Republican corporate tax cuts = record stock buybacks in May 2018 = corporate insiders selling to profit BIGLY

From the story, "Corporate executives are using stock buybacks to pad their own compensation, according to the SEC", here:

Indeed, buybacks totaled $178 billion during the first quarter, hit a record $171.3 billion in May alone and have seen $51.1 billion announced so far in June, according to market data firm TrimTabs. At the same time, insider selling has totaled $23.6 billion.

Meanwhile Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports total hirings in the first five months of 2018 are down 48% from the first five months of 2017.

The Republican tax cuts are working out as predicted: Failing to provide jobs while enriching elites.

Texas alone has 251,000 criminal aliens who aren't good people, committing 663,000 serious crimes since 2011

From the story here:

According to the DHS and the Texas Department of Public Safety, over 251,000 criminal aliens have been booked into local Texas jails between June 1, 2011, and April 30, 2018. They have been charged for a total of 663,000 offenses including:

1,351 homicides;

7,156 sexual assaults;

9,938 weapons charges;

79,049 assaults;

18,685 burglaries;

79,900 drug charges;

815 kidnappings;

44,882 thefts;

4,292 robberies.

The Answer: Because they are slaves

The Question:  Why middle-aged women with kids make the best employees

"... the group that is most discriminated against when it comes to jobs."

Reihan Salam: Permanent normal trade relations with China fostered its tyranny

Well duh. We sell them the rope to hang us with, but first they hang their own.

From the story in The Atlantic, here:

What might the world have looked like had the U.S. never granted PNTR to China? One possibility is that China would have pursued an economic strategy built around fostering indigenous entrepreneurship and bettering the lives of its own workers, as it did in the 1980s. Instead, Beijing chose to transfer wealth from ordinary Chinese citizens to its politically powerful export sector, a path made possible by PNTR. China might very well have become just as rich by embracing a more balanced and humane approach to development. Doing so, however, would have required that its central government surrender a measure of control to its citizens. Rather than foster liberalism and openness in China, I suspect PNTR did exactly the opposite—creating the conditions for China’s central government to exert tighter control over the Chinese populace.

Sheldon Richman, a progressive, Marxist libertarian

 "Most of the old rules are rubbish ... divisions ... wither away with each generation".

Funny how Enlightened England became hostile to American Presbyterianism, and so ruined itself

The ruin of a state is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners, and contempt of religion, which is entirely our case at present.

-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

Buzzfeed attacks Disqus for its alt-right hangouts

The marginalization war continues, and the herding instincts of the targets makes them easy prey. The irony of their ghettoization is lost on them.

Here:

A number of pro-white and alt-right users have created their own bloglike communities inside Disqus’s platform in order to share stories, comment, and coordinate influence trolling campaigns (which the trolls dub “raids”). One channel called Mickey’s Clubhouse — whose popular topics include Jews, Holohoax, Censorship, White Genocide, and Jew World Order — appears to be home to a number of users coordinating the infiltration of comment sections on Breitbart and other conservative publications. The goal, as evidenced by their comments, is to flood conservative-leaning publishers with pro-white and anti-Semitic content in order to win hearts and minds and indoctrinate others to their politics.

Jim Goad's just upset because readership at takimag has dropped off a cliff

Like Rush Limbaugh, he blames his base:

'I’d like to cheerfully suggest that you take that finger you’re always pointing at others and stick it up your ass. With the way you’re always talking about “degenerates,” you’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?'

SECDEF Mattis explicitly states US troops in South Korea are not a bargaining chip in North Korea denuclearization talks

Quoted here:

However, Defense Secretary James Mattis said recently at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that any discussion about U.S. military presence in South Korea will be "separate and distinct" from the negotiations with Pyongyang.

"That issue will not come up in the discussions with [North Korea] and as you all recognize; those troops are there as a recognition of a security challenge," Mattis said.

Our political opponent Charles Krauthammer, unlike John McCain, shows us the way home

Showing gratitude, not acrimony.

Here.

May G-d be with you, Charles.

Just 16% of junior US Navy officers completely competent at ship-handling

But I'll bet the rest know everything there is to know about equality between the sexes and sexual preference.

The story is here.

More US Navy shame, more proof China's our enemy: Chicoms successfully hack 614 gigabytes of highly sensitive data from contractor

WaPo reports here:

Chinese government hackers have compromised the computers of a Navy contractor, stealing massive amounts of highly sensitive data related to undersea warfare — including secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U.S. submarines by 2020, according to American officials. ...

In September 2015, in a bid to avert economic sanctions, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to President Barack Obama that China would refrain from conducting commercial cyberespionage against the United States. Following the pact, China appeared to have curtailed much, although not all, of its hacking activity against U.S. firms, including by the People’s Liberation Army. Both China and the United States consider spying on military technology to fall outside the pact.

For failure to understand "not-in-labor-force" it's hard to beat Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King

The only segment of this pie chart which could reasonably be expected to be hiding missing labor is the not-working-aged-between-16-and-64.

Trouble is, 37.4 million of the 45.7 million in the group are in high school and college. That leaves 8.3 million from this group who could possibly work, many of whom are homemakers,the idle rich, people who have just given up finding a job, volunteers, etc. The government says only 5.2 million of them in May 2018 "want a job now".

The idea that we should think about putting old people and the disabled to work is crazy on its face, while there is something to be said for putting prisoners to work.

Why King isn't rebuking Republicans for wanting to replace Americans with cheap foreign workers ought to be the issue. So-called record job openings go unfilled because they can. The unemployed at 7.2 million plus the 5.2 million represent 12.4 million who would work, if only business paid enough.

Ralph Peters drinks the Putin KoolAid

Ralph Peters: "I Am Convinced That Vladimir Putin Has Some Grip On President Trump"

A DACA "fix" is a recipe for more illegal immigration

Amnesty for ‘Dreamers’ won’t solve policy flaw creating DACA dilemma:

"Congress itself has been the culprit. ...

Congress continues to refuse to mandate the well-tested and widely-used E-Verify system. The outlaw employers in construction, manufacturing, hospitality and other services, of course, don't use it. Thus, parents worldwide, at this very moment, are enticed to illegally cross borders and overstay their visas while starting their children on the path to the long-term illegal-status life that Dreamers say is untenable. ...

As soon as amnestied illegal immigrants become U.S. citizens, current law allows them to petition for their parents to also obtain lifetime work permits and permanent residency. ...

But in the lifetime of a young Dreamer given an amnesty today, there would likely be time not only to obtain lifetime work permits for the original chain of extended family but for that Dreamer's grandparents (as parents of the Dreamer's parents), aunts and uncles (as siblings of the Dreamer's parents), and cousins (the children of the Dreamer's aunts and uncles).

The chains don't stop there. Every one of those adults could immediately bring their minor children and their spouse. Every spouse can start the same chains in his or her families.

All of them could receive lifetime work permits to compete for jobs with working-age Americans who don’t have a job, nearly one-in-four Americans, according to government data.

That’s the reality of DACA amnesty that Congress needs to face."

As Republicans and Trump prepare legislation granting a DACA amnesty, illegals are swarming the border with Mexico

These idiots are, well, idiots! They're just sending the same old message: If you come, we will let you stay.

Nay, Nay! They cannot stay! Illegal aliens must go away!

From the story, "Illegal immigration rises for third straight month despite Trump crackdown", here:

Total arrests along the U.S.-Mexico border topped 40,000 last month, according to the [DHS], which is used as a benchmark for understanding the level of illegal immigration occurring at the border. ... The crackdown has seemed to have little effect on the overall numbers of immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, as the arrest numbers have been steadily climbing since January, though some of the rise can be attributed to regular seasonal workers.

Bush's and Obama's legal immigrants have taken all the jobs, no matter how you measure them

Until Bush 41, the average rate of legal immigration into the US was 0.25% of population but has since doubled to 0.49%

Jan Hatzius is hysterical: Unemployment rate set to move into overheating territory

Quoted here:

"We are still creating a lot more jobs than the long-term trend which we would put at 100,000 (each month), so when you are adding 200,000, that means the unemployment rate is set to move into overheating territory," Hatzius added.

The 62-year trend for total nonfarm (Jan 1939 - Jan 2001) is 138,143 jobs/month. Since 2001 through Jan 2018 we're off that trend by 46%, with a monthly rate of just 74,014 jobs added a month. Go back 18 years from May 2018 to incorporate present-day job-creation and the monthly rate goes up only to 76,597 jobs/month.

For workers, the last 17-18 years have absolutely SUCKED!

Nothing is overheating here except Jan Hatzius.

For him recovering the missing 13 million + jobs since 2001 would be a catastrophe . . . for the profits of Goldman Sachs. 

We have 16.1 million total unemployed in May 2018, and 16.8 million new legal immigrants since Bush 43 was elected

That doesn't make any sense!