Wednesday, April 3, 2019

England swings . . .

England swings like a pair of tits do
Boobies on buildings, two by two
Elizabeth Hurley the Tower of Pig Pen
The rosy-red cheeks of embarrassed children

Stacey Abrams, who knows a thing or two about being petty and uninterested in stability, still hasn't conceded in Georgia, and Ralph Northam is still governor in VA


Climate update for Grand Rapids, MI, March 2019

Max temp 61 / Mean 66
Min temp 8 / Mean 7
Av temp 32.2 / Mean 34
Precip 2.23 / Mean 2.45
Snow 7.9 / Mean 9.1
Snow to date 76.4 / Mean 63.7
Heating degree days 1006 / Mean 955
HDD to date 5910 / Mean 5849

So, it's been 20% snowier than the mean and 1% colder by HDD.

Even when correcting himself Rush is wrong: Beto won election to the Texas House and quit after a year


Oh. I erred, folks. I said Beto O’Rourke had never won an election. He did. He won an election to the Texas House and then quit after a year to run against Cruz in the Senate. What I meant to say was that Beto O’Rourke’s biggest life achievement is losing to Ted Cruz in the Senate race, not that he’s never won an election. Because he has.

Beto was elected to the US House three times, in 2012, 2014 and 2016, representing TX-16.

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

John Gray: The possibility that millions value some things more than economic gain is not considered by the British political classes

Sounds oddly familiar.

Brexit has left the British political class trapped by its own history:

Persistently denying respect to Leave voters in this way can only bring to Britain the dangerous populism that is steadily marching across the European continent.

Gay mayor runs for president, launches Buttkrieg, gets Justin Raimondo's attention


President Kushner has alternative facts about Florida voter registrations by felons


The Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald looked at the most recent year of data on citizens who lost their right to vote in the 20 largest counties in the state and found a lot of Democrats. In those counties, which hold more than 80 percent of the state’s voters, 52 percent of those who lost their voting rights because of a conviction were Democrats. Only 14 percent of those who lost their voting rights because of felony convictions were Republicans. The rest had no partisan affiliation. ... Democrats could see a net gain of several hundred thousand votes from the new amendment.

Kulaks everywhere: The failure of Kristolnicht's kulturkampf in the countryside has him worried about 2020


Cobra, a few bricks short of a load, cops a feel at a cop funeral


New York's moron Senatrix, Kirsten Gillibrand, doesn't know seven states, including her own, didn't have a popular vote for president, for example in 1796

There was no principle of one person, one vote. The legislatures of Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Massachusetts and Vermont appointed Electors to the Electoral College. Other states actually had Electors names on the ballots, not the names of the presidential candidates. And women didn't get to vote everywhere as a matter of federal law until 1920.

Kirsten is giving Hawaii's Crazy Mazie a run for her money.

There are so many women suddenly coming out against Joe Biden that . . .


Everything human beings touch turns into a shit-hole, including near-earth orbit

Space debris from India’s anti-satellite missile test a threat to ISS, NASA says :

But speaking on Monday, Bridenstine said NASA had identified 400 pieces of orbital debris from the test, with at least 24 of them — each one larger than 10 cm — having gone above the apogee of the ISS, something he described as “a terrible, terrible thing” and which put the safety of the ISS at risk. However, he confirmed that because the test was carried out low enough in Earth orbit, the fragments — and therefore the risk — would dissipate over time. The space agency is currently tracking 23,000 pieces of orbital debris, each one 10 cm or larger. Scientists, meanwhile, have been working on a number of different projects aimed at getting rid of the debris.

 

When Republicans like Rush Limbaugh keep blaming loss of the House on "retirements", just remember Republicans didn't even run candidates in 38 districts

Republicans ran no one against the Democrat in 38 districts in 2018:
 
AL-7
AZ-7
CA-5
CA-6
CA-13
CA-20
CA-27
CA-34
CA-40
CA-44
FL-10
FL-14
FL-20
FL-21
FL-24
GA-5
LA-2
MA-1
MA-4
MA-7
MA-8
MI-13
MS-2
NY-5
NY-6
NY-7
NY-8
NY-16
NY-17
PA-18
TX-9
TX-20
TX-28
TX-30
VA-3
WA-2
WA-9
WI-2.

Democrats meanwhile abandoned the field in just four districts:

AK-1
CA-8
GA-8
NC-3.

Like lotto, you gotta be in it to win it.

It also helps to have a message.

Do Republicans have one anymore, except more freedom?

You know, freedom to ship your jobs overseas where the labor is cheaper and safety, health, and environmental regulation is next to nonexistent, freedom to cut the taxes of the businesses that won't give you a job, freedom to spend your tax dollars on defense of "US interests" abroad which are really the interests of those businesses not yours, freedom to keep bringing in millions of cheaper laborers to compete for your jobs and drive down your wages, and freedom to keep charging 4.45% for federal students loans in a 2.49% 10-yr note economy.

Yes, we need freedom all right. Freedom from Republicans.

Unfortunately that means Democrats.

Which is why we are well and truly screwed.

Sunday, March 31, 2019

Democrats should man-up and go full socialist and back Bernie: They're gonna lose anyway, might as well pick someone whose lunacy at least has some gravitas

Don't want no gaffe machine!
Don't need no furry queen!
Can't have no renegade cop!
Or a fake Indian tomahawk chop!
Just give us that Bernie man,
And his hurdy-gurdy socialist plan.

Hard to believe but it's cat-callin' lunch-box Joe by 7.4 over Sanders at Real Clear Politics


CBS, the most perverse of the news organizations, tries to put a positive spin on the coyotes

Hitler built the autobahn!


Wow, I missed this one: Michael Morell, former CIA director under Obama, in March 2017 said Chris Steele PAID Russkies for dossier info

Clinton Ally Says Smoke, But No Fire: No Russia-Trump Collusion:

About the dossier, Morell said, "Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can’t judge the information — you just can’t." The dossier "doesn’t take you anywhere, I don’t think," he said. He continued: "I had two questions when I first read it. One was, How did Chris talk to these sources? I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries. "And then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this information, what was their motivation? And I subsequently learned that he paid them. That the intermediaries paid the sources and the intermediaries got the money from Chris. And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you’re paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call you up and say, ‘hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for you,’ because they want to get paid some more. "I think you’ve got to take all that into consideration when you consider the dossier." Another former CIA officer in the room pointed out that the CIA also pays its sources. "But we know who the source [i]s and we know how they got the information," Morell responded.

 

Sad to see Glenn Greenwald retweeting the spitting-on-Vietnam-vets-is-a-myth crap

The left-wing standard for doubting the veracity of the claims continues to be the inability to find corroborating news accounts at the time of the alleged spitting incidents, as if Vietnam vets were such whiny weenies that they ran like babies to the papers to complain "that hippie spit on me!" See the 1998 book by Jerry Lembcke which depends on this line of reasoning to argue the spitting incidents are a myth.

In our own time there has been a virtual news blackout on assaults against Trump supporters, especially during 2015 and 2016, which partisans point to as evidence those also are myths.

"If we don't report it, it's not news."

The problem with this analysis, now standard, is that libertarianism co-opted conservatism

The three-legged stool of "conservatism" in the age of Reagan consisted of a libertarian leg, a social conservative leg, and a foreign policy hawk leg. The libertarian leg came to dominate (the money interest), as is typical, which discarded the conservative leg except when it needed it, at election time (traditional values agenda), and put the foreign policy leg to work in its interests (global free trade).

This has happened before. The proponents of the professional, managerial state in the early 20th century similarly co-opted the rural Christian farming population to pass the "progressive" agenda, in the name of Christian fairness, of women's suffrage, popular election of senators, the corporate and income taxes to make business and the rich pay their fair share, and Prohibition, in exchange for political power.

The gulls in this game have always been the core Christian population. They are being replaced now, however, by a new class, the Latinos.

The 3-D chess masters will have to run the future scenarios. Yo no hablo espanol. But I expect them to be less charitable when jilted.

Current illegal immigration surge totally predictable but Trump botched the response


The Border Patrol has been facing a record influx of migrant families since fall, but in recent weeks the numbers have begun to escalate substantially, thanks to the annual surge before the arrival of the deadly summer heat.

For months, the federal authorities knew that this spring was likely to set records, but only now is it becoming apparent how big the numbers will be. Apprehensions already dwarf the numbers of five years ago and echo those of the spring of 2014, when the arrival of the first migrant families from Central America transformed the nature of immigration along the southern border.

“The current surge was totally predictable and the Trump administration chose not to prepare for it. Instead it launched a raft of harsh deterrence measures that were totally ineffective,” said Wayne Cornelius, a migration scholar at the University of California, San Diego. ...

In the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, nearly 400,000 migrants were apprehended at the border, a low figure compared with the peak of 1.6 million in 2000. But experts predict that arrivals this fiscal year could hit one million, a level not seen since the record numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Trump's incompetence combines with Congress' inaction on immigration resulting in human traffickers confidently overwhelming the asylum system with hordes of illegals


Border Patrol officials were on pace in March for more than 100,000 apprehensions and encounters with migrants – the highest monthly tally in over a decade, he said. Around 90 percent of those – or 90,000 – crossed the border between legal ports of entry. ... Increasingly, smugglers are bringing larger numbers of families together and delivering them across the Rio Grande, knowing they’ll overrun facilities and be released until their immigration court date, she said. Under U.S. law, Border Patrol is not supposed to hold any migrant for longer than 72 hours. Usually, Border Patrol hands them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which can detain families for up to 20 days. But all of those facilities are overcrowded, [Theresa] Brown [of the Bipartisan Policy Center] said, leading Border Patrol to skip the transfer to ICE and release migrants to shelters en masse. “This is a system-wide collapse,” she said.

Saturday, March 30, 2019

No, not The Onion: New political party forms in the realm which gave us rum, sodomy and the lash, calls itself CUK

Short for Change UK, formed on the day when Brexit was finally supposed to occur.

Apparently their idea of change is no change, as in no Brexit.

Looks like the woman in the center realizes their mistake, but that's probably just wishful thinking.

Any seat in Parliament kept by one of these in the next election one wag says will constitute a CUK-hold, but they all already have made cucks of the people of the UK they represent. It is an odd fetish, thankfully, enjoyed by but few, less than 2% of the UK's constituencies. 

 


Friday, March 29, 2019

Education is so bad that even common idioms like "turned out" and "ended up" are lost to us

Or is it the toxoplasmosis?

67% of Democrats think Russia tampered with vote tallies to get Trump elected in latest Economist/YouGov poll

Democrats also believe in reincarnation, yoga, astrology, spiritual energy and the evil eye by 2 to 1 over Republicans in a Pew Research study from 2009.
The same goes for being in touch with the dead, ghosts and fortune tellers.

Independents are almost as bad at 1.8 to 1 on average.

Ding dong.

Leader of New Zealand mosque says the Joos did it!

Must be why Democrats run interference for Muslims so much.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

There's been no manufacturing jobs boom here in Michigan under Donald Trump, just more of the same


This has never been an economic boom, just more meh


Gee what a shock, millions of older Americans get fired in the Great Recession, and their homelessness soars

Welcome to libertarian hell.


UCSF researchers estimate that half of the single homeless adults are age 50 or older, compared to 11 percent in the early 1990s — a 354 percent uptick. This data is emblematic of a graying homeless population across the nation: America’s homeless elderly population is projected to nearly triple by 2030, according to new research encompassing New York City, Boston and Los Angeles County. And this problem spans the globe: A 2017 report on the U.K.’s homeless population found that the population of homeless people over 60 had increased 111 percent since 2009, and for those over 75 it had increased by 155 percent — compared to an increase of 48 percent in the general population.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Remember those 5 guys Obama let go to get back Bowe Bergdahl?


Maybe they could cast Rachel as Kayla Arnold in a tranny remake of The Wonder Years


Letting Jussie Smollett go is the kind of criminal justice reform you can expect from the woman who inspired it, Kamala Harris


Here in Grand Rapids, Ann, they're called Dutch Yetis: Their feet as so big you can actually hear them comin' up behind you


Jussie Smollett pretty tight with Moochelle


If Joe Biden gets his way white jurisprudential culture in America will be replaced with Smollett-style justice


Alexandra Chalupa's timeline of her activities and of her fears about Paul Manafort's influence in Ukraine in his capacity as part of the Trump campaign isn't convincing



In late 2015, a small group of Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian civic leaders visiting Washington, D.C. told Chalupa they had heard Manafort’s former clients in Ukraine were remobilizing again, and that Manafort had made a fortune working in Kyiv. ...

It was around this time that Chalupa started to develop a gut feeling that Manafort was poised to help Trump’s bid for the White House. ...

By early 2016, Chalupa notified a senior DNC executive that a political spin doctor who had worked against America’s interests for the pro-Kremlin Yanukovych and was linked to some of the most powerful Russian oligarchs serving Putin was to play an important role in the effort to get Trump elected. ...

On March 28, The New York Times broke the story that Manafort had joined the Trump campaign.

The problem with this timeline and Chalupa's obsession with Manafort's Ukraine connection is that Manafort's overture to Trump to come on to the campaign didn't come until February 29, 2016, according to The New York Times. And the overture came at the urging of Trump's close friend Tom Barrack, who wanted Manafort to help a flailing and inexperienced Trump by managing successfully the potentially explosive upcoming Republican convention in Cleveland. Manafort's Republican political experience dating from 1976 onwards is well known.

Chalupa would have had no reason to believe Manafort would suddenly become active in the Trump campaign in late 2015 and early 2016, as she claims, when it wasn't until sometime in mid-February 2016 that Tom Barrack made his pitch to Manafort.

It is more likely that Manafort became the convenient focus for Chalupa after the fact when all along it was opposition to Trump's proposed opening to Russia which motivated her activism and overtures to the DNC long before Manafort came on the scene.

There is absolutely nothing in this puff piece in The Kyiv Post about Chalupa's longstanding loyalty to and work for the Clintons.

Alexandra Chalupa is at the nexus of what has become the criminalization of a foreign policy difference between Trump Republicans on the one hand and Democrats and NeverTrumpers on the other, like John McCain who was notably famous for his deep involvement in the political dispute in Ukraine.

George Washington tried to warn us about the consequences of entangling foreign alliances, and those have been Exhibit A for the last two years.



If 29% of 2016 population 55 and older have absolutely nothing coming in retirement except Social Security, we're talking about 26 million Americans


Of those 55 and older, 48 percent had nothing put away in a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan or an individual retirement account, according to a GAO estimate for 2016 that was released Tuesday. That’s an improvement from the 52 percent without retirement money in 2013.

Two in five of such households did have access to a traditional pension, also known as a defined benefit plan. However, 29 percent of older Americans had neither a pension nor any assets in a 401(k) or IRA account.


Lee Stranahan in Dec 2018: CNN peddled lies trying to put daylight between DNC and Alexandra Chalupa, but Wikileaks now proves Chalupa was working with Dems to connect Trump to Russia long before DNC was hacked or Trump Tower meeting

And notice how after Hillary's unexpected loss, Chalupa's sister, who admits Alexandra's role with the DNC,  is suddenly deeply involved in the effort to spread the story that the Russkies hacked the voting totals of Election 2016. 


Over the weekend, Wikileaks tweeted about how CNN had reported last year a denial by the Democratic National Committee and Hilary [sic] Clinton officials of illegal election collusion between the DNC and the government of Ukraine during the 2015 [sic] election. CNN’s conduct is a textbook example of smothering a story and leaving out relevant facts.

The story that CNN was trying to bury was published in Politico in January 2017 titled Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire. That story was written by David Stern and Ken Vogel (who is now writing at the New York Times) detailed how a DNC operative named Alexander [sic] Chalupa worked closely with officials at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, including Ukrainian Ambassador Chaly, to try and dig up dirt connecting Donald Trump and Paul Manafort to Russia. The story also mentions that Chalupa told people that the Democrats were planning to hold hearing connecting Trump to Russia in fall of 2016, just before the election.

It should be noted that this illegal attempt to gather information from the Democrats [sic] was underway by March, 2016…which is before the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC was detected as well before the Trump Tower meeting that are cited by the media as examples of Russian collusion. In other words, the DNC was actively working on a plan to connect Trump to Russia before the alleged collusion ever happened.



I reported on this, what, like in July 2017, how POLITICO already in Jan 2017 tried to spin Hillary's collusion with Ukraine

Here, where the exploits of one anti-Russian pro-Ukrainian Alexandra Chalupa may ultimately be the origin for the whole Trump-Russia collusion narrative of the last two years.

She really ought to be investigated and deposed. Maybe she knows more than she's letting on about how the New York Times got the information it published causing Manafort to resign from the Trump campaign.

In the article below John Solomon appears to be completely oblivious to this POLITICO article excerpted at the link above, which outlined how long time Clinton ally and Ukrainian-American activist Alexandra Chalupa was instrumental in siccing Democrats on Paul Manafort for his alleged Russian ties immediately after Manafort became Trump's campaign manager in 2016. The DNC and Marcy Kaptur in particular are named as very interested parties who gave Chalupa a hearing, as were Ukrainian diplomats. Chalupa also notably claims to have been a major source on Ukraine for the reporter Michael Isikoff.

The upshot is that the Hillary campaign as the pro-Ukrainian in the 2016 race (along with John McCain!) was the intended principal beneficiary of the effort to destroy Manafort for his alleged pro-Russian activities.


Ukraine’s top prosecutor divulged in an interview aired Wednesday on Hill.TV that he has opened an investigation into whether his country’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.

The leak of the so-called black ledger files to U.S. media prompted Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign and gave rise to one of the key allegations in the Russia collusion probe that has dogged Trump for the last two and a half years.

Ukraine Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko’s probe was prompted by a Ukrainian parliamentarian's release of a tape recording purporting to quote a top law enforcement official as saying his agency leaked the Manafort financial records to help Clinton's campaign.


Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Support for single payer healthcare has fallen since 2017, opposition to it has risen, country is divided

I thought Obamacare was supposed to have fixed everything?

You mean it didn't?

Somebody get Obama on the phone.

Border Patrol in Rio Grande Valley has apprehended illegals from 44 countries, on track for 60, not like before when it was the same people over and over again

Border Patrol: 25,000 Illegal Aliens Evaded Capture in Southeast Texas:

"So far, here in south Texas, we’ve apprehended folks from 44 different countries. These are from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, you name it.” Although most illegal aliens hail from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, Ortiz estimates that by the end of the year, Border Patrol will have apprehended people from 60 different countries. ... Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said that although Border Patrol apprehended more than 1 million people in the early- to mid-2000s, it was often the same people, from Mexico, and it was easy to return them. ... “But now, that’s not what we’re dealing with. We’re on pace to have about 900,000 arrests, but that’s 900,000 people that we’re dealing with. Whereas back in the early-2000s, we were dealing with somewhere around 500,000, 600,000 people. We were just arresting the same person over and over and over again. So we’re dealing with something that’s just never been dealt with before. And if we don’t get the support from Congress, we’re going to fail. Period.”

Bush 43 appointed federal judge voids North Carolina law outlawing abortions after 20 weeks

Federal judge strikes down North Carolina post-20 week abortion ban

Bankrolled into office by George Soros, it's almost as if Kim Foxx let Smollett go after reading statement from Chicago's Fraternal Order of Police yesterday


Ann Coulter also knows federal civil rights laws are designed to prevent blacks excusing black crime, whites excusing white


Ann Coulter knows the meaning of "tribal" which Zmirak says he doesn't


John Zmirak pretends his "tribal" wasn't a dogwhistle, blocks the guy who answers it


Jussie Smollett off the hook on 16 felony charges for anti-Trump hoax in Shittown


No shit Sherlock, you're just a tabloid, a shameless repeater of bias, baseless speculation, snarky innuendo and smears

CNN President Jeff Zucker Defends Network’s Coverage of Mueller Probe: ‘We Are Not Investigators’

 

Looks like "we" aren't going to impeach anybody after all, you mother