Here.
The commenters are all over the affirmative action president like white on rice, if that's possible in this instance.
Talk about kicking a dog when he's down . . . for the Muslim cause.
And you thought America was lost.
Courage!
Friday, February 6, 2015
Missing the Gipper, who would have been 104 today
I'm proud to say I voted for him twice, when I was 24 and again when I was 28.
Communism abroad was our enemy then. Little did we imagine it would grow root and branch here, and invade the very White House.
The man would be appalled at what we've let happen to America.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
King Abdullah of Jordan for President of the United States
Might as well have a real moderate Muslim as president instead of the one we've got. You know, someone who names the enemy and wants to take it to the enemy instead of lecturing Christians that they are sinners too, confusing people about whose side he's really on.
"Any man I see out there, I'm gonna kill him. Any son of a bitch takes a shot at me, I'm not only going to kill him, I'm going to kill his wife and all his friends and burn his damn house down."
Story here from Byron York.
Surprise: Lefty Michael Tomasky wants to punish the middle class with an increase in the regressive gasoline tax
Here in "Pony Up, Middle Class, for a Gas Tax", recommending Hillary do it in 2017 like her husband did with income taxes in 1993, by lying about it:
"And the rich, even though they’re rich, only have so much to contribute. The top marginal tax rate just isn’t going to get much higher, and the corporate tax rate if anything should be lowered (although as loopholes are simultaneously closed). So you’re going to have to pay a little.
"I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this for a campaign. But let us not forget that the husband of the putative Democratic nominee in 2016 got into office in 1993 and promptly raised taxes, and fairly substantially, on just about everybody."
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Of course, Tomasky doesn't mention Bill Clinton specifically promising in October 1992 NOT TO RAISE TAXES on the middle class, period.
Americans were forced in the aftermath of those tax increases to plunder home equity to maintain their standard of living. Owners' equity as a percentage of the value of household real estate subsequently plunged from 60.88% when Clinton was elected to 57.43% in the autumn of 1997 even as those housing values began to soar in the gestating housing bubble. We won't digress about how Clinton then threw gasoline on the housing fire in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 just as the percentage of owners' equity had hit that new low.
What's noteworthy is how enthusiastic the left is to punish the middle class, now as then. They haven't changed a wit, and neither have their methods. Everyone is paying higher taxes now in the form of healthcare premiums (hello HillaryCare), and if they get their way they'll raise federal gasoline taxes, too.
Of all the taxes which hurt working and middle class people more it's gasoline taxes, euphemistically referred to as user taxes by libertarians. The current federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon generates about $131 of federal revenue for every vehicle driven 15,000 miles annually getting 21mpg. While that's hardly noticeable to your person making $50,000 per year, a mere quarter percentage point, it's like adding almost one percentage point to the taxes of a minimum wage earner making $15,000.
The problem is then greatly magnified by the states, which add on another 29.89 cents per gallon on average, also in the name of transportation funding. Suddenly your 1% tax on the poorest drivers becomes a 2.3% tax.
Any addition at the federal level will only exacerbate this regressiveness. It's not that liberals don't know any of this. They do. It's just that they don't care.
Everyone benefits from roads, not just the users. Everyone should pay for them.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Every Republican for president sucks on immigration, except for Romney
Ann Coulter gets reinstated here, for this, clearly delineating the new fault line for 2016, with Mitt Romney the only one on the right side of the issue:
The only Republican who has ever opposed the media and big campaign donors on immigration was Mitt Romney. You know, the guy we just kicked to the curb. On immigration, the elites speak with one voice: The donors want cheap labor, and the media hate Republicans who push ideas that are wildly popular with voters. ...
But with the cheap-labor plutocrats up in arms during the 2012 presidential campaign over Romney's suggestion that their serfs "self-deport," all the Republican lickspittles rushed to denounce his untoward remark. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker -- all of them lined up to take Sheldon Adelson's loyalty oath, swearing that, as far as they were concerned, illegal aliens should be treated as honored guests.
Michael Lind is right: American progressives should thank libertarians for hijacking American conservatism
From a perceptive (because he agrees with me) obituary for economic conservatism in Salon, here, by ex-neocon Michael Lind:
In today’s debate about the economy, populist liberals, centrist neoliberals and libertarians are represented. One group is missing from the American economic debate: economic conservatives.
The economists and economic pundits who are usually described as “conservatives” in the U.S. are really libertarians, or, if they are more moderate, right-neoliberals. While genuine conservatives are anti-utopian in temperament, most right-wing economists in the U.S. [today] share the utopian belief that many if not most public services and publicly regulated utilities can be replaced with competitive private markets. ...
The once-influential conservative historian Russell Kirk dismissed libertarians as “chirping sectaries” and declared that any genuine conservative would sooner be a socialist than a libertarian. From Kirk’s Burkean conservative perspective, libertarians or classical liberals were crazed, hyper-rationalist, utopian radicals, like Marxists.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Liberal Salon and libertarian Rand Paul both show their true colors: a shushing they will go
The episode, summarized here, shows the true colors of the politically related liberals and libertarians. Silencing speech is what they are both about, all the while claiming to champion it. Accordingly both resort to the ad hominem: Rand Paul is a "brat" to Salon while he says liberals typically need to "calm down", implying emotional inferiority.
I wonder if Joan Walsh protested being used in this way. And I do mean used: She never once suggests Rand Paul should be shushed, but the headline writer at Salon sure did the dirty work for her. Don't kid yourself. She was OK wit dat.
Standard and Poors admits no guilt in the financial crisis, but pays $1.375 billion
From the story here:
On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s (S&P), agreed to pay $1.375 billion to settle claims by the Department of Justice and multiple state governments that the ratings agency defrauded investors in the lead up to the financial crisis.
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Theoretically Standard and Poors made about $7 billion during the period in question, so the claw-back is theoretically 20%.
There are plea bargains, and then there are plea bargains.
Romney beat McCain, but not in the mind of Donald Trump
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| 2012 |
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| 2008 |
Trump said just now on the Laura Ingraham show that Romney got fewer votes than McCain.
See how a falsehood repeated endlessly by Rush Limbaugh becomes the truth?
Roger Kimball doesn't believe in freedom of speech anymore than anyone else
Here, in The New Criterion:
'As for the herds of “Je Suis Charlie” marchers in Paris and elsewhere, it is worth noting how very few actual “Charlies” there were. It is one thing to carry a placard. It is another to take a stand by, for example, publishing a caricature of Mohammed.'
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You see, by Roger Kimball's standard, unless I myself engage in a certain form of speech of which he approves, nay requires, I am an enemy of the West and all it stands for. It's not enough that I subscribe to the principle that one has a right to say or publish anything. Unless I actively read it and publish it myself I am not worthy. Kimball's world has no room in it for people who censor themselves out of religious and moral principle, who believe that without such principles there can be no civilization to begin with. Instead I must become a pornographer, I must become a blasphemer, I must join The Party.
Totalitarian ideology never looked so familiar.
Monday, February 2, 2015
I still haven't heard a single Tea Partier demand representation at 1:15,000, let alone 1:30,000
Which their holy, sacred Constitution alternately forbids and enjoins in Article I., Section 2:
"The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand . . .."
Stephen Moore tells some whoppers: Income was FALLING long before the 2013 increase in the capital gains tax rate
From Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, here:
"When Mr. Obama entered office the capital gains and dividend tax was 15 percent. Then he raised it to 20 percent and then he added a 3.8 percent investment surtax, bringing the rate to 23.8 percent. The tax rose by more than 50 percent. ...
"Wages have stagnated under Mr. Obama as taxes have risen on capital."
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Nice try at hiding the chronology, Moore, but no cigar.
Real median household income and real gross private domestic investment crashed in tandem and in concert with the 2007 recession. The investment side rebounded quickly, but real household income did not, and still hasn't. What's more, the whole phenomenon preceded any increase in the capital gains tax rate, which didn't pass until January 2013, with Republican support by the way.
And it won't do to talk about wages stagnating, either. Real incomes have actually fallen, and fallen big. Employers figured out that the 2008 crisis gave them the cover they needed, their golden opportunity, to shed millions of expensive workers and rehire younger, cheaper ones. It's the biggest scandal in recent history, much bigger than the lies about ObamaCare, but no one is going to talk about it, least of all libertarians who are happy that the business inputs cost less.
The incredible rebound in investment is on the backs of all this labor shed in the crisis, helped along by rock bottom interest rates for those who are first in line for the money: bankers and businesses.
So-called conservatism never looked so bad.
The housing bubble was mainly a middle class and higher phenomenon, not of the poor
From Robert Samuelson, here:
". . . in poorer neighborhoods . . . the actual borrowers . . . were much richer than average residents. In 2002, home buyers in these poor neighborhoods had average incomes of $63,000, double the neighborhoods' average of $31,000. ...
"In 2002, the mortgage-debt-to-income ratio of the poorest borrowers was 2; in 2006, it was still 2. ...
"[T]he bulk of mortgage lending and losses [during the housing bubble] - measured by dollar volume - occurred among middle-class and high-income borrowers. In 2006, the wealthiest 40 percent of borrowers represented 55 percent of new loans and nearly 60 percent of delinquencies (defined as payments at least 90 days overdue) in the next three years."
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Grand Rapids, Michigan, starts 2015 with a January temperature anomaly of -3.2 degrees F
And 23.2 inches of snow after December's paltry 0.3 inches and November's deluge of 31.0 inches.
Here we go again.
It speaks volumes about our society that Rush Limbaugh has never been able to count in Roman numerals
Under his "Pearls of Wisdom" no less, here, last week:
"Is this Super Bowl XLIX? Super Bowl XLIX. I've lost track of the ability to count the Roman numerals. Not that I ever did know."
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Maybe he'll finally figure it out next year at "Super Bowl L".
Oops, sorry. The NFL is giving up the Roman numeral counting system for Super Bowl 50, according to Wikipedia, here:
"Instead of naming it Super Bowl L with Roman numerals like in previous Super Bowls, this game will be marketed with the Arabic numeral '50'. The game is scheduled to be played on February 7, 2016, at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, the home stadium of the San Francisco 49ers. This will be the first Super Bowl held in the San Francisco Bay Area since Super Bowl XIX in January 1985."
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I guess you'll still need to know the Roman numeral system to count Super Bowl XIX.
Surely The Apocalypse is nigh.
But to me it will still be "Super Bowl L", not to be confused with the official name of the trains of the Chicago Transit Authority:
Only in the United States of Moronica.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Kevin Drum admits ObamaCare is a cost to the middle class, not a benefit
Here in Mother Jones last November:
[N]early all [ObamaCare's] benefits flow to the poor. ... winners are those with household incomes below $25,000 or so, and losers are those with incomes above $25,000. ... If you think of Obamacare as something that benefits the working and middle classes, you're probably wrong. It may benefit a few of them, but overall it's a cost to them ... the bottom line is simple: like most of the social welfare programs championed by Democrats, Obamacare is primarily aimed at the poor. Once again, the working and middle classes are left on the outside looking in.
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First Obama did nothing about housing, the sine qua non of the middle class: Over five million completed foreclosures eliminated millions from the middle class without firing a shot.
Then he did nothing about jobs, without which no one buys a house: 18 million have been added to the potential workforce but haven't actually joined it.
Then he rammed through healthcare reform, which was designed to raise costs on the middle class.
And people wonder how Obama could even think of taxing their 529 plans?
The middle class is the enemy of the revolution, the object of the transformation, the source for the redistribution.
Friday, January 30, 2015
So, Libya was really Hillary's war, and more broadly the women's war, not Obama's
From the first part of an investigative report, here, which details that there were secret recordings between Gaddafi's son and none other than Rep. Dennis Kucinich, now out of office:
Mr. Kucinich, who challenged Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, acknowledged that he undertook his own conversations with the Gadhafi regime. He said he feared Mrs. Clinton was using emotion to sell a war against Libya that wasn’t warranted, and he wanted to get all the information he could to share with his congressional colleagues. ...
Numerous U.S. officials interviewed by The Times confirmed that Mrs. Clinton, and not Mr. Obama, led the charge to use NATO military force to unseat Gadhafi as Libya’s leader and that she repeatedly dismissed the warnings offered by career military and intelligence officials.
In the recovered recordings, a U.S. intelligence liaison working for the Pentagon told a Gadhafi aide that Mr. Obama privately informed members of Congress that Libya “is all Secretary Clinton’s matter” and that the nation’s highest-ranking generals were concerned that the president was being misinformed. ...
Instead of relying on the Defense Department or the intelligence community for analysis, officials told The Times, the White House trusted Mrs. Clinton’s charge, which was then supported by Ambassador to the United Nations Susan E. Rice and National Security Council member Samantha Power, as reason enough for war.
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