Monday, May 22, 2017
Trump's battle of good vs. evil sounds like George W. Bush, kind of warmed over for 2017
Flashback to 2004 here and The President of Good and Evil:
Bush's tendency to see the world in terms of good and evil is especially striking. He has spoken about evil in 319 separate speeches, or about 30 percent of all the speeches he gave between the time he took office and June 16, 2003. In these speeches he uses the word "evil" as a noun far more often than he uses it as an adjective-914 noun uses as against 182 adjectival uses. Only 24 times, in all these occasions on which Bush talks of evil, does he use it as an adjective to describe what people do-that is, to judge acts or deeds. This suggests that Bush is not thinking about evil deeds, or even evil people, nearly as often as he is thinking about evil as a thing, or a force, something that has a real existence apart from the cruel, callous, brutal and selfish acts of which human beings are capable. His readiness to talk about evil in this manner raises the question of what meaning evil can have in a secular modern world.
Ann Coulter's excellent rant against Heritage Foundation
We can bring Ann up to speed on the Germans later.
Best one: Burke said Americans were descendants of Englishmen, and Protestant.
Heritage should sell everything and donate it to the Center for American Progress. They're already doing their work anyway:
"champion the common good over narrow self-interest, and harness the strength of our diversity."
The Heritage Foundation are lunaticks, as the King James Version of the Bible would put it
They are oft cast into the sea in danger of drowning, or into the fire in danger of burns, were it not for the common sense of Americans who have been repelled by their passions, for health care mandates for example.
For a think tank they really should get some thinkers over there one of these days.
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| Which is why they kept slaves, and required presidents to be born here of American citizens? |
Trump calls war on terrorism a battle between good and evil
Full transcript of remarks in Saudi Arabia here.
Gee, sounds just like Bush (and ISIS) and conservative talk radio is thrilled.
Typically, this rhetoric is used to justify treating the evil as less than human, which is what ISIS does, or sending American troops abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But we're 16 years into Afghanistan now, with no end in sight, and the monsters just keep reproducing themselves.
This is not to suggest moral equivalence, but only that the West continues to delegitimize the "Islamic" in Islamic State in order to keep the military-industrial complex busy.
The goal of war, rather, is supposed to be to end the enemy's ability to wage it. We haven't been serious about that, and I don't think Trump will be either.
Either end it, or quit it, but carrying on like this is bankrupting the country.
Enough.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Flashback: Robert Mueller and James Comey at FBI accused the wrong guy in the 2001 anthrax letter deaths
Carl Cannon recounts the sorry episode of their incompetence, here, in The Orange County Register.
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Robert Mueller can't investigate Comey's record either, because Comey's his "protégé"
Conflict of interest.
Reported here:
Comey regards his predecessor as a mentor, while Mueller considers Comey his protégé. When Comey was appointed to succeed Mueller as FBI Director, both men appeared together and were effusive in their praise of one another. Their relationship is not merely a casual one. It is precisely the kind of association which ethical rules are designed to guard against.
Friday, May 19, 2017
Oops, Robert Mueller's law firm represents both Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort
Conflict of interest!
If Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself, then Kushner and Manafort must be off limits to Mueller. Or, Mueller has to go.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Reported here:
Mueller's former law firm, WilmerHale, represents Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who met with a Russian bank executive in December, and the president's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is a subject of a federal investigation.
Hey WaPo: Thom Hartmann, Larry King, Jesse Ventura and Ed Schultz get $ from RT RIGHT NOW, are they Russian agents?!
You turds.
Here:
Flynn also received $45,000 to appear in 2015 with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a dinner for RT, a Kremlin-controlled media organization.
If you had a good mother and father, that's socialism
They did everything for you because you were of them and belonged to them.
No one else will ever care for you like that.
And that's as far as socialism goes, unless you're an Italian, capisce?
Robert Shiller blames housing bubbles on get rich quick flipper narratives, still completely misses the tax angle
Here, in The New York Times:
There is still no consensus on why the last housing boom and bust happened. That is troubling, because that violent housing cycle helped to produce the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2007 to 2009. We need to understand it all if we are going to be able to avoid ordeals like that in the future.
Ordinary Americans were suddenly able to make a lot of money by flipping their homes because of the tax law changes of 1997. Capital that was previously locked-up in housing by the rules of the New Deal until 1997 was suddenly unleashed to slosh around in the economy when lawmakers gave homeowners the right to avoid most capital gains on the sale of their homes as long as they lived in them only two years. Until 1997, if you didn't buy a more expensive home after you sold yours, you were exposed to a tax hit, unless you took the option of a once in a lifetime exclusion on the gain. The old arrangement had insured, along with the 30-year mortgage, that housing capital built up over a long period of time, creating forced savings for the middle class which could be safely liquidated in retirement without adversely affecting the housing market.
The Republican and Democrat geniuses who ran our government in 1997 changed all that, and within ten years the dang thing blew up. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Bill Clinton, and you, Newt Gingrich.
Too bad Robert Shiller still doesn't get it.
It would probably be unwise to turn back the tax clock now that the damage has been done, but the reinflation of the housing bubble after the crisis wasn't inevitable. The Fed's unprecedented zero interest rate policy has been responsible for that.
When the next housing crash comes, we'll probably not understand it either.
Meanwhile, the median sales price of homes in the aggregate has never been higher, or more unaffordable, and remains the primary driver of wealth inequality in America.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Obstruction of justice is Hillary Clinton deleting over 30,000 emails after they were subpoenaed
Lock her up, with the guy who gave her a pass.
You know, if Trump picks Joe Lieberman for FBI, I'm done
If we wanted that version of The Swamp in 2000, we would have voted for Al Gore.
We certainly don't want it now.
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