just 30,000. Thousands more farms are up for sale. ...
Since 2007, at the direction of the government, South African police have stopped releasing statistics about the race of the victims. Monitoring group Genocide Watch says the cover-up has been exacerbated by American and European governments, which have “remained silent about the problem, reinforcing the campaign of denial”. The rise in farm attacks has been blamed on increasingly anti-white hate speech, particularly from the ruling African National Congress.
In 2010, high-profile ANC member Julius Malema sang “Shoot the Farmer, Kill the Boer”, which Genocide Watch describes as “once a revolutionary song, but now an incitement to commit genocide”.
Malema was convicted for hate speech and the singing of the song was banned, but just seven months later president Jacob Zuma sang the song himself at an ANC event, in direct contempt of the judge’s ruling.
Malema was later kicked out the ANC, forming his own Marxist party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, which is now the third-largest party in parliament. Recently, Malema has been travelling the country urging black South Africans to take back land from “Dutch thugs”.
“People of South Africa, where you see a beautiful land, take it, it belongs to you,” Malema was quoted in The Telegraph as telling parliament.
Perhaps in response to populist pressure from Malema, Zuma earlier this month called for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation. Zuma urged the “black parties” in the parliament to unite to form the two-thirds majority that would be needed to make the necessary change to the country’s constitution.
Last week, during a debate in parliament about the farm attacks, an ANC MP shouted “Bury them alive!” while MP Pieter Groenewald was speaking about the plight of white farmers.
“This is proof that the utterances of political leaders could lead to violence and murders and that the issue of farm murders is of little importance to the ANC,” AfriForum’s head of community safety, Ian Cameron, said in a statement afterwards. “Certain members of the ANC were chatting during the debate and not listening nor partaking at all.”
Mother Of All Bombs tested on the wrong target in Afghanistan, prolonging the 16-year war
They bombed caves. If they had meant to end the war, they would have bombed the Kajaki dam instead, ending electricity and opium production in Helmand Province instantly:
Conservative Tree House is kooky, calls China not joining Russia Syria veto in UN "historic" and a Trump achievement
Here.
No, it isn't historic, and it's not a Trump achievement.
There have been nine occasions where China has not joined Russia in the veto since 1992. China does what's good for China.
The only country getting realigned here is America under Trump, who keeps "learning" things and changing his stated positions.
Trump's in danger of giving away the store to China on currency, trade and the South China Sea in exchange for the promise of a denuclearized North Korea.
China thinks that might be a good deal, but it's a lousy deal, because the Chinese are the biggest liars on the face of the earth, the biggest thieves, and the biggest mass murderers in the history of mankind.
North Korea is their little pit bull keeping South Korea, Japan and the United States off balance.
Wake up and smell the coffee, guys.
Trump flips on Ex-Im Bank
Reported here:
His budget chief Mick Mulvaney said on CNBC (transcript via Reason) Wednesday that Trump was now pro-Ex-Im, and the president himself professed his love for Boeing's bank to the Wall Street Journal:
The president said he planned to fill two vacancies on the bank's board, which has been effectively paralyzed with three open seats on its five-member board.
"It turns out that, first of all, lots of small companies are really helped, the vendor companies," Mr. Trump said. "But also, maybe more important, other countries give [assistance]. When other countries give it we lose a tremendous amount of business." ...
"Instinctively, you would say, 'Isn't that a ridiculous thing,'" Mr. Trump said of the Ex-Im Bank. "But actually, it's a very good thing. And it actually makes money, it could make a lot of money."
"It turns out that, first of all, lots of small companies are really helped, the vendor companies," Mr. Trump said. "But also, maybe more important, other countries give [assistance]. When other countries give it we lose a tremendous amount of business." ...
"Instinctively, you would say, 'Isn't that a ridiculous thing,'" Mr. Trump said of the Ex-Im Bank. "But actually, it's a very good thing. And it actually makes money, it could make a lot of money."
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