Sunday, October 9, 2016

Trump audio: Democrats follow Alinsky rules to neutralize Trump

Rule 4: The Democrats are trying to make the Republican enemy live up to its own book of rules, which state that Trump's sexual immorality will not play well in Peoria. 

Rule 6: It's a good tactic because Democrats especially enjoy embarrassing Republicans as hypocrites to their religion, which is Democrats' real enemy.

Rule 10: If enough Republicans can be turned to denounce Trump the target will have been effectively personalized, frozen and polarized, ensuring a Democrat victory.

Americans didn't want Boy Scout Mitt Romney in 2012, but may well end up with a gay Brownie in 2016

Adriana Cohen stops just short of going there in The Boston Herald, here:

Donald Trump is not a Boy Scout. If that’s what Americans were looking for they could have elected Mitt Romney in 2012. But they didn’t, proving these latest attacks are nothing more than slimy political theater.

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Joe Pags thinks "not in the labor force" does not include the retired, but it does

It's shocking how many people still think, wrongly, that "not in the labor force" includes huge numbers of people who could be or should be working but aren't.

Today on his show Joe Pags said the number not in the labor force, currently over 94 million, does not include retired people, when, for example in 2014 the retired constituted 44% of those "not in the labor force". The truth is the retired always constitute the single largest proportion of those "not in the labor force".

The sick and disabled in 2014 accounted for almost 19%, and people going to school made up another 18% of the total "not in the labor force". Tell me there are some claiming disability who don't have one who should be working, but don't tell me the damn kids should be working. 15.5% were homemakers while 3.5% had other reasons. There's probably many people in these categories who might want a job but can't find one, or ought to be working but aren't, but nothing even remotely close to the almost 39 million retired at the time.

Joe Pags joins a long list of idiots who are quite outspoken in their ignorance about this, including Zero Hedge, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, et alia. Thinking there might be vast numbers of hidden unemployed in "not in the labor force" is just plain lazy stupid.

None of these apparently have had the slightest interest in checking this out on Al Gore's amazing internet using the google machine, which takes you to this page at the Bureau of Labor Statistics with one of the better explanations out there.

I can only conclude the ignorance in the case of Joe Pags is willful because Joe Pags is smarter than that. But then again, he thinks Ted Cruz is a natural born citizen.

His bad.

Well now, the Trump audio, as embarrassing as it is, actually helps make the choice in this election easier than before

There's transgressing normal, and then there's transgressing not so normal.

Clinton to Brazilian bank in 2013: "My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders"

Hacked comment revealed here (private position), which is consistent with her pro-TPP stance while Secretary of State, but inconsistent with her opposition to it now that she is the Democrat nominee for president (public position):

The speech transcripts, a major subject of contention during the Democratic primary, include quotes from Clinton about her distance from middle-class life (“I’m kind of far removed”); her vision of strategic governing (“you need both a public and a private position”); and her views on trade, health care, and Wall Street (“even if it may not be 100 percent true, if the perception is that somehow the game is rigged.”) ... "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” Clinton is quoted as telling a Brazilian bank in 2013. “We have to resist, protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market access and to trade.”

Friday, October 7, 2016

Steve Sailer says it took Trump 1 hour and 1 minute to get to the immigration issue in Debate One because he's winging it


It never occurs to him it's the libertarians running ruining his campaign telling him to downplay the issue.

"Conservatism" is exhausted, Rod Dreher calls for "new ideas"


I guess that subscription of his to The New Yorker isn't paying off.

And no matter what anyone says, he's not an utopian, he's not (a little obsolete usage there just for all you lovers of the modern out there).

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Our enemy, the administrative state: Only Trump will reduce it

Gut 'em.


Obama hates the middle class: Caller after caller today to Chris Plante reported 200%+ increases to their health insurance premiums because of Obamacare

Impoverishing the middle class has been Obama's goal all along. Obamacare redistributes the incomes of ordinary middle class people to the poor, just as higher taxes on the rich do. Here's how.

Chris Plante himself reports that his household used to pay $551 a month before Obamacare, but now pays $1731, an increase of 214%.

My household in 2010 paid just $2552 a year for coverage with $2500 individual calendar year deductibles. Six years later for the same plan we pay $4252, an increase of 67%, but the individual calendar year deductibles have skyrocketed to $10,000 each, a 300% increase.

In other words, for the privilege of having coverage, we could end up on the hook for as much as $30,000 in any given year before the plan pays anything in a health emergency. You get some discount on services as in a preferred provider network, but you still have to pay.

I know because I had one in 2014 which drove my out of pocket medical expenses for the year well over $10,000. They're normally half that.

Obamacare is nothing more than a tax increase on the middle class, to subsidize "coverage", that is Medicaid, for the poor.

Contemptible WaPo says anti-intellectual parents endanger their own kids by withholding vaccines, ignores flood of disease pouring in with illegals

And we tried to stop the 911 terrorists from hitting Washington why? These assholes deliberately settle these illegal aliens not in DC but in the hinterlands of middle America, out of spite.


Americans have a long and ignoble tradition of denigrating expertise. Today, nearly 40 percent of adults think there isn’t evidence for global warming. Skeptical parents won't vaccinate their children, endangering their communities with breakouts of preventable diseases like measles. So maybe we can make a deal. If we want experts to listen to our opinions, we might also do them the courtesy of sometimes listening to their opinions, too.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Another Obama lie from 2013: We aren't rifling through ordinary emails of American citizens . . . right now

The Guardian had the quote here:

He added: "This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens or anybody else. This is not a situation where we simply go into the internet and start searching any way that we want. This is a circumscribed, narrow system, directed at us being able to protect our people and all of it is done with the oversight of the courts."

But by 2015 they were, at Yahoo.

I guess they wanted in on the action, since 500 email accounts had been hacked the year before. 

Publius Decius Mus eviscerates libertarian James Pethokoukis as a mere leftist materialist, calls him a traitor

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Here are some excerpts, but read the whole thing:

'In the leftist-Hegelian hive mind of which Pethokoukis is but one drone, the benefits of mass immigration and open trade are true simply; therefore popular objections are illegitimate. ... Pethokoukis ... has absorbed the core premises of the Left. “That’s racist!” This points to one of the deepest problems with “conservative intellectualism.” It accepts, out of conviction or fear or both, every restriction the Left places on it. The left rules out-of-bounds any discussion of the cultural or political effects of immigration as “racist,” and the conservatives go along. Hence they can only talk about immigration in economic terms, as if human beings were widgets.

'In fact, this particular intellectual rot defines almost all of “conservatism.” It’s allowed the Left to bully the Right out of talking or thinking about so many subjects that all conservatives can rouse themselves to address any more is the economy. They rationalize such a narrow focus by insisting economics trumps all. But the root is fear. Or was. Fear may have caused the initial retreat, but younger “conservatives” raised in the faith actually believe every line of the Leftist creed. Except the parts about redistribution, because Hayek. Also, the donors don’t like it. ,,,

'Like all self-castrated “conservatives,” Pethokoukis goes right along. Whether out of fear or conviction doesn’t even matter anymore.


'Either way, he—and all the others like him—are obstacles to the near- and long-term project of saving what’s left of American and Western civilization. To climb out of the hole we’re in, we don’t need liberals, we don’t need cowards, and we don’t need traitors.'

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Hillary "Can't we just drone this guy?" Clinton: You could be next

With 35 days to go to the election, Hillary steals a march on Trump in the last week: Electoral College forecast is now Hillary 321, Trump 217

With 35 days to go to the election, Hillary steals a march on Trump in the last week: Electoral College forecast is now Hillary 321, Trump 217.

Last week it was Clinton 292, Trump 246.

Things have deteriorated for Trump in the last week by 12%.

Nevada, Colorado and North Carolina have shifted as Toss-Ups back to Clinton, and New Hampshire and Virginia have moved out of Toss-Up into the Clinton column totaling 205.

The Real Clear Politics Electoral College Map has Clinton with 205, Trump 165 and 168 in "Toss-Up".

Based only on the polls in the Toss-Ups as of this morning, Clinton is winning 116 of those, and Trump 51.

Clinton is ahead in:

NV +0.2
CO +3.3
MN +4.3
WI +5.0
MI +5.0
PA +3.5
NC +0.2
FL +2.8
ME-1 +17

Trump is ahead in:

AZ +2.2
IA +5.0
OH +3.8
GA +4.8
ME-2 +8.7

Based only on these polls, Trump's top objectives should be winning Nevada, Colorado, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, and keeping Arizona and Ohio.

Oops, Libertarian VP candidate William Weld says Trump's use of loss carryforward "not that uncommon"

After recently saying Hillary is the most qualified to be president and Gary Johnson himself admitting to not knowing what Aleppo is, the honesty from this libertarian pair is getting to be almost too much.

As in, "We're not serious! We're just running for fun! Look! I'm on TV again!"

Weld on CNN with Chris Cuomo, here, yesterday:

WELD: I say that the net operating loss carryforward is a well-known provision of the tax code. I hate to defend Donald Trump -- believe me when I tell you -- but it's not that uncommon.

Monday, October 3, 2016

Rush Limbaugh understands nothing about the tax returns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: Comparing them is comparing apples and oranges

The two tax returns couldn't be more different.

Trump in 1995 reported cumulative losses from his many pass-through entities on page 1 of his personal tax return as Net Operating Losses from businesses, which can be carried forward 15 years to offset net gains in those years and 3 years in arrears. All perfectly legal, but that's why he gets audited like hell, year after year.

Hillary reported a long term capital loss of almost $700,000 in 2015 for something on page 17, which would be interesting to know more about, but which she can't carry forward, and most of which she just had to eat because she's not organized to use pass-through entities like Trump is. If Rush had simply read page 18 of Hillary's return he'd have seen that Hillary did just that, eat it, like all taxpayers in the same situation, being entitled to only $3000 in long term capital losses in the reporting year. That's all she got. And none of the rest can carry forward because the loss was in that year. She ate it. People do it all the time, and quite unhappily.

That's what makes Trump smarter than Hillary, and smarter than most taxpayers. His affairs are arranged in a complicated fashion in order to maximize the tax consequences in his favor. Hillary isn't a fool for missing her tax-saving opportunities from such an arrangement, but Trump is very wise. It also probably costs him a tidy sum every year to keep it all straight.

Here is where Rush gets it all wrong:

RUSH:  We've got Hillary's tax returns from 2015, last year, the one that she just released her tax returns on, and it shows something strange, something awkward on page 17.  Line 14, long-term capital loss carryover.  Enter the amount, if any, from line 13 of your capital loss.  And the amount is $699,540.  Now, that's not on the scale of Trump's $915 million, but, in a nutshell, Hillary Clinton took a capital loss of $699,000 in 2015, as was reported on her tax return.
  
Where is the outrage?  Nobody even cares to report it.  That capital loss, she's allowed to carry that forward and it will affect how much income tax she owes in future years.  Same thing that we're dealing here with Trump.

Gay Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook doubles down, says "a lot of the people that stand by Donald Trump are deplorable"


Well, he ought to know.


Hillary's version of Obama's "clinging to their guns and religion": Sanders' supporters are the "children of the Great Recession, living in their parents' basement"

The Intercept has a transcript of a portion of the leaked Hillary audio here:

CLINTON: Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future. I met with a group of young black millennials today and you know one of the young women said, “You know, none of us feel that we have the job that we should have gotten out of college. And we don’t believe the job market is going to give us much of a chance.” So that is a mindset that is really affecting their politics. And so if you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing. So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism. We want people to be idealistic. We want them to set big goals. But to take what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals.

The Donald has been politically correct long enough

Hey Donald! We paid to see you burn down the house, to fight for America's forgotten citizens, but ever since August 17th when you brought in your little libertarian clique you've been trying to be too "presidential".

Go for Hillary's jugular. No holds barred. Everything's fair game. Scorch the earth. Dismantle the establishment. Fight until Washington is leveled and you're the last man standing.

You have nothing left to lose, so fight to the death. It's either us or them.

Yellen is political, talk of a future put in the form of the Fed buying stocks last week was intended to backstop the market this month

And a buoyant market in October 2016 will only help Clinton.

Yellen should be impeached immediately.

Reuters reported here last Thursday, but no one is touching this story with a ten foot pole because they all want Hillary elected:

"It could be useful to be able to intervene directly in assets where the prices have a more direct link to spending decisions," she said, adding that buying equities and corporate bonds could have costs and benefits.