Sunday, March 31, 2019

Sad to see Glenn Greenwald retweeting the spitting-on-Vietnam-vets-is-a-myth crap

The left-wing standard for doubting the veracity of the claims continues to be the inability to find corroborating news accounts at the time of the alleged spitting incidents, as if Vietnam vets were such whiny weenies that they ran like babies to the papers to complain "that hippie spit on me!" See the 1998 book by Jerry Lembcke which depends on this line of reasoning to argue the spitting incidents are a myth.

In our own time there has been a virtual news blackout on assaults against Trump supporters, especially during 2015 and 2016, which partisans point to as evidence those also are myths.

"If we don't report it, it's not news."

The problem with this analysis, now standard, is that libertarianism co-opted conservatism

The three-legged stool of "conservatism" in the age of Reagan consisted of a libertarian leg, a social conservative leg, and a foreign policy hawk leg. The libertarian leg came to dominate (the money interest), as is typical, which discarded the conservative leg except when it needed it, at election time (traditional values agenda), and put the foreign policy leg to work in its interests (global free trade).

This has happened before. The proponents of the professional, managerial state in the early 20th century similarly co-opted the rural Christian farming population to pass the "progressive" agenda, in the name of Christian fairness, of women's suffrage, popular election of senators, the corporate and income taxes to make business and the rich pay their fair share, and Prohibition, in exchange for political power.

The gulls in this game have always been the core Christian population. They are being replaced now, however, by a new class, the Latinos.

The 3-D chess masters will have to run the future scenarios. Yo no hablo espanol. But I expect them to be less charitable when jilted.

Current illegal immigration surge totally predictable but Trump botched the response


The Border Patrol has been facing a record influx of migrant families since fall, but in recent weeks the numbers have begun to escalate substantially, thanks to the annual surge before the arrival of the deadly summer heat.

For months, the federal authorities knew that this spring was likely to set records, but only now is it becoming apparent how big the numbers will be. Apprehensions already dwarf the numbers of five years ago and echo those of the spring of 2014, when the arrival of the first migrant families from Central America transformed the nature of immigration along the southern border.

“The current surge was totally predictable and the Trump administration chose not to prepare for it. Instead it launched a raft of harsh deterrence measures that were totally ineffective,” said Wayne Cornelius, a migration scholar at the University of California, San Diego. ...

In the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, nearly 400,000 migrants were apprehended at the border, a low figure compared with the peak of 1.6 million in 2000. But experts predict that arrivals this fiscal year could hit one million, a level not seen since the record numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Trump's incompetence combines with Congress' inaction on immigration resulting in human traffickers confidently overwhelming the asylum system with hordes of illegals


Border Patrol officials were on pace in March for more than 100,000 apprehensions and encounters with migrants – the highest monthly tally in over a decade, he said. Around 90 percent of those – or 90,000 – crossed the border between legal ports of entry. ... Increasingly, smugglers are bringing larger numbers of families together and delivering them across the Rio Grande, knowing they’ll overrun facilities and be released until their immigration court date, she said. Under U.S. law, Border Patrol is not supposed to hold any migrant for longer than 72 hours. Usually, Border Patrol hands them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which can detain families for up to 20 days. But all of those facilities are overcrowded, [Theresa] Brown [of the Bipartisan Policy Center] said, leading Border Patrol to skip the transfer to ICE and release migrants to shelters en masse. “This is a system-wide collapse,” she said.

Saturday, March 30, 2019

No, not The Onion: New political party forms in the realm which gave us rum, sodomy and the lash, calls itself CUK

Short for Change UK, formed on the day when Brexit was finally supposed to occur.

Apparently their idea of change is no change, as in no Brexit.

Looks like the woman in the center realizes their mistake, but that's probably just wishful thinking.

Any seat in Parliament kept by one of these in the next election one wag says will constitute a CUK-hold, but they all already have made cucks of the people of the UK they represent. It is an odd fetish, thankfully, enjoyed by but few, less than 2% of the UK's constituencies. 

 


Friday, March 29, 2019

Education is so bad that even common idioms like "turned out" and "ended up" are lost to us

Or is it the toxoplasmosis?

67% of Democrats think Russia tampered with vote tallies to get Trump elected in latest Economist/YouGov poll

Democrats also believe in reincarnation, yoga, astrology, spiritual energy and the evil eye by 2 to 1 over Republicans in a Pew Research study from 2009.
The same goes for being in touch with the dead, ghosts and fortune tellers.

Independents are almost as bad at 1.8 to 1 on average.

Ding dong.

Leader of New Zealand mosque says the Joos did it!

Must be why Democrats run interference for Muslims so much.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

There's been no manufacturing jobs boom here in Michigan under Donald Trump, just more of the same


This has never been an economic boom, just more meh


Gee what a shock, millions of older Americans get fired in the Great Recession, and their homelessness soars

Welcome to libertarian hell.


UCSF researchers estimate that half of the single homeless adults are age 50 or older, compared to 11 percent in the early 1990s — a 354 percent uptick. This data is emblematic of a graying homeless population across the nation: America’s homeless elderly population is projected to nearly triple by 2030, according to new research encompassing New York City, Boston and Los Angeles County. And this problem spans the globe: A 2017 report on the U.K.’s homeless population found that the population of homeless people over 60 had increased 111 percent since 2009, and for those over 75 it had increased by 155 percent — compared to an increase of 48 percent in the general population.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Remember those 5 guys Obama let go to get back Bowe Bergdahl?


Maybe they could cast Rachel as Kayla Arnold in a tranny remake of The Wonder Years


Letting Jussie Smollett go is the kind of criminal justice reform you can expect from the woman who inspired it, Kamala Harris


Here in Grand Rapids, Ann, they're called Dutch Yetis: Their feet as so big you can actually hear them comin' up behind you


Jussie Smollett pretty tight with Moochelle


If Joe Biden gets his way white jurisprudential culture in America will be replaced with Smollett-style justice


Alexandra Chalupa's timeline of her activities and of her fears about Paul Manafort's influence in Ukraine in his capacity as part of the Trump campaign isn't convincing



In late 2015, a small group of Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian civic leaders visiting Washington, D.C. told Chalupa they had heard Manafort’s former clients in Ukraine were remobilizing again, and that Manafort had made a fortune working in Kyiv. ...

It was around this time that Chalupa started to develop a gut feeling that Manafort was poised to help Trump’s bid for the White House. ...

By early 2016, Chalupa notified a senior DNC executive that a political spin doctor who had worked against America’s interests for the pro-Kremlin Yanukovych and was linked to some of the most powerful Russian oligarchs serving Putin was to play an important role in the effort to get Trump elected. ...

On March 28, The New York Times broke the story that Manafort had joined the Trump campaign.

The problem with this timeline and Chalupa's obsession with Manafort's Ukraine connection is that Manafort's overture to Trump to come on to the campaign didn't come until February 29, 2016, according to The New York Times. And the overture came at the urging of Trump's close friend Tom Barrack, who wanted Manafort to help a flailing and inexperienced Trump by managing successfully the potentially explosive upcoming Republican convention in Cleveland. Manafort's Republican political experience dating from 1976 onwards is well known.

Chalupa would have had no reason to believe Manafort would suddenly become active in the Trump campaign in late 2015 and early 2016, as she claims, when it wasn't until sometime in mid-February 2016 that Tom Barrack made his pitch to Manafort.

It is more likely that Manafort became the convenient focus for Chalupa after the fact when all along it was opposition to Trump's proposed opening to Russia which motivated her activism and overtures to the DNC long before Manafort came on the scene.

There is absolutely nothing in this puff piece in The Kyiv Post about Chalupa's longstanding loyalty to and work for the Clintons.

Alexandra Chalupa is at the nexus of what has become the criminalization of a foreign policy difference between Trump Republicans on the one hand and Democrats and NeverTrumpers on the other, like John McCain who was notably famous for his deep involvement in the political dispute in Ukraine.

George Washington tried to warn us about the consequences of entangling foreign alliances, and those have been Exhibit A for the last two years.



If 29% of 2016 population 55 and older have absolutely nothing coming in retirement except Social Security, we're talking about 26 million Americans


Of those 55 and older, 48 percent had nothing put away in a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan or an individual retirement account, according to a GAO estimate for 2016 that was released Tuesday. That’s an improvement from the 52 percent without retirement money in 2013.

Two in five of such households did have access to a traditional pension, also known as a defined benefit plan. However, 29 percent of older Americans had neither a pension nor any assets in a 401(k) or IRA account.


Lee Stranahan in Dec 2018: CNN peddled lies trying to put daylight between DNC and Alexandra Chalupa, but Wikileaks now proves Chalupa was working with Dems to connect Trump to Russia long before DNC was hacked or Trump Tower meeting

And notice how after Hillary's unexpected loss, Chalupa's sister, who admits Alexandra's role with the DNC,  is suddenly deeply involved in the effort to spread the story that the Russkies hacked the voting totals of Election 2016. 


Over the weekend, Wikileaks tweeted about how CNN had reported last year a denial by the Democratic National Committee and Hilary [sic] Clinton officials of illegal election collusion between the DNC and the government of Ukraine during the 2015 [sic] election. CNN’s conduct is a textbook example of smothering a story and leaving out relevant facts.

The story that CNN was trying to bury was published in Politico in January 2017 titled Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire. That story was written by David Stern and Ken Vogel (who is now writing at the New York Times) detailed how a DNC operative named Alexander [sic] Chalupa worked closely with officials at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, including Ukrainian Ambassador Chaly, to try and dig up dirt connecting Donald Trump and Paul Manafort to Russia. The story also mentions that Chalupa told people that the Democrats were planning to hold hearing connecting Trump to Russia in fall of 2016, just before the election.

It should be noted that this illegal attempt to gather information from the Democrats [sic] was underway by March, 2016…which is before the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC was detected as well before the Trump Tower meeting that are cited by the media as examples of Russian collusion. In other words, the DNC was actively working on a plan to connect Trump to Russia before the alleged collusion ever happened.