Saturday, May 13, 2017

It's May and the top two issues remain healthcare and immigration

Here, but Obamacare is still the law of the land, and not one mile of The Wall has been built.


Robert Tracinski skewers some libertarians for the socialism in their heads, but still misses why it's there

Here, chalking it all up to "unexamined collectivist assumptions" and mistakenly allowing "a little dominion of socialism over their thinking" and the left "trying to preserve that territory they own in your head" through various schemes like the estate tax.

In other words, they're insufficiently indoctrinated. You know, like all those intractable Russians who were sent to the Gulag for nothing more than mistakenly expressing incorrect thoughts.

It never dawns on Tracinski that ideology is a coin with socialism on the one side and libertarianism on the other.

The article is amusing because the "conservatives" he skewers for being insufficiently libertarian are or were aligned with the left and leftism: Charles Murray (former labor unionist, six years in the Peace Corps, "rebel"), Ronald Reagan ("I didn't leave the Democratic Party . . ."), Stuart Butler of health mandate infamy (Brookings), Milton Friedman (FDR functionary) and Megan McArdle (self-described former "ultraliberal").

With the example of McArdle on the estate tax before him, one might have hoped that Tracinski had stumbled into the origin of the socialism in our heads, but no, "there is no such collective entity as 'society.'"

The man wishing to leave his estate to that little society called his family might have begged to differ.


Thursday, May 11, 2017

Grassley wants to end the EB-5 visa program altogether, but Cornyn wants to end the EB-5 cap

Grassley would end the issuance of these "buy-your-way-in" visas, but the Texas Senator would open up the program to thousands more.

Story here.

Libertarianism is adolescence dressed up as a political philosophy

No surprise that it was cooked up by Baby Boomers.

And as we all should know by now, there's no arguing with adolescents, not even after they've wrecked the family car.

What P. J. O'Rourke doesn't get is that free individuals would never make babies without hormones

And they'd never make war, either. So O'Rourke's ideal libertarian world of individual freedom would die out first, from failure to reproduce, and then from war. Compulsion is inevitable. You know, like death.

Looks like we're well on our way.


And what defines a mob? Mobsters. That Cosa Nostra with its code of omertà at the Clinton Foundation. Those "Make America Great Again" Crips and Bloods wearing their colors on their baseball caps with brims bumped to the right.

We should be learning the value of individual liberty from the failure of the elites and the fiasco of their vast political power. Good things are made by free individuals in free association with other individuals. Notice that that's how we make babies.

Individual freedom is about bringing things together.

Politics is about dividing things up.

Elites would have us make babies by putting the woman on this side of the room and the man on that side of the room while the elites stand in the middle taxing sperm and eggs.

The Grauniad complains P. J. O'Rourke's new book is "rural" and "lazy"

One David Runciman, here, who evidently does not know that the old boy has slowed down since he became sick with cancer:

[O'Rourke] operates more in the mould of HL Mencken, one of his heroes, who rarely felt the need to leave his beloved Baltimore in order to lambast the idiocy of his fellow Americans. O’Rourke lives, as it says on the dust jacket, “in rural New England, as far away from the things he writes about as he can get”. This is American politics as viewed from the back room in front of the TV, feet up on the recliner chair. ... O’Rourke forfeits the reader’s patience and simply comes across as lazy.

Dilbert thinks James Comey took one for the American team

Scott Adams, here, who covers all the bases.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Senate Intelligence Committee aide anonymously tries to smear Trump with money laundering

Probably a Democrat aide. Democrats on the committee include Diane Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Martin Heinrich, Angus King (I), Joe Manchin, Kamala Harris and Mark Warner.


The Senate Intelligence Committee wants to see any information relevant to its Russia investigation the Treasury agency has gathered, including evidence that might include possible money laundering, according to a committee aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. Also at issue: to what extent, if at all, people close to Vladimir Putin have invested in Trump's real estate empire.

Trump showed patience in waiting to fire Comey and Krauthammer finds it inexplicable


Well, they pay Krauthammer to say something.

Susan Collins proves the old adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day


When the liberal Republican FBI director loses the support of a Susan Collins, he'd better believe he's had it.

Laugh of the Day: Trump fires Comey to distract from making no progress on border wall

Ann Coulter, here.

Why we love him still


The firing of James Comey presents the opportunity of a lifetime

Seen here.


Monday, May 8, 2017

War is the father of everything


Tea Party darling Sen. Ron Johnson of WI introduces massive guest worker/amnesty: 500k annually

The Tea Party was one half open-borders-libertarian from the beginning. That's why it went no farther than it did.

And Wisconsin narrowly reelected Johnson in 2016 why? It was the price we paid for the very narrow Trump victory there.

Story here.

Joe Klein says thanks to Trump we currently live in Pat Buchanan's world

Here in The New York Times.

He hopes it's only for a moment.

Sunday, May 7, 2017

Emmanuel Macron doesn't know how to speak of France, only of Europe and its citizens

Emmanuel Macron, the new president of France, quoted in the story here:

"I know the anger, the anxiety, the doubts that very many of you have also expressed. It's my responsibility to hear them," he said. "I will work to recreate the link between Europe and its peoples, between Europe and citizens." ...

[Marine Le Pen's] tally was almost double the score that her father Jean-Marie, the last far-right candidate to make the presidential runoff, achieved in 2002, when he was trounced by the conservative Jacques Chirac. ...

[A]ny idea of a brave new political dawn will be tempered by an abstention rate on Sunday of around 25 percent, the highest this century, and by the blank or spoiled ballots submitted by 12 percent of those who did vote.