What a joke our country is.
Dianne Emiel Goldman Berman Feinstein Blum has been on the Senate INTELLIGENCE Committee since 2001, but never knew.
Sunday, August 5, 2018
Jordan Weissmann affects a fever over QAnon despite Pew finding that "commitment to representative democracy is strongest in North America and Europe"
Here:
What makes QAnon a little a different, and little bit scarier, than many of the conspiracy theories Americans have latched onto through the decades, is that it’s fundamentally authoritarian . . . They’re waiting for the sitting president to deliver their country from evil by rounding up his political opposition. Adherents have taken to jubilantly counting up the sealed indictments federal authorities have filed lately because they see them as a sign that a mass wave of arrests is coming. At Trump’s Wednesday night rally in Tampa, Florida, a shocking number of attendees showed up with QAnon T-shirts and signs. These people are all but asking for a strongman to seize control of the country . . . You can’t tell how many are really out there, but they’re now part of the political fabric in a country where around 1 in 5 people think we’d be better off with a strongman leader, and 17 percent say they’d be OK with military rule.
He's referring to this from Pew, which nevertheless finds "broad support for representative and direct democracy" globally:
There is less support for a strong leader who can make decisions without interference from a parliament or courts. Still, about a quarter or more back this idea in Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom, Israel, Hungary, South Korea and the U.S. And while military rule is relatively unpopular, 17% endorse this idea in the established democracies of the U.S., Italy and France.
France, Italy, the US, three overly generous countries being injected with many costly, difficult to assimilate, and lawless "refugees".
Democrat Mayor of Portland, Oregon, is another Antifa enabler
Where were the police? Ordered away by Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, who doubles as police commissioner. “I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict, particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track,” he tweeted. “If [ICE is] looking for a bailout from this mayor, they are looking in the wrong place.” ...
“I join those outraged by ICE actions separating parents from their children, and support peaceful protest to give voice to our collective moral conscience.”
The Hakes family, which owns the Happy Camper food cart across the street from ICE’s office, responded to the statement with incredulity. The mob “terrorized our family” and forced the business to close, Julie Hakes told me.
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Mitchell Research and Communications has John James beating Sandy Pensler 44-30 in Michigan Republican US Senate primary
Reported here this morning, +/- 5 points.
Conservatism upside-down: Russell Kirk chair in history at Hillsdale held by professed libertarian
Bradley J. Birzer, here:
"I have never considered myself a classical liberal, but I have always considered myself libertarian."
Russell Kirk, of course, was neither, but especially not libertarian.
An alt-right taxonomy one year after Charlottesville, and its prospects for survival
Provided by Paul Gottfried, with useful links, in Paul Gottfried: Charlottesville After A Year—As An Outsider, I Think The Alt-Right Far From Finished, from which this excerpt:
Growing racial tensions, reckless immigration and a further weakening of already-weakened social bonds could all help the Alt-Right expand its following.
Part of the Alt Right’s eventual success may come from its anti-traditionalism. The Alt-Right is mostly (but not entirely) anti-Christian and advances a Nietzschean or neo-pagan perspective. It is thereby in sync with the growing secularism of millennials.
And the Alt-Right doesn’t wear itself out trying to defend the traditional bourgeois family. It appears to be made up largely of young, unattached bloggers. Most of those Alt-Right publicists I read focus on racial conflict or the struggle between civilizations; and they push these themes far more frankly and with less careerist backtracking than the well-paid propagandists of Conservatism, Inc. They also cite telling statistics about racial and gender differences; and they pride themselves on their openness to science as well as on their sometimes vaguely defined “radical traditionalism.”
The Alt-Right belongs to a post-conservative Right.
This is another way of saying the future success of the alt-right depends on the continued splintering of the American experience occasioned by its enthusiasm for secular ideologies.
Hence the way to defeat the alt-right, if that is what the left really wants, is to reject multiculturalism and participate in unifying the country instead of working toward its demise. And that implies supporting the radical correction of America's immigration laws symbolized and actualized by Donald Trump's wall.
But, of course, that would make too much sense, as little sense as reproducing oneself the old-fashioned way, by marrying and having children.
Idealism, of whatever stripe, is poison, but our thirst for it, unfortunately, is the well nigh inescapable bastard patrimony of our Christian past.
Or that the charm and venom, which they drunk,
Their blood with secret filth infected hath,
Being diffused through the senseless trunk
That, through the great contagion, direful deadly stunk.
-- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Canto II, iv.
Friday, August 3, 2018
Just received a robocall on behalf of John James for US Senate in the Michigan Republican primary
From the Susan B. Anthony list.
DOJ did not inform the FISA court of FBI interviews with Papadopoulos and Mifsud, but should have
From the story here:
These facts indicate that the DOJ did not inform the FISA court of the FBI interviews with Papadopoulos and Mifsud. But it should have, especially if Mifsud denied Papadopoulos’ claim that the Maltese professor had bragged that the Russians had dirt on Hillary. Or was Mifsud an FBI informant or an asset of a foreign government, and was that instead what the DOJ told the FISA court?
It’s time for the FBI to come clean: Who was Mifsud, and what was his role in the launch of Crossfire Hurricane? And did the State Department assist the FBI in handling Mifsud? Congress and the president supposedly hold power over these agencies. They, and we, need the answers.
Laugh of a whole generation: Rush Limbaugh has had the same ethics, conscience, core beliefs, morality for 30 years
Here:
RUSH: So I’ve had a lot of emails from a lot of people in the past couple of days, and one of them I received last night that started me thinking. Now, I love things that make me think — I’ll be honest with you — and this one did. “Do you know how few people can say that they’ve had the same ethics, the same conscience, the same core beliefs, the same morality, and the same connectivity with themselves in their twenties, through their forties, and into the sixties and beyond, into their best years? Do you realize how few people are as consistent and reliable as you are?”
No, I don’t ever stop to think of anything like that. I don’t think… See, this is why I don’t… I don’t think it’s unusual that things I believed in my heart when I was in my twenties would survive my getting to my sixties. Core beliefs. I can totally believe that I wouldn’t change in those things. But this person said, “You don’t know how rare it is,” and what inspired her to write this, I think she said, was a caller that appeared to the program yesterday saying basically the same thing.
Spouses:
Roxy Maxine McNeely (1977–1980, div.)
Michelle Sixta (1983–1990, div.)
Marta Fitzgerald (1994–2004, div.)
Kathryn Rogers (2010–
Drug use:
Admitted addiction to prescription painkillers (October 2003)
Arrests:
Doctor shopping for prescription painkillers (April 2006)
Confiscations:
Viagra, Palm Beach International Airport (June 2006)
Thursday, August 2, 2018
Sandy Pensler grows even more desperate in Michigan Republican race for US Senate, enlists Rand Paul for robocalls
I got that call this afternoon, just days after getting one from Rick Santorum urging a vote for Pensler. Clearly this is Pensler's play for the libertarian vote after the earlier play for the Catholic vote.
Pensler is counting on his expensive ad campaign overcoming Trump's endorsement of his challenger, John James, and on the fractured nature of Republican politics in Michigan to eek out a win, which is a phenomenon of its libertarian leanings.
And as everyone knows, libertarians are a contrary bunch who can hardly come to agreement about anything among themselves, let alone unite anyone around their views once in office. Pensler himself has alienated Polish-Americans with his holocaust remarks. He fits right in with the libertarians.
The right thing to do in this context is vote for John James.
Good comparison of the presidents on GDP by Justin Fox at Bloomberg
Fox well reminds his readers that GDP is an inadequate measure in many respects, and gives credit where credit is due even when the numbers don't seem to show it.
His second chart is the better chart since it is a political comparison, which is what this is all about, pegging beginning and end of analysis to fourth quarters when presidents are elected or eclipsed.
He has Kennedy and Johnson first and second (5.5% and 5%), followed by Clinton (3.8%), Reagan 3.6%), Carter (3.2%) and Nixon 3.0%), then IKE (2.5%), then Ford and Bush 41 tied (2.2%), with Obama (1.9%) and Bush 43 (1.8%) bringing up the rear. (Trump so far is seventh, ahead of IKE but behind Nixon, at 2.7%).
A few quibbles.
The data is plenty fine for Truman 1948-1952. He should be included. His performance is the best of them all on a full term basis (5.54%), using the same compound annual growth rate Fox uses. The secret to Truman's success? He slashed government spending in the wind-down from World War II. No one seems to get that. By cutting taxes and not slashing spending, Republicans since Truman only defeat themselves and discredit what works.
Secondly, JFK didn't serve out his first term, Nixon his second. Therefore it makes more sense to view JFK coterminous with LBJ (5.19% together), and Ford with Nixon (2.73%), evaluating them together in two eight year periods of Democrat and Republican political administration respectively, which is what it was.
Third, Fox rounds his numbers, which obscures how close Bush and Obama were in their terrible records (1.83% and 1.88% respectively).
All in all, though, we come up with similar results: Truman is first (5.54), followed by JFK/LBJ (5.19), Clinton (3.81), Reagan (3.55), Carter (3.19), Nixon/Ford (2.73), IKE (2.52), Bush 41 (2.21), Obama (1.88), and Bush 43 (1.83).
Trump's first year through 4Q2017 is 2.47%. Measured 2Q2017 on 2Q2018 just completed he's at 2.85%.
Only by comparison with the previous sixteen years is this anything to cheer about, but thankfully we have that.
Democrat socialist Ocasio-Cortez is a crackpot, says everyone has two jobs when multiple jobholding is at historic lows
The lights are on there, but nobody's home. Even at the historic highs it was less than 7% of the employed, and that was back in the Clinton era when the economy is pretty much universally acknowledged to have been a lot better than it is now. That suggests multiple job holding is a good thing, not a bad thing. When people can get two jobs that means there is more opportunity to work harder to save for important goals and pay for them. No coincidence, either, that GDP was better then when more people worked multiple jobs. More work equals more GDP.
Governor Moonbeam is clueless about how much warmer it was in Greco-Roman antiquity than today
Jerry Brown, quoted here:
The governor added that "since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse and that’s the way it is."
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