"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.

Republicans apparently have had enough of the man who first brought the Muslims to Minnesota

Omarosa's not a dog, she's a chameleon: She worked in the Clinton administration in her 20s

Trump's not the only one who's switched parties.

Reported here last December:

In her 20s, she was a political appointee in the Clinton administration where, according to People, she held four jobs in two years. ... In the last, she was reportedly “asked to leave as quickly as possible, she was so disruptive.”

Trump expands infrastructure of the coming police state, body scanners coming to LA subway system

This will be in mass transit countrywide before you know it, and then in every public building and on every roadway. And then on your street, and on your house. There will be no escape from the surveillance of Big Sis.

If you object to the surveillance, you won't be able to ride or eventually do other things you take for granted now under the free republic. In effect this will be no different than the Chinese social credit system, which denies travel, and other "privileges", to people who receive low scores for not cooperating with the state's demands in matters of politics or religion.

From the story here:

Los Angeles' subway will become the first mass transit system in the U.S. to install body scanners that screen passengers for weapons and explosives, officials said Tuesday.

The deployment of the portable scanners, which project waves to do full-body screenings of passengers walking through a station without slowing them down, will happen in the coming months, said Alex Wiggins, who runs the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's law enforcement division.

The machines scan for metallic and non-metallic objects on a person's body, can detect suspicious items from 30 feet (9 meters) away and have the capability of scanning more than 2,000 passengers per hour. ...

Signs will be posted at stations warning passengers they are subject to body scanner screening. The screening process is voluntary, Wiggins said, but customers who choose not to be screened won't be able to ride on the subway.

The IRS fraudsters are at it again, calling from 615-258-9721

Supposedly from Nashville, TN.

The call was already into its spiel before I could even say hello.

I hung up on the robot.

Poverty guidelines for 2018

When Antifa thinks even the media are the fascists, you know we are still at Orwell's "meaningless" fascism from 1944

George Orwell, here:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

Antifa trying to incite violence with a banner stating it takes a bullet to bash fascism, media/Democrats in their silence remain complicit

Video here.

"White" is really beside the point to Antifa, when what it really wants is the overthrow of the American nation

Antifa's radicalism boils down to communist anarchism: No borders, no walls, no USA at all

To Antifa, anyone who believes in the American nation is a fascist and is therefore the enemy. The police are the enemy because the police defend the nation, the citizens and their property, all of which Antifa believes must be destroyed. That's why the police arrest people with hammers at these "protests".

Antifa hates the cops by definition because Antifa are radicals, not simply because cops stop them from beating up their other enemies

Ann Coulter: Antifa is 90% white (in addition to being violent, angry, self-loathing liberal projectionists)

Peter Strzok, who led the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election, was fired on Friday

From the story here:

Strzok has been a target of withering criticism since text messages he exchanged with FBI lawyer Lisa Page became public. In thousands of messages, Strzok and Page disparage the president and other political figures.

In one exchange, Page asked Strzok: "Trump's not ever going to be president, right? Right?!"

In response, Strzok wrote, "No. No he won't. We'll stop it."

That text exchange was one of 40,000 reviewed by the Justice Department's inspector general in the course of its review of the investigation into former Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton's private email server. Strzok played a senior role on the Clinton email investigation.

The inspector general's report, made public in June, found that there was no evidence that Strzok took any action in that inquiry as a result of political bias. The text messages, however, "cast a cloud over the entire FBI investigation," the inspector general concluded.

The pastor who stood by Bill Clinton during his impeachment, Bill Hybels, crashes and burns in his own sex scandal

He’s a Superstar Pastor. She Worked for Him and Says He Groped Her Repeatedly

How the Willow Creek Church Scandal Has Stunned the Evangelical World

Afraid of being replaced in 2017 200+ million vacation days were left on the table, worth $62 billion

Quits may be high above the 3 million level, but that's a drop in the bucket compared with the tens of millions feeling job insecure.

CNBC reports here:

52% don't use all their vacation time

24% have gone a year without a vacation

12% haven't taken a vacation in three years

61% say they fear looking replaceable

56% say they have too much work to do to take time off

The many tweets of Sarah Jeong, now of The New York Times, add up to just one thing

A multitude of vulgar turds she tweets,

poured forth through soiled lips not sweet;

On men of just one tribe and race she heaps,

a steaming pile of excremental heat.

-- Johnny

Yakima Washington Herald lets the cat out of the bag: American fruit grower rich enough to buy hotel to house foreign labor complains they make too much

Growers want more, cheaper guest workers:

Rob Valicoff is relying on 270 guest workers this year to pick his 1,700 acres of apples and pears in Wapato, nearly triple the 96 guest workers he used last year.

Under the federal H-2A guest worker program, growers are required to provide workers with housing, transportation, affordable meals and pay them higher wages.

“I’m excited now, to be honest,” he said. “Even if it costs more money, I’m excited for us not to be short of labor this year.” ...

One recent afternoon, more than 300 laborers filed into the dining hall at the former FairBridge Inn and Suites on North First Street in Yakima for dinner after a day in the fields.

Valicoff bought the 800-bed hotel and in June began housing H-2A workers from Mexico there. Some of the workers are employed by other growers, with Valicoff providing housing under an agreement with them.

Housing is free for workers, and they each pay $12.26 a day for three meals. They eat breakfast and dinner at the hotel and are provided sack lunches.

Valicoff would like to see changes that would require workers to pay a little more for meals and help with the cost of utilities.

“I think they need to pay a portion of that,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a lot, maybe $6, $7 a day.”

He’d also like to see wages lowered for H-2A workers. The minimum wage is $14.12 an hour, above the state minimum wage of $11.50 an hour.

Turkey won't let Rev. Andrew Brunson go, Trump retaliates with tariffs as promised, Turkish lira plunges

Hooah President Trump!

The story is here.

Brunson had been imprisoned for a year and a half and is reportedly now under house arrest. The tyrannical government of Erdogan allegedly pressured his own parishioners to testify against him falsely under threats.

More here.

A country headed by the likes of Erdogan is not fit to be a NATO member country.

Rick Gates testimony the complete opposite of MSNBC buffoon Chris Hayes: Manafort working to ally Ukraine with EU not with Kremlin

From the story here:

Gates said that their shell companies in Cyprus had transferred money between themselves in payments disguised as loans.

Manafort crafted a policy for Yanukovych aimed at bringing Ukraine into the European Union called “Engage Ukraine”.

Manafort recruited top former European politicians to help out with that effort.

Manafort’s income fell precipitously after Yanukovych stepped down in 2014.

Manafort then had trouble paying his bills.

Manafort then worked briefly advising Ukraine’s current president, Petro Poroshenko. ...

“Engage Ukraine became the strategy for helping Ukraine enter the European Union,” he told prosecutors Tuesday.

The meaning of "high" in "high crimes and misdemeanors" refers not to the nature of the offenses, but to their sphere

Gary L. McDowell, "High Crimes and Misdemeanors": Recovering the Intentions of the Founders (1999) here:

[I]t was essential to their way of thinking to make clear that impeachment was a political process dealing with political wrongdoing and not a part of the criminal justice process. Thus, they made clear that punishment for impeachment could not "extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States." But they emphasized that impeachment was not a bar to prosecuting criminal acts that the person impeached may have committed by noting that "the Party convicted [of impeachment] shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law." Thus, although an indictable crime may be deemed an impeachable offense, impeachable offenses are not simply limited to indictable crimes. ...

In all of the English cases the political nature of the offenses charged in impeachments was revealed by the use of the word "high" to modify both "crimes" and "misdemeanors." The use of "high" in "high crimes and misdemeanors" did not refer to the substantive nature of the offense, that it was a particularly serious offense, but that it was a "crime or misdemeanor" carried out against the commonwealth itself. This use of "high" to distinguish crimes and misdemeanors against the society as a whole derived from its use in distinguishing "high" treason from "petit" treason. Alexander Hamilton summarized this understanding of "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" as adopted by the Federal Convention in his explanation of the impeachment process created by the Constitution. The objects of impeachment, he noted, "are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."

Nearly 1 million Americans, many of whom are rich urban elites, received over $13 billion in farm subsidies in 2017

From the story here about the findings of the organization headed by Tom Coburn:

'Today, our organization, American Transparency, released its OpenTheBooks oversight report, “Harvesting U.S. Farm Subsidies.”  The report catalogues $13.2 billion in these subsidies flowing to nearly 958,000 recipients in fiscal year 2017. Using our interactive mapping platform at OpenTheBooks.com, taxpayers can search all recipients receiving $100,000 or more in FY2017 farm subsidies by ZIP Code.'  

FBI now admits they improperly continued to solicit and receive info from Steele through Bruce Ohr

As reported here by John Solomon:

Ohr’s own notes, emails and text messages show he communicated extensively with Steele and with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. Those documents have been turned over in recent weeks to investigative bodies in Congress and the DOJ, but not reviewed outside the investigative ranks until now.

They show Ohr had contact with Steele in the days just before the FBI opened its Trump-Russia probe in summer 2016, and then engaged Steele as a “confidential human source” (CHS) assisting in that probe.

They also confirm that Ohr later became a critical conduit of continuing information from Steele after the FBI ended the Brit's role as an informant. ...

Steele's FBI relationship had been terminated about three months earlier. The bureau concluded on Nov. 1, 2016, that he leaked information to the news media and was “not suitable for use” as a confidential source, memos show.

The FBI specifically instructed Steele that he could no longer “operate to obtain any intelligence whatsoever on behalf of the FBI,” those memos show.

Yet, Steele asked Ohr in the Jan. 31 text exchange if he could continue to help feed information to the FBI: “Just want to check you are OK, still in the situ and able to help locally as discussed, along with your Bureau colleagues.” ...

FBI officials now admit they continued to receive information from Steele through Ohr, identifying more than a half-dozen times its agents interviewed Ohr in late 2016 and 2017, to learn what Steele was saying.

That continued reliance on Steele after his termination is certain to raise interest in Congress about whether the FBI broke its own rules.

But the memos also raise questions about Ohr’s and the Justice Department’s roles in the origins of building a counterintelligence case against the Republican presidential nominee, based heavily on opposition research funded by his rival's campaign, the DNC, and the DNC’s main law firm, Perkins Coie.

Despite personal support from Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, lefty candidate Welder in Kansas defeated

Trump beat Hillary in Ohio's 12th District 53% to 42% in 2016, Republicans barely held on to it yesterday

Last October yesterday's result was hardly thinkable:

Map makes Republicans strong favorites to retain Pat Tiberi's 12th Ohio congressional district

Total nonfarm employment has come a long way in Ohio, especially overperforming quite recently in vaulting well past the 5.6 million mark.

You'd think the voters had been more grateful yesterday, but like Hillary energizing Trump supporters by calling them deplorables, Republican Troy Balderson managed to get out the Democrat vote for his opponent by insulting part of his own district, in Franklin County.

All politics is local.

Liz Peek's talk radio echo chamber: Trump's already solved the jobs crisis

This morning on the Steve Gruber show.

This is the sort of hubris which precedes debacles, especially when the hubris isn't justified by the facts.

The difference between an employment population ratio at 60.5% today vs. 63% pre-Great Recession is in excess of 6 million jobs, or 120,000 votes in each and every one of the fifty states in the union. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by fewer than 80,000 votes total. Failure to expand employment decisively beyond current levels is courting disaster.

Hardly a time for gloating.

Egyptian American Abdul El-Sayed came within 3 points of beating Gretchen Whitmer in Kent County MI in the Democrat primary for governor

Whitmer overall captured the nomination for governor among Democrats in Michigan with nearly 52% of the vote, but Democrats in the county around Grand Rapids, Michigan, are clearly very divided. El-Sayed crushed Whitmer in the city itself, 49% to 36%, and beat her also in the city of Wyoming.

El-Sayed is an accomplished individual, who however has the support of very far left people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Linda Sarsour, and of the far left The Nation magazine.

Public Enemy #1 of democracy is Connecticut's Democrat Senator Chris Murphy

Dan Bongino for Mark Levin opens the show on fire tonight

He's saying the rules which say Republicans have to lose ground in November because that's what usually happens two years after a new president is elected . . . aren't the rules.

Good for him.

Fight! Trump broke the rules, so can we.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for July 2018

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for July 2018

Max temp 94, Mean Max temp 94

Min temp 54, Mean Min temp 49

Av temp 74.4, Mean Av temp 72.2

Av temp to date 48.3, Mean Av temp to date 46.6 (actual is elevated 3.6%)

Precip 2.30, Mean precip 3.12

Total precip to date 21.5, Mean total precip to date 19.7 (actual ahead 1.8 despite dry conditions)

Cooling Degree Days 301, Mean CDD 241, Season to date 577, Mean Season to date 425

The cooling season to date as measured by CDD has moderated to 35.76% warmer than the mean after a hot early start to the summer season.

I notice Mean Max temp for June 2018 has been altered/changed/corrected down to 91 from the 94 I reported. It's also possible I misread it.

Check, check, double check, but still discrepancies arise due to human error . . . just not sure whose. 

Sarah Jeong of The New York Times is guilty of far worse than racism

Frank Rich slams Gary Cohn in NY Mag, Cohn fires back in Bloomberg

Frank Rich on the 5th, here:

The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill. ... But it’s a measure of how much the country is broken that we just shrug with resignation when the wealthy Democratic Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn joins this administration to secure an obscene tax cut, then exits without apology to enjoy his further enrichment at the expense of the safety net for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Gary Cohn here on the 6th:

In ’08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens. I think banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some of the social media companies are today. And it affects everyone in the world. The banks have never had that much pull. ... In Washington nothing’s perfect, so I’m not thinking it’s perfect, it’s never going to be perfect. But the fact that we got something really important done, which is corporate tax reform, which made us competitive with the rest of the world, is good.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: Boris Johnson objects to "The New English Letter Box"

Quoted here:

"If you say that it is weird and bullying to expect women to cover their faces, then I totally agree," he said.

"I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes."

And he added that "a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber" he would ask her to remove it to speak to her.

Frank Rich: The sole upside of the 2008 crash is that it exposed the kleptocratic Establishment of both parties

The chief kleptocrat, of course, was Bill Clinton, but Franky doesn't mention that, nor that his hero Barack Obama, who in the worst of economic times managed to come in third for increasing income inequality, is hard at work in retirement trying to catch up with him. Former President Carter, meanwhile, is building and restoring over 30 homes in Indiana for his 2018 work project. 

Still, it's a worthwhile read, if your indignation has been flagging of late.

In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream

Variety review of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie can't get even recent history right

Here:

At one point, amid all the fringe academics he interviews, D’Souza sits down with Richard Spencer, the white supremacist and alt-right crusader who came to mainstream prominence when he led the May 13, 2017, riots in Charlottesville.

There were no riots in May. Those were in August. And about the only thing Spencer led then was the retreat when the local Democrat authorities gave police a stand down order, effectively giving Antifa the green light to attack.

There is no variety at Variety, just the homogeneity of political correctness, aka fake news.

Meanwhile orthodox Jewry in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut is head over heels in love with Donald Trump

Laugh of the Day: Socialist Jew invested in being white gets the bad news that just being white makes him a racist

Isaac Chotiner: What could a white person in America in 2018 do to not be racist, or do you believe that’s impossible?

Robin DiAngelo: Well, I have to ask you a question I forgot to ask you earlier. What is your racial identity?

Isaac Chotiner: I’m white. My family’s originally from Eastern Europe. 

Seen here.

Mandela's ANC government in South Africa writes off whites as murderers

I guess Obama's message in July fell on deaf ears:

'It’s not justice if now you’re on top, so I’m going to do the same thing that those folks were doing to me, and now I’m going to do it to you. That’s not justice. “I detest racialism,” [Mandela] said, “whether it comes from a black man or a white man.”'

Asli Erdogan: Turkey has descended into fascism under President Erdogan

Quoted here:

The award-winning author [not related to the president], still traumatised by the four months she spent in an Istanbul prison, warns that Turkey's institutions are "in a state of total collapse".

"The extent of things in Turkey is like Nazi Germany. I think it is a fascist regime. It is not yet 1940s Germany, but 1930s. A crucial factor is the lack of a judicial system. Erdogan is almost omnipotent. He decides on the price of medicine, on the future of classical ballet, his family members are in charge of the economy. Opera, which he hates, is also directly tied to him. That's the nice thing about fascism, it's also pathetically funny sometimes. It's an emergency state made permanent."

James Whitman is clearly a man of the left who indicts the entire British patrimony as racist

From an interview Whitman gave to Salon last September:

It is important to note how the United States was not alone in its commitment to the idea of white settler democracy. We find the same phenomenon elsewhere in places colonized by the British. In Australia you see a very similar pattern, New Zealand and South Africa of course, and in Canada as well. That’s part of what I learned in doing the research for this book, and I have to say, it is a troubling and challenging fact that what reemerged with the white supremacists in Charlottesville seems to grow out of a British tradition that we like to think of as a great source of liberty, democracy and equality for the world.

Dinesh D'Souza has been aware for a long time that his source Whitman is a leftist, and he believes Whitman is dishonest because he does not acknowledge the peculiar culpability of southern Democrats in crafting the race laws.

Dinesh D'Souza's new movie "Death of a Nation" popularizes research by James Q. Whitman of Yale

Published in early 2017, Yale Law School said of the book at the time:

"[T]here is much evidence of deep Nazi engagement with American race law in the early 1930s—too much to ignore."

A reviewer for Inside Higher Ed here was clearly disgusted with what he had learned from the book:

Many people will take the very title as an affront. But it’s the historical reality the book discloses that proves much harder to digest. The author does not seem prone to sensationalism. ...

Hitler’s American Model is scholarship and not an editorial traveling incognito. Its pages contain many really offensive statements about American history and its social legacy. But those statements are all from primary sources -- statements about America, made by Nazis, usually in the form of compliments. ...

A stenographic transcript from 1934 provides Whitman’s most impressive evidence of how closely Nazi lawyers and functionaries had studied American racial jurisprudence. A meeting of the Commission on Criminal Law Reform “involved repeated and detailed discussion of the American example, from its very opening moments,” Whitman writes, including debate between Nazi radicals and what we’d have to call, by default, Nazi moderates.

The moderates insisted on stare decisis:

The moderates argued that legal tradition required consistency. Any new statute forbidding mixed-race marriages had to be constructed in accord with the one existing precedent for treating a marriage as criminal: the law against bigamy. This would have been a bit of a stretch, and the moderates preferred letting the propaganda experts discourage interracial romance rather than making it a police matter. The radicals were working from a different conceptual tool kit. ...

The lawyers whom Whitman identifies as Nazi radicals seemed to appreciate how indifferent the American states were to German standards of rigor. True, the U.S. laws showed a lamentable indifference to Jews and Gentiles marrying. But otherwise they were as racist as anything the führer could want.

Wells Fargo sets aside $8 million to compensate about 400 homeowners foreclosed from 2010-2015 due to computer glitch

Well whoopdedoo. That's about only $20,000 a pop.

Sorry you lost your job. Here's a sandwich.

Story here.

Nikolas Cruz was failed at least twice, by the cops months before the shooting he perpetrated, and by his school

He had called the cops on himself around Thanksgiving 2017, as The New York Times reported in February.

Now it turns out his school failed to inform him he was eligible for counseling services when he asked for help around the same time.

His mother had died on November 1, 2017. His father had died years earlier, in 2004. So this was an already troubled young man who became lost and alone in the world before he did what he did.

So Senator Dianne Feinstein is worth north of $46 million because her husband Blum benefitted from her closure of the Mountain Pass mine

Feinsteinah, rhymes with Mountain Pass Mineah while tradin' with China.

Honestly your honor, I had no idea my driver was a spy for China.

So Senator Dianne Feinstein's driver was a spy for China for almost 20 years, apparently from 1993-2013

What a joke our country is.

Dianne Emiel Goldman Berman Feinstein Blum has been on the Senate INTELLIGENCE Committee since 2001, but never knew.

Feinstein had a Chinese spy connection she didn’t know about — her driver

How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies

Details Surface About Chinese Spy Who Worked For Sen. Feinstein

Jordan Weissmann affects a fever over QAnon despite Pew finding that "commitment to representative democracy is strongest in North America and Europe"

Here:

What makes QAnon a little a different, and little bit scarier, than many of the conspiracy theories Americans have latched onto through the decades, is that it’s fundamentally authoritarian . . . They’re waiting for the sitting president to deliver their country from evil by rounding up his political opposition. Adherents have taken to jubilantly counting up the sealed indictments federal authorities have filed lately because they see them as a sign that a mass wave of arrests is coming. At Trump’s Wednesday night rally in Tampa, Florida, a shocking number of attendees showed up with QAnon T-shirts and signs. These people are all but asking for a strongman to seize control of the country . . . You can’t tell how many are really out there, but they’re now part of the political fabric in a country where around 1 in 5 people think we’d be better off with a strongman leader, and 17 percent say they’d be OK with military rule.

He's referring to this from Pew, which nevertheless finds "broad support for representative and direct democracy" globally:

There is less support for a strong leader who can make decisions without interference from a parliament or courts. Still, about a quarter or more back this idea in Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom, Israel, Hungary, South Korea and the U.S. And while military rule is relatively unpopular, 17% endorse this idea in the established democracies of the U.S., Italy and France.

France, Italy, the US, three overly generous countries being injected with many costly, difficult to assimilate, and lawless "refugees".

Democrat Mayor of Portland, Oregon, is another Antifa enabler

Anarchy Breaks Out in Portland, With the Mayor’s Blessing: A vicious mob targeted the ICE office and even a food cart. The police followed orders to do nothing:

Where were the police? Ordered away by Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, who doubles as police commissioner. “I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict, particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track,” he tweeted. “If [ICE is] looking for a bailout from this mayor, they are looking in the wrong place.” ...

“I join those outraged by ICE actions separating parents from their children, and support peaceful protest to give voice to our collective moral conscience.”

The Hakes family, which owns the Happy Camper food cart across the street from ICE’s office, responded to the statement with incredulity. The mob “terrorized our family” and forced the business to close, Julie Hakes told me.

Mitchell Research and Communications has John James beating Sandy Pensler 44-30 in Michigan Republican US Senate primary

Reported here this morning, +/- 5 points.

Conservatism upside-down: Russell Kirk chair in history at Hillsdale held by professed libertarian

Bradley J. Birzer, here:

"I have never considered myself a classical liberal, but I have always considered myself libertarian."

Russell Kirk, of course, was neither, but especially not libertarian.

And at public universities also it is common for atheists to chair religion departments.

An alt-right taxonomy one year after Charlottesville, and its prospects for survival

Provided by Paul Gottfried, with useful links, in Paul Gottfried: Charlottesville After A Year—As An Outsider, I Think The Alt-Right Far From Finished, from which this excerpt:

Growing racial tensions, reckless immigration and a further weakening of already-weakened social bonds could all help the Alt-Right expand its following.

Part of the Alt Right’s eventual success may come from its anti-traditionalism. The Alt-Right is mostly (but not entirely) anti-Christian and advances a Nietzschean or neo-pagan perspective. It is thereby in sync with the growing secularism of millennials.  

And the Alt-Right doesn’t wear itself out trying to defend the traditional bourgeois family. It appears to be made up largely of young, unattached bloggers. Most of those Alt-Right publicists I read focus on racial conflict or the struggle between civilizations; and they push these themes far more frankly and with less careerist backtracking than the well-paid propagandists of Conservatism, Inc. They also cite telling statistics about racial and gender differences; and they pride themselves on their openness to science as well as on their sometimes vaguely defined “radical traditionalism.”

The Alt-Right belongs to a post-conservative Right. 

This is another way of saying the future success of the alt-right depends on the continued splintering of the American experience occasioned by its enthusiasm for secular ideologies.

Hence the way to defeat the alt-right, if that is what the left really wants, is to reject multiculturalism and participate in unifying the country instead of working toward its demise. And that implies supporting the radical correction of America's immigration laws symbolized and actualized by Donald Trump's wall.

But, of course, that would make too much sense, as little sense as reproducing oneself the old-fashioned way, by marrying and having children.

Idealism, of whatever stripe, is poison, but our thirst for it, unfortunately, is the well nigh inescapable bastard patrimony of our Christian past. 

Or that the charm and venom, which they drunk,

Their blood with secret filth infected hath,

Being diffused through the senseless trunk

That, through the great contagion, direful deadly stunk.

-- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Canto II, iv.

60.5% are working, not 63%: That's 6.4 million missing workers in this so-called boom

If this is a boom how come the scale of pay raises is so puny compared with the last three cycles?

Just received a robocall on behalf of John James for US Senate in the Michigan Republican primary

From the Susan B. Anthony list.

DOJ did not inform the FISA court of FBI interviews with Papadopoulos and Mifsud, but should have

From the story here:

These facts indicate that the DOJ did not inform the FISA court of the FBI interviews with Papadopoulos and Mifsud. But it should have, especially if Mifsud denied Papadopoulos’ claim that the Maltese professor had bragged that the Russians had dirt on Hillary. Or was Mifsud an FBI informant or an asset of a foreign government, and was that instead what the DOJ told the FISA court?

It’s time for the FBI to come clean: Who was Mifsud, and what was his role in the launch of Crossfire Hurricane? And did the State Department assist the FBI in handling Mifsud? Congress and the president supposedly hold power over these agencies. They, and we, need the answers.

Laugh of a whole generation: Rush Limbaugh has had the same ethics, conscience, core beliefs, morality for 30 years

Here:

RUSH: So I’ve had a lot of emails from a lot of people in the past couple of days, and one of them I received last night that started me thinking. Now, I love things that make me think — I’ll be honest with you — and this one did. “Do you know how few people can say that they’ve had the same ethics, the same conscience, the same core beliefs, the same morality, and the same connectivity with themselves in their twenties, through their forties, and into the sixties and beyond, into their best years? Do you realize how few people are as consistent and reliable as you are?”

No, I don’t ever stop to think of anything like that. I don’t think… See, this is why I don’t… I don’t think it’s unusual that things I believed in my heart when I was in my twenties would survive my getting to my sixties. Core beliefs. I can totally believe that I wouldn’t change in those things. But this person said, “You don’t know how rare it is,” and what inspired her to write this, I think she said, was a caller that appeared to the program yesterday saying basically the same thing.

Spouses:

Roxy Maxine McNeely (1977–1980, div.)

Michelle Sixta (1983–1990, div.)

Marta Fitzgerald (1994–2004, div.)

Kathryn Rogers (2010–

Drug use:

Admitted addiction to prescription painkillers (October 2003)

Arrests:

Doctor shopping for prescription painkillers (April 2006)

Confiscations:

Viagra, Palm Beach International Airport (June 2006)

95,598,000 eating but not working in July 2018

Today's example of a woman who doesn't know what she doesn't know

The arbiters of taste at The New York Times rule Roseanne unpalatable but hire a racist pig to write editorials

The good old days: As late as 1971 16 states and the federal government considered rape a capital offense

I wonder how many illegals get the full-frisk TSA treatment while flying free on United

Sandy Pensler grows even more desperate in Michigan Republican race for US Senate, enlists Rand Paul for robocalls

I got that call this afternoon, just days after getting one from Rick Santorum urging a vote for Pensler. Clearly this is Pensler's play for the libertarian vote after the earlier play for the Catholic vote.

Pensler is counting on his expensive ad campaign overcoming Trump's endorsement of his challenger, John James, and on the fractured nature of Republican politics in Michigan to eek out a win, which is a phenomenon of its libertarian leanings.

And as everyone knows, libertarians are a contrary bunch who can hardly come to agreement about anything among themselves, let alone unite anyone around their views once in office. Pensler himself has alienated Polish-Americans with his holocaust remarks. He fits right in with the libertarians.

The right thing to do in this context is vote for John James.

Good comparison of the presidents on GDP by Justin Fox at Bloomberg

Guess Which Presidents Really Oversaw Economic Booms

Fox well reminds his readers that GDP is an inadequate measure in many respects, and gives credit where credit is due even when the numbers don't seem to show it.

His second chart is the better chart since it is a political comparison, which is what this is all about, pegging beginning and end of analysis to fourth quarters when presidents are elected or eclipsed.

He has Kennedy and Johnson first and second (5.5% and 5%), followed by Clinton (3.8%), Reagan 3.6%), Carter (3.2%) and Nixon 3.0%), then IKE (2.5%), then Ford and Bush 41 tied (2.2%), with Obama (1.9%) and Bush 43 (1.8%) bringing up the rear. (Trump so far is seventh, ahead of IKE but behind Nixon, at 2.7%).

A few quibbles.

The data is plenty fine for Truman 1948-1952. He should be included. His performance is the best of them all on a full term basis (5.54%), using the same compound annual growth rate Fox uses. The secret to Truman's success? He slashed government spending in the wind-down from World War II. No one seems to get that. By cutting taxes and not slashing spending, Republicans since Truman only defeat themselves and discredit what works.

Secondly, JFK didn't serve out his first term, Nixon his second. Therefore it makes more sense to view JFK coterminous with LBJ (5.19% together), and Ford with Nixon (2.73%), evaluating them together in two eight year periods of Democrat and Republican political administration respectively, which is what it was.

Third, Fox rounds his numbers, which obscures how close Bush and Obama were in their terrible records (1.83% and 1.88% respectively). 

All in all, though, we come up with similar results: Truman is first (5.54), followed by JFK/LBJ (5.19), Clinton (3.81), Reagan (3.55), Carter (3.19), Nixon/Ford (2.73), IKE (2.52), Bush 41 (2.21), Obama (1.88), and Bush 43 (1.83).

Trump's first year through 4Q2017 is 2.47%. Measured 2Q2017 on 2Q2018 just completed he's at 2.85%.

Only by comparison with the previous sixteen years is this anything to cheer about, but thankfully we have that.

Democrat socialist Ocasio-Cortez is a crackpot, says everyone has two jobs when multiple jobholding is at historic lows

The lights are on there, but nobody's home. Even at the historic highs it was less than 7% of the employed, and that was back in the Clinton era when the economy is pretty much universally acknowledged to have been a lot better than it is now. That suggests multiple job holding is a good thing, not a bad thing. When people can get two jobs that means there is more opportunity to work harder to save for important goals and pay for them. No coincidence, either, that GDP was better then when more people worked multiple jobs. More work equals more GDP.

Governor Moonbeam is clueless about how much warmer it was in Greco-Roman antiquity than today

Jerry Brown, quoted here:

The governor added that "since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse and that’s the way it is."

Russian non-citizen of the US was registered to vote in San Fran Freako without her knowledge, as a Democrat

Story here.

Seems the scam kicks into motion if you sign a petition on the street. The activists then turn in stacks of registrations with the petitions:

Ms. Shuvalova was signed up — possibly without her knowledge — by an organization circulating a petition for a 2013 ballot initiative to stop a massive condominium development on the San Francisco waterfront. A signed registration card was submitted with the petition to qualify Ms. Shuvalova as a petition signer, said John Arntz, director of the San Francisco Department of Elections. Activists often hand in stacks of registration cards with their petitions, he said. Election officials say they conduct routine cross-references of voter registration information with databases at the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles and the secretary of state’s office but did not flag Ms. Shuvalova as a noncitizen. The box for “vote by mail” was checked on her registration card, and the county began sending her ballots. County records show she received nine ballots but never voted.