Friday, September 18, 2015
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Charles Cook embraces the impotence of contemporary conservatism faced with Donald Trump
Where else but in National Review here, the locus of conservatism as ineffectual cult and ideology, which finds it impossible to revolt against anything except for the rebels:
"As it happens, Trump’s critics do grasp the appeal [of revolt]. What they do not do, however, is act upon it in this manner. The temptation to deliver a bloody nose to one’s ideological enemies is a human and comprehensible one, by no means limited in its allure to the disgruntled part of the Republican primary electorate. But temptation and reasonable conduct are two separate things entirely, and they should always be treated as such. Can one understand the instinct that is on display? Sure. Can one look beneath the surface and do anything other than despair? I’m afraid not. Such as they are, the explanations provided by Trump’s discordant choir are entirely risible and easily dismantled. Great, you’re annoyed! But then what?"
He's obviously proud of it. In 1776 he'd be called a royalist.
Was taking up arms against England "reasonable conduct"? Only a Catholic sensibility could fail to grasp the point. "But then what?" Well, a long war of several years, full of privations and without guaranty of success, followed by another long period of several years preparing for and culminating in a constitutional convention, during which local and colonial institutions were strong enough to support the absence of a centralized framework. The same is still true today, if only the locals more frequently told the federal courts to go to hell, as the Kentucky county clerk recently did.
By definition, an ideology ought to have some ideas in it which form a system, and should be, when all is said and done, unrealistic. That pretty much describes American conservatism since forever: unable to roll back anything, including the income tax, direct election of Senators, universal suffrage, the Federal Reserve Act, the Reapportionment Act of 1929, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, Obamacare, and the enormous regulatory code, and unable to permanently refound the country on any constitutional principles, say, of limited government or separation of powers. Conservatism has a massive record of zero achievement while liberalism's untruths keep marching on like tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Trump's camp, meanwhile, thinks three modest things: the way to make America great again is to restore law and order by starting with enforcing its borders and putting an end to illegal immigration, to bring jobs back to Americans by reforming the tax code, developing energy independence, cutting wasteful spending and punishing unpatriotic corporations who profit from exporting jobs, and to rebuild the military to protect freedom at home and for our friends and allies abroad.
It takes near religious nuttery to call the proponent of these measures "a self-interested narcissist and serial heretic whose entirely inchoate political platform bends cynically to the demands of the moment."
To understand Trump, it takes a village . . . of Protestants.
Pompous ass Steve Gruber Show doesn't fact check while imagining it possesses journalistic integrity
"49 million on food stamps."
"McCain got more votes than Romney."
Donald Trump again brought NFL-level ratings to Republican debate, this time 23 million to CNN, its most-watched program ever
Reported here:
"Wednesday's prime time GOP debate averaged 22.9 million viewers, making it the most-watched program in CNN's history. ... CNN's most-watched program overall was a special "Larry King Live" episode in 1993. The episode featured Al Gore and Ross Perot debating NAFTA and averaged 16.8 million viewers. ... These are NFL-level ratings -- affirming that the Donald Trump fueled Republican debate slate is one of the most popular television shows of the year."
Republicans in denial: 911 happened under George W. Bush's watch, as did the 2008 financial panic
George W. Bush remains the elephant in the Republican debate room. We're not safer since he was elected in 2000, and we're not richer, either.
Obama has failed miserably to fix it, and the "it" still needs fixing.
Discussed here.
Destroying Trump means even disgraced Rolling Stone becomes a credible source
The Daily Beast, here:
'Asked what she thought of the comment and of Trump’s explanation that he was referring to her “persona” when he told a Rolling Stone reporter to “look at that face. Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?" Fiorina paused and then went in for the kill.
'“I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” she said.'
Feminism uber alles, even if all you've got is a made up story about campus rape.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Obama says America is great right now, on same day his own Census Bureau reports people are 6.5% poorer than in 2007
Obama here.
Marketwatch here:
"The Census Bureau reported that median household income was $53,657 in 2014. That’s less than the 2013 median of $54,462, but not statistically different. What is of significance is that, when adjusted for inflation, the median household generated 6.5% less than they did in 2007, the year before the recession."
Ben Carson's church believes carbon dioxide is a pollutant causing climate change and should be reduced
Here:
"To keep climate change within bearable limits, the emissions of greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), need to be significantly reduced. Industrialized countries are the main source of these emissions, while the first victims are the small island states and low-lying coastal countries."
Something down is up in Russia
Normally traffic from Russia represents over 10% of my blog audience, going back years, but in the last week that has dropped off the cliff to zero.
It's like somebody turned off the spigot.
Reuters provides clues here:
"The large Moscow street protests of 2011 and 2012 illustrated the connection between economic growth and demands for greater political participation by the chief beneficiaries of Russia’s then-prosperity. Now, as the collapse in oil prices and Western sanctions undermine the economy, the mood inside Russia could hardly be more different. The creative class in big cities like Moscow is depressed and increasingly disengaged from political life. Some have given up and are just leaving the country. The combination of economic crisis, heavy propaganda, patriotic mobilization and hybrid war inside Ukraine have produced conformism, passivity and insensitivity."
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Monday, September 14, 2015
Joke of the day: Rick Perry said he had three reasons for ending his campaign for president . . .
. . . but he could remember only two of them.
h/t Chris Plante
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Warming over 100 years from 1990 predicted by IPCC is falling short by 62% due to 18 year, 8 month pause
Reported here:
"From January 1979 to August 2015, the trend was just 1.21 K/century.
"In 1990, the IPCC had predicted near-straight-line warming of 1 K to 2025, equivalent to almost 2.8 K/century. Of this warming, more than 0.7 K should have happened by now, but only 0.26 K has actually occurred. ...
"The UAH and RSS satellite data both show the Pause, though the terrestrial tamperature datasets have all been altered in the past year with the effect of concealing it."
Saturday, September 12, 2015
WaPo story continues the Hillary e-mail shell game: It's her CURRENT server which needs to be examined
Reported here tonight by WaPo:
'“Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped,” company
spokesman Andy Boian told The Washington Post. “All the information we
have is that the server wasn’t wiped.” ... All the e-mails from Clinton’s tenure at the State Department were on
the server when the device was taken over in June 2013 by Platte River
Networks, four months after Clinton left office. A company attorney has said that all of Clinton’s e-mails were then migrated to a new server. The e-mails were removed from the second server in 2014, with
Clinton’s lawyers storing those they deemed work-related on a thumb
drive and discarding those that they determined were entirely personal.
Copies of 30,000 work e-mails were turned over to the State Department
in December and are being released to the public in batches under the
terms of a court order.'
All the e-mails were migrated to the current server in June 2013, five months after Hillary's January 23, 2013 testimony before the Oversight Committee and nine months after it asked for her emails about Benghazi on September 20, 2012. They were combed, sorted, some distributed to the State Department in December 2014 and everything supposedly "deleted". But all that is theoretically recoverable from the current server, which evidently remains in Chappaqua, NY.
Some might also be recoverable from the New Jersey server. And there might be backup servers no one has yet learned about, but it is the current server which needs to be examined.
But just try getting in to Bill Clinton's stuff.
Hillary is still exploiting him for all he's worth, and right now his sacrosanctity is worth everything.
Friday, September 11, 2015
It's the 14th anniversary of 9/11 and we're still waiting for a president who will send in the troops to kill everybody and break everything
Everybody. Everything. Yesterday.
Hooah you maggots.
With nine days to go before Greek elections, Syriza recaptures the lead in the latest ProRata poll
The latest Greek election poll result appears here today, showing left wing Syriza back on top with 28.5% of the vote and center right New Democracy roaring back strongly in second with 23.5% as more undecided voters in the last two weeks have made up their minds. Syriza had been taking a beating in various polls over the fortnight.
Nationalist Golden Dawn remains in third with 6.5%, unchanged from the end of August. The communist KKE and socialist PASOK are duking it out for fourth place with 4.5% of the vote each, while the Syriza rebels who formed Popular Unity have lost support and fallen below the 3% threshold necessary to get representation in the parliament. Two weeks ago Popular Unity had been polling at 3.5% but evidently as time has passed voters have realized these former compatriots of Alexis Tsipras really do mean to dump the Euro and go back to the Drachma, and want none of it.
Greeks overwhelmingly continue to favor remaining in the Euro, but really like Tsipras over Meimarakis of New Democracy 37% to 25%.
The election is a week from Sunday.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Jeb Bush the snake: omitted plan to cap itemized deductions in Wall Street Journal tax op-ed
Reported here:
"But the full plan includes one very significant change not mentioned in the Wall Street Journal op-ed where Bush announced his plan—one that would likely raise more than a trillion dollars in revenue over a decade, and secretly accomplish a policy goal sought by everyone from President Obama to Paul Ryan. The change: Bush wants to limit itemized deductions sharply, capping them at 2 percent of aggregate gross income, and eliminate the deduction for state and local taxes entirely. (The exception would be the deduction for charitable giving, which is politically toxic to attack, and would still be unlimited.) ...
"But it’s the politics of the cap that make it really interesting. If you look at who would actually be affected, it appears that the cap is a very benign-sounding way to do something politically difficult: limit the mortgage-interest deduction. Of the $54 billion a year the cap would raise according to the Feldstein estimate, $46 billion comes out of the mortgage interest deduction."
Trump questions Ben Carson's job-creation experience, Carson goes nuclear and plays the religion card
Ben Carson has gone sectarian, which comes as no surprise in view of his Seventh Day Adventism, which has its roots among the Millerites and the Methodists of the 19th Century.
What is surprising is that it is in response to criticism from Trump about Carson's job-creation experience. Trump questioned whether Carson has the right stuff in that area, and Carson's first inclination is to question Trump's faith. Pretty thin-skinned of Carson, playing the religion card like that. It's reminiscent of Obama playing the race card. Not a good sign in a chief executive.
Asked to name a favorite Bible verse in a Megyn Kelly interview, Carson named two but tellingly stumbled over one of them.
Video here at about the 2:25 mark where Ben Carson haltingly quotes Proverbs 22:4 as "With humility and the fear of the Lord, that's where life and wealth come from." The King James puts it this way: "By humility and the fear of the LORD are riches, and honour, and life."
Funny he left out "honor".
Evangelicals will question whether this was an honorable thing for Ben Carson to say in a political context yesterday, where sectarian arguments between candidates are generally frowned upon:
"The biggest thing is that I realize where my success has come from, and I don't any way deny my faith in God," said Carson. "And I think that probably is a big difference between us." That was his entire answer. A reporter asked Carson to expand on that response, and on whether he didn't believe Trump's expressions of faith have been sincere. "I haven’t heard it, I haven’t seen it," said Carson. "You know, one of my favorite, Proverbs 22:4, it says: 'By humility and the fear of the Lord, our are riches and honor and life.' And that's a very big part of who I am. Humility, and fear of the Lord. I don’t get that impression with him. Maybe I'm wrong."
Pretty ugly to question Trump's sincerity, but to accuse him of denying his faith? That's wacky. Consider the source.
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Make America Great Again: Make Babies
Births per 1000 population in 2013 fell to 12.4, less than half the 1957 level of 25.3.
The preliminary estimate for 2014 is 12.5 per 1000 population, as of June 2015.
Is Trump great or what: Jeb says his brother W spent too much
'“He should have brought the hammer down on the Republicans when they were spending way too much, because our brand is limited government,” Jeb said. “He didn’t veto things, he didn’t bring order and fiscal restraint.”'
Donald Trump is having an amazing impact on the election campaign: we're talking about illegal immigration and rising crime, sanctuary cities and defiance of federal law, stupid treaties and the stoops who write them, and Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are so desperate that she is apologizing (not sure for what) and he is violating the family loyalty oath.
Now that's progressive Republicanism.
Speaking of Ben Carson, it's odd that such a smart guy has a crackpot religion
It was Mormonism's turn in 2012, now it's on to Seventh Day Adventism.
Ben Carson's Seventh Day Adventism keeps the Sabbath on Saturdays, believes in the investigative judgment of professed Christians, ongoing somewhere in heaven since 1844, and considers the scores of revelations of the visionary Ellen G. White authoritative, placing the group outside the beliefs of the world's 600 million Evangelical Christians.
But hey, it's a free country, right?
Ben Carson advocated fingerprint locks on guns as recently as October 2014
Fingerprint locks would incapacitate a weapon to everyone save the owner, which pretty much means the Second Amendment is reduced to a self-defense amendment instead of a militia amendment, i. e. an anti-tyranny amendment. Fallen soldiers' weapons would be useless to others.
It's not helpful that the Supreme Court has ruled the right to keep and bear arms an individual right, which plays into the hands of those seeking constitutionality for fingerprint locks.
Can fingerprint condoms be far behind?
Audio of Carson here.
Rush Limbaugh expresses astonishment that Germany will accept 500,000 refugees annually
Limbaugh said in the last half hour that he looked into it and discovered Germany's birthrate is so low they're happy to have the refugees as future workers.
How long will it take this doofus to figure out that our declining labor force is the result of retirees who aren't being replaced because our birthrates were also too low for too long?
The Baby Boom between 1946 and 1966 produced 83.1 million births. Unfortunately Baby Boomers produced just 72.6 million births from 1967 to 1987, a shortfall of 10.5 million or 12.6%.
What it means is there are 500,000 fewer replacements every year on average for retiring Baby Boomers, about 85% of whom more or less survive to retirement age.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Sunday, September 6, 2015
John Kasich says the county clerk in Kentucky has to comply with the gay marriage law
What law? Did the Supreme Court pass a law? Since when did the Supreme Court make laws?
John Kasich, here.
Friday, September 4, 2015
Government under Obama routinely ignores immigration and drug laws, but the only one going to jail is a county clerk in Kentucky
David Harsanyi, here:
"In this country, people who are here illegally can march in the streets to protest their station without any genuine fear of being rounded up and expelled. They are celebrated. Moreover, we have cities across this country that ignore immigration laws they don't like and create sanctuaries from law. We have cities that ignore federal drug laws because they find them oppressive. Yet no one finds himself in jail. ... [I]f we're going to be rigid about the rule of law, let's throw all officials who ignore it into cells. We can start with the president and work our way down."
Thursday, September 3, 2015
If Trump decides to sign a Republican pledge . . .
. . . he should add a signing statement stating he disagrees with it and has no intention of abiding by it.
Syriza youth wing declines to support Alexis Tsipras and Syriza in upcoming election
That could well signal it's already curtains for Syriza with less than three weeks to go to new elections.
From the story here at the Greek Reporter:
"On Monday, his speech writer Theodoros Kollias resigned stating that SYRIZA has lost its founding ideals. On Tuesday, the SYRIZA Youth issued a statement saying they withdraw their support to the party in the upcoming elections. Also, the same day, another part of the SYRIZA coalition, the Communist Drift, left the party and will join new SYRIZA offshoot Popular Unity. ...
"In social networks the party and its leader are ridiculed for the 180-degree turn from militant leftists to a more conservative, pro-euro political entity. The 20-24 percent the party gets in opinion polls is nothing compared to the 45-plus percentages they were getting just three months ago."
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Obama's red line in Syria washes up on shore in Turkey
The refugee crisis in the Mediterranean is the direct result of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton policies to destabilize Libya, Egypt, Syria and more.
Everything they have touched has turned to death for thousands upon thousands of innocents.
Bret Stephens imagines the American creed is a sonnet lately written and adorning the Statue of Liberty from 1903
Here:
'[W]e may soon have a conservative movement in which the American creed of “give us your tired, your poor” could yield to the Trumpian creed that America must not become a “dumping ground” to poor immigrants from Latin America, as if these millions of hardworking and God-fearing people are a specimen of garbage.'
The Trumpian creed is that we must not become a dumping ground for illegal immigrants or the world's criminals. But for admirers of French statues and exploiters of cheap foreign labor like Stephens and The Wall Street Journal it is necessary to erect straw men the more easily to knock them down.
Grand Rapids, MI, had average temperature in August 2015 1.2 degrees F BELOW normal
The string of negative temperature anomalies continues in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in August 2015 with average temperature 1.2 degrees F below normal.
That brings the cumulative anomaly for 2015 from -21.4 degrees F last month to -22.6 through August.
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Since Obama was elected in 2008, wise investors in firearms have become fabulously wealthy
$100K invested in Sturm Ruger & Co. has become $979K, in Smith & Wesson $787K.
Way to go Brownie!
Way to go Brownie!
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| up 879% |
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| up 687% |
Monday, August 31, 2015
Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley pulled a Clinton, made off with furnishings from the mansion before leaving office
Martin O'Malley is right. The Democrats need more debates so that he and Hillary can argue over who got away with more.
The Clintons, as you remember, were dirt poor when they left the White House and tried to make off with about $190K in goods, The New York Times reported at the time.
The Baltimore Sun reports here that Marty O'Malley had $62K worth of furniture in the residence declared "junk" and then bought it for less than $10K while he was still in office, and then took it with him when he moved out.
That there's a law against that in Maryland tells you everything you need to know about Maryland Democrats.
The Orange County Register is wondering why it's taking the Justice Department so long to decide whether to indict Lois Lerner
Here:
Indeed, we think there is ample evidence to indict Ms. Lerner, who has acknowledged “absolutely inappropriate” actions by her division, while casting blame upon low-level “front-line people” who worked for her.
The answer to why it's taking so long is that it's run by the Obama Administration, which intends to stall justice, get around justice, and actually commit injustice, not expedite justice, as in put a Holder on justice, and then Lynch it.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Meanwhile speaking of perverts, The Donald calls Anthony Weiner "one of the great sleazebags of our time"
 |
| Weiner is very popular with some people. |
Here:
"Who is Huma married to? One of the great sleazebags of our time: Anthony Weiner."
Michigan has two top 10 universities . . . in the Ashley Madison hack
Story here, which twice calls the hack a "data leak".
Syriza goes from "hope is coming" to "only ahead" just as Obama went from "hope" to "forward"
Is this a shameless rip-off of a 2011 hit by Greek pop star Demy or what?
The vote of the young and the dumb, as always, is key to the advance of socialism.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Jeb Bush has a big expensive campaign, and you know what that means
He'll have a big, expensive government.
Seen here:
But Bush’s fundraising pace has slowed in the late summer months. Still, he’s likely to remain the GOP campaign’s top fundraiser, but Bush is also spending more than other candidates because he has a mammoth operation.
“Jeb has a big army, and that army needs to be fed,” said one campaign consultant familiar with the campaign’s internal numbers. “Jeb might not have a fundraiser problem. He might have a spending problem.”
Peter Morici says Trump's ideas really do make sense
Peter Morici of the University of Maryland, quoted here:
"One of the reasons he is winning votes is he's talking about the macro issues that so frustrate many Americans and seem so blatantly unfair," says Peter Morici, a professor of economics at University of Maryland's Robert Smith school of business. ...
"The big issues he talks about do make some sense," says Morici. "The question is...is there really much substance there or is this just a few phrases?"
Friday, August 28, 2015
Flashback January 28, 2013: Obama called Hillary "one of the finest secretary of states"
To its credit, CBS preserved in "print" the supposedly smartest president ever flubbing the English language yet one more time. But then again how could they not preserve it? It's on tape.
Occidental? Columbia? Harvard? Still hard to make a purse out of a sow's ear, as my mother used to say.
Here:
President Obama: "Well, the main thing is I just wanted to have a chance to publicly say thank you, because I think Hillary will go down as one of the finest secretary of states we've had. It has been a great collaboration over the last four years. I'm going to miss her. Wish she was sticking around. But she has logged in so many miles, I can't begrudge her wanting to take it easy for a little bit. But I want the country to appreciate just what an extraordinary role she's played during the course of my administration and a lot of the successes we've had internationally have been because of her hard work."
Maybe if Obama had had more attorneys general Hillary would have been indicted by now just by luck.
h/t Chris Plante
Flashback to January 2011: Hillary said extremists shot Gabrielle Giffords, you know, extremists like terrorists and Republicans
Reuters had the quotations here, uttered by Hillary Clinton while in the United Arab Emirates :
"We have extremists in my country. A wonderful, incredibly brave young woman Congress member, Congresswoman Giffords, was just shot by an extremist in our country," she added.
"We have the same kinds of problems. So rather than standing off from each other, we should work to try to prevent the extremists anywhere from being able to commit violence." ...
"The extremists and their voices, the crazy voices that sometimes get on the TV, that's not who we are, that's not who you are, and what we have to do is get through that and make it clear that that doesn't represent either American or Arab ideas or opinions," she said. ...
Thirty-five years ago the economy mattered more than actual power
"[Economists] never offer anything but the same command approach to the obvious exception of everything else that used to be easily and conventionally embraced. The willingness of political figures across the spectrum to allow it and even strengthen it defies democracy. Thus Donald Trump".
Jeffrey Snider here.
The biggest bloc of voters is undecided in the upcoming September Greek election according to a new poll
Reuters reports here:
Syriza was supported by 23 percent of those polled, with the conservative New Democracy party second on 19.5 percent, according to the survey, carried out by pollsters ProRata and published in Friday's Efimerida Ton Syntakton newspaper. ... Popular Unity, the party formed last week by Syriza rebels who oppose the bailout, was backed by 3.5 percent in Friday's poll - just above the 3 percent threshold needed to enter parliament. But the Independent Greeks, the ally in Tsipras' former coalition government, scored just 2 percent, meaning Syriza would be forced to seek another coalition partner. ... It also showed 25.5 percent of voters were still undecided, making them the biggest bloc.
What nobody talks about in these reports, of course, is that the party polling third is Golden Dawn, well ahead of Syriza breakaway party Popular Unity as well as the communist KKE. Golden Dawn has increased its support from earlier in the year no doubt because Greece is being overrun by refugees from around the Mediterranean and the incompetent left running the show is failing to solve the problem. Golden Dawn is said to draw its support at elections from members of the police and the military.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Yanis Varoufakis calls far left party Popular Unity's plan for Grexit and a return to the drachma "isolationist"
In Greece the left calls the left isolationist.
In America the right calls the right isolationist.
Maybe the isolationism is where the real meaning is, the other monikers "left" and "right" being obfuscatory and Orwellian, and useless.
The two candidates for president in America with any energy in their campaigns are against free-trade because it is one-sided trade which slowly impoverishes the American middle class. A more insidious form of Fabianism is hard to imagine. One of the candidates is a patriotic socialist throwback to the FDR 1930s, the other a businessman whose hero was another Democrat in recovery, Ronald Reagan.
In our time it has been only some people from the left who have seemed capable of understanding that our capitalism-in-name-only actually requires the destruction of the economic ladder along which historically Americans have more or less freely traveled both up and down. This is because only people of the left are acquainted with the truth of the observation by Marx how free-trade was to be welcomed because it hastened the revolution. We get absolutely no insight from the American right about this and they run headlong unaware toward their fate. Accordingly we get no sympathy from them either for the plight of formerly prosperous millions of Americans who have crashed onto the rocks of the libertarian free for all. Their few children will become the next proletariat, the wealth of their parents and grandparents only a faint memory.
The irony of the world situation is that it is creatures of the left who want to stop this, both here in America and in Greece.
Yanis Varoufakis on the other hand is not one of them. Chalk it up to being an "erratic" Marxist, as he likes to say. What he is is a pan-Europeanist, a world citizen and globalist who is more at home in European capitals than he is on Aegina. He is not for what Greeks need most, which is the ability to feed themselves and export at a profit, for which they must have control over, and responsibility for, their own affairs.
Seen here:
'The 54-year-old Varoufakis has already dismissed speculation that he would join the far-left Popular Unity party that broke away from Syriza last week, telling ABC that he had "great sympathy" but fundamental differences with them and considered their stance "isolationist".'
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Chris Plante: Hunter Biden exposed in Ashley Madison hack
Reports Plante on the air just now:
The son of Joe Biden denies it, says Putin or somebody fabricated it, says he's dropped the email address. Hunter Biden has an unusual business interest in Ukraine.
Update:
ABC News helpfully reminded everyone in the story about the hack that Hunter had left the Navy in 2014 under a cloud for testing positive for cocaine in 2013.
Breitbart reported here that his Ashley Madison profile was set up on June 17, 2014, four months after his discharge.
CNN reported here last October (!) that Biden was discharged in February (!) 2014.
Update:
ABC News helpfully reminded everyone in the story about the hack that Hunter had left the Navy in 2014 under a cloud for testing positive for cocaine in 2013.
Breitbart reported here that his Ashley Madison profile was set up on June 17, 2014, four months after his discharge.
CNN reported here last October (!) that Biden was discharged in February (!) 2014.
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Obama and McCain reverting to type, calling their respective opponents crazies
John McCain quoted here in Politico in July:
“It’s very bad,” the Republican senator said. “This performance with our friend [Trump] out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain said. “Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.”
And here's Barack Obama now at the end of August, also quoted in Politico:
Ruddy from the sun, Obama described himself as “refreshed, renewed, recharged — a little feisty.” And he delivered, recounting the ride he and [Senator Harry] Reid had just taken from the conference to the fundraiser in his up-armored presidential limo, where they talked about old times and getting back to Washington to “deal with the crazies in terms of managing some problems.”
If anyone should know crazy, it's Barack Obama and John McCain.
If anyone should know crazy, it's Barack Obama and John McCain.
Monday, August 24, 2015
Scott Walker has nothing up his sleeve
In the last week Governor Scott Walker has stated he's for the 14th Amendment as currently (mis)interpreted, establishing birthright citizenship as the law of the land, for repealing birthright citizenship going forward, and against taking a position on the subject for now!
Scott Walker is a fish out of water, flopping on the pier.
CNN (justly) crucifies him for it, here.
On the merits of the issue Walker's flip-flops clearly show that he perceives the acceptable establishment view to be out of step with what he thinks the voters feel about it. Regular middle class folks with whom Walker identifies hate it that they're footing the bill for people who cut in line, go on government assistance and even commit crimes without serious consequences.
On the politics Walker looks unprofessional and unready for primetime, and when you get down to it, divided in his own mind about the issue.
The real Scott Walker has always been a little soft on illegal aliens but keeps changing his position because he senses voters aren't soft on them.
In view of his previously stated support for a pathway to citizenship, it's pretty obvious Walker has never had the fire in the belly on this subject which the Americans whose vote he's angling for possess.
And it's too late to do anything about it now.
He's done.
If he were wise he'd find a way to bow out, throw his support to Trump, and hope for a position in a Trump administration where he can do to government unions nationally what he's done to them in Wisconsin.
Sunday, August 23, 2015
In Greece the popular PM Alexis Tsipras resigned last week in order to consolidate his power
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| Alexis Tsipras, Greece's hope peddler |
Most reports put the resignation of Alexis Tsipras last week down to an act of desperation due to a loss of support in his own coalition in Syriza. 25 MPs have split off to form Popular Unity, basically composed of Syriza's old Left Platform. This party intends to stay true to the Syriza platform of an end to austerity, evidently adding in Grexit and a return to the drachma as planks.
How wonderfully conservative of the lefties. The Greek left has moved so far to the left it's become the bourgeois nationalist right.
True as all this is, Tsipras' resignation was actually an exertion of his power in the current circumstances and a demonstration of his political acumen.
By resigning now instead of sometime later, Tsipras is able to do two important things. One, he can select the candidates himself according to the rules who will replace the defectors, for whom he will use his popularity to smooth their way to election, presumably on 20 September. But he also catches the opposition flat-footed thereby, giving them no time to prepare to stop him. If Tsipras is successful in this gambit, he will be able to form a less leftist government committed to the Euro but also committed to breaking the privileges of the Greek oligarchy, approximating a key leftist political aim of more social equality.
Tsipras is proving himself to be quite adept at discerning politics as the art of the possible, for which he is already much hated by the overly principled figures populating his own and the other political parties, even as the Greek people keep supporting him.
For all the mistakes he has made this year, Alexis Tsipras has proven himself remarkably capable for such a young man.
Greece could do a lot worse, and it has.
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Donald Trump lives rent free in Larry Kudlow's mind
Larry Kudlow devoted his entire three hour radio show today on WABCradio.com criticizing, ridiculing and caricaturing Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency. If there was a way to discuss Trump, he found it, and if the air in New York stank, that was Trump's fault, too. It reminded me of the relentless criticism of George W. Bush by the main stream media.
It was embarrassing. The callers to the show supported Trump and Trump's policy on illegal aliens, but Larry was having none of it, marginalizing every single caller as ignorant and uninformed about the real state of affairs despite the fact that they were living it.
That's what Larry Kudlow's big tent Republican Party stands for, inclusion for elite liberals and illegal aliens, but not for working stiffs and law and order patriots.
If Republicans lose in 2016, it will be Larry Kudlow's fault, not Donald Trump's.
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