Tucker Carlson skewers the libertarianism of Bret Stephens, who thinks you are nothing but a widget in the machine of global capitalism

Here:

He also shows little care for Americans as anything besides units of economic productivity, widgets to fuel the machine of global capitalism that pays Bret Stephens many thousands a year to write mediocre opinion columns in a dying newspaper. 

Finally somebody at National Review gives libertarianism the what-for and really, truly gets it

Here:

The alliance that has united conservatives and libertarians in common cause against bureaucratic bloat and its soft despotism is crumbling; indeed, it could never be maintained. The identity confusion that manifested as the splintering of the Right into neo-conservatives, paleo-conservatives, crunchy conservatives, tea-partiers, Trumpists, and all the rest is, in large part, the tension between the conservative and the libertarian minds. The individualism and myopia of the libertarian vision of society — atomized individuals self-defined and free from every native context in a world where everything is earned and nature mastered — is at fundamental odds with the conservative reverence for ties to family, place, and history, with its hope for nature in harmony, man’s with himself and the rest of creation. ... the fissure widens and the semantic gap between “liberal” and “libertarian” shrinks . . ..

SECDEF Mad Dog Mattis is mad as a hatter: Imposes mandatory transgender training on the US Army

From the story here:

As part of the Pentagon’s attempt to create an accepting environment for transgenders, the Army held a session Tuesday teaching officers and others how to implement existing military policy, particularly how to “assist soldiers who have a medical diagnosis indicating that gender transition is medically necessary through the gender transition process,” USA Today reports. ...

Conservative leaders have asked Secretary of Defense James Mattis to rescind directives allowing transgenders to serve, as “costly and distracting social engineering” that is standing in the way of combat effectiveness and readiness.

Pat Buchanan remembers a score of violent leftist attacks in America, and more

Here:

The campus violence and urban riots of the decade, from Harlem to Watts to Newark and Detroit, to Washington, D.C., and 100 cities after Dr. King’s death, were not the work of the Goldwater right.

F. H. Buckley doesn't have a clue how to kill the administrative state

Here. And I won't bore you with any of the impotent suggestions.

The only way to kill the administrative state is to cut off its food supply, which is taxes in quantity. That's why it took so long to get to the administrative state: The constitution effectively outlawed taxes in quantity by outlawing any taxation save for direct taxation and excises and tariffs.

We could start by abolishing withholding, on our way to abolishing the income tax. But frankly, this will require a revolution, including in thinking. And you won't find anything revolutionary from F. H. Buckley.

Real conservatives know that without the income tax there would be no administrative state to speak of. Fake conservatives pretend that we can have limited government short of abolishing it.

The Big Picture of the stock market funk

But nobody tells you that, either.

The Big Picture of the full-time jobs funk

Is that clear enough for ya?

Flashback: The New York Times Jan. 9, 2011, updated for today

Here, updated for today, but not by The New York Times:

It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans Democrats or Tea Party members Bernie Sanders' most devoted supporters. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans Democrats and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats actual incidents of violence against peacefully assembling Republicans, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right left have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants cops, or welfare recipients white people, or bureaucrats small business owners. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government Republican Party is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.

41% want Comey prosecuted, 66% of Republicans (but probably not Justin Amash)

Rasmussen, here.

Laugh of the Day: Putin mocks Comey, offers him asylum as a persecuted leaker like Snowden

Reported here:

How then is the director of the FBI any different from Snowden?

Where are all the Democrats calling for calm, denouncing violence?

Same crickets we hear from Muslims after terrorist attacks.

The Democrat Party has more in common with Islam than you realize

Camille Paglia crafts an anti-elitist zinger, aimed at our modern day Puritans, calls Comey an effete charlatan

From the interview here:

These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.

Recession omen: 33 states to miss revenue targets, highest number since 2010

From the story here:

Thirty-three states will miss revenue projections in Fiscal Year 2017, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. That’s the highest number of states to miss revenue targets since 2010, during the middle of the recession, when 36 states missed projections.

In total, states anticipate revenues falling short by $12 billion. Most of the shortfall comes from sales tax collections, which are projected to be down $6.6 billion. That troubles some economists because sales taxes are traditionally the most stable revenue sources for states.

Loretta Lynch, Attorney General of The Party of Violence: March, Bleed, Die!

Remember?

That was just three months ago.

Your kid probably isn't working this summer like he should be, because of the minimum wage and cheap immigrant labor

The population level of teenagers in 2017 has recovered to 1978 levels, but only 29% are employed in May 2017 vs. 47% in May 1978.

The minimum wage has made it too expensive to hire your kid to recover shopping carts at the grocery store, and soaring immigration means your kid competes against Francisco to cut the grass and Sanjay to sell ice cream.

Full Oceanic Nino Index data trend shows the Pacific Ocean is definitely cooling slightly

Not quite 0.1 ONI value point since 1951. Data for 2017 shown is for ten months, all the rest twelve.

Happy Birthday President Trump!

You know what a baseball field full of dead Republican Congressmen would have meant to the shooter?

A complete and utter shutdown of legislative business which would have made it impossible to move any of the Trump agenda forward at all.

After all, that's been the goal of the Democrats all along.

This leftist shooter simply thought he had found a more definitive way to delay and obstruct Trump. The Party of Violence strikes again.

Someone better find out if he had help, as in . . . conspiracy. 

Sounds totally rational to me. Sinister, but rational.

Mollie Hemingway throws together a litany of James Comey's many misdeeds and mistakes

But stops short of calling Comey a law unto himself for some reason, which is what he is.

The article reads like it was written to meet a deadline, and suffers for it.

The best reminder in the story is that under Comey the FBI destroyed evidence, just like Hillary did, for which they both should be in prison:

[U]pon learning that two Clinton staff members had classified information, the FBI didn’t subpoena those computers but gave the employees immunity in return for giving them up. The FBI severely limited their own searches for data on the computers and then destroyed them. A technician who destroyed evidence lied to FBI investigators even after he received immunity, and Comey did nothing. And after the FBI discovered that President Obama had communicated with Clinton on the non-secure server, Obama said he didn’t think Clinton should be charged with a crime because she hadn’t intended to harm national security. As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey noted, “As indefensible as his legal reasoning may have been, his practical reasoning is apparent: If Mrs. Clinton was at criminal risk for communicating on her nonsecure system, so was he.”

Here.