Call me crazy, but did it cross your mind that today's stock sell-off might be intentional?

Tonight's Trump's first State of the Union address, after all, at which he's set to crow about the stock market. Could be disgruntled folks just trying to create a bad mood, knowing they'll be back tomorrow to buy a little bit cheaper.

The "all items" CPI is up 2.1% year over year, wages 2.5%

Now don't go blow all the 0.4 points all in one place.

CNBC says "Paul Ryan sees 'no reason' for Trump to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein"

You remember Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's running mate.

Mitt Romney saw no reason to light his hair on fire about anything, including Obamacare.

Paul Ryan ditto (especially when he's got that whole Eddie Munster thing going on).

We've had facts vs. alternative facts, but now Nancy Pelosi introduces "classified facts"

Which, since we're never going to be allowed to see them, mean only some people have the true but secret knowledge, right?

So we're supposed to just trust authority, you know, like her.

Nancy Pelosi is Exhibit A for the enemy in The Open Society and Its Enemies, but there are twenty-five more letters in the alphabet, and hardly enough.

Pelosi, quoted here:

"What they're putting forth is a total misrepresentation. It is false," Pelosi told CNN's Chris Cuomo. "In order to refute it, you'd have to tell the facts, and the facts are classified."

Bernie Sanders understands open borders is what the libertarian Koch brothers want, but he doesn't

Here, where he says open borders are harmful to ordinary Americans' wages.

Why is it the only prominent politician who really truly gets it is the socialist Bernie Sanders? Donald Trump, by contrast, has claimed American wages are too high and does not support increases to the minimum wage.

Maybe Bernie's not really a socialist as he claims. True socialists welcome free trade and open borders because they know that equalizing wages globally will hasten the revolution of the proletariat since it widens the gap between rich and poor to the extreme, driving wages down in a race to the bottom, ending in a violent overthrow of the rich capitalist owners.

Instead Bernie believes in the US nation state. If he's a socialist, he's a national socialist. He just can't say it. Instead he calls himself a democratic socialist.

It's too bad nobody cared for ten years about white employment, which didn't recover until 2017

Hey Rush you idiot, 96 million still eating but not working one year after Trump's election

Rush Limbaugh never mentions them anymore, but not because he's finally figured out that these aren't the unemployed. He never mentions them because they don't fit into his narrative world view of Trump's so-called booming economy.

Global stock insanity, Swiss edition: Swiss National Bank balance sheet shows almost $100 billion in US stocks

From the story here:

It’s all fun and good to speculate on the SNB equity price, but I am more interested in what the SNB’s behaviour means for the global markets going forward.

The real problem is that a Central Bank just monetized their balance sheet against another country’s equity market, and instead of getting punished for this reckless behaviour, the markets are celebrating the Swiss good fortune. And I ask you - have you ever seen Central Bankers not behave like a bunch of antelopes on the Serengeti? It is an amazingly disturbing precedent.

Yeah, but can she cook?

Illinois legislature calls the market top, plans to borrow $107 billion and invest it to rescue failing pension system

From the story here:

(Bloomberg) — Springfield lawmakers are so desperate to shore up the state's massively underfunded retirement system that they're willing to entertain an eye-popping wager: Borrowing $107 billion and letting it ride in the financial markets.

He's got Calypso Lou, the anti-Jew, B...B...B...Benny and the Jets

Where the consequences of open borders politics are sitting right next to you, white high schoolers overwhelmingly chose survival in 2016

Annualized rate of economic growth slows from 3.2% in 3Q to 2.6% in 4Q 2017

Imports increased, a drag on GDP.

Expect more of the same if Trump & Co. (yeah, I'm talkin' to you Mnuchin) keep talkin' down the dollar.

DXY was trading above 100 as recently as last April, struggled to achieve 95 in November, and now this morning is trading around 89 after Mnuchin's loose lips at Davos.

It would be nice if this administration got its policy act together, on immigration, trade, the dollar, etc. instead of all these comments which imply they are winging it.

So much winging . . ..

That would be "caffeinated" you numbskull

One of these days Trump may float a trial balloon on immigration we actually like, but the latest one is a nonstarter

The story here says he's now offering a pathway to citizenship to nearly 2 million Dreamers.

Trump needs to understand that his voters aren't going to show up for him if he actually signs an amnesty, and that an amnesty just guarantees that the problem won't go away.

Been there, done that. The country's full. They need to go back. All of them.

Trump is boring me to death with these endless iterations when he's not pissing me off with them.

Andy McCarthy ties a nice little bow around his thesis that Hillary wasn't prosecuted because Obama was implicated in her felonies

The presidency long ago became a law unto itself. Occasionally the tyranny becomes more evident, depending on the level of the lawlessness in the heart of the man, or the woman. Good character, unfortunately, matters more than ever, but is increasingly in short supply, in each of us, in our neighbors and in our politicians.  

From the story here:

As his counselors grappled with how to address his own involvement in Clinton’s misconduct, Obama deceptively told CBS News in a March 7 interview that he had found out about Clinton’s use of personal email to conduct State Department business “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.” Perhaps he was confident that, because he had used an alias in communicating with Clinton, his emails to and from her — estimated to number around 20 — would remain undiscovered. ...

[A]n agitated Mills emailed Podesta: “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.” (That is, Obama had emails from Clinton, which he had to know were from a private account since her address did not end in “@state.gov” as State Department emails do.)

Correctamundo, Ann: The FBI is first and foremost incompetent

The government shutdown was so boring

And in a few weeks prepare to be bored again.

The problem with Mormon Utah is that it would be OK with having a senator who makes excuses for Antifa violence

A grandmother of Bolshevism over at The American Conservative is upset with her children

Hey, we are the chosen immanentizers of the eschaton, not you!

Kelly Marcum, here:

The left, which continues to decry the social faux pas of cultural appropriation with ever-increasing vehemence, is itself guilty of the very same crime. They, the proponents of a predominantly liberal post-Christian culture, have undertaken a great project of appropriating and reinventing orthodox Christian values. ...

The left has made it its mission to culturally appropriate Christianity and use it for its own ends; in too many cases, it has been allowed to do so and even aided in its efforts by Christians themselves. ...

If orthodox Christianity is to survive in an evermore hostile culture, its practitioners and leaders will need not only to withstand the pressure to accommodate and self-censor, but to repossess their own language and tenets that have been exploited by the left.