Mark Levin is right to be upset about Trump's proposal to grant paid maternity leave and childcare, eldercare subsidies

This is the same sort of objectionable thing rammed through by George W. Bush in the Drugs for Seniors legislation. Totally unaffordable, but helpful for reelection purposes.

The difference this time is that it ain't gonna pass, unless of course you idiots out there give the House to the Democrats.

I think it's all politics and will get drastically pared down. Some token thing may pass, but not the full monty.

If Trump wins, which is what this is really all about.

It is noteworthy, however, that other radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham are nearly rolling over for this thing. The program is objectionable out of the box, except to people like James Pethokoukis, but those two today were almost paragons of equanimity. I think Laura even took a call praising the pro-family aspects of the plan. The worst argument for the idea being repeated is that it will encourage single mothers to work. So we'll subsidize single motherhood? Yeah, that's a Republican value.

I don't expect the Limbaughs and Ingrahams to diss Trump at this stage of the game, but it is this stage of the game. They could have at least hinted at the politics.

Trump can't defend patriotism without Jimmy Pethokoukis invoking totalitarianism

Donald Trump "One Country Under One Constitution Saluting One American Flag! And ALWAYS Saluting It!

Publius Decius Mus responds effectively to some of his critics, but his own words still condemn him

Namely, these (here):

[Trump] is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left. The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.

Well, so long as you accept the income tax, Decius, as you clearly do in your Flight 93 Election essay, YOU pose no serious challenge to the administrative state, either.

And secondly, you don't even recognize the fact that, or the reasons why, our "representative institutions" stopped being representative a long time ago. Conservatism today, including yours, does not recognize that the income tax is essential to funding the administrative state, and it does not recognize that our representatives are remote from the people by design from the 1920s. 

Trump is adequate for the moment, and necessary if there is to yet be a chance to fix these problems, but there is no one, no one, who is really working politically to restore the Republic either by cutting it down to size or by expanding the input of the sovereign people to a level imagined by the constitution. The people may yet have their day on immigration and trade because of Trump, but after Trump, what?

What an Obama has done by fiat can be undone by a Trump. But that buys you four, maybe eight, years. And then? The next president can undo it, and probably will.

That means we already live under a tyranny.

Conservatism Inc. doesn't have a clue, and neither do you.

Speaker Ryan is still disgraceful, small and weak, still tiptoes up to "regular order" instead of demanding it

And the opposition can smell the weakness.

The job of Speaker is much too big for little Paul Ryan, who appears to have not one single fight in him.

From the story here in Roll Call:

Minibuses would break up the 12 individual spending bills into a few small packages rather than lump them into a single omnibus bill. Ryan has argued that passing minibuses is closer to regular order and would make the appropriations process more digestible. But he's privately acknowledged that such a strategy would likely result in some bills not getting done, leaving the agencies covered by the unfinished measures in need of a continuing resolution to extend funding through the remainder of the fiscal year.

Mark Levin won't tell you Ronald Reagan expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit in the 1986 tax reform

Hey Mark, does that make Reagan someone who "sold out his principles" for liberalism?

Well does it?

Dilbert thinks Hillary just became unelectable

Here.

Mark Levin tonight said something about populism being the province of Congress, not the Executive

Well yes, that's the idea from an originalist point of view, isn't it? Yes it is.

But what did the Congress do in the 1920s?

It tried to limit its own natural growth as required by the Constitution by fixing its number at 435 in the House, thinking that it could thereby enhance its own power. But by doing so it became less and less populist and more and more elitist, so that today no one in a given congressional district is confident his or her congressman knows their own name, let alone represents what they think on Capitol Hill.

So ever since we've been stuck with 435 representatives, and the Census has simply functioned to decide which state gets more and which fewer representatives based on population shifts.

Well that's not how it's supposed to be, dammit! (cue the shouting)

Now we have supremely powerful individuals in the House, like the Speaker and the committee chairmen, who function like co-presidents or consuls on the Roman model. The Romans had two consuls by the way, elected every year to one year terms. At least if we had that we'd have more influence over affairs, but as it is the people have no representative, which is why . . .

Donald Trump.

Fix representation, folks.

To have a ratio of one congressman per 50,000 of population, a House of Representatives numbering 6,460 is called for, instead of the current, elitist, unresponsive House of 435 apportioned in a ratio of one representative to 743,000 people per district on average.

That's the crisis of the Republic. Not the quixotic Donald Trump actually figuring out how to be the voice of so many millions of forgotten Americans.

To be a reactionary is to answer action with action . . . it is the virile part to react

The only salvation is in the recognition of some superior guiding and dividing law of just rule and right subordination, in the perception, that is, of something permanent within the flux. ...

The saying has gone abroad that strength means joy in change and that he who would question change is reactionary and effeminate; and so in the name of progress and virility we drift supinely with the current. If by reactionary is understood only the man who shudders at all innovation and who cries out for some impossible restoration of the past, the charge is well made. Such a man in the social realm corresponds to the metaphysician who would deny the existence of change and the many for an exclusive and sterile idealism of the one. But reaction may be, and in the true sense is, something utterly different from this futile dreaming; it is essentially to answer action with action, to oppose to the welter of circumstance the force of discrimination and selection, to direct the aimless tide of change by reference to the co-existing law of the immutable fact, to carry the experience of the past into the diverse impulses of the present, and so to move forward in an orderly progression. If any young man, feeling now within himself the power of accomplishment, hesitates to be called a reactionary, in this better use of the term, because of the charge of effeminacy, let him take courage. The world is not contradicted with impunity, and he who sets himself against the world's belief will have need of all a man's endurance and all a man's strength. The adventurous soul who to-day against the reigning scientific and pragmatic dogma would maintain no vague and equally one-sided idealism, but the true duality of the one and the many, the absolute and the relative, the permanent and the mutable, will find himself subjected to an intellectual isolation and contempt almost as terrible as the penalties of the inquisition, and quite as effective in producing a silent conformity. If a man doubts this, let him try, and learn. Submission to the philosophy of change is the real effeminacy; it is the virile part to react.

-- Paul Elmer More, SHELBURNE ESSAYS, Seventh Series: Victorian Literature (The Philosophy of Change), 1910, pp. 267ff.

Hillary's doctor Lisa Bardack said Sunday she diagnosed Hillary with pneumonia on Friday

Yea, that's the ticket.

Story here.

Clinton at gay fundraiser: Half of Trump's supporters are deplorable

Yeah, but ALL of Hillary's are.

Bloomberg reproduces the remarks here:

Clinton told an audience of gay-rights supporters at a fundraiser Friday night in New York City: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it.”

Video of Hillary this morning nearly collapsing after leaving 911 event early due to illness

There's something seriously wrong with this woman's health. They propped her up against the pillar to keep her from falling while waiting for the transport to arrive, and basically had to manhandle her into the van.

Video here.

On 9/11/16 Rasmussen has Clinton +4, LA Times/USC has Clinton +1.4

Rasmussen: Clinton 43%, Trump 39%.

LATimes/USC: Clinton 45%, Trump 43.6%.

The Real Clear Politics average shows Clinton +3.1 from eight recent polls, with an average margin of error of 3.5.

The traitor in the Oval Office has weakened us, hobbled us and aided our enemies

Dick and Liz Cheney in The Wall Street Journal, here:

Defeating our enemies has been made significantly more difficult by the policies of Barack Obama. No American president has done more to weaken the U.S., hobble our defenses or aid our adversaries. ...

Fifteen years after 3,000 Americans were killed by Islamic terrorists, America’s commander in chief has become the money launderer in chief for the world’s leading state sponsor of terror.

Clinton insults millions: You know it's a new world when Real Clear Politics has a sidebar story which is a Donald Trump tweet

"Clinton insults millions" lights up Trump's Twitter feed

Age discrimination update: Unemployment rate for those 55+ estimated to be 12%, 2.5 million want to work but can't get hired

Reported by Reuters, here:

Further, if you add jobless workers who gave up looking after more than four weeks, the 55-plus unemployment rate is a whopping 12 percent, SCEPA [Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School] analysis shows. Looked at another way, 2.5 million older Americans want a job but do not have one.

The last time banks failed and the economy tanked while a Republican was president, "Dunkirk" meant this

Hoover, 1932: 59 electoral votes

Landon, 1936:  8 electoral votes

Willkie, 1940: 82 electoral votes

Dewey, 1944: 99 electoral votes

Dewey, 1948: 189 electoral votes 

McCain, 2008: 173 electoral votes

Romney, 2012: 206 electoral votes

NeverTrump, 2016:

Publius Decius Mus has appeared before, at The Unz Review, and had his own blog

Before his Claremont piece, Publius Decius Mus made an appearance in March at The Unz Review, here, and had his own blog, here, since shut down after only four months of operation.

Ben Shapiro, of Michelle Fields infamy, says it may be Dunkirk for conservatives, but not Shanksville

Here at The Daily Wire, where he is much too sanguine about conservative "victories":

"Publius’ oddest argument is that conservatives have been losing, and only losing, for decades. This is historically ignorant."

Actually that's what an earnest young man of 32 would be expected to say, and you have to give him credit for that, even if he is wrong.

Publius Decius Mus is getting bashed here and there for writing anonymously . . .

. . . but it's a fine old American, patriotic and anti-federalist tradition, as explained here.

Lefty Damon Linker thinks "The Flight 93 Election" is radical when it's hardly radical enough

The "conservative" world conceived of by the author of "The Flight 93 Election" isn't radical, it's unimaginative.

Being the good leftist that he his, however, Damon Linker senses the inherent weakness and flogs the man as a "reactionary" just for thinking about getting his feet wet, almost daring the author to defend what he knows he probably would not.

Struggling swimmer in the water. Shark arrives. 

The weakness of the anonymous author, Publius Decius Mus, is illustrated by the closing which imagines what actually lassoing the moon would look like in his mind: a return to constitutionalism, limited government and a top marginal income tax rate of 28%. Really?

You won't get either of the first two while keeping the third. And the income tax wasn't "constitutional". 

It doesn't occur to our anonymous author that through the income tax is how big government in this country made a big splash in the first place, and that it was necessary for progressives to eradicate the constitution's self-limitation expressed in its direct taxation handcuffs in order to achieve that big government.

In effect repudiating "constitutionalism" was necessary. And that's what the progressive era achieved, sweeping away the defenses of the constitution through the amendment process, bringing us woman's suffrage, the direct election of senators and the income tax. It made the country sick enough, but only enough to cut off the fourth leg of the progressive stool by repealing Prohibition.

So it works both ways. We can change our minds. The task of conservatism in our time ought to be to wake up the country to the possibilities of more repeal, to the conviction that we can correct our mistakes, whether it's the income tax, direct election of senators, or the vote of 18-year olds. And to the possibilities of ratification, say of Article the First.

Being "reactionary" isn't a bug, it's a feature, and thoroughly American.

Unless you're a communist. Or Damon Linker. But I repeat myself.