John Brennan and his liberal sycophants make Glenn Greenwald want to puke

Your next opportunity to pick a parasite is little more than two months away

In a truly representative republic which reflected the intent of the Founders, America would have 100 senators picked by the state legislatures, not by popular vote, and at least 6,561 members of the US House (using the ratio of 1 representative per 50,000 of population intended by Article the First, not ratified; the father of our country wanted a ratio of 1:30,000 for 10,934 members of the US House in 2018). Instead we have 100 senators and 435 representatives, and 10,840 lobbyists in 2018. The corporate takeover of the Congress was a fait accompli by 1929, thanks to Republicans.

The English today are better represented than Americans with one member of parliament to about 101,000 of population, for all the good it does them. In the US the current ratio is 1:754,092. When Republicans stopped the growth of representation once and for all in 1929, the ratio stood at about 1:280,460. Using the 1929 ratio in 2018 would mean 1,170 members in the US House instead of 435.

Surely what was good enough for 1929 is good enough for 2018, no? But good luck even with that.

Author finds cost of housing and daycare to be the main drivers of the middle class "squeeze"

From the transcript of the podcast here:

Middle-class life is 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. ... The main problem is the cost of housing. ... The second problem was the cost of daycare. A lot of it had to do with wages that were just not keeping up with other kinds of expenses. ...  [R]eal estate is no longer a place to live, but it’s an investment vehicle. That has driven up the cost of housing for ordinary people or the precarious middle class, as I call them. 

Unstated here is the new necessity of two incomes once women entered the labor force in quantity after the 1960s under the influence of feminist ideology. For the first twenty years of the post-war this was not so. When you dramatically increase the size of the labor force, the cost of the labor naturally comes down. The result was that women entering the workforce increased their average real income, but only just enough over time to pay for the cost of daycare, a wash. Meanwhile real male incomes stagnated.

Women working in large numbers naturally put pressure on the future growth of the labor force as well. Because they were not having the children who would become the country's next workers, a future labor shortage was inevitable as the post-war 4-child families transformed into 2-child families.

Enter the pressure to increase immigration, wink at low-labor-cost illegal immigration, and export jobs, a new era of which was inaugurated under George H. W. Bush in 1989, who doubled the level of legal immigration overnight, and under his son George W. Bush in 2001, who presided over the export of 3 million manufacturing jobs, a trend continued under Barack Obama who exported 3 million more. Manufacturing jobs had been the most important anchors and hubs for middle class jobs in American communities, the absence of which turned college from an option into a necessity in order to maintain what was formerly possible with only a high school diploma. Increase the demand for college, and you increase its price, and with it the pressure on stagnating pocketbooks.

Housing prices rose dramatically from the late 1990s in consequence of the fateful decision under Bill Clinton to unleash the savings hidden in the nation's housing stock for sixty years. Clinton signed in 1997 the libertarian Republican legislation rewriting the tax laws which had forced homeowners to stay in their homes or move up to avoid large capital gains tax hits. Large economic forces were behind this, not the least of which was the growing sense of the unsustainability of the middle class consumption culture without a new source of savings. 

The birth of the housing ATM under Reagan in the 1980s had no doubt prepared the way for these developments, who infamously did away with the tax deductibility of credit card interest while increasing the same for home equity lines of credit. The effect was to get the children of the Baby Boom to think of their homes as mere commodities which could be exploited to extract value. The liquidity unleashed by the Clinton legislation ten years later hit the economy like a tidal wave, driving prices higher and higher into the now infamous housing bubble as homes were churned by flippers and families alike. It took just ten years of that to drive the economy into the worst panic it had experienced since the Great Depression.

Reversing these horrible developments would require a civilizational transformation of values which in the past only Protestant Christianity seems to have been able to provide. Feminist ideology, like all ideology, has done nothing but take away. The revaluation of values necessary in our situation would have to begin with women insisting on fidelity and marriage once again. Women are biologically predisposed to the self-sacrifice needed. To get the men to go along they will need a Lysistrata, but she's probably not Camille Paglia.

Communism works in only one place.  

Priceless: Yale historian Timothy Snyder blames Democrats for Hillary's loss

Here, on May 1, 2017, in Historian Timothy Snyder: “It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a coup and overthrow democracy:

 '"On Tyranny" is a suggestion of things that everyone can do. ... [T]he other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016.' 

Funny how he lets that little slap slip at the end of an interview about his fears. It is the great, unacknowledged truth of Election 2016.

The rest of it reminded me of myself in 2009.

When I saw how leftists started trashing Obama one year in to his presidency it dawned on me that the tyranny I had feared from an Obama presidency had been a misplaced fear. Then the stories of Obama's laziness started to surface, and the personal details about his penchant for watching sports on TV, traveling, fine dining and playing golf. The guy got captured by the trappings of the office. Only then was it clear that there was nothing existential to fear. And then the guy punted on Obamacare, letting the House and Senate duke it out, creating a grotesque. And after reelection, he actually made the Bush tax cuts permanent and fixed the AMT.

Wow. What a revolutionary!

If Snyder breathed into a paper bag for a minute or two, he might realize that Trump's first midterms are upon us and only now is Trump starting to realize what presidential power is all about. The thing is, it's way too late. He has already squandered his political capital in year one, failing at job one, which is to get the order of the agenda correct. This was partly the result of making lousy appointments across the board in the first place, many of whom have gone on to blow up like so many Clinton bimbo eruptions but without the sex. By generally being incompetent like any true outsider would be in Washington Trump was at a huge disadvantage from the start anyway. But the people who could have helped him didn't because Trump got elected in part by insulting them.

This presidency is already much like Obama's, a creation of the House and Senate, not of the president. Recourse to executive orders to get what you want but can't get the ordinary way is a sign of weakness, not strength. It shows that the master is the slave. 

Few presidents get three important things done. Trump has one major accomplishment but it wasn't the one people remember the fearless leader championing at every venue of 2015 and 2016. So far the corporate tax cut is not translating into unequivocal results for the people. As a percentage of civilian population, employment remains over 6 million behind the pre-Great Recession average.

"Hillary isn't president" is something to be truly grateful for, but sooner or later it will dawn on the Trumpists that Trump isn't either.

Black privilege in Michigan

Remember all those stupid ads on conservative talk radio a few months ago about a breakout for silver?

There was even this story about it in April, "Silver On The Verge Of A Breakout".

Silver's down about 15% since April 19th when the story was published.

What they didn't tell you was the expected breakout was to the downside, and "it would be really nice of you to buy all this silver I need to unload".

Silver soared to 48.70 in April 2011, but it's been all downhill from there.

Average US House seats lost by Republican and Democrat presidents in midterm elections

Average including all midterms:

9 Republican: 21

12 Democrat: 32

Average for midterms after initial election to office:

6 Republicans: 17

7 Democrats: 31

Data here. 

Matthew Continetti is delusional, imagines Republicans after 2010 "overreached", thinks Democrats might after 2018

Here, when in reality the so-called Tea Party Congress utterly capitulated.

It continued to ratify the new level of Obama's spending from fiscal 2009 onward, increased 25% overnight and kept there through the end of his presidency.

The Congress wasn't supine just in respect of the spending, either. John Boehner explicitly ceded the agenda to Obama after his reelection in 2012. Congress did nothing to hamstring an imperial president bent on ruling by decree. It was the Supreme Court which had to repeatedly rebuke the Obama administration, which simply ignored the court and kept on doing it.  

One can only wonder what Continetti would call it if Congress had actually exercised its constitutional power of the purse instead of lining up at the hog trough to lap it up with the rest of the pigs. Probably something about the tyranny of the legislative, or some such rot.

Why did the liberal cross the road, mommy?

Same as the squirrel, honey. He wanted to die.

Democrat gifts that keep on giving: Fazliddin Kurbanov of Uzbekistan, given refuge by Obama in 2009, convicted of attempted murder after terrorism conviction

He tried to kill the prison warden by slitting his throat, so the judge slapped him with 20 years to run concurrently with the 25 he's serving on the terrorism conviction.

Oh yeah, that'll hurt him.

All this after prosecutors reached a deal to drop their appeal that his sentence wasn't long enough. Actually it wasn't severe enough. The guy should have been hung in the first place, and the guy who let him in here impeached.

But I repeat myself.

Stories here and here.

"At today’s hearing, Kurbanov, speaking through an interpreter, told the court he was not sorry for his actions and that the victim was supposed to die. Kurbanov also expressed extreme animosity toward the United States." 

Right back at ya, buddy.

The liberal death wish fulfilled by Islam

Puncturing Matt Yglesias: Kids today may be growing less tolerant of those they actually disagree with

Noted here at Heterodox Academy:

Contemporary young adults are significantly less likely to endorse “racist” views than any other U.S. age cohort. Well, are they more likely to give the racists a platform? Actually, they are far less willing today than they ever have been to grant racists a platform. And this is actually far more significant than it may initially seem in light of the fact that the sphere of what counts as “racist” has radically expanded – from David Duke in the 70’s to things like “microaggressions” today. In other words, not only are contemporary youth more willing to censor those they deem racist than previous cohorts, but they are likely to brand a much wider range of speech as “racist” (and therefore, worthy of censorship). ... Coverage on campus speech by Vox writers seems to regularly suffer from bias.

Public school indoctrination about race clearly has succeeded.

Hey Boston Business Journal, tell it to the gun industry and the NRA, you jerks

Obama spied on Americans FOR YEARS, crickets from his SLAVES in the media

'The normally supportive [FISA] court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

'The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.' 

Story here.

The enemies of the people circle the wagons

Former communist head of the CIA loses his security clearance

Sad.

"Wayne Isaac" provides a sage estimation of Richard Spencer, and much else besides

Here at American Greatness:

Spencer’s aims are rooted instead in a romantic vision of defending the volksgeist. ... Spencer is, at heart, a contrarian social critic. ... Instead of bourgeois and proletariat, we now have whites versus the marginalized. Spencer is the poster-boy archvillain of that construct. The entirety of Spencer’s argument is simply to posit the opposite of the Left: whites aren’t bad. In fact, they’re wonderful. ... [I]n the end, he is a provocateur and critic of liberalism, nothing more. Spencer’s politics are reactionary not “Progressive.” His erudition and urbanity allowed him to become the perfect representation of all the Left’s nightmares: a defender of whiteness sensible enough to be a threat but fringe enough to be safely skewered by the elite everywhere and anywhere. Spencer is a convenient Leftist boogeyman. But in the end, there is no “there” there. Spencer is wide, not deep.

Julie Kelly unpacks in August 2018 what Pat Buchanan had already assembled in October 2017

"Thus we have Free Beacon neocons, never-Trump Republicans, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, a British spy and comrades in Russian intelligence, and perhaps the FBI, all working with secret money and seedy individuals to destroy a candidate they could not defeat in a free election."

Here:

The Washington Free Beacon admitted last year that they retained Fusion from late 2015 until April 2016 to gather opposition research on Republican primary candidates. The website is run by Kristol’s son-in-law, Matthew Continetti. The Beacon posted numerous negative stories about the Trump campaign in 2016, including hit pieces on Carter Page in March and July.

The Beacon’s story keeps changing, however. At first, Continetti admitted that the Beacon “retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary.” Days later, Continetti explained why his website failed to mention its relationship with Fusion in several related articles prior to October 2017. After some blather about aggregated articles, Continetti vowed that future articles “will mention its history” with Fusion.

And they did. A few days after that, the Beacon posted an article with this disclaimer: “The Washington Free Beacon was once a client of Fusion GPS. That relationship ended in January 2017.”

Say what? Something is not adding up here; in fact, it stinks.

We are expected to believe that Bill Kristol’s son-in-law paid Fusion throughout the 2016 presidential campaign cycle but Simpson doesn’t pitch one dossier-related story to either one? Kristol just comes up with the very same flimsy talking points that Simpson and Steele are peddling—at the exact same time—and it’s pure coincidence? Kristol just happens to call for an investigation one week before the FBI takes the outrageous and unprecedented step of probing private citizens working on an opposing presidential campaign? Kristol and Robby Mook just strangely regurgitate the identical Trump-Russia plotline—on the same morning?

Chief economist at Merrill Lynch when it went bankrupt ignores the first 130 years of US history, aptly proffers a figure of mere myth

Those Cuomos sure are kwazy

Chris Cuomo says Antifa is on the side of right.

Andrew Cuomo says America was never great.

Since Antifa wants to overthrow America, they're reading from the same page.

So that's the meaning of Mario Cuomo's liberalism. Or its legacy anyway.

There is no contradiction between liberalism and socialism.