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| In Saudi Arabia |
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| At The Vatican |
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Trump resurrects Bush's idiotic war on evil ideology
Trump, quoted here:
'This wicked ideology must be obliterated – and I mean completely obliterated – and the innocent life must be protected. All innocent lives. Life must be protected.'
"The long-term solution is to promote a better ideology, which is freedom. Freedom is universal," Bush said in 2011 after Osama bin Laden was assassinated by Obama.
How long is long term? 6 years? 10 years? 16 years in Afghanistan and Iraq? The better ideology isn't working too well, is it?
You don't defeat ideas. You defeat the people who have them, and keep them out of your society. You know, like a Muslim ban.
How long is long term? 6 years? 10 years? 16 years in Afghanistan and Iraq? The better ideology isn't working too well, is it?
You don't defeat ideas. You defeat the people who have them, and keep them out of your society. You know, like a Muslim ban.
But no, we're "rights" absolutists and can't bring ourselves to infringe the rights of those who want to kill us.
That's the ideology that is killing us.
Living in the West should be viewed as a privilege, which then distributes the rights. Lose the privilege, and lose the rights.
Our real enemy is libertarians and liberals who think every man, woman and child in the world is entitled to come here, live here and enjoy the benefits previous generations bled and died to ensure for themselves.
The Manchester bomber is not equal to George Washington.
Monday, May 22, 2017
Visa overstays hit 740,000 through September 2016
From the story here:
Countries with the highest visa overstays during the period from October 2015 to September 2016 were Canada, Mexico, Brazil, China and India.
Trump isn't fighting to build a wall, in fact he keeps caving
Trump got nothing in the continuing resolution through this fiscal year, and will get even less than he was asking for, if he's lucky, in the next.
Story here.
What a pathetic loser this guy's turning out to be.
What the hell is this?! Now Comey is colluding with the special prosecutor to get their story straight!
Comey shouldn't be allowed to come near Mueller.
Chaffetz is a putz.
Trump's battle of good vs. evil sounds like George W. Bush, kind of warmed over for 2017
Flashback to 2004 here and The President of Good and Evil:
Bush's tendency to see the world in terms of good and evil is especially striking. He has spoken about evil in 319 separate speeches, or about 30 percent of all the speeches he gave between the time he took office and June 16, 2003. In these speeches he uses the word "evil" as a noun far more often than he uses it as an adjective-914 noun uses as against 182 adjectival uses. Only 24 times, in all these occasions on which Bush talks of evil, does he use it as an adjective to describe what people do-that is, to judge acts or deeds. This suggests that Bush is not thinking about evil deeds, or even evil people, nearly as often as he is thinking about evil as a thing, or a force, something that has a real existence apart from the cruel, callous, brutal and selfish acts of which human beings are capable. His readiness to talk about evil in this manner raises the question of what meaning evil can have in a secular modern world.
Ann Coulter's excellent rant against Heritage Foundation
We can bring Ann up to speed on the Germans later.
Best one: Burke said Americans were descendants of Englishmen, and Protestant.
Heritage should sell everything and donate it to the Center for American Progress. They're already doing their work anyway:
"champion the common good over narrow self-interest, and harness the strength of our diversity."
The Heritage Foundation are lunaticks, as the King James Version of the Bible would put it
They are oft cast into the sea in danger of drowning, or into the fire in danger of burns, were it not for the common sense of Americans who have been repelled by their passions, for health care mandates for example.
For a think tank they really should get some thinkers over there one of these days.
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| Which is why they kept slaves, and required presidents to be born here of American citizens? |
Trump calls war on terrorism a battle between good and evil
Full transcript of remarks in Saudi Arabia here.
Gee, sounds just like Bush (and ISIS) and conservative talk radio is thrilled.
Typically, this rhetoric is used to justify treating the evil as less than human, which is what ISIS does, or sending American troops abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But we're 16 years into Afghanistan now, with no end in sight, and the monsters just keep reproducing themselves.
This is not to suggest moral equivalence, but only that the West continues to delegitimize the "Islamic" in Islamic State in order to keep the military-industrial complex busy.
The goal of war, rather, is supposed to be to end the enemy's ability to wage it. We haven't been serious about that, and I don't think Trump will be either.
Either end it, or quit it, but carrying on like this is bankrupting the country.
Enough.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Flashback: Robert Mueller and James Comey at FBI accused the wrong guy in the 2001 anthrax letter deaths
Carl Cannon recounts the sorry episode of their incompetence, here, in The Orange County Register.
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Robert Mueller can't investigate Comey's record either, because Comey's his "protégé"
Conflict of interest.
Reported here:
Comey regards his predecessor as a mentor, while Mueller considers Comey his protégé. When Comey was appointed to succeed Mueller as FBI Director, both men appeared together and were effusive in their praise of one another. Their relationship is not merely a casual one. It is precisely the kind of association which ethical rules are designed to guard against.
Friday, May 19, 2017
Oops, Robert Mueller's law firm represents both Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort
Conflict of interest!
If Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself, then Kushner and Manafort must be off limits to Mueller. Or, Mueller has to go.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Reported here:
Mueller's former law firm, WilmerHale, represents Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who met with a Russian bank executive in December, and the president's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is a subject of a federal investigation.
Hey WaPo: Thom Hartmann, Larry King, Jesse Ventura and Ed Schultz get $ from RT RIGHT NOW, are they Russian agents?!
You turds.
Here:
Flynn also received $45,000 to appear in 2015 with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a dinner for RT, a Kremlin-controlled media organization.
If you had a good mother and father, that's socialism
They did everything for you because you were of them and belonged to them.
No one else will ever care for you like that.
And that's as far as socialism goes, unless you're an Italian, capisce?
Robert Shiller blames housing bubbles on get rich quick flipper narratives, still completely misses the tax angle
Here, in The New York Times:
There is still no consensus on why the last housing boom and bust happened. That is troubling, because that violent housing cycle helped to produce the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2007 to 2009. We need to understand it all if we are going to be able to avoid ordeals like that in the future.
Ordinary Americans were suddenly able to make a lot of money by flipping their homes because of the tax law changes of 1997. Capital that was previously locked-up in housing by the rules of the New Deal until 1997 was suddenly unleashed to slosh around in the economy when lawmakers gave homeowners the right to avoid most capital gains on the sale of their homes as long as they lived in them only two years. Until 1997, if you didn't buy a more expensive home after you sold yours, you were exposed to a tax hit, unless you took the option of a once in a lifetime exclusion on the gain. The old arrangement had insured, along with the 30-year mortgage, that housing capital built up over a long period of time, creating forced savings for the middle class which could be safely liquidated in retirement without adversely affecting the housing market.
The Republican and Democrat geniuses who ran our government in 1997 changed all that, and within ten years the dang thing blew up. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Bill Clinton, and you, Newt Gingrich.
Too bad Robert Shiller still doesn't get it.
It would probably be unwise to turn back the tax clock now that the damage has been done, but the reinflation of the housing bubble after the crisis wasn't inevitable. The Fed's unprecedented zero interest rate policy has been responsible for that.
When the next housing crash comes, we'll probably not understand it either.
Meanwhile, the median sales price of homes in the aggregate has never been higher, or more unaffordable, and remains the primary driver of wealth inequality in America.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Obstruction of justice is Hillary Clinton deleting over 30,000 emails after they were subpoenaed
Lock her up, with the guy who gave her a pass.
You know, if Trump picks Joe Lieberman for FBI, I'm done
If we wanted that version of The Swamp in 2000, we would have voted for Al Gore.
We certainly don't want it now.
Kevin McCarthy is the poster boy for stupid Republicanism, but I repeat myself
No wonder Democrats run California.
From the story here:
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.
Previously while preparing to replace Speaker John Boehner McCarthy infamously said with a straight face that Republican success was evident from the House Benghazi investigation because it was proving to be politically detrimental to Hillary. The mug. He never knew what hit him.
When are they going to lock up these Americans who "receive money from Russia" like Mike Flynn?
They all work for "RT" just like Flynn did once: liberal radio man Thom Hartmann, liberal CNN interviewer Larry King, former Minnesota governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura, and liberal radio man Ed Schultz.
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| Thom Hartmann |
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| Larry King |
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| Jesse Ventura |
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| Ed Schultz |
Tom Fitton is right, Robert Mueller will never find fault with anything done by Comey's FBI
Mueller led the FBI under Bush II and Obama before his pal Comey was appointed.
Fitton heads Judicial Watch, interviewed right now on Laura Ingraham.
Laura Ingraham singles out Justin Amash as a turncoat
In the last hour.
Good on her, but he's never been on our side. He's on his own side.
The people who leaked are imputing obstruction of justice as the meaning of Comey's memo
That was the political purpose of drafting the memo in the first place and showing it to others.
But Comey will testify under oath that he never saw it that way.
Otherwise he'll be in trouble himself.
He's a Niebuhrian. The end justifies the means.
What this is about is the deep state not wanting improved relations with Russia EVER . . .
. . . and it and the Clinton wing trying to criminalize the policy change by Trump & Company.
From the story here:
[T]he two [Flynn and Kislyak] discussed establishing a back channel for communication between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that could bypass the U.S. national security bureaucracy, which both sides considered hostile to improved relations, four current U.S. officials said.
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
The New York Times has nothing on Trump, who only expressed a hope, that's all, IF the memo is legit
Meanwhile the dishonest media keep reporting such things as "Trump asked Comey to cut short the Flynn investigation" when Trump did nothing of the kind.
Here, claiming to quote Trump from Comey's memo:
“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
That's why Turley says there's no evidence in the memo. Trump asks for nothing, threatens nothing, and only expresses a hope.
And even if it were "evidence", it would only be "he said" vs. "he said", a form of hearsay and inadmissible.
Princeton's Stephen Cohen blames false Russia narrative about Trump on Clinton wing of Democrat Party and the intelligence complex
Here:
"Two motives have dirven this false narrative about Trump, that he is somehow a Kremlin agent. There have been two forces. One is the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, which doesn't want to admit she lost the election... and that may be because she wants to run again.... At the same time, there has long been in Washington, let's call it the fourth branch of government -- the intelligence services, who have opposed any rapprochement or cooperation with Russia."
If Comey suspected obstruction of justice in February, he was obligated to report it immediately
From the story here:
Under the law, Comey is required to immediately inform the Department of Justice of any attempt to obstruct justice by any person, even the President of the United States. Failure to do so would result in criminal charges against Comey. (18 USC 4 and 28 USC 1361) He would also, upon sufficient proof, lose his license to practice law. So, if Comey believed Trump attempted to obstruct justice, did he comply with the law by reporting it to the DOJ? If not, it calls into question whether the events occurred as the Times reported it.
Jonathan Turley: The Comey memo is not proof of an impeachable offense
Here:
[W]e need to move beyond the hyperventilated pronouncements of criminal conduct or impeachable offenses based on this memo. This conversation in the Oval Office is a valid matter of concern and worthy of further investigation. It is not proof of an impeachable offense any more than it is proof of a crime.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Mark Levin: Let's see ALL Comey's memos
Levin correctly asks why Comey reveals a memo about a possible Trump misdeed now. If it's the real deal, he might have lied to Congress months ago when he said Trump was not a target of his investigation.
Here's the testimony of Comey's number two, who stresses there has been no interference "to date":
The notes taken by Comey appear to contradict testimony offered just last week by his temporary successor, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe.
"There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date,'' McCabe said last week in response to a question posed by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. "Simply put, sir, you cannot stop the men and women of the FBI from doing the right thing, protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution.''
Law enforcement officials declined to explain the apparent contradiction between Comey's notes and McCabe's testimony.
Here's the testimony of Comey's number two, who stresses there has been no interference "to date":
The notes taken by Comey appear to contradict testimony offered just last week by his temporary successor, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe.
"There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date,'' McCabe said last week in response to a question posed by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. "Simply put, sir, you cannot stop the men and women of the FBI from doing the right thing, protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution.''
Law enforcement officials declined to explain the apparent contradiction between Comey's notes and McCabe's testimony.
New York Times blames housing unaffordability on mortgage interest deduction, never mentions how the Fed just reinflated the housing bubble quite apart from it
Here.
Housing was on its way to being affordable again until the Feds stepped in to stop foreclosures from rising and prices from falling, late in 2008. As a result of rock bottom interest rates which existing owners used to refinance their mortgages, housing is now more expensive than it has ever been, but the Times attacks the mortgage interest deduction for causing the problem.
Prices are up 47% since the 2009 low, in just eight years! The mortgage interest deduction was invented over 100 years ago, and helped to build the post-war middle class.
The Times seems bent on further destroying it.
Monday, May 15, 2017
Voter fraud: Is it really unimaginable that 3 million voted fraudulently in 2016?
In 2004 there were just short of 114,000 polling places in the United States. The number has doubtlessly grown considerably since then, but take 114,000 for a fact even though 12 years out of date and all it takes to get to 3 million is 26 illegal votes per precinct.
Fraud is complicated by in-person early voting in 21 states and DC, making it possible for determined fraudsters to vote multiple times in one state and/or states. Alternative voting methods other than by in-person on election day are now estimated to account for more than a third of all votes cast. These include absentee/by-mail voting in many states, which liberals typically find more susceptible of fraud than in-person systems.
Governments often raised funds with lotteries in the past, but how about $7 trillion in FY2017?
I don't think so.
Lotteries started to fall out of favor after 1830, according to the story here, mostly due to corruption. The guys running the things would run off with the dough. So much for the golden age of the past.
Government at all levels in the US will shell out $7.04 trillion in fiscal 2017, 36.5% of GDP.
In 1817 the number was in the neighborhood of $23 million, about 3% of GDP.
The problem with raising revenues today is only a problem because government is too damn big. Spending 3% of GDP today on government at all levels compared with current outlays means they are twelve times the size they should be, $7 trillion instead of $0.6 trillion.
Besides, you couldn't possibly raise enough using lotteries. In fiscal 2014 lottery revenues countrywide barely totaled $70 billion, just 1% of current total outlays.
Every man, woman and child in this country would have to purchase at least $21,757 in lotto tickets this fiscal year in order to fund government at all levels. And that's before any jackpots are paid out, or lottery workers paid.
Or we could just tax everyone that much.
It would be easier and fairer, right?
After all, we're all "equal".
Except 60 million Americans don't make even that much. If government took it all what would they live on?
Hope, no doubt.
Sunday, May 14, 2017
Wow, Sen. Mike Lee falls 28,000 feet directly into the sea from Mt. Tea Party Olympus
Another phony like Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. Justin Amash.
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