Thursday, January 17, 2019

Mark Levin goes nuclear . . .

. . . calls AIPAC a bunch of quislings.

Pat Buchanan call your office.

Trump gave away 75% of federal spending as a shutdown bargaining chip over immigration in Sept. 2018, so before Sept. 2019 his only other chip is the debt ceiling

Flashback to September 28, 2018:


President Trump on Friday signed an $854 billion spending package that will avert a shutdown by keeping the federal government open into the new fiscal year, which begins Monday.

The measure fully funds most parts of the federal government through fiscal 2019, pushing off a deadline for a partial shutdown — and showdown over funding for Trump's proposed border wall — until early December. 

“The signing of this legislation marks a drastic turnaround in the way we have funded the government in recent years," said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in a statement announcing the signing. "As of today, 75 percent of the government is funded — on time and through an open, bipartisan process.” ...


[A]fter March 1, the government will need to take "extraordinary measures" to avoid defaulting, and those measures will last for a few months. Ordinary investors should be aware that in 2013, the last time it looked as though Congress might not raise the limit, the market avoided Treasury securities that matured around the dates when the government projected it would exhaust the extraordinary measures.

So, looking ahead, ordinary investors shouldn't be surprised if we see an increase in rates and a decline in liquidity if it looks like the debt ceiling fight is going to be dramatic again. The current state of the shutdown may presage such drama.

Hm, just after the nick of time 1.5 million ineligible voters removed from LA County rolls

Let's see. Hillary won California with 8.75 million votes, minus 1.5 million = 7.25 million. Rinse and repeat for every other California county and see how many it takes to erase the other 2.75 million votes Hillary stole the election by in that state.

Muslim Ilhan Omar gets elected to MN-5 and homophobia runs rampant on Capitol Hill

We need a General Sherman to march on Minneapolis/St. Paul and burn the place down.

Laugh of the Day No. 2: Pelosi cancels Trump's State of the Union, Trump cancels government flights for Pelosi


Laugh of the Day: German industrial production tanks 4.7% in November, Reuters calls it a tentative sign of slowing growth momentum

The signs were tentative in H1 and worrisome since then. November was a disaster.


[T]here were tentative signs of slackening momentum in the United States and Germany in November.

FBI arrest of White House terrorist is just public relations, another case of standard M/O of entrapment and inducement

They never catch the real threats. The FBI has to help these marks become terrorists by using an agent to pose as another terrorist. The FBI suborns terrorism. Otherwise neither the terrorist mark nor the FBI would "succeed". They had been working on this guy for nine months. Meanwhile the real threats have no resources committed to them because that rarely results in anything, including no press conference where the FBI can pat itself on the back.

Total PR for the low IQ crowd, which is lapping it up like milk.


“All potential threats have been neutralized and were under control from the inception of this case,” said U.S. Attorney Byung J. “BJay” Pak, who added that authorities would take no questions on the investigation, which is ongoing.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Contra Richard Spencer, it's not a question of the efficacy of the constitution but of the efficacy of its heirs

The constitution's heirs clearly aren't worthy of it. To slaves it is meaningless, a trifle to be dispensed with. Only already free people could write it, and only still free people can love it.

Like all liberals, Beto O'Rourke is mistaken about human nature



"I trust the wisdom of people. And I'm confident - especially after having traveled Texas for two years - people are good, fundamentally, and if given the choice to do the right thing, they will. To do the good thing, they will," he said, referring to his unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign while giving a walking tour of El Paso and its Mexican sister city, Juarez.

People are not fundamentally good. Nor are they basically evil. Human nature is irreducibly mixed. If people were fundamentally good we wouldn't need laws or government at all, or lawyers, judges, courts and prisons. If they were basically evil the possibility that is America never would have presented itself to history, and monarchy would still be called for. America is the gift of English dissenting Protestantism.

All our political problems remain spiritual ones. There is no freedom without self-control.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Already there, Senator

Said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., “The shutdown will eventually take us to a place where the average American is angry at and sick of all of us.”

 


 

Oswald Spengler to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio: "Left" is, finally and above all, lack of respect for property

De Blasio pitches plan to seize private property of problem landlords, opponents cry ‘communism’:

[W]e will seize their buildings and we will put them in the hands of a community nonprofit that will treat tenants with the respect they deserve.

British Prime Minister Theresa May's soft Brexit, agreed to by EU, defeated in Parliament 432-202

UK leader Theresa May suffers resounding defeat on her Brexit divorce deal: 

May’s proposed “Withdrawal Agreement” was agreed with EU leaders in November last year. ... It’s reportedly the largest defeat for a sitting government in U.K. political history. Despite the result, and expressing a defiant tone, May told lawmakers that she wanted to show those who voted leave the EU that it was her “duty to deliver” on Brexit. ... On June 23, 2016, voters in the U.K. favored leaving the EU by 51.9 percent. The U.K. is legally set to leave the political and trading bloc on March 29.

In 1930 each Congressman decided the fates of 283,000 Americans . . .

. . . and now in 2019 754,000.

Don't talk to me about growing executive power, Justin Amash. If you really cared about the original constitution, you'd give the president more cats to herd.

Says Justin Amash, whose party stopped the growth of Congressional representation in the 1920s, consolidating legislative power in ever fewer hands (his)

The president is term-limited, you are not.

Nicholas Bakalar for The New York Times can't figure out that 69.4 inches is 5' 9.4"

 The Times is also absolutely certain that Steve King is a white supremacist.

You’re Not Getting Much Taller, America. But You Are Getting Bigger.:

Among all men, age-adjusted mean height increased to 69.4 inches (about 5 feet 8 inches) in 2005 from 69.2 inches in 1999, and then decreased to 69.1 inches by 2016.

Glenn Greenwald thinks the FBI is overreaching and abusing its power


If Trump’s foreign policy is misguided or “threatening,” that’s a matter for the Congress and/or the American public, not the FBI. However “threatening” one regards Trump’s foreign policy relating to Russia, the FBI’s abuse of its powers to investigate an elected official due to disagreement with his ideology or foreign policy views is at least as dangerous, it not more so, and the fact that those policy disagreements are characterized as “national security threats” does not make those actions any less threatening or abusive – whether for Trump, Henry Wallace or George McGovern.

It’s certainly possible, as the always-smart Harvard Law Professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith wrote at Lawfare, that the FBI had far more grounds that is currently known for opening this investigation. But based on what we do know, Goldsmith adeptly argues, there is a potentially disturbing incident of serious overreach of the FBI’s role and grave abuse of its vast investigative powers. While Goldsmith is clear that he is not yet adopting this view – in part because some facts are unknown and in part because the Constitutional issues are murky – he lays out what the potential dangers are . . ..

Teen use of marijuana just once or twice interferes with normal sculpting of the brain

But our foolish politics is making marijuana use more likely, not less.


“At the age at which we studied these kids (age 14), cortical regions are going through a process of thinning," he said, suggesting that this is a “sculpting” process that makes the brain and its connections more efficient. "So, one possibility is that the cannabis use has disrupted this pruning process, resulting in larger volumes (i.e., a disruption of typical maturation) in the cannabis users. Another possibility is that the cannabis use has led to a growth in neurons and in the connections between them."

It's not the first research to find that cannabis use may cause changes to the teen brain.

A recent study found that teen brains are more vulnerable to the effects of marijuana than alcohol. And in June, University of Pennsylvania scientists discovered that young people who used marijuana frequently were more likely than nonusers to have slightly lower scores on tests of memory, learning new information, and higher-level problem solving and information processing.

Monday, January 14, 2019

House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings Plans To Hit The Ground "Flying"

Much smaller than first thought to be, the gig economy lies prostrate before the great wall of state capitalism


Future ICE agent: 11-year old uses Full Metal Jackets on intruder, makes him cry like a little baby

Next time use hollow points, boy.