We're all Good Germans: "As Ben Casselman at FiveThirtyEight has pointed out, grand juries nearly always decide to indict — unless the perpetrator is an on-duty law-enforcement official. In such cases, the jury goes in the diametrically opposite direction and nearly always lets the perp off without a trial. This is true even when the act of violence leads to death, even when the confrontation was the result of police error, and even when the victim was (like Michael Brown) unarmed."

Ze authorities iss alvays right!  Ja. Das ist the ting!  More oompah ooompahing here. Grand Juries - originally a key protection of the common law - have been turned into liberal fascist jokes.  Only 11 out of 162,000 times did a Federal Grand Jury refuse to indict.  And since 97% of the indicted are intimidated into pleading, it means that the Feds can destroy anyone they want to.  Anyone.

Hey I have an idea:  why don't we treat cops and their vile lawyer overlords like everyone else rather than death dealing demigods. I know, I know: blasphemy! The state is our savior! 

Obama! Chew got some 'splaining to do!

Polls say that among Latino voters (aka Citizens) Jobs, The Economy and Healthcare trumped immigration:

When asked in an October Pew survey about five issues in this year’s congressional campaign, more cited education (92 percent), jobs and the economy (91 percent), and health care (86 percent) as extremely important or very important to them. By comparison, 73 percent said the same about immigration

And caring about immigration cuts both pro and con.  And since the big "O" has fumbled the first three pretty badly he thinks he can con latinos by letting a whole bunch more in to compete for the limited jobs and government funded healthcare available.  Amnesty is about making voters who are permanently dependent up on Democrats for their status.

I think Republicans should pass a Constitutional Amendment that says:  every person in the US as of November 6 2014 is a permanent resident and has the right to become a citizen under current law.  Every person entering the country illegally after that date can never become a permanent resident, can never become a citizen and can never, ever have any form of legal status whatsoever in the United States or its territories. And additionally, that states can enforce the US immigration law and bill the US for their costs. I know, I know, Democrats won't enforce it any more than they've ever enforced the 14th Amendment, they're pickers and choosers when it comes to law, but Republicans can. 

Most importantly, it would go a long way towards stopping the Democrat goal of creating a permanent underclass clientele who get here only under their dispensation and pervert our politics.  Resolutely Republican states would have higher wages and no illegal problems.  California and New York would become  howling  third world wastelands but they're already headed there, this just gets them to hell quicker.  And places like Massachusetts and Minnesota would see their lily white politics overwhelmed by all the illegals - unless they enforce the law that is. Texas could set up corridors and wave them through  so that oh so liberal northern and northeastern states could have their very own favellas. And become 'racist' and 'nativist' hotbeds as a result while we southerners shake our heads at all that Yankee nastiness.

And Democrats would oppose the amendment because what they really want is people to come here illegally and suffer and then every twenty years or so 'give' them 'relief' so that they'll be loyal.  The suffering is key to the loyalty, you see.  And their vile cynicism would be on display for all to see.

Poor little Democrat Lambikins lost in the woods - Even Rahm "The Ram" Emmanuel is flummoxed as to what to do

The Rahmmer raised Chicago taxes and fees almost $500 a household in his first term, that's roughly $1.5 billion dollars a year. But it isn't enough.  He could double it and double it and double it again and it won't cover Chicago's obligations to its unions - who are key to getting elected.  And Illinois can't help because it's in even worse shape and no moderate Republican 'wondergov' can change that.  And the Feds?  Well the Dems had a chance to use the printing press to bail themselves out of years of drunken profligacy at the state and local level with the stroke of a pen when they had 60 senate votes. But instead, Narcisso the Wonder President went for a ruinously expensive and ill conceived healthcare boondoggle certain to cement his 'legacy'.

What that legacy will be can only be ascertained after Blue America goes well and truly bankrupt.  Job 1 for Republicans is to allow the Dems to luxuriate in the consequences of their choices. Tough, tough love is the therapy of choice. Job 2 is to make damn sure that the "Great Bankruptcy and Collapse" doesn't have enough Red in it to turn it purple.

Apparently the presumption of innocence does not extend to men accused of "sexual assault"

Defining men as a criminal class may become a self fulfilling prophecy. I recommend a little of that old time procedural liberalism to my blue stockinged friends.

"Holistic" Admissions in the Ivy League means "no more than 19% gooks"

You see the problem with Asians is very few of them have rich and well connected parents.  And the Ivy is all about status and money.  In fairness when the Yids had poor and unconnected parents they froze them too.  As soon as Jews got rich well, come on down! Now they are six times more likely to be admitted than other whites - far greater numbers than their test scores would predict - and this will continue....until they run out of money.

The best racists are liberal racists. Read the whole thing.

Nope 'n Change: Record number of people forgoing medical care because of costs

The ugly hidden feature of Obamacare is that it drives massive healthcare inflation which is driving employers to implement high deductible plans.  Which actually is good but when combined with all of the restrictions on competition, cartelization and limits on promoting transparent pricing the only thing consumers can do to cope with exploding costs is forgo care.

So O'care means less healthcare and more expensive healthcare.

Hope and effing change indeed. My God these people are stupid, aren't they?  Or cynical. Or both.

Narcisso: The Wonder President

'I,' 'Me,' 'My': Obama Uses First Person Singular 91 Times in Speech... 

Sigh.

Hattip Drudge.

Another immense flaw in the neo Marxist Piketty Agitprop - Entrepeneurs

It turns out that le Piketty failed to even consider the category of entrepreneur manager wealth, instead conflating them with professional managers.  It turns out that:

It’s not a minor oversight: Self-employed business owners who actively manage their firms own around 70 percent of the wealth of the top 0.1 percent. With top earnings, too, business owners are far more important than salaried executives. 

The questionable misuse of the data and deliberate ignorance of our tax laws and transfer payments constitutes academic fraud. Or Marxist agitprop which is increasingly the same thing.

Read the whole thing.

Holy Sino Wastefulness, Batman, Post Communist Regimes are still insane. Just in a different way...

Intergalactic levels of wasteful investment indicates that real Chinese GDP is quite a bit lower than that reported by the Agitprop Division of the Chicoms. Absolutely amazing. Half is wasted.  Half! China is literally full of shit.  Useless shit.

“Ghost cities” lined with empty apartment blocks, abandoned highways and mothballed steel mills sprawl across China’s landscape – the outcome of government stimulus measures and hyperactive construction that have generated $6.8tn in wasted investment since 2009, according to a report by government researchers.

In 2009 and 2013 alone, “ineffective investment” came to nearly half the total invested in the Chinese economy in those years, according to research by Xu Ce of the National Development and Reform Commission, the state planning agency, and Wang Yuan from the Academy of Macroeconomic Research, a former arm of the NDRC.

…The bulk of wasted investment went directly into industries such as steel and automobile production that received the most support from the government following the 2008 global crisis, according to the report.

Mr Xu and Ms Wang said ultra-loose monetary policy, little or no oversight over government investment plans and distorted incentive structures for officials were largely to blame for the waste.

Don’t forget this part:

Misallocation of capital and poor investment decisions are not the only explanation for the enormous waste in China’s economy. A significant portion of China’s post-crisis stimulus binge was simply stolen by Communist Party officials with direct responsibility for boosting growth through investment, according to separate estimates by Chinese and overseas economists.

There is more here, from the excellent Jamil Anderlini. As Arnold Kling would say, 祝你今天愉快…

- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.W7IcZTpp.dpuf

Perhaps this explains why so many educated Chinese want the hell out.  It makes it doubly stupid for the Middle Kingdom to be throwing it's (wildly inflated) weight around.  Catch up with the US?  Never.  Ever.  This Dynasty is more wobbly than it looks.

Uber is hitting rent seekers where it hurts: in their medallions...

Taxi Medallion prices are an indicator of the level of state criminality in the car for hire market.  The higher the premium to participate in a rigged market, the worse the exploitation. Great news:  Medallions are plummetting.

We were talking about this at lunch the other day, and now Josh Barro steps forward with the numbers:

The average price of an individual New York City taxi medallion fell to $872,000 in October, down 17 percent from a peak reached in the spring of 2013, according to an analysis of sales data. Previous figures published by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission — showing flat prices — appear to have been incorrect, and the commission removed them from its website after an inquiry from The New York Times.

In other big cities, medallion prices are also falling, often in conjunction with a sharp decline in sales volume. In Chicago, prices are down 17 percent. In Boston, they’re down at least 20 percent, though it’s hard to establish an exact market price because there have been only five trades since July. In Philadelphia, the taxi authority recently scrapped a planned medallion auction.

There is more here. I learn also that Nevada just banned Uber.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.W7IcZTpp.dpuf

Kotkin on the ascendancy of the Left Plutocracy - Democrats had 13 billionaire supporters to 9 for Republicans for example

Most of the Money is now on the left: Richies are split, Corporates are split, Unions are Dem, Foundations and Charities are Dem, Universities and Schools are Dem, most media is Dem.  Almost all governments are Dem and two thirds of lawyers support Dem.  Dems massively out raised Republicans in the midterms.  Yet Dem brand is in trouble.

Demn.

Government is presented as a rational, empirical activity. It is in fact a religious institution.

Government dogma often strays far from any rational purpose as George Will points out here.

“Black Friday is the day wealthy whites are applauded for judging lower-class folks who are just trying to buy affordable gifts for their kids.”

Indeed.

CLASSISM AND DISDAIN: “Black Friday is the day wealthy whites are applauded for judging lower-class folks who are just trying to buy affordable gifts for their kids.”

Tin soldiers and Nixon's not coming Missouri's Democrats are finally done....

The Democrats were on their last legs in Missouri before Ferguson. Now with Nixon's cowardly failure to deploy the National Guard ahead of the Wilson announcement along with the feckless behavior of Democrat St. Louis county they are soooo done as a statewide party.

So done in Missourah! How many more? How many more?.

http://m.nationalreview.com/corner/393468/why-wasnt-national-guard-deployed-ferguson-last-night-john-fund

Mug him again.

And again and again and again and agai......

THE TELOS OF THE LIBERAL MIND?
Remember the old joke from the 1960s about the liberal cleric who told his congregation that he had been mugged, but that he sympathized with his mugger, because injustice, etc. . . Whereupon an elderly lady in the back of the pews mutters loudly, “Mug him again.”

The joke has come to life in Georgetown, where a student who was recently mugged at gunpoint has written an article justifying the muggers because of his privilege. I’d suspect this of being a grand punk job, but I think the student, Oliver Friedfeld, actually means it:

Last weekend, my housemate and I were mugged at gunpoint while walking home from Dupont Circle. The entire incident lasted under a minute, as I was forced to the floor, handed over my phone and was patted down.

And yet, when a reporter asked whether I was surprised that this happened in Georgetown, I immediately answered: “Not at all.” It was so clear to me that we live in the most privileged neighborhood within a city that has historically been, and continues to be, harshly unequal. While we aren’t often confronted by this stark reality west of Rock Creek Park, the economic inequality is very real. . .

What has been most startling to me, even more so than the incident itself, have been the reactions I’ve gotten. I kept hearing “thugs,” “criminals” and “bad people.” While I understand why one might jump to that conclusion, I don’t think this is fair.

Not once did I consider our attackers to be “bad people.” I trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me. In fact, if they knew me, I bet they’d think I was okay. They wanted my stuff, not me. While I don’t know what exactly they needed the money for, I do know that I’ve never once had to think about going out on a Saturday night to mug people. I had never before seen a gun, let alone known where to get one. The fact that these two kids, who appeared younger than I, have even had to entertain these questions suggests their universes are light years away from mine. . .

Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as “thugs?” It’s precisely this kind of “otherization” that fuels the problem. . .

The millennial generation is taking over the reins of the world, and thus we are presented with a wonderful opportunity to right some of the wrongs of the past. As young people, we need to devote real energy to solving what are collective challenges. Until we do so, we should get comfortable with sporadic muggings and break-ins.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/11/the-telos-of-the-liberal-mind.php

Tens of millions getting sick every day? From one in ten million more ozone molecules? Puhleese.

This clown was credulously quoted in our agitprop of Record NYT arguing that a change in Ozone of 1.5/10,000,000 in the limited areas of the country for the limited periods of time that they are out of Ozone compliance would prevent them.

He's a prima facie lying clown. Which makes the NYT even more ridiculous. If that is possible.

The NYT is increasingly a Pinch'd leftist rag

Publishing someone they dislike's address in the hopes they will be harassed or hurt (if not then why publish?) Is so bush league. Pathetic.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/11/why-did-the-new-york-times-say-where-darren-wilson-lives.php

Unconstitutional and irrelevant - that's our Gummint

Thuggish and irrelevant is no way to go through life, Feds. Leave our digestion alone.

NO, AND I HOPE SOMEONE CHALLENGES THEM ON THIS: Constitution Check: Does the government have the authority to write restaurant menus?

It’s also an obsolete approach, now that there are loads of smartphone apps that give you more detailed nutritional info — carb/fat/protein breakdowns, for example — at your fingertips

Hattie instapundit.com

It turns out that US income mobility is identical to Canada and Sweden

There's been a lot of very shoddy data and claims made about income inequality and intergenerational income mobility that purported to "prove" that the poor were much more likely to stay poor in America than the other two countries. I always struggle with this finding because of the counter evidence from immigration. Sweden, being a good world citizen gets a lot of refugees and  Canada aggressively discriminates against poor immigrants while the US takes all comers - if the US has such poor prospects for the poor  why don't they go elsewhere?. It's also strange that the areas of the US with lowest income mobility also tend to be places where people move to. While the highest mobility places are places people move from. Immigrants looking to get ahead should move to places like Wisconsin where mobility is "great" yet they move to Texas instead by the millions, particularly Asians of all stripes. Why? Texas isn't any closer and there's no more cultural affinity. And according to left wing economists there's no equality or opportunity in Texas. Yet they pour in in droves, bypassing Massachusetts and Iowa and all the other egalitarian meccas for the "hate and inequality" filled south.

It turns out that when you set out to understand the data rather than create agitrop, the convenient Marxist envy based conclusions evaporate like greasy Friedrich Engels Sauerbrauten belches on a windy night. Which is an inconvenient truth if I ever saw one. Scott Winship explains.

I take exception with his "early childhood education will help" line. Perhaps the single most expensive piece of social science ever done found that the highest quality early education likely to ever offered - Federal Head Start - had no, nada, nunca long term impact on educational outcomes. All improvements disappeared by third grade. The Obami buried and compsted the research despite being conducted by HHS and Education educrats who so much wanted it to show benefit.  Apparently early childhood education is the new leftist boondoggle so they can achieve "permanent rule" now that income inequality and Healthcare are in the toilet.

It would be so much better if the left veering would try a policy that the data said would work rather than the policy that maxes benefits to favored groups and government employees.

But that would be a policy of less government. And where's the left wing ROI in that?

The Pilgrims were the original leftists

Anyone who's read an honest history of the Pilgrims knows that when they got to America they were essentially a socialist Religious community seeking to build a heaven on earth. They failed and despite finding enormous food caches left by the smallpox and influenza ravaged Indians they almost starved until they granted permanent property rights to each family. As such, the first Thanksgiving can be read as the Pilgrims giving thanks to God for delivering them from the 17th century equivalent of Left Liberal  rule.

As Paul Rahe writes:

We have much to learn from the history of the Plymouth Plantation. For, in their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims conducted an experiment in social engineering akin to what is now contemplated; and, after an abortive attempt at cultivating the land in common, their leaders reflected on the results in a manner that Americans today should find instructive.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Moreover, he observes, “the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, America’s first socialist experiment “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

In practice, “the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”

But the original heritage of the Seperatists explains a few other things about left liberals:

1. Why a grim eat your peas puritanical streak runs through everything they do
2. Why they look upon their politics as a "mission" and a "calling" rather than a practical set of tasks
3. Why they continually behave as if they are building a shining city on a hill or ushering the new heaven and earth. "Hope" "Change" "FundamentallyTransform" "A new politics of meaning" "Ask not blah blah bla...." and so on and so forth in messianic ad infinitum.
4. Why they consider their ideological adversaries not to be mistaken but to be evil.
5. And finally: Why any institution dominated by them quickly drives heterodox thinkers out to the modern day equivalent of Rhode Island.

More at the link.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/11/americas-first-socialist-republic-3.php

Winter's coming: Great Lakes ice forming earliest in 40 years

This AGW thing gets curiouser and curiouser every day. Could it be that our boffins have boffed it up? 

http://www.mlive.com/weather/index.ssf/2014/11/great_lakes_ice_cover_developi.html

In 162,000 cases, Federal Grand Juries failed to indict in 11

Or about one "no" for every 15,000 "yeses". And about 97% of the prosecuted cases ended in a plea agreement with only 3 percent going before a jury. Clearly the key factor in your being convicted is whether or not the government targets you, not your guilt or innocence. No wonder we have incarceration and conviction rates rivaling Stalin's Great Terror.

Another signpost on our way to banana republic status. Great graphic at the link.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/11/24/the-rarity-of-a-federal-grand-jury-not-indicting-visualized/?tid=pm_politics_pop

Peter Thiel on how colleges fail us

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/peter-thiel-thinking-too-highly-of-higher-ed/2014/11/21/f6758fba-70d4-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html

Obama dumps on close allies Canada, Israel, the UK, Poland and now Australia. While cozying up to Mullahs and gerontocrats in Iran and China.

So much damage so little regard for others or our long term interests. Read about the outraged Aussie reaction at the link. "Unprecedented" gets used.

President Obama's Amnesty was "Worse than a crime. It was a Blunder"

Talleyrand said that after Napoleon had committed some senseless outrage that hurt his cause.  The same holds true for our President's Constitutional "Innovation".  But first let me be clear: I think the current illegal immigrant situation is untenable and immoral.  We need as a nation to resolve the iniquitous exploitation of millions of undocumented and illegal immigrants in a way that is just to them and to the people like my Sister In Law who worked two jobs and spent half her life bringing every one of her siblings from El Salvador legally. Unfortunately our President by acting outside of our constitutional traditions has made solving the problem much harder because:

He has made the issue infinitely more partisan.  Many conservatives and moderates agree with me that we need to solve the problem.  It was hard enough to be in favor of reform when you had Democrats proclaiming that the rise of immigrant groups 'guaranteed' Democrat hegemony going forward. Now the President, in the face of a crushing electoral defeat, without even waiting for the new Congress, freelances a 'solution' that is cynically tuned to provoke a segment of conservative opinion and cause an overreaction.  By acting unilaterally he is repeating the abortion blunder, poisoning the issue for a generation or more.

He has "Taken 5 million hostages". Things that can be 'done' by decree can be undone by decree.  These people's 'amnesty' is not based on law but on the President's  whim and his party's continuing ownership of the White House.  Paradoxically the man these people consider to be their 'savior' is also their jailer.

He has set a precedent that is much more harmful to his party than it is to Republicans. The Democratic party's agenda is very heavy on state solutions to problems that include detailed regulations, subsidies, mandates and 'enforcement'.  It would be easy for a Republican President to decline to enforce these mandates.  I can make a long list of pet Democrat laws that would collapse into nothing if a President Rubio or Jindal simply decided to use his newfound, shiny Barack Obama issued 'prosecutorial discretion'.  The Republicans, being less interventionist are far, far less exposed.  It is unwise for people with glass jaws to throw punches.

He has given a sterling example to the electorate for why they need to elect a Republican next time. Some voters who usually lean left but value the protections that a constrained executive give them will think twice before encouraging this type of behavior.  And people who usually lean left but are upset about immigration (almost every black American and the white working class, for example) will have one more reason to veer rightward. People forget just how quickly black voters switched from Republican to Democrat over a salient issue.

He has shown himself to be a deceitful narcissist.  Wapo has documented twenty occasions where Barack Obama talked about not having the power to do what he now intends to do. He is doing so in spite of the many bad outcomes that flow from it for the worst reasons possible:  to remain 'relevant' and to secure his 'place in history'.  In other words to indulge his prideful vanity.  They really didn't preach much bible at that church he used to go to did they?

He has shown his party to be cowards.  Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats could have passed any reform they wanted in his first two years.  It would have been easy and completely constitutional.  But they feared losing votes so they chose not to.  The Democrats talk a good game about how they support the President on this but they're in fact cowards who have provoked a constitutional crisis rather than doing what they say is the 'right thing' and taking the political consequences.

The Supreme Court.  Barack Obama has missed his opportunity to replace another aging liberal on the court.  It is unlikely that Justice Ginsberg will make it another six years, much less ten.  The President's high handed action and Harry Reids suspension of the filibuster for Appeals Court confirmations provides Mitch McConnell with all the cover he needs to suspend the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees when President Paul appoints a down the line conservative replacement for Ginsberg or Breyer or both.

I change my mind:  it was worse than a crime and worse than a blunder:  it's a strategic own goal of epic proportions whose reverberations will last for at least a generation. We can be so selfish and short sighted when we think righteousness is on our side.  In a Republic the process and the faith and loyalty it engenders is more important than today's outcome.  Much more important.  Fuck that up and you fuck everything up. Our dear left friends have forgotten that to the nation's sorrow.  This is going to get ugly before it gets better.

My God what a mess the liberal arts have become

This has to be read to be believed. The raw racialism and misanthropy is toxic on many elite campuses.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/11/is-there-any-hope-for-our-civilization.php

EU wants to break up Google because it's big and American

And that's evil QED.  Very similar to the justification of soak the rich and class warfare. Lefty means never having to justify yourself.

This Caesar has granted a boon to millions and the next Caesar can take it away

Caesarism is the concentration of true power in the hands of the top man while retaining constitutional forms. Rule becomes personal, dependent on the character of the ruler. And one Caesar can take away what another has granted. Rule that rests on one man's whims (and how can an action that he has argued in the past is unconstitutional be anything but a whim?) is inherently unstable,  capricious and ultimately violent.

That's what happens to Republics when the only thing that matters is who Caesar is. Caesar Obama has just made 5 million personal clients whose futures rest solely on his party remaining perpetually in power. People that have been raised in other Caesarist regimes and who have risked their lives to come here are much more likely to resort to violence to ensure that the "Right" Caesar remains in power. Something that a "Constitutional Scholar" must be aware of.

Still, it's surprising that the leader of a party that is so heavily reliant on complex, rube goldberg legal contraptions and coercion to implement its agenda would set a precedent that the executive doesn't have to enforce laws he doesn't like. Try this on for size:

President Rubio, confronted by a narrowly Democrat Senate demands that the 'green' laws that he says are strangling the economy be 'reformed', the Senate refuses. In retaliation Rubio refuses to enforce all green mandates so the entire ethanol industry collapses, green light bulb makers lose billions, all windmill and solar companies go out if business, innovation on electric and hybrid cars disappears and SUV sales soar.

Or how about refusing to enforce Obamacare mandates? Or rules limiting the use of Federal funds for school vouchers? In eight years a whole lot of the institutions that Democrats rely on to sustain their competitiveness could be severely weakened or even out of business. Republicans have a major advantage playing this game because their agenda is much less Federally activist. In this Obama and the Democrats are like a fighter with a glass jaw: if you can't take a punch you shouldn't throw one.

But I think the better analogy is child discipline: Barack Obama, having been spanked by the voters is in the basement sniveling and muttering "I'll show them" while playing with matches amid the old newspapers and oil soaked rags. Very foolish. Very childish.

Robert Tracinski points out that the president hasn't really dome anything except burnish his left wing legacy. He sure isn't doing the immigrants or Dees any favors:

What Obama is doing is creating a class of people—possibly millions of them—who are dependent solely on the favor of the emperor. As Eduardo Alvarez put it on Twitter: “A hostage class is born.” This is the real essence of Obama’s play for the Hispanic vote: they have to keep him or one of his gang in the White House, or cousin Felipe gets trundled back across the border.

This fits the broader pattern of Obama’s administration. By a combination of design and incompetence, he has built a system in which every part of his agenda has been accomplished primarily by executive order and can only be sustained based on the will of the executive.

Even with his signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare, consider how much of the actual law has been changed from how it was written, altered by executive waivers and fanciful reinterpretations. This is what the Halbig case is about. The law as written specifically banned subsidies outside the state exchanges, but ObamaCare needs those subsidies to mask how the law increases the cost of health insurance. So the president ordered the IRS to reinterpret the law to allow them. Without this kind of executive rewrite, ObamaCare collapses.

Aye, there’s the rub. As Stephen Miller asks: “What’s Obama’s historical legacy if everything he does can be undone via executive order?” Look at the bind he has put his party in. If their entire agenda is enacted by executive fiat, then everything depends on an unbroken string of victories in presidential campaigns.

If this is the outcome of years of 'constitutional scholarship' at the University of Chicago then all I've got to say is that my Alma Mater is so very fucked.  The rest at the link.

Gruber demonstrates that being an academic means no real world consequences (for you)

Gruber made ridiculous pie in the sky projections about the cost of insurance going down. Projections that were refuted by Massachusetts' experience - which he should know about as he was its architect.

Who's dumber the President or the press for failing to due diligence this bozo?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/21/grubers-botched-obamacare-predictions/

Is the lack of black progress the legacy of slavery or statism?

Thomas Sowell - the most brilliant economist to not win a Nobel still living (and I doubt if he ever will because he's the "wrong kind" of black man) points out that black economic and social progress was fastest under Jim crow and slowed dramatically once a "liberal" regime arose. He also reminds us that the salvation of liberals inaugurated a massive and ongoing social collapse among blacks - under Jim Crow black children grew up in intact families and we're far less likely to harm each other than under our welfare state. You can read what he has to say here.

He makes a compelling argument but leaves out an important coincidental detail: the drug war was declared at about the same time blacks were liberated. Historically the drug trade had been centered in black neighborhoods and in effect what our Federal government did was start a massive multi trillion dollar war right on top of a people who had just gotten full civil rights.  The economic effects of aggressive prohibition were to drive the ROI on drug manufacture and distribution sky high, drawing a community already familiar and active with the trade in much deeper at a time when penalties became draconian. The rest is catastrophe.

So it's the same alliance of manipulative, centralized eat your peas  liberalism and the piously hateful church ladies that ushered in the first catastrophic prohibition that birthed its demon incubus: the war on drugs.

But that's not surprising: I've always considered Social "democracy" to be borne of a snobbish moral panic over "what's to become if us sophisticates if the lower orders are allowed to do as they please".

Hell it was invented by Prussian aristos in the late 19th century for just that reason. 

But every time another social Democrat is elected President they're  presented as the second coming of Christ. Which might explain the electoral chaos that tends to follow when people find out that instead of Jesus all they got was another blowhard, venal pol and his pack of unprincipled plug uglies manipulating the body politic in the name of their damned "legacy". "I gave you healthcare", "I gave you prosperity", "Happy days are here again because of me. No look at me, I'm the hero! You're the proles. I demand that you worship me!" (Note the petulant stamp of the foot).

Without the constitution we would be where the UK is with its new police laws

Of course the past two administration's have been steadily whittling away at its protections . Tonite was a classic example. Blue and red stockings never sleep. More about the earth shaking and truly obscene change in in an English man's relationship to his government at the link.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-asb-act-all-power-to-the-state/16218#.VG68c3rnbqA

It looks like the "stupid people" are wising up.

Henninger with one hypothesis for why the Democratic party is in such trouble: it's the Technocracy wot dunnit.

The original Democratic idea was at least benign. In the hands of the Obama-Gruber coalition, it has finally degraded into something else. It has become malign, a politics that has to be faked or crammed down.

The best and brightest of the Democratic left will now fashion legal arguments defending national government by executive order. Too late. It looks like the stupid people are wising up.

College fascism watch; Oxford bans abortion debate

SPEECH IS LIKE A TRAIN: WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT YOUR STOP, YOU GET OFF. Oxford cancels student-group-organized debate on abortion. Links at the link. Hattie instapubdit.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/198603/

Under Obama, U.S. personal freedom ranking slips below France

And I was feeling sooooo good about the country before. BHO: our Hugo Chavez without any of the cool Caudillo schtick. Sigh.

Americans' assessments of their personal freedom have significantly declined under President Obama, according to a new study from the Legatum Institute in London, and the United States now ranks below 20 other countries on this measure.

In other news, Americans' "we're so screwed" ranking surged to be higher than 38 other countries, including Kreplachistan and Lower Ruritania.

Obama telling grads to ignore those warnings about Caesarism

Barack Obama is just a slicker version of Hugo Chavez operating in a nation with a much more sophisticated and deep civic architecture.

It's a pity His Fraudulence wasn't taken back to Kenya as a youth because he'd be President for life by now. Course becoming ex President of Kenya makes you dead rather than a lionized centimillionaire golfer.

What a cynical, shallow man.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/05/05/obama_to_ohio_state_grads_reject_voices_that_warn_about_government_tyranny.html

It's ironic: a movement that has very few children desperately wants the state to impose their morality on everyone else

It's not just morally suspect to enlist the state in service to your religious beliefs about the nature of marriage, it's also practically insane for a self extinguishing minority estimated at no more than 2% of the population to demand that the state do so.

How long do these fools think they are going to remain fashionable? If history teaches us anything its that small heterodox minorities get crushed and slaughtered by powerful states. Rational minorities buttress the libertarian institutions and philosophies that defend everyone's right to do as they please not the majoritarian institutions of state supremacy and coercion.

But nobody ever said modern so called "liberals" were rational. God help them every one.

Samuelson on De Toqueville and the culture wars at the link.

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/11/19/what-tocqueville-can-teach-us-about-the-culture-war/

Don't look now but Google explains why it ditched R&D in renewables

In essence they concluded that even the best case rapid global adoption of the best renewable technologies couldn't achieve the goals that AGW alarmists have set for "stabilizing" the climate. In other words if the alarmists are right it's "kiss your ass goodbye" time unless sequestration technogies are massively adopted.

In other words we're doomed. Fortunately the hysterics are clearly wrong. Not that you'll hear that from our so called "great and good".

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineers-explain-why-they-stopped-rd-in-renewable-energy

The problem with Caesarism is all the Rubicons never get uncrossed

Every expansion of executive or judicial authority ends up becoming the norm. This President rewrites laws on the fly to suit his party's electoral needs? Tomorrow the other party will. This President issues executive decrees that last year he characterized as unconstitutional? Next time the other party will. Wapo'a editorial board provides a wonderfull example: 

It is 2017. Newly elected President Ted Cruz (R) insists he has won a mandate to repeal Obamacare. The Senate, narrowly back in Democratic hands, disagrees. Mr. Cruz instructs the Internal Revenue Service not to collect a fine from anyone who opts out of the individual mandate to buy health insurance, thereby neutering a key element of the program. It is a matter of prosecutorial discretion, Mr. Cruz explains; tax cheats are defrauding the government of billions, and he wants the IRS to concentrate on them. Of course, he is willing to modify his order as soon as Congress agrees to fix what he considers a “broken” health system.

Eventually the only thing that will matter in our politics is who Caesar is. And we know that story ends.

What a preventable disaster. Glen Kessler at Wapo demonstrates using the Constitutional Scholar in Chief's own testimony from the past how constitutionally criminal his amnesty will be. At the link.

Liberals to Red State Dems: our religion is more important than your survival

Mary Landrieu's last hope evaporates in the midst of Democrat indifference. Dozens of defeated Red state and district Dems who gave everything for their God must be wondering whether the State Religion is really worth it.

The God of State Supremacy is a brutal Gorgon devouring everything and everyone in its path.

This OECD chart speaks volumes beyond the obvious

Sure the US has the highest marginal tax rates on the top decile but look who's second: basket case Italy.

And look who's lowest? Perhaps the consistently most prosperous nation in the world: Switzerland.

But note the Scandinavians: they tax their rich far less.

Also note that  the six native English speaking countries have the highest marginal rates relative to top decile share of income. Only the Netherlands is as high any Anglo Saxon/Celtic nation. And of course the US is tops in this metric imposing the harshest taxes relative to top decile share in the OECD.

Why is the US so high in top decile income share ? Well when you remember that the US is the white hot center of global technological and business innovation and that the rewards for being number one in a field in the US dwarf those of any other nation it's not surprising income is both less equal and much higher on average than the rest of the OECD.

But remember that the income inequality argument is about two concerns:

1. Cosmic Justice or basic fairness or envy depending on your inclination.  It's a belief that fabulous wealth shouldn't fall to so few for whatever reason.

2. The fear that concentrations of wealth will distort our republic's politics , turning it into an oligarchy.

As to issue one all I can say is that sin will always be with us and since I am convinced that there is no distribution of income that the levelers would deem fair I say why bother? Particularly when we already do more leveling with our tax code than any other nation.

On number 2 my reaction is that the US because of its immense scale, decentralization and the many non governmental loci of power is the country least susceptible to undermining by a rich oligarchy.  Countries like Sweden, the UK and so on have a much greater history of oligarchic rule and yet they undertake far less leveling. Why aren't they worried while we are? I mean if they're so darn progressive?

More at the link.

“It was good being the party of Robin Hood. Until they morphed into the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

What happens when the party of the state needs so much money to keep its operations going that it must plunder it's working and middle class base to stay afloat? And it's still going to go bankrupt!

Sheriff of Rottingham, more like. The story is oh so familiar:

Henninger zooms in on the significance of all this in noting that the Democrats are the party of the state and public sector. “Over a long period,” he writes, “the costs of maintaining the state have risen inexorably, especially in the North due to public-union costs and transfer payments.” The problem is that there isn’t enough money in the public coffers to pay for the governmental structure that is the foundation of the Democrats’ political standing.

Unwilling to restructure government, state Democrats turned to taxes. “First,” writes Henninger, “they raised taxes on large business. Then the ‘wealthy.’ Then came the fees and regulatory costs for smaller businesses. In Maryland and Illinois, companies and the wealthy fled.”

But it still wasn’t enough, so Democratic politicians (and some Republicans, notes Henninger) started imposing regressive fees across the board. Then comes a passage that gets to the crux of the matter:

“Which means the party’s pols are now siphoning cash straight out of the budgets of their blue-collar and middle-class base. That hurts.”

Based on endless television interviews and Obama’s postelection news conference, it seems the Democrats are salving their wounds with two thoughts—first, this is merely the midterm elections and in presidential elections their constituency will come out in force and rescue them again; and second, those troublesome whites are going to be overrun demographically at some point, anyway, so there’s nothing to worry about.

This isn’t a governing philosophy. It isn’t even a philosophy. Many Democratic analysts figured that the demographic changes washing over America would hand them a governing position in the country without a fight. But that isn’t how democratic politics works. There’s always a fight, as the 2014 election returns demonstrate.

And despite all the taxing blue cities and states are still circling the fiscal drain: First Detroit and a batch of mid sized Californian cities and soon Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City (pulled forward by six months of truly insane fiscal profligacy by the new 'progressive' mayor) and a host of other oh so blue, oh so progressive garden spots will tip into the toilet.  To be followed by the formerly "great" states of California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland and so on.  And all the last minute "Tough Guy" moderate Republican Governors and big media shilling in the world won't save Dems from their fate:  to become the party of high taxes, collapsing services and bankruptcy.*

Read the whole thing. Happy days are here again!


*The other stalwsrts of the 'progressive' state are also scheduled to fail for the same reasons: hundreds upon hundreds of colleges and universities and urban school districts will die noisy, messy deaths with their self righteous faculties, staffs and students shrieking about how despite truly intergalactic levels of per student spending they are still being oppressed by honky white bread tax paying America, which will do wonders for the Party of the State's electoral prospects. But you kids go ahead and count on raw, overt racialism to save you.

All of the legislative incentives favor state intervention and deception - How else will the Grubers of the world get rich?

Gruver Ocare payday was at least $1.5 million.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Gruber’s Obamacare payday highlights ulterior motives behind ‘do something’ cry.

For all the cursing of congressional gridlock, one of the greatest sources of Washington’s evils may be the bias in favor of doing something.
As voices chime in from the major media, from K Street, and from party leadership for the new Republican Congress to do something, it’s worth pausing, taking a breath, and looking at the recent problems caused by this urge — and the less-than-noble incentives that sometimes drive it.
The Beltway media’s predominant bias is that, for every issue, Washington politicians should do something. The simplest explanation for this bias: it gives reporters something to write about. Inaction is bad for readership.
Democratic politicians’ uncontrollable urge to do something is tied up with their view of government’s role as the champion of justice, the wise arranger of the economy and shaper of culture.
But there’s a deeper motivation to do something, and the Republican leadership shares it: When government takes a more active role in the economy, it creates private-sector employment opportunities for the policymakers — and for their advisors, like Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber.
Gruber, the MIT professor who won almost $400,000 in contracts from the Obama administration in a non-competitive contract process, came into the spotlight again this month when a new video surfaced in which he admitted that “lack of transparency” was crucial to passing Obamacare.
My colleague Byron York pointed to a more interesting Gruber detail: After the bill passed, Gruber won hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts with state governments setting up the exchanges under Obamacare.
Gruber, then, had to mislead Americans (or maybe just their senators) in order to pass Obamacare, and that opened a gusher of lucrative contracts for him. There is no doubt that Gruber sincerely thought the country needed health-care reform. But still, his financial interest in the bill ought to have raised some skepticism about the numbers he was peddling.

“Harvard’s (sexual "assault") policy was written by people who think sexual assault is so heinous a crime that even innocence is not a defense.” - Alan Dershowitz

300 years ago in another Massachusetts town a few miles away a bunch of hysterical bigots went on a irrational panic fueled rampage. Ironic that the so called "greatest" university in the world is channeling 17th century anti woman Puritan bigots. Its alumni must be so proud.

With no sense of fair play or due process, just slavish obedience to the dictats of the Party of the State, America's universities are in the process of writing themselves out of the American story.

Who in their right mind would trust such people to deal fairly in anything? More at the link.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/198499/

What do you expect? Today's Universities are much more Neo Stalinist than Jeffersonian

And remember that Colombia refuses to release BHO's grades while Yale leaked GWB's.  One party Duchies with all the wealth and privileges of a Medieval Dukedom.  And about as much morality and tolerance for dissent.  Hattip Instapundit.com

AIRBRUSHING IN THE ERA OF OBAMA: University of Rhode Island Removes Gruber Video After It Goes Viral. First Penn, now this. You’d almost think that the higher ed establishment is in the tank for the Democrats or something.

And you wonder why conservatives like me hold our institutions of higher learning in contempt. These guys need to be careful or they could write themselves straight out of the American story.  Tax advantaged Duchies are awfully thin on the ground these days....

IRS wants to tax London mayor Boris Johnson because he was born here and left when he was five

In other news the IRS has not acted on the millions of dollars in back taxes that Al Sharpton has owed for more than a decade.

In other other news the IRS was forced to admit under oath that it hasn't even begun to look for the Emails that the IRS illegally destroyed despite Congressional and court subpeonas asking for them.

The subpeonas were to address allegations that the IRS singled out hundreds of conservative groups for harassment that IRS honcho and Dem contributor Lois Lerner took the Fifth to avoid testifying on.

In other other other news it was revealed that the Acting Commissioner of the IRS and its Chief Counsel visited the White House over 300 times in the first Obama term. The number of times they visited the Bush White House in the equivalent time span: 1.

Oh and Boris Johnson is, of course, a conservative. And people wonder why conservatives fear and distrust the Federal government.

The President is insane, isn't he?

David Brooks observes that Mr. Obama is behaving very strangely for a lame duck facing an opposing Congress. He's opting for destructive, Constitution damaging Caesarism rather than Republican modesty and conciliation.

The likely result is a Republican Wipeout two years hence and a more suspicious, anti government electorate.

This guy really, really, really doesn't have what it takes to be President. Brooks at the link.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/opinion/david-brooks-obama-in-winter.html?referrer=

Ed Rogers points out that the years of obsequious media shilling for Democrats hasn't exactly been good for their long term health

Poor pitiful Dems: shielded from reality by their media friends who don't think they can handle honest scrutiny.

They're probably right.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/11/17/the-insiders-where-is-the-scrutiny-of-the-democratic-party/

And these guys are the so called Palestinian moderates.

My God the Pals are insane aren't they? 

In recent weeks leaders of the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah party, both controlled by President Mahmoud Abbas have been calling for violence in Jerusalem. An incitement that has been ignored by Israel's 'friends' in the Obama administration

One wonders what would be their reaction if they really experienced all the depredations they claim. They are like surly teenagers who trash everything their parents do but then expect their allowance. Read the ugly details of official PA incitement.

And Obama: Obama is the most religious President we've ever had: worshipping in the Church of left orthodoxy regardless of consequence. A Church where defending Israelis are devils and terrorist Pals are angels.  Madness, truly madness.

This is a secret rejection of the market by someone not self aware enough to recognize what he's done.

If voters must become conversant in the arcana of health insurance and managed care to supervise the Republic then sign me up for Caudillo school right now. The brilliance of our republic has been that people didn't need to trouble themselves with what goes on in DC.

It's like the argument that the Free Market in detergent (or insert your commodity) is a sham because only a few percent of consumers are conversant about the product category. But that is the beauty of marginal thinking. A shift of a few percent changes the balance of power in a government or a market. Result: most people don't need to be geniuses, they can rely on healthy product and political markets to send them the right signals.

And the political market seems to be sorting itself out quite nicely right now thankyouverymuch. Sneering boffins right or left are tedious in the extreme.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/11/17/heres-what-jonathan-gruber-got-right/

To Obama: a new noun, to Barack: a new verb

In 2010 I predicted the following neologisms:

To Barack: verb, to screw up arrogantly. "Boy, you really baracked that up"

Obama: noun, a highly educated fool. "What a bunch of obamas"

I think we're just about there, don't you?

Top quintile pays for everything.

Actually the top quintile and the next generation pay for everything. And the reason that the results are so skewed is because of the insane price inflation that the Federal government programs have provoked in lower and higher education and health care.  Because these two line items make up a huge part of social spending, vastly more than they did thirty or forty years ago. But I can't see how giving the Feds more control over those sectors will do anything but accelerate the disaster.



This is from the CBO under bipartisan control so it's as close to level honest as our system can produce.  It is also a chart that you will never see in a class warrior's presentation.  This is a complete picture as opposed what the Marxist French Frauds spewed out to such acclaim among the ccognoscenti.

It turns out that when it came to obamacare, every Dem was singing off of Gruber's songsheet

All the " models" cited for enrollment or savings numbers were provided by Gruber who had a contractor relationship with the White House for which he was paid $400, 000. This was at the exact same time as he and the administration presented himself as an independent expert with his own models that just happened to jibe with what the administration was saying. No one realized at the time that this was because Gruber was on the inside producing the numbers telling them what to say in the first place. Without disclosing his conflict.  And the "best" journalists and economists fell into lockstep behind this fraud. Repeating Gruber's Obama funded lines over and over.

So it wasn't just accounting fraud or lies about keeping your plan it was even lies about the programs validation by outside experts who were insiders. The press didn't discover this because they didn't want to know. Once again our establishment fails us. More at the link.

http://m.weeklystandard.com/blogs/cbo-effectively-used-gruber-s-model-score-obamacare_819105.html?nopager=1

We're paranoid because the state has taught us we need to be

The state is everywhere.

NICK GILLESPIE: Americans Trust. Government Less and Less Because We Know More and More About How It Operates. It’s an interesting point that, at just about the same time Richard IEEEHofstadter was castigating the “paranoid strain” in American politics, the FBI was trying to get Martin Luther King to commit suicide

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/.

I love the way that the liberal intelligentsia is pulling the party leftward just as it has been punished for being too left wing.

It's as if these guys are stupid or something. God I love intellectuals. More drivel at the link.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/11/democrats_can_t_win_white_working_class_voters_the_party_is_too_closely.html?wpsrc=fol_tw

One third of all women imprisoned in the world are in the US

The drug warrior scum who rule us must be so proud.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-16/america-land-not-so-free-if-youre-woman

DC police actually budget the amount of property they are going to steal every year

This fits with police departments continuing education programs that teach the popo  how to steal. I wonder if the mob budgets it's theft or has continuing education requirements?

Oh and the DC guys were budgeting thefts done under Federal programs. So even if your state bans the activity the Feds will pay out boku bucks for behavior that is indistinguishable from that of many convicted and incarcerated felons.

We have some of the most corrupt law enforcement in the world - particularly at the Federal level. Kinda makes you proud.

The sordid details at the link.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/the-fine-art-of-public-sector-budgeting-for-seized-assets.html

The Knights of Anarchy - Prologue

OK first of all I know that I'm comparing us to that HBO series about the bikers:  Sons of Anarchy.  They are not our kids, I swear.  And there really is no comparison between them and us.  I don't think any of us had a tatoo back then or a Harley - a few of us did some light drug dealing (not me mom, I swear) but that's as far as it went.  I use the Knights of Anarchy handle because we were KAs and the guys at national said that we were supposed to be "Knights" or something pompous like that.  What we were were older boys with a few young men mixed in coming of age at the University of Tulsa in the early Reagan Years.  This is the distorted, flawed and for some of us deliberately redacted just short of libel remembrance of that short time when it seemed we could do anything.  Or least get away with a lot.

But enough about them let's talk about me: I am descended from a long line of KAs, most notably my Great Uncle Frank who had been a KA at the University of Oklahoma during prohibition, gaining notoriety for the Great Foaming Frat Incident.  Evidently to get around the national ban on alcohol and get 'tight' as he so quaintly put it Uncle Frank led the lads at the house in a beer making exercise.  They traditionally made their Spring Semester Lager in the winter, hiding hundreds of bottles in between the inner plaster lathe walls and the exterior brick to ferment.  Tragically that year saw a series of very early heatwaves with the spring temperatures in Norman soaring into the nineties.  And one very hot day the bottles began to burst one, then two then ten then a hundred and then almost all of them blew up in the first, second and third story walls with the beer pouring in a heated foam out through the first floor. Uncle Frank said that after it was all over it was amazing how many drunk dogs they found in and around the house.

This lassiez faire attitude towards alcohol is perhaps why my father chose to pledge the very same fraternity at the University of Tulsa. My father was so determined to have a good time that he actively risked losing his student deferment and being sent off to the Korean war.  Indeed, after three grueling semesters - the drinking and partying were grueling, the class work not so much - he succeeded in being kicked out of school and into the Army who luckily for him were winding down the Korea imbroglio and ramping up their deployments to the German Fraulein which according to my father replaced the Siegfried line facing the opposite way. Of course my father was not much into history so he could have gotten his frauleins mixed up. When he finally got out of the Army he rejoined the KAs - this time at OU where any nephew of Foaming Frank Smith was a friend of theirs.

One would think with this rich fraternal ancestry I would have jumped at the chance to pledge good old KA when I matriculated TU and you would be wrong.  One reason was because the chapter had just been let back on campus after a fairly large but very fraternal drug dealing ring had been found operating out of the the chapter room.  This was at the tail end of the Vietnam war and fraternities were in bad odor, not just because of all the funny smoke rising from them but because they were somehow considered to be warmongering tools of 'the Establishment'. Which I guess judging from my Dad's insouciance at being drafted to man the Fraulein made some sense.  Anyway it only had about seven members and the house, well I'll just say that the house was far from being a home.  But that's not the real reason I didn't engage in manly fraternization, no that reason was a woman.  Or a girl - my first true love - or third - one of them anyway.  Unfortunately it wasn't hers - her first true love would come only after she had gotten rid of me.  But she was back home and I wasn't so I spent most of my weekends schlepping back to bug her until she graduated and went to college so far away that I had to as she so sweetly put it "leave me the hell alone".  That's when I joined the old frat.

Up next:  The Un Fraternity

Top quintile earners pay all the net Federal taxes in the nation.

Well except for the one to four trillion a year that future generations are paying for....but they don't count because they can't vote yet.

Carpe diem has the details at the link.

Feminist just got voted off the island by Time

Of course Time then had to apologize to feminists for including feminist in they survey of words to ban so it would won by a huge margin.  The editor was about to be beaten to death by the handbag brigade.

Meanwhile, Time magazine last week ran an online poll of words that should be retired from the English language. The winner — by an enormous margin — was "feminist." That's fitting. With this sort of behavior in mind, it's no surprise that so many people feel that feminism has passed its sell-by date.

Only 23% of American women and only 20% of Americans overall identify as feminists, even though most are in favor of gender equality. Feminists, who like to say that feminism isgender equality, are unhappy with this, but I think the poll captures a truth. Whatever feminists say, their true priorities are revealed in what they do, and what they do is, mostly, man-bashing and special pleading.
When you act like what pioneer feminist Betty Friedan once called "female chauvinist boors," you shouldn't be surprised to lose popularity.

"Mean girls" online mobbing may be fun for some, but it's not likely to appeal for long. If self-proclaimed feminists have nothing more to offer than that sort of bullying, then their obsolescence is well deserved.

I always used to thunk that Rush Limbaugh's "feminazi" was over the top but I'm not so sure. There is a lot of brownshirt in the left wing perversion called feminism.

To bad we can't ban feminists.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/11/15/shirt-comet-girls-feminism-column/19083607/

What? You mean that kids think that an Obama initiative sucks? Who knew that kids could be so perceptive about statist manipulation.

The "healthy food initiatives' are such a joke that kids are organizing boycotts saying:

"It's not actually giving us healthy foods," Hellrood told Fox News. "It's giving us small portions of very processed foods."

Of course you only get this news from Fox because the rest of the media are so deep in the tank for their Lord and Savior. But something is seriously wrong.

Schools don't like it. More than 1,400 school districts have opted out of the USDA School Lunch Program since 2010. Students and families don't like it, either. According to federal government data, the USDA School Lunch Program served 180 million fewer lunches last year than it did at its high point, in 2010. Average participation for students who pay full meal prices now stands at just 9.2 million, a drop of nearly half from 1970 figures.

Some of the loudest blowback against Mrs. Obama's reforms has come from the School Nutrition Association. The SNA bills itself as "the only professional association dedicated solely to the support and well being of school nutrition professionals." It currently boasts"more than 55,000 members" across the country. SNA members—from so-called lunch ladies to state officials—are no doubt threatened by the First Lady's plans because of the realization of unintended consequences. Fewer lunches purchased means fewer federal funds go to reimburse schools. That, in turn, means the possibility for smaller budgets, potenial layoffs, leaner school kitchen staffs and, presumably, fewer SNA members.

The SNA has allied itself with House GOP members, who want to roll back the changes Mrs. Obama supports.
Even if it happened to be a good idea, the Federal government is utterly incompetent in the places where is is not actively corrupt.  Useless is the most apropos adjective to use when discussing our Federal 'saviors'.  What a joke.

One small step for man, one giant step for female pettiness

It's like the worst sexist stereotype you can imagine: a brilliant scientific achievement and all the women can talk about is what people are wearing. Glenn Reynolds ruthlessly mocks the gender hysterics at the link. Fun fun fun! Try this:

It seems to me that if you care about women in STEM, maybe you shouldn't want to communicate the notion that they're so delicate that they can't handle pictures of comic-book women. Will we stock our Mars spacecraft with fainting couches?

Or this:

As Chloe Price observed: "Imagine the ... storm if the scientist had been a woman and everyone focused solely on her clothes and not her achievements."

The wheels of badged pervert thugs turn sleazily

Making child porn to prosecute "child porn" and then suing when you get caught is a new low for our perverted popo. Another reason not to trust them. They always go to far, they always tend to abuse their power.

WHEELS OF JUSTICE: Cop Who Obtained Warrant To Take Photo Of Teen’s Erect Penis For Sexting Case Sues Teen’s Lawyer For Defamation. “The department, however, still backs the decision to create child porn in order to charge someone else with child porn creation and distribution. A close look at its statement indicates that there’s a bit of post-debacle blame-shifting going on.”

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/198300/

Joe Nocera illustrates why the NYT is increasingly irrelevant.

He has a piece saying he can't find "anyone" who is outright opposed to net neutrality while I read one panicked, impassioned plea after another begging our fixer in chief not to to fuck up one of the few bright spots in our utterly strangled economy.

Joey: if you're not going to ever get out if your upper west side bubble you really should get a new career. What a pathetic, blinkered buffoon. More of his buffonery at the link.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/joe-nocera-net-neutrality-rules.html?referrer=

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? The best the Dems can do?

Although they are both clearly better at their jobs than the President is at his. The Dems (il)logic for keeping a couple dumb old farts well past their sell by date is at the link.

One reason of course is they can deny anything and when caught out claim senility. That's what happened when the Pelosiraptor was caught lying about knowing the loquacious Dr. Gruber.

More stunned amazement at our left wing's incipient Alzheimerification at the link.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/harry-reid-senate-democrats-112882.html

Mollie Hemingway explains why Jon Stewart is not only a leftist shill but an ignorant leftist shill

To think that Jimmy Carter's ex presidential ministry is anything but a brutally ugly joke is the height of delusion. But it's a very common delusion on the left where identity always trumps reality.

Mollie chums the water with Stewart's ignorant glorification of Carter's ignorant glorification of evil at the link.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/11/11/jimmy-carter-spends-his-time-pimping-for-tyrants-so-of-course-jon-stewart-loves-him/

The Rosetta lander is dead.

So is this a great moment for the Euro  space bureaucrats?

The reign of terror of a ' socially awkward male' or are women becoming too weak to go to college alone anymore?

The blue stocking hysteria has reached Canada.  Apparently women need to be kept home until they are married or turn 30. To protect them from socially awkward situations.

Ain't feminism grand?

The state kills so many possibilities - one woman's lament

I thought this was an interesting take on the things we lose when we get saved from ourselves. At the link.

Something senseless this way comes. How overreach guarantees chaos.

Gerson points out that ten years ago there was bipartisan support for sensible Healthcare Reform,  immigration reform, AGW remediation and I'll add one other: Social security reform. Today all are points of brutal partisan war why?

1. Big differences on big issues with big consequences. Obviously.

2. Winner takes all attitude by dems

3. Borne of their religious dogma to wit:

- our coalition is destined to dominate
- what we believe is right and moral and inevitable

Needless to say this is ludicrous madness, easily shredded as soon as you think seriously on it. But when you invest your temporal beliefs with transcendent significance you reduce your room for maneuver and compromise.

And the President is the most ardent believer of all: on immigration he could have passed the Bush package that narrowly lost in his first two years - or even something more to his liking. But instead, believing his "inevitability of righteousness" shtick he dawdled. And then he deliberately provoked the majority of the nation by issuing amnesties and de facto opening the southern border to unlimited illegal immigration.

And his religious dogma leads him to dismiss his critics as a dwindling band of white haters rather than recognizing that in politics, like physics, every action eventually  creates an equal but opposite reaction. Without a doubt Obama's super amnesty will result in the lamest of lame ducks trying to rule like a caudillo via "Presidential Decrees" leading to a real blowout and total Republican hegemony in two years.

He's really going to piss the country off, poisoning the Democratic brand for some time to come. But when you've been told how swell you are so much and given prizes for doing nothing not to mention being regularly compared to Jesus Christ you begin to believe you're invincible.  And even after being trounced.

From childhood this President has been systematically kept away from reality. Six years in the White House has led him to float completely away. If he were Idi Amin this would be the "kill and eat your opponents" phase of his administration. Thank God he's not. But he is seriously detached from reality.

China vows to begin aggressively falsifying CO2 output numbers. NYT and liberal America swoon.

When China's apparatchiks get together with our apparatchik in chief you know the lies are going to fly fast and thick. And you know that Pravda on the Hudson is going to hail this as the second coming of Christ. Wait they already did that in 2009. Okay, the 600th coming of the Christ. Here's the Onion's take.

BEIJING—Acknowledging the industrialized nation’s role in global climate change, China reportedly reached a landmark agreement with the United States Wednesday, pledging to significantly increase the rate at which it falsifies air pollution data over the next 15 years

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/11/hallelujah-climate-salvation-in-our-time.php

Feminists hate men. So what else is new.?

Article on how "anti misogynist" videos are all the rage online and how the cumulative effect is anti man. I used to joke about how liberal men who supported feminists had been neutered. Now I think they're truly cowards and weaklings. Much like many pastors and other high status Christians are afraid of Church ladies. Details at the link.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11228387/The-internet-hates-men-and-no-ones-a-winner.html

We must also tell them that no more of this take off a few years part time crap

ASHE SCHOW: A Modest Proposal For Closing The Gender Wage Gap. “Every reputable study suggests that working age women earn less than men mostly due to the choices women make in their careers. The scientists know this, the economists know this — even the White House knows this. And so I humbly present my own proposal for closing the gender wage gap, which I hope will not only solve the problem but also satisfy voices on all sides of the argument. As a society, we must begin telling women what subjects they can major in, what colleges they can attend, and what jobs they can take.”

I can't imagine why anyone would be upset by this because it's in the finest tradition of the authoritarian state along with jailing people who use the wrong drugs, provide services to customers in their homes or happen to be a man on a date that the woman later regrets.  Openly manipulating women's careers is just the next logical step on the progressive journey to nowhere.  Oops, I mean utopia - pointless brutality always sounds better when it's Utopian.

Hattip Instapundit.com

Net neutrality: what happens when nothing is left of a party except the rent seeking.

One would think that in the midst of a six year long capital strike driven by huge numbers of invasive regulations of energy supply, consumption, fringe benefits, healthcare finance and delivery, retail banking, investment banking, CO2 emissions, automobiles, appliances, college sexual politics ad infinitum the powers that be would be satiated.  And you would be wrong.  Instead the Obami are targeting  two of the most dynamic sectors that heretofore have avoided much in the way of Federal 'assistance'.

The Fracking industry is scheduled to get all sorts of "help" from an EPA whose leaders and rank and file want to shut it down and now this:  strangling online commerce with a reregulation of telecommunications dressed up as 'net neutrality' - Ma Bell Resurrected.  

Holman Jenkins chronicles the wrecking of our most innovative industry so that DC lawyers can live large. These people are far to the left if where Ted Kennedy was. It's as if they really believe all the anti-capitalist agitprop they heard (or taught) in college.

Incomprehensible except as rent seeking.

Boy these politicians will get some serious national attention

Because they're all political trailblazers and the press loves that kind of story.

The first Asian governor of a southern state, it's youngest governor who led his state  back from a catastrophic disaster.

Governor of our second largest state who overcame a freak paralyzing accident to be the second wheelchair governor after FDR.

A man who was literally living on the streets from age 11 to age 13 becomes governor of his state.

The first Latina governor in the nation.

One of the first Latino governors in the nation who just won reelection with 70 percent of  the vote in a purple state.

The first black senator elected from the south since reconstruction.

An ex CIA spy and African American representing a majority Latino district.

The nation's youngest congresswoman ever.

The daughter of Haitian refugees becomes the first Haitian American to be elected to Congress from one of the whitest districts in the country.

The first Cuban American and one of the first Latinos to be elected to the Senate

The second son of Cuban refugees to be elected to the Senate.

The first woman of Asian descent to be governor in the nation.

Her state's first female senator and the nation's first war veteran female senator.

Son of Cuban political prisoner becomes first Lation congressman from his state.

A second state's first female senator.

And then there were the two openly gay men that came within a cat's whisker of winning house seats only to be derailed in part by last minute sexual allegations.

Of course you haven't heard of most of these people because they're all from the old, white, bigoted, sexist, homophobic Republican party. You see the secret to Republican success is narrowness and racial exclusivity how else could they have ended up controlling 70 of 99 legislative chambers (NE is non partisan but it's conservative non partisan) and 31 or 32 (Alaska may end up with a Sarah Palin supported independent governor - God she's such a Republican Barbie - a regular political Stepford Wife) of the 50 governors including those of the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th  largest states.

Dismissing conservatives as white cracker racists appears to be a risky strategy borne of outdated stereotypes and willful ignorance.  Here's to having it bite the proggos in the ass even harder and deeper.

The complete data on inequality changes in the US are in and it's a very different picture than the one retailed by Piketty and Saenz

P and S ignored everything but cash compensation reported on income tax returns.  Health insurance, pension contributions, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, the first 500,000 of a house sale were simply deemed to not be relevant.  Needless to say, when you adjust for all the factors, including tax law changes and whatnot the 'catastrophic' picture disappears.  This article summarizes what the Study found.

And now, thanks to a new study in the Southern Economic Journal, we know what the picture looks like when the missing data are filled in. Economists Philip Armour and Richard V. Burkhauser of Cornell University and Jeff Larrimore of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation expanded the Piketty-Saez income measure using census data to account for all public and private in-kind benefits, taxes, Social Security payments and household size.

The result is dramatic. The bottom quintile of Americans experienced a 31% increase in income from 1979 to 2007 instead of a 33% decline that is found using a Piketty-Saez market-income measure alone. The income of the second quintile, often referred to as the working class, rose by 32%, not 0.7%. The income of the middle quintile, America’s middle class, increased by 37%, not 2.2%.

Read the whole thing.  It is a good illustration of what agenda driven academic 'research' does to distort the public debate.  What Piketty and Saenz produced was so wrong and was known to be so wrong by anyone who looked at it for a minute that it is tantamount to fraud.  Either by P and S or by the legion of people who checked their skepticism at the door and rapturously welcomed a data outcome that aligned with what they wanted to believe.

It's a helluva way to run a a critical policy debate.