Elon Musk's empire fueled by 4.9 billion in Federal subsidies

Who was grousing about income and wealth inequality again?  I'll believe that Dems care about income inequality when they stop lavishing billions on their cronies.  And when their Presidential candidates stop giving speeches to not for profit Universities at 300K a pop.  Until then their income inequality patter is no different than what the Sovs used to bellow about how "Democratic" they were: Lies to gull the rubes. And they're gulling the poor and the weak.  Which is despicable.

The problem with having the world's currency is that you can take on far more obligations and debt. Until you can't.

Greenspan and some other Ex Fed-kins explain that our real debt levels are the same as Greece's.  Fortunately our private economy is still much healthier than any other in the world.  So the much maligned and abused private sector is letting the deeply corrupt, utterly irresponsible and frankly insultingly rude public sector run amok.  Perhaps we should figure out how to crash it all now and get it over with rather than puking all over our kids.  If we were half the people we claim we are we would.  Social Democracy is a criminal enterprise.  Always was, always will be.

Lawrence Lindsey, former assistant to the president on economic policy in the Bush administration, said the national debt is closer to 300 percent of GDP with unfunded obligations for Social Security and Medicare included.

“That, by the way, is higher than Greece’s debt currently,” he said.

Greenspan said the White House and Congress are avoiding the fact that the government has committed itself to paying for pensions the nation cannot afford.

“It’s not that we’re getting like Greece. We’re getting like Illinois,” he said.

Richard W. Fisher, president/CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, called the fiscal crisis a “political train wreck ready to happen.”

“We have to somehow urgently come to grips with it,” he said.

Greenspan said the U.S. is “way underestimating” the national debt, which is currently at $18 trillion.

“Largely because we are not including what I would call contingent liabilities, that is the issue of, which is answered by a question: what is the probability that in today’s environment JP Morgan would be allowed to default? The answer is zero or less,” he said.

“Now, that means that whole balance sheet is a contingent liability. Now to be sure, while it’s contingent, there’s no interest payments but ultimately that overhangs the structure because we have committed in so many different ways to guarantee this, that and the other thing. It’s not only Fannie and Freddie but it’s a whole series of financial institutions and, regrettably, it is also non-financial institutions.”

Fisher said it is clear what steps the federal government must take to tackle its financial challenges but he has no idea where the nation’s fiscal policy is heading.

Sex and the Married pol

If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.

Yikes.

Dershowitz on the Hastert case: "This case just smells"

Like Menendez, FIFA, Tea Party 501c's, coal miners, frackers, big Romney donors and Texans, Hastert is an enemy of the current regime. And if there's one thing that Barack Obama knows how to do it is use corrupt legal machines to flail his enemies. Just ask his primary and general election opponents when he ran for senate.

The degradation of the rule of law over the last six years has been shocking. I almost want the coming Republican Regime to give the progs a taste of their own medicine. I would love to hear them howl.

But that way lies madness: it would endorse the Chicago-Obamist notion of "Le etat c'est moi" and if this nation gets much more criminal anti-constitutionalism it will break into pieces. Because most Americans won't live under Chicago style progressive thuggery. We just won't.

And a note to all you right wing drug warriors out there: it's invasive, liberty sapping drug war laws that he's using to screw people. The drug self righteousness of right wingers like gambling addict Bill Bennett is obscene to behold.

The modern progressive agenda is crushing Black America.

And Barack Obama is the racialist Pied Piper leading them to their doom.

Public sector jobs are in decline, and one community has been hit particularly hard: African Americans. Historically, the black middle class has relied on the government for good jobs. One in five African Americans are employed by the government, making them more dependent on public sector employment than whites and Hispanics. But those jobs are disappearing, as the New York Times reports:

The Labor Department counts half a million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007. That figure, however, understates just how much the government’s work force has shrunk, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research organization in Washington. That is because it fails to account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the public sector for people to fill.

The decline reverses a historical pattern, researchers say, with public sector employees typically holding onto their jobs even during most economic downturns.

But you must understand the elites are all Gaists now. And Gaists believe there are too many people (and not enough food being converted into biofuels) and since blacks are disproportionately poor and felonized....well. And of course they're all being replaced by immigrants anyway.

Boy I bet Denny Hastert wished he had this.

Tech is enabling anonymous anywhere, anytime money transfer? Via QR codes no less.

Environmentalism is a Religion and the EPA is a very powerful and corrupt church

May you be ruled by true believers is an epic curse. One that we experience more each day. Like much of the rest of the Feds the EPA isn't on your side, they're  on their side. Read the whole thing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is outraged that the United States has indicted 14 FIFA soccer officials, accusing them of corruption, racketeering, fraud and conspiracy, involving bribes totaling over $150 million in kickbacks for awarding tournament rights. He says the US is meddling in Russian affairs and plotting to steal the 2018 World Cup from his country. What chutzpah.

This is the same Mr. Putin who annexed Crimea and parts of Ukraine, and whose close cronies have been secretly channeling millions of dollars to US and EU environmentalist groups to oppose both American oil drilling in the Arctic and hydraulic fracturing – the game-changing process that is producing so much oil and gas that it’s slashed energy prices … and Russian revenues.

The Justice Department indictments generated global applause. Now the DOJ needs to conduct an equally zealous investigation into corruption, fraud and collusion in the Obama Environmental Protection Agency. Of course, that will never happen – no matter how rampant or flagrant the abuses have been.

As Kimberly Strassel documents in May 14 and May 21 articles, EPA emails and other documents reveal that the agency had already decided in 2010 to veto the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska on ideological grounds, “well before it did any science” on the project’s potential environmental impacts. Meanwhile, an EPA biologist was working with eco-activists to recruit Native Americans to oppose the mine. “It’s not much of a leap,” Strassel writes, “to suggest that the EPA encouraged [petitions against the mine] so that it would have an excuse to intervene, run its science as cover, and block a project it already opposed.”

At the same time the biologist was aiding the petition drive, he was also helping to write EPA’s “options paper” for the mine – and lobbying his co-authors and report contributors to veto the mine, Strassel notes. Now, contrary to newly discovered agency emails, EPA bosses are pretending they never saw the options paper and trying to put the blame on low-level functionaries, when they were deep in cahoots all the way.

This represents incredible collusion, deception, fraud and abuse of power – to impose agency edicts and appease environmental ideologues in and out of EPA. Moreover, it is just the latest in a long line of abuses and usurpations by this Obama agency, under a culture of corruption and secretive, manipulated science used to justify regulatory overkill that imposes extensive damages for few or no benefits.

On climate, EPA relies on computer models and discredited IPCC reports to predict global catastrophes that it insists can be prevented if the United States slashes its fossil fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions and living standards, even if China, India and other developing countries do nothing. Meanwhile, real-world temperatures, hurricanes, tornadoes, polar ice and sea levels continue to defy the fear-mongering. So now the rhetoric has shifted yet again, to alleged national security and asthma threats from climate change.

Just this week, EPA announced that it will henceforth regulate any ponds, puddles, creeks, ditches and other waters that have a “significant nexus” to navigable waterways, even if that ill-defined connection enjoys six degrees of separation from streams in which you can actually paddle a kayak. EPA itself recognizes that “science” does not support its new regime, so now it says its “experience and expertise” justify regulating virtually all “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) – and thus of all lands, land uses, and family, farm and industrial activities not already covered by its climate and other rules.

The biggest problem with most science fraud is that the fraudsters actually believe their fraud

The second biggest problem is that the press will believe and publish anything that comports with their worldview. Put simply: in their world "progressive" science is "true" and all other science isn't science. Particularly read the bit about P value mining and how common false positive outcomes are.

So how do you know what you know?

Goaded by the Obama administration's illiberal and quite likely unconstitutional diktats college life is turning into a permanent witch hunt

The defining of things that are not crimes as crimes, the suspension of due process for those accused, the prosecutions of  speech because it "triggered" or "micro agressed" someone is turning many of our college campuses into balkanized  chaos. The American university is no longer a liberal institution. And given the insane tuition inflation  really not Not  For Profits either. Read this story about a professor who spoke out against the witch hunts and is now being dragged before drum head tribunals for something she wrote.

Mandatory electronic health records: because political lawyers are experts on primary health care delivery

Ridiculous fiasco that made a number of big Democrat donors billions. But the lefties are braniacs and don't you forget it!

Another provision of Obamacare is proving to be utter nonsense.

Well I wouldn't put it quite like that. If it was me I'd say "utter fracking" nonsense. But only because fracking sounds really dirty to liberal ears.

If it weren't for the fracking frackers we'd be in recession.

First quarter final print shows GDP shrinking at a 0.7% annual rate. Current independent forecasters estimate that 2q growth is an annualized 0.8%. Economists estimate that the decline in oil prices driven by massive increases in US supply due to fracking add over 1% to US GDP. How typical: the thing saving the Obami from the first government provoked recession since 1937 is the reviled fracking community.

Recen unilateral rewrites of the clean air and water acts are making all sorts of industrial and real estate projects too risky. Add to that the cartelization of finance and health care and the continuing oh so progressive rape of college students and this economy has immense headwinds to overcome. And hurricane Obama is scheduled to last for 20 more months.

And the one thing he's doing right: the Pacific trade pact - necessary to cement a geopolitical alliance to block the expansion of Chinese hegemony - is being opposed by almost the entire Democratic caucus which is making Republicans - fearful of another Obama double cross - wonder if this isn't just a "set up" for electoral gain. But who can blame them for not trusting a president who's demonstrated time and again that he will ignore and rewrite laws when it suits him?

We're like an eighteen wheeler with a drunk zombie at the wheel.

Who's more corrupt now?

Imagine if Dick Cheney had pushed for "Free Gasoline". Liberals are simply corrupt schemers for not for profit and government aggrandizement. The more powerful the state gets the more they will loot and the more of us will be made "criminals". And "law 'n order conservatives" will then come and arrest us in the name of progressive theft. Conservatives aren't the stupid party, they're the stupid species. Morons all.

Stand with Elizabeth Warren: Support debt-free college

Join Campaign For America's Future and support Brian Schatz, Elizabeth Warren, Raul Grijalva, Keith Ellison, and other progressive leaders in Congress to get the debt out of college. These progressive champions are launching a new resolution to build support for debt-free college:

"Resolved, that Congress supports efforts to ensure that, through a combination of efforts, all students have access to debt-free higher education, defined to mean having no debt upon graduation from all public institutions of higher education."

Care to see Europe gut itself over climate superstition?

The lights are going out all over Europe with reliable base load generation being replaced by wind and solar. Solar! They're on top of the world and pepetually swathed in clouds and these forest elves in their chartreuse jumpers actually believe they'll be saved by solar. There hasn't been this much gap jawed credulity in Europe since they stopped burning witches. Just goes to show that the old saying is true: when they stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing - they believe in everything. What a bunch of Maroons.

NYU is the tip of a very dirty spear.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Angry Faculty Savage New York University. “A real estate development/management business with a predatory higher-education side venture

Liberals outraged as wind farms built at the demand of liberals kill lots if birds and bats that liberals care about, liberals assert. Liberals demand that liberals who have passed laws mandating and subsidizing said wind power hire other liberals to write liberal laws regulating the liberal wind farms.

And I'm spent. An so you will be too. More loon killing lunacy here. 

Even if everything the EPA says about its new water regs is true there would still be no trust

The Obami have destroyed faith in the legality, transparency and non partisan nature of Federal regulation. And it will never return.  Another reason why we need to break it up, break it all up.

Latest water regs encounter hail of criticism.

One of the ways that many progressive states are actually progressive - empowering Nurse Practitioners

Now at least 21 states are undermining the MD Monopoly that our fearless Federal Government has tended so carefully since 1980 when Jimmy Carter and his Kool Kats handed it to an AMA that was already richer than Dallas. They are doing so by allowing graduate level Nurses known as Nurse Practitioners to provide primary care to patients without a monopolist - I mean an MD's - direct, avaricious supervision.



Despite this "progressive" innovation of Federalism, most progressives want to further empower that Federal State Who Sees and Rules Everything even though it would crush decent and honorable bits of progressivism like this. There's no accounting for liberal taste.

Note that states that have innovated in using Nurse Practitioners tend to be states with isolated, underserved communities.  States with huge numbers of doctors moving there and wanting to practice like FL, CA or TX are retrograde.  Also note that Obamacare makes no real provision for diverse state by state needs but imposes a national norm of corporatist control on healthcare provision.  Indeed it even makes the situation worse by penalizing independent doctor practices through underpayment the better to force them to sell to the bloated "Health System" duopolies that tend to dominate almost all communities not dominated by state sponsored "Health System" monopolies.

The way to think about "health systems" in your community is to imagine that instead of establishing national chains Walmart and Target remained only in your metro and acquired every kind of retail distribution outlet that existed until the two of them controlled 80% of the market.  Gas stations, mail order shops, difficult bra problem shops, gourmet restaurants, you name it.  Then imagine that the law protected the managers of each shop from active supervision by the conglomerate and the shop managers had the powerful American Shop Managers Association to advocate for their position in Congress and State Legislatures. Absent a market that strips even the privileged of their protections via market price and volume signals the management problem of the duopoly is insurmountable.  No management control, no cost control, no scale economies, no experience curves - almost nothing.  A true nightmare.  And the nightmare that we have and that has been massively strengthened via reimbursement subsidies by the corporatists that rule us.

Oh and did you hear?  O'care Healthplan 2014 year loss ratios are starting to come out very negative implying major rate increases - or plan shut downs. Surprise, surprise, surprise.  I think it's great that Progressives are learning the economics that they slept through in College.  It's just that the rest of us are paying the tuition.

Addendum: I forgot to mention that impeccably blue metros still (red states ditched these years ago) have the wonderful Federal innovation of "Health Facilities Review Boards" created by the Poindexters on the theory that more competition drives up prices (where the left gets the notion that they're braniacs is beyond me). And as per my example above, the most influential and active members of the local Boards to Supress Competition will almost always be reps from the local duopoly who are of course acting "in the best interests of the community".

It's corporatist fraud from sea to shining sea.

Robert Kaplan in FoPo: what the mideast needs now is imperialism, sweet imperialism, it's the only thing that there's just too little of (with apologies to Bachrach)

I recommend you read this in full. I think "imperialism" is needed but a very different kind than that practiced by Bush (interventionist) or Obama (appeasement). We need to pursue the Raj's successful policies of balancing power while promoting trade. Stay out of an interior that must sort itself (the ISIS rump, the Houthis of Yemen) but crush anything that destabilizes regional hegemony (iran). In a nutshell, stop what the Obami are doing and do purt' near the opposite.

BHO'S decades of neo Marxist catechism really are failing him here.

Barack Obama looks at the Israeli situation dialectically

And dialectical thinking isn't really interested in facts per se. It's interested in "oppressors" (Jews) and their "victims" (Palestinians). It expects the former to act against their normal interest to survive and excuses the latter of their promotion and celebration of attricities. It treats Israelis as ersatz Americans having all the power of the superstate while treating the Pals as completely separate from the Arab nation all around them. As Eli Lake Points out, this leads him to brand harsh chastizers of o Palestinian militancy like Gold Meir as heroes because they were socialists who approved of kibbutz and collective puppies while hating a Netanyahu who is far more moderate in his relations with the Pals but is an icky capitalist.

It is very hard to lead the free world when your head us filled with such poisonous and irrational concepts. Incidentally, it's the the same thought process that animates the liberation theology that Pope Francis thinks us so swell.

This is it, Sarge.

Sarge, I, I've bought the farm. But you...you...gotta tell ..tell the boys back at the station that...cough! Cough! Gotta tell 'em...wheeze...it ain't the dogs that get ya...tell 'em it's it's it's wheeze, gulp, cough......it's the big shiny....stay away...big...shiny....buffalo with rubber feet.

Wapo trashes Rubio because he doesn't get $300k for a 30 minute speech.

I am sooo looking forward to the next election when the .001% Democrat attacks the middle class Republican for supporting the 1% to the hysterical cheers of the 1% press. Koch!

Of course I'm also looking forward to electing someone who isn't an ivy league crony. Anyone. Even a Scott Walker who didn't  (gasp) graduate college. Because we all know that college is far more consequential than reforming "progressive" Wisconsin in the face of public employee riots, recall elections and political prosecutions. Clearly college indoctrination didn't take.

The panic over 30,000 ISIS with AKs and Scimitars continues apace with Ramadi

So the Radical Sunni champion filled with radical Sunnis from Anbar Province have conquered their homeland where all of their families and friends are. And with the exception of finally taking Sunni Ramadi and being thrown out of a couple other non Sunni towns, have sat on their asses ever since. Big deal.  For ISIS to be a threat it has to overthrow a contending regional force:  it couldn't overthrow the Alawite/Shiite rump of Syria and it doesn't look like the Kurds are going to fold.  And fortified by the Iranians, the Shiite Militias are sourcing from a huge population with every reason to hate and fear ISIS.  The Sunni Gulf states are quasi patrons of ISIS but only so long as they protect the Sunni homeland and don't upset the applecart. This "Caliphate" has the short leash and fearsome nip of a Chihuahua. Although when they yap heads roll and necks spurt. As dog tricks go it beats "sit up", "roll over" and speak.

The ISIS thing is a testament to the impact gruesome images has on public opinion.  We need to get a stiff upper lip or some stones or something.  Conservatives:  quit shrieking like a Gender activist who has to sit next to Rush Limbaugh.  The ISIS boys aren't going anywhere. But aided and abetted by the feckless and deluded Obami the Iranians are. Mark my words.

If this hepcat's the sharpest tool in the Harvard Law shed then someone needs to radically revise those law school rankings.


More hand wringing at the link.

Agents Provacateurs caught fomenting Ferguson riots come from Acorn and are funded by George Soros

A favorite phrase of the left is "by any means necessary" which reflects their total confidence that they are  right and that the arrow of history is pointing straight at them.  It also reflects their hatred and ontempt for those who do not share their 'vision'.  But when you believe you're the future and everyone else are morons, it starts making sense to do evil things like foment riots.

PAUL RAHE: Staging Riots. “Yesterday, Katie Pavlich, Debra Heine, and Ed Driscoll drew our attention to a demonstration, unmentioned in the mainstream media, that took place in St. Louis and eventuated in the occupation of the offices of an outfit called MORE – Missourians for Organizing Reform and Empowerment. MORE is an offshoot of ACORN, and it is funded in part by George Soros’ omnipresent Open Society Institute (which has spent something like $5 billion supporting such outfits in recent years). What makes this particular demonstration newsworthy is the fact that the demonstrators were demanding that they be paid, as promised, for the work they did in organizing demonstrations in Ferguson last summer

Hat Tip Instapundit

On Friday, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign released her personal financial disclosure form for 2014 through the present, which reported that she and her husband had earned $25 million delivering paid speeches.

I never knew the Clintons were such riveting speakers. I have GOT to get a ticket to one of Chelsea's stemwinders.

But I'd better double sock lest the first pair be knocked off.....

“Because Facebook would never secretly tweak its algorithm to influence voter behavor! … Oh wait.”

They said American fascism would be something bland and therapeutic. Fascism with a smiling face.....book? Wait that can't be right. Can it? The great and good said it would be Republican, you know, right wing corporations that would strangle us.

"Ha ha. Sir makes clever joke. Now if sir would come with me and complete the approved voting template...."

Bobby Morrisey

With Robert Morrissey: Leading midwestern antiques dealer, savior and chronicler of the Stan Master's collection (quite possibly the most important American realist artist since Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper), an underappreciated (as daughter Amelia discovered) expert on 70s, 80's and 90's rock 'n roll and (quite inexplicably) my friend.

He's the one with the haircut.

What black women know about parenting is dwarfed by what they know about victimology

Here's a NYT piece that purports to "school" 'white' upper middle class women who over nurture their children on the "facts of life". And it's probably good advice. The only problem is that given the catastrophic state of black children and the utter inability of these "schooling" marms to reverse or even arrest it, most helicopter mommies will take the advice as a cautionary tale and do the opposite. The establishment has become so besotted with "victims" that they elevate them to faux sages or divines. I say faux because very few people who write or read the NYT will actually pay any attention to any black parenting advice.

This is a classic example of condescending liberal racism. A potion that has done more damage to black Americans than Jim Crow ever could. Because Jim Crow simply argued that blacks were less capable adults who in fact had to be held to higher standards than whites. Liberals behave as if blacks are "children" who can be held to no standards. Until the police sweep through at which point these "children" are brutalized by the cruelest "standards" in the modern world.

The cynicism of the left has as many dimensions as a theoretical model of the universe it poisons.

Feds want to regulate Internet content as "in kind" donations - Ajit Pai

If the state can take control of the banking, education, Healthcare and energy generation markets by fiat then why not rule the press? It's not like the "liberal" press will object.

3rd Obamacare contractor folds in the face of the irrational, unreasoning Federal borg

Remember this "solution" was supposed to "seamlessly" "integrate" "information" from a myriad of Federal "systems" into a "smooth running" "consumer facing" application delivering a "customer experience" analogous to that of private insurance sites.

It didn't, can't and won't. And the tragedy is that's the least of Obamadon'tcare's problems. Democrats (and half of the Republicans) in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary persist in believing that writing 2000 pages of gobbeldygook and calling it a "law" can "achieve" anything.

Except of course (eventually) dissolving
our persistent and irrational faith in the Federal stupor state. My God they're useless aren't they?

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Edmund Burke

Politically connected Obamacare Web builder suddenly quits.

Another benefit of warming: stronger breezes blow away pollutuon

Houston ozone levels have plummeted due to both better controls but also higher velocity sea breezes. It's what we in the skeptic camp call a "good gig".

Amtrak is wildly more dangerous than other operators.

And wildly more expensive with worse service in a country unsuited to train travel. Yet the Dems want to pour Billions into this abortion of a company. Let the BosWash rich pay for their own damned choochoo. Read the whole thing.

Like most things our Feds do it will make you weep.

Fast food restrictionists get what they want, fail to move the needle on obesity

The conviction that people are malleable blobs of putty that the "Great and Good" can manipulate into poses that please their prideful egos is constantly being refuted by reality.  But because the "Great and the Good" have control of what they call "truth" and a magic money machine they are all but impermeable to said reality.  Witness the AGW jihad.  The ability of the elite left to do what it wants for a long period of time in the face of reality really calls into question the validity of Democracy.  When a small self replicating and blinkered elite can do as it pleases because it has control of the levers of power then small r republican governance fails.  As Kevin Williamson said:

The people who love American politics love it for the give-and-take, for the exchange of ideas, for the sport of it. The people who hate American politics hate it because of the lie at its heart: that this is still the self-governing republic created by Jefferson, Madison, et al., instead of a new, different kind of regime that is something new in the world but immediately familiar, something dishonest, something gaudy and contemptible.

"Dishonest, gaudy and contemptible."  Yup, that's just about it.

Carly Fiorina has always been underestimated. Hillary Clinton has the opposite problem.

7Of course Hillary "married well" from a career standpoint. Carly is the GOP veep nominee barring catastrophe. Hat tip instapundit. Here's an article at Wapo  it's  dawning on the left that she represents a threat. A taste:

What government gets wrong is how accountable business is because customers have choices, stockholders and investors have choices. The power of choice and accountability has a very positive effect,” she says. In her speeches, she likes to say that facts matter in business and that the numbers speak for themselves. “Choices, transparency and accountability are very powerful,” she says. Unlike politicians, CEOs can’t say one thing when the numbers say something else, she observes.

And she turns the "gender gap" into a weapon against the morbidly obese Federal blob.

Why is there a gender wage gap? She identifies a factor few politicians talk about. “I do think with any seniority system women are going to do worse. They come in [to the workforce] later or leave the workplace for a time. If you pay for time and grade women are disadvantaged. It is why I’ve always favored pay for performance.” She says instead of lecturing business, government should set the example by going to a pay-for-performance model. That will work to remove one disadvantage women face.

Is she a feminist? “I think, for me, the definition of a feminist is a woman who gets to choose her own life. If a woman wants to have five kids and home-school, she is a feminist. If a woman wants to be a CEO, she’s a feminist.” She says things got off track when the left started telling women that some choices (e.g. staying home) weren’t acceptable. “That’s not feminism. It’s politics,” she says.

Watch out Hillary: here's a real woman with real accomplishments.

Democrats be clown themselves on trade. And When Obama criticizes them they get "Identity" vapors.

The Democratic left is having a hissy fit. And they now define any criticism of any of "their" women or minorities as "sexism or racism" or perhaps rasexism. Gonna be a long election cycle.

Our joke left wing elite universities - but I repeat myself

Student newspaper at Columbia says Ovid too traumatic to be taught.

During the week spent on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored.

Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.
We don’t know much about what happened between the student and the professor. Was there an assignment or further lectures on Persephone she wished out of? One would hope that when approached privately about such a matter, a professor would be sensitive to the student’s concerns and offer alternative assignment options. But the fact that an occasional student might feel uncomfortable with certain material seems a strange reason to think no one should read and discuss it.

It used to be right wingers bitched about the naughty bits. Maybe our oh so progressive elite students should just all get their assess to a nunnery. Perhaps the Ivy League should all become (gender inclusive, non judgemental) nunneries filled with Play doh and puppy videos.

And liberal friend recently was mocking people from TEXAS.

Now I do not understand this:

FAILURE: Obama’s plans for trade deals with Asia and Europe in tatters after Senate vote. “Barack Obama’s ambitions to pass sweeping new free trade agreements with Asia and Europe fell at the first hurdle on Tuesday as Senate Democrats put concerns about US manufacturing jobs ahead of arguments that the deals would boost global economic growth. . . . Drama over the landmark trade negotiations has been escalating for weeks, propelling Obama into a public feud with Democrats – going so far as to accuse opposing members within his party of lying about the fast-track bill. The vote marked a rare moment in which Republicans lined up to support the president’s agenda, even as GOP leadership pointed to Obama’s failure to rally his own party in favor of the legislation.”

So I get that Democrats are no longer free traders. But the argument that they are doing so to 'protect' manufacturing jobs is silly.  First of all, the manufacturing segments vulnerable to low cost manufacturing are already gone.  To China or Mexico.  Second, the US is in the midst of a manufacturing Renaissance focused on energy intensive applications.  But the people in these industries are among the most hostile to Democrats.  Third, these types of agreements typically benefit intellectual property intensive industries like tech and entertainment more than anyone else and those industries are the two stalwarts of the Democrat's plutocratic wing.  This opposition doesn't make sense on realpolitic grounds.  It appears to be more of a howl of frustration - one that is part and parcel with the extremist chaos going on in leftist Universities and inner city neighborhoods.  After six years of indifferent leadership from their favorite President ever the left realizes that it has nothing much to show for all of the effort. And convinced that they are on the right side of history, they are throwing a tantrum at anyone and everyone that they perceive has 'held them back'.

I'm open to other explanations but I just don't see them.  Does Lizzy Warren in MA really give a rip about manufacturing?  New England is deindustrialized for gosh sakes.

Hat tip Instapundit

Niall Ferguson mocks Paul "Pauly K" Krugman so completely that I fear for the Krugmanator's tender ego....

Aw who am I kidding? Krugman is not mockable because he has neither shame nor integrity. Kudos to Princeton for unloading this joke "asset" on New York - the only jurisdiction in America current run by men stupid enough to take his advice. More mockery of the Krugmanator's Kontemptibly Krude Kwasi Keynesian Kruminations here. Warning: not for Keynsians or the squeamish.

Niall Ferguson: once again you are my hero. Hit him again daddy!

The AGW chaps are now modelling the old stock market scam. They're just too stupid to realize that's what they're doing. Which says a lot.

Read this Guardian piece about the the "pause". In it the warmists rationalize the fact that 95% of models missed the pause by in essence arguing 5% got it right so we should just trust those models. Which reminds me of the old stock market scam: send letters to 4000 people predicting the market will go up over the next month and to 4000 predicting it will go down. When it's up send half of the 4000 an up and half a down prediction. When it's down send half of the 2000 an up and half a down. When it goes down send a letter to the 1000 saying: "for each of the past 4 months I've accurately predicted which way the market would go. This is because I am brilliant and have a system. Invest your money with me and get rich."

It turns out AGW is no better than an old fashioned fraud scheme. My God these people are pathetic.

Wait you mean you don't have banish someone as a homophobe if they disagree with homosexual orthodoxy?

Who knew? And here I thought disagreeing with the new establishment Was a Moral Crime of the first order requiring banishment .

Columbia students mock the Sexual Gestapo. Gestapo gets snippy.

Yay Orgo night. May you bend the blue noses of the blue stockings out of shape forever.

“Six years ago, Obama goes to Cairo. Proclaims a new era. Today, Arab leaders won’t come to Camp David.”

Attaboy Barry! You sure proved you k ow your Muslims! Tweet after New Saudi king declines Obama invite to peace confab at Camp David. For some strange reason America has very little clout the these days.

Richard Dreyfuss says something worth saying

Yes. THAT Richard Dreyfuss. Don't be a sucker. Read it.

Once again the left ignores the science and misses the boat by several hundred yards. But instead of waiting they begin throwing children into the sea.

In this piece philosopher Adam Swift assumes that reading to one's children gives them a leg up. This flies in the face of quite good research highlighted by Freakonomics that reading to one's children is not correlated with literacy but being born of literate parents whether or not they ever read to you is. Marxists persist in their viciously unscientific belief that the human mind as Stephen Pinker puts it is a "Blank Slate" unaffected by genetic inheritance. They do this at the same time they claim to believe in evolution despite the fact that the only way humans could have evolved is if children inherited their parents increasing mental capacities.

But leftist intellectuals haven't put two consistent, coherent thoughts together for quite some time.  More irrational blather here.

Liberation theology is more perverted than the communism it promotes

Because at least the commies don't promote their perversions in the name of Jesus. If Pope Francis is really promoting this poison after generations of Catholic Popes holding firm against totalitarian ideologies then I fear the RC church has truly bought the farm. And if that's the case then God help us all.

And the first blue state to go belly up is....Puerto Rico.

In PR both parties have followed the Blue playbook: much higher than productivity minimum wages? Check. High tax rates with lots of exemptions for the politically connected? Check. Lavish pensions for government employees? Check. Lots and lots of pettifogging regulation that strangles business but enriches the lawyer class? Check.

The big difference is simply that Puertoriqueños are simply much less productive than mainlanders. So they've burned through their wealth quicker. It'll be fun seeing which US state will become a floating, bloated corpse first. It actually might be West Virginia which is technically a "red" state but who has a legacy of Democrat Party corruption plus the pending extermination (once again by Democrats) of their largest industry: coal mining - to thank for their thankless position. Aside from similarly placed Kentucky, all the rest of the 20 worst off states are blue.

As I said the denouement of state level social democracy will be fun to watch. Meanwhile check out PR for a preview of what no doubt will be a bloody but quite educational era.

In other news the impeccably blue Supreme Court of Illinois is straining itself, waving both hands saying "ooh, ooh let it be us, we want to go first! Please oh please can we?" By ruling arithmetic unconstitutional - at least as it relates to pensions. God this is going to be a hoot.

Journalism: Where facts go to die.

An article describing how "narrative" has replaced facts as the dominant factor in our political discourse. He uses a wide range of examples from Michael Brown to anti-vaxxers. The academy long ago dispensed with the notion of objective facts in favor of "narrative" and "identity" and because our "press" is largely Ivy educated this poisonous "revolutionary" bigotry has seeped into the culture.

And it's hard to see how we can fight the continuing centralization and expansion of dirigisme and the concomitant diminishment of democracy in a nation where facts don't matter.

For the record: I am still very upset about the Ferguson situation - not because Michael Brown was anything but a violent thug but because riots don't occur over the death of one strutting criminal. I know the injustice of our so called criminal "justice" system first hand . And unreformed it will end up alienating so many of us that the country will be ungovernable. And if chaos is the only way justice and respect for truth can be restored then faster please.

In failing to unfailingly stand up for free speech Bill O'Reilly demonstrates that he's just a pissy seventy something curmudgeon pissing and moaning at other pissy 70 year old curmudgeons.

I guess defending unpopular speech is unpopular. And BO is all about being popular. Steyn rips him and the rest of the press coward brigade new holes to moan through.

In Copenhagen, in Paris, in Garland, what's more important than the cartoons and the attacks is the reaction of all the polite, respectable people in society, which for a decade now has told those who do not accept the messy, fractious liberties of free peoples that we don't really believe in them, either, and we're happy to give them up - quietly, furtively, incrementally, remorselessly - in hopes of a quiet life. Because a small Danish newspaper found itself abandoned and alone, Charlie Hebdo jumped in to support them. Because the Charlie Hebdo artists and writers died abandoned and alone, Pamela Geller jumped in to support them. By refusing to share the risk, we are increasing the risk. It's not Pamela Geller who emboldens Islamic fanatics, it's all the nice types - the ones Salman Rushdie calls the But Brigade. You've heard them a zillion times this last week: "Of course, I'm personally, passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But..."

And the minute you hear the "but", none of the build-up to it matters. A couple of days before Garland, Canadian Liberal MP (and former Justice Minister) Irwin Cotler announced his plan to restore Section 13 - the "hate speech" law under which Maclean's and I were dragged before the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission and which, as a result of my case, was repealed by the Parliament of Canada. At the time Mr Cotler was fairly torn on the issue. We talked about it briefly at a free-speech event in Ottawa at which he chanced to be present, and he made vaguely supportive murmurings - as he did when we ran into each other a couple of years later in Boston. Mr Cotler is Jewish and, even as European "hate" laws prove utterly useless against the metastasizing open Jew-hate on the Continent, he thinks we should give 'em one more try. He's more sophisticated than your average But boy, so he uses a three-syllable word:

"Freedom of expression is the lifeblood of democracy," said Cotler, who was minister of justice under Paul Martin.

"However..."

Sometimes the Feds do it right: FARCing up Colombian Narco-terrorists using GPS bombs

'Course the Narco-terrorists wouldn't exist without the lunatic and evil Drug War but still....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2013/12/21/covert-action-in-colombia/

Say what you will about the Donkeys but when Barack Obama is considered to be on the right wing of your Party you are one crazy Burro.

The Dems are likely to end up Burritos.  The only question is how Chimichangaed the nation will get before they do.

Ay poppy! Aqui.

Pundits say UK election sounds the death knell for Social Democracy

Tragically, Democrats are still desperately trying to implement this swell if antique and discredited idea from the mid 20th century. Of course the Democrats haven't been a party that represents the working class for at least a generation. The Party of the state and it's parasites has no ideology aside from avarice and self preservation. It's like a giant virus that can only replicate itself by consuming the life around it.

Spiked drives a spike through the British Labour Party's pretensions to relevance for average blokes. And reminds us that the Party that Tone built is nothing but a bloody trendy left wing toff factory and finishing school.

Number of things against the law up by 50% since 1980?

Frankly that sounds low.  Because the number of regs and rules that must be complied with has grown far faster than that and failure to comply with a governmental edict leads to indictments.  There may not be many more offenses but there are vastly more situations, events and circumstances when each of us is exposed to legal jeopardy. An unscrupulous prosecutor can indict almost anyone because everyone is 'guilty'.  It's ironic that Ayn Rand described precisely this outcome in Atlas Shrugged.  The statist bad guys were very frank about wanting to make sure everyone was guilty of something so they'd all live in fear of the hammer coming down on them and would be grateful for the state's forbearance.  It's essentially where we sit now.  And its a God Damned Never Ending Tragedy.

Charles Murray explains here.

"Fracking chemicals" found in PA water supply says NYT

Sigh. "Fracking" chemicals are non toxic organic substances that are in the homes of many consumers. Ingredients in detergents and chewing gum for example. So finding traces of those chemicals in a homeowners tap once in a while is not surprising. It's also vanishing unlikely to have anything to do with Fracking which any geophysicist or petroleum engineer could explain. If the naive, easily manipulate dears at the NYT wanted to know, that is.

Update: someone who read the piece points out:

They found parts per trillion in drinking water of a chemical which is commonly used in (latex) paint and cosmetics.

Gee there wouldn't be any reason for paint or cosmetics to be lying around a house would there?

Matt Drudge the "second most influential man in America"?

I don't doubt it. He sits at an information nexus. Reading his antiquated page with its annoying mandatory refreshes is the easiest way to get a feel for what is happening and hot. That he does so with a Conservative eye is just the icing on top.

The capital strike continues apace - apparently business doesn't trust the President

I am shocked at those racist bigots how dare they withhold their investment from hope 'n change? Don't they know that the invention of Hopium is the greatest example of freestyle hokum extant in the world today?

The significant burdens placed upon business and indeed its outright persecution by a politicized IRS and EPA combined with the quite explocit state cartelization of Finance, Telecoms, Education and Healthcare under Obama have severely damaged business confidence. As a result they are sitting on their money. And without investment there is no productivity gain and so no rise in standards of living.

Sam Fleming reports from the FT:
The economist Andrew Smithers singles out a longer-term decline in investment as a share of GDP as a critical drag, as well as a slowdown in education improvements in recent decades. A report by the Aspen Institute and MAPI Foundation on Wednesday warned of a “significant lag in capital investment” in the US and argued this was a major contributor to low productivity growth. Whereas real GDP was in 2014 some 8.7 per cent above its level at the end of 2007, gross private domestic investment was up just 3.9 per cent in the same period, it said.

The Democrats are apparently willing to tolerate stagnation so long as they get to divvy up ehatever pie is left. Perhaps it's time for a new American establishment - one that actually believes in America.

"Hate speech" is just speech that those holding the guns, badges and handcuffs....hate.W

Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey famously said that "Democracy is like a train ride: you get off when you get to your station".  Apparently the left in our society believes the same thing about Constitutional liberties like Free Speech.  When they get to their station they begin pitching concepts like banning 'hate speech'.  The definition of "Hate speech" is speech that those that have the guns, badges and handcuffs....hate.

THE IGNORANCE, IT BURNS!: The New York Slimes Times editorializes about “Free Speech vs. Hate Speech.” Versus? Ugh. The progressive stupidity about free speech is actually getting dangerous. So-called “hate speech”–which is defined by progressives as speech they deem “hateful” (i.e., which disagrees with their worldview)–is fully protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court said in the Westboro Baptist Church case, Synder v. Phelps:

Such speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt. If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment , it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. Indeed, “the point of all speech protection … is to shield just those choices of content that in someone’s eyes are misguided, or even hurtful.”

Exactly. But the NYT editorial is just the tip of the progressive iceberg to roll back free speech. That’s what totalitarians do.
Hat tip Instapundit.com

Corey Booker tweets that it's "not right" that someone must work 50 hours a week to escape poverty because he's never had to work that hard

IT HAS COME TO THIS:  U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) tweets that it’s “not right” that someone must work 50 hours per week to escape poverty.  How far we have come, since Booker T. Washington said, “Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.”  Senator Booker channels the progressive mindset, which holds nothing is worth working hard for, but should merely be “given” by (redistributed from) others foolish enough spend so much time working.  After all, they didn’t build that.

Affirmative action has paid off for the lazy children of upscale black Americans and African Kleptocrats.  They rise effortlessly on the basis of benefits given to atone for suffering that they have never experienced and intended to help people that they share nothing with.  It's how we got our current President and his lack of a work ethic shows.

It's incredible how by adopting the Climate Change Religion "Progressives" have become objectively anti-poor.

Thank God for the Authoritarian, anti-democratic Chinese. The Obami desperately tried to stop them from creating an Asian Development bank not because it would undermine American influence for peace and Democracy but because it would undermine the Obami's malthusian ban on funding hydrocarbon energy projects in desperately poor countries. The amount of elimanationist rhetoric coming out of the enviro left makes it clear where they really stand on the poor. Hat tip WUWT.

The hatred of traditional liberties like free speech by the left us nothing but an artifact of their current cultural and political dominance

Back when they weren't on top they were all for liberty. But now you see they don't need it anymore. 

Here us a particularly egregious example of authoritarian thuggery masquerading as concern for "human rights". I recall the Nazis shut down Jewish and Communist speech because they said it was "offensive" to the volk. Some things never change. Except that it's the left that is now openly authoritarian and anti constitutional.

Larry Tribe Constitutional Mensch

Tribe is one of the few establishment liberals who actually stands up for government for, by and of the people. The rest of them are arrogant technocrats in the style of Colbert - Louis Catorce's dirigiste Finance minister. No more interested in constitutional rule or the people's sovereignty than a mob of Sun Kings.

As Myron Magnet points out: for treating the Constitution as if it's Supreme Law rather than parchment he is vilified as a traitor to his class in much the same way that wealthy men who worked for FDR were. And like in FDR'S time the state and business are bypassing Congress to do their own market rigging deals in Energy, Banking, Telecom and Immigration. And it stinks to high heaven of Euro style oligopoly and corruption.

Read the whole thing.

So Harvard is a two faced lying Bitch of an institution that applies double standards the way explorers up the Zambezi apply bandaids to their bug bites. Whaddya expect? It's "liberal" and "not for profit".

So it routinely engages in politicized fraud. Like accusing a climate skeptic of conflicts of interest while characterizing  work of politically correct scholars as "independent". Work that fulsomely praises the EPA without dislosing their over $50 million dollars in direct EPA funding.

Or practicing Affirmative Action while claiming to be color blind. Or claiming to promote diversity while refusing to hire or tenure professors with heterodox views. Or claiming a commitment to egalitarianism while running what is effectively a finishing school and match making service for the cognitively super rich.

Face it: Harvard puts the "hip" in hypocrite. And does so proudly.

John Kennedy doomed blue states and cities

FDR knew that public employee unions were poison. They concentrate power among a group that can hold the public good hostage and create terrible conflicts of interest among politicians. One party has catered to their ever increasing demands and has been rewarded with almost perpetual power in many if our larger cities and more liberal states. But to get and hold power through the votes and money of public unions is to do a deal with the devil - a lesson city after city and state after state is learning as the  ludicrous retirement schemes they've acquiesced to to keep labor peace now come due. On top of that the unions have made America's unaccountable legal system even more impervious to true reform.

Cities like New York and states like California have gleaming facades that are under girded by rotten fiscal arrangements doomed to collapse. And it will sweep away any pretense of liberal "policy" superiority in an orgy of lawsuits and recrimination.

All to keep a promise that helped get wonder boy Kennedy the job his daddy always wanted him to have.

That began in January of 1962, when President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988, which ushered in a broad expansion of public unionized workers, who had not received collective bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The 1935 act confined collective bargaining rights to private sector industrial unions.

The so called "booming" cities are bankrupt

It never ceases to amaze me at how blinkered and parochial our Ivy bred press is. This wonkblog (now there's a misnomer) article talks about how NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and DC are "booming" and as a result struggling with the effects of more and taller buildings. But only one of these 5 cities is booming in the traditional sense of the word: a burgeoning local private economy. DC has the flushed faux glow of health that only the Capitol of a waxing kleptocracy can have. One that is very likely to turn into a cadaverous stare come the election. The other three cities have experienced some growth but nothing to compare with any similar sized red state city. Indeed the whole meme of a back to city movement is a giant fraud as Wendell Cox of Newgeography.com demonstrates over and over. The fact of the matter is that all of these cities are bankrupt and headed for Baltimorean chaos as the public employee unions long parasitic march through them continues.

But "tall buildings"! "One percent restaurants"! God help them everyone.

Who Pays When The DEA Destroys Your Vehicle And Kills Your Employee During A Botched Sting? Hint: Not The DEA.

The drug war has destroyed more lives and done more to undermine faith in law enforcement and our government than anything since....well since the last time progressives and puritans got together to manipulate people because it made them feel powerful.

It's shocking just how much of the traditional common law rights of Englishmen our Federal Government has destroyed. It used to be that the government could not take you property without your knowledge, wreck it and get your employee killed without at least paying for the damage. But we live in a "progressive" state now. And they can do any damn thing they want so long as they do it to the weak or unpopular.

I generally feel sorry for Dick Nixon but if there is a just God his declaration of the drug war earns him a spot at the center of Dante's Inferno. And to all my "friends" who have loyally supported state brutalization regardless of the horrific consequences: You can go there too.

Another obscene example at the link.

I look forward to the day when someone having the "wrong" intoxicating substance preference has the liberty that someone having the "wrong" sexual preference has today. I fear I will die waiting.

We have the liberty we have because some arch conservative white men set it up that way 225 years ago.

It's inconceivable that today's political and intellectual elite would act with such restraint. With our colleges doing everything they can to ban free expression and stamp out conservative and libertarian ideas. With the government accumulating "metadata" on who we call, where we go and what we say. With the passage of 2000 page "laws" with 25,000 pages of regulations that openly flout the law's plain meaning. With the defacto abolition of Mens Rae and the unleashing of the totalist prosecutor. With law enforcement's naked search for property to confiscate for its own account and with the President openly flouting the nation's immigration and citizenship laws to rig the next election in swing states, it's only our atavistic loyalty to this piece of parchment that keeps the nation from descending into the oh so "progressive" night.

Outstanding commentary from Reynolds, Cooke and Stephenson at the link.

A San Francisco small business rube self identifies

Shocked that the law will wipe out the Comic book store profits he lives on. And with comic book prices printed right on the front and online sources selling from far cheaper jurisdictions he can't raise prices. Well it looks like San Francisco just won't have nice quirky things anymore. Just government and high productivity corporate businesses. Kinkos, Targets and Chipotles as far as the eye can see.

Golly SFO that's a heck of a nose you cut off there. You sure showed your face. Whaddya gonna cut off next? You tough old prog you.

Watch the show trial of the Baltimore 6

This is what happens in one party states. Dershowitz points out the travesty at the link.

If Black People Lived As Long As White People, Election Results Would Be Very Different. Yes Mother Jones they'd be middle class and vote Republican

The extent to which the left believes in racial and gender essentialism is impressive. They must think that little black babies are born with a donkey or hammer and sickle on their asses while little white babies get an elephant or swastika on theirs. Yet blacks who didn't kill each other or succumb to the depredations of excess subtance abuse the way they do today  would live very different lives with very different outcomes. One outcome would almost certainly be different voting patterns - an obvious result that is simply beyond the power of MOJO and its faithful to comprehend. Which is strange because it's been the unstated but quite successful policy of the left to keep blacks isolated, paranoid and dependent upon the Federal stupor state that has contributes so much to their electoral success.

Read more of Mother's mental mutters here.

Buffett Says Minimum Wage Increase Isn't Answer to Income Gulf

Neither are any of the politicians you support Warren. But of course your goal is to ensure you die the richest man in the world so the goals you set out for your politicians are quite different.

More billionaire buffeting at the link.

Do we really want this petty, paranoid woman in charge?

A new book on the domestic side of the White House from the Kennedys to the Obamas looks like fun. It also illustrates why we'd be fools to let the Clintons slither back in.

The White House was under a constant state of panic with the Clintons in charge. Their time was unpredictable, often breaking protocols of the House. What Brower calls their “obsession” with secrecy exasperated the staff. Skip Allen, for many years the White House usher, calls them “about the most paranoid people I’d ever seen”; another longtime staffer, Chris Emery, was fired due to his close relationship with Barbara Bush. The Clintons installed a new phone system to make sure no one could eavesdrop on their phone calls, compromising the security of the phone lines.

Although I wonder if Kennedy's Federally funded in house prostitutes - Fiddle and Faddle - are covered. Doubt it. Our bien pensants will allow no truth to sully the memory of St. John of Camelot.

So there are no "trigger" warnings for Free Speech on Campus: ‘F*ck Masculinity’, ‘Fight the Straightness’?

No cries of 'micro aggression'? Orwell was right "All animals are equal but the left most pigs are most equal of all".

Let me preface this by asking: Is anyone really surprised?

This past May Day students and faculty at Cornell marched across campus and sat in a street intersection for over an hour delivering riveting speeches about everything they detest about this country, their university, and their peers.  They later paraded through the farewell party for Cornell’s outgoing president of nine years, and for about twenty minutes chanted and delivered speeches from the stage where a jazz band was playing .

You can read my more comprehensive recap of events over at The Cornell Review.

At the street intersection and on the band stage, protesters took turns delivering short speeches and tirades covering a range of topics, including, but not limited to, the following: systematic racism, sexism, rape culture, the riots in Baltimore, microaggressions, Cornell administrators and trustees, Cornell’s occupation of formerly indigenous lands, capitalism, Israel, the NYPD, oil companies, patriarchy, whiteness, masculinity, and straightness.

What a bunch of bigoted oinkers. More on their squealy grunts here.

Don't fund with Gofundme. It's run by leftist crooks who will pull the plug.

Of course making grandiose promises and then not keeping them is the left wing M.O.

Not content with shutting down a fund for some Christian bakers who fell afoul of the gay mafia, the Leftist trolls behind the crowd-sourcing site GoFundMe have just pulled the plug on a defense fund for the six Baltimore police officers hastily and very likely irresponsibly charged in the Freddie Gray affair:

Read more: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/05/02/gofundme-leftist-tool/#ixzz3Z67yZCkW
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/05/02/gofundme-leftist-tool/

First Baltimore, now Seattle. Progressive rioting is becoming a trend

And without a war or civil rights crisis (and if you say 'gay marriage' I will slap you silly) and after 50 straight years of jamming trillions in 'Great Society' quackery down our throats liberalism is at its exhausted, ridiculous end. So with hope for a new heaven gone the left wing fun bunch has decided to shoot for a new hell.

"Tin soldiers and Obama's coming, we're finally on our own, I can see the black clad coming, to burn the whole place down."

Couldn't happen to a more ridiculous political movement. I mean calling the corrupt corporatist divvying up of spoils while truncating people's traditional liberties and bankrupting the state "social democracy" is one thing but to call it "liberalism" is just obscene.

More on Seattle's contribution to the negative Eschaton.

Almost half of Obamacare exchanges in financial trouble.

Is there anything that this President has touched that isn't worse for the touching? What a remarkably destructive man. Hope! Change!

Almost half of the 17 ObamaCare state insurance exchanges are reportedly suffering financial difficulties, posing a significant challenge to state officials just five years after the passage of President Obama’s signature health care law.

Incompetence us it's own curse.

Kevin Williamson rides the rails with our very own Gropenfuhrer

A wonderful illustration of what our "Democratic" Republic really stands for.

The people who love American politics love it for the give-and-take, for the exchange of ideas, for the sport of it. The people who hate American politics hate it because of the lie at its heart: that this is still the self-governing republic created by Jefferson, Madison, et al., instead of a new, different kind of regime that is something new in the world but immediately familiar, something dishonest, something gaudy and contemptible.

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent at National Review.

Disney fires IT staff and replaces them with H1B indentured servants

These days all the progressive Obama championing tech and entertainment companies are "Serfing".

More cowabunga here.

Scott Walker has a negative net worth of -72,500

He's obviously not spent anytime with cattle futures or writing solopsistic memoirs or other money making wheezes.

Harry Truman 2?  Hmmm.

A good short reading list for a principled conservative libertarian

Steve Hayward list. I'm proud to have read the core Hayek, Orwell and Lewis pieces more than once each. The Straussians? Not so much. It is Lewis' insistence on objective, even dogmatic truth that separates me from atheists and libertarian purists.

Read this if you want to understand principled conservatism. It's good shit. The best, really.

Not all Democrats are totally statists Ted Lieu stands for our privacy

A great response to the badged baboons who want abuse us more.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), who described himself as a "recovering computer science major," provided one of the most forceful counter-arguments. (He is just one of four House members with computer science degrees.) Lieu also is a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force Reserves and served for four years as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

"It is clear to me that creating a pathway for decryption only for good guys is technologically stupid, you just can't do that," he said, underscoring that he found Conley’s remarks "offensive."

He argued:

It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Why do you think Apple and Google are doing this? It's because the public is demanding it. People like me: privacy advocates. A public does not want an out-of-control surveillance state. It is the public that is asking for this. Apple and Google didn't do this because they thought they would make less money. This is a private sector response to government overreach.

Then you make another statement that somehow these companies are not credible because they collect private data. Here's the difference: Apple and Google don't have coercive power. District attorneys do, the FBI does, the NSA does, and to me it's very simple to draw a privacy balance when it comes to law enforcement and privacy: just follow the damn Constitution.

And because the NSA didn't do that and other law enforcement agencies didn't do that, you're seeing a vast public reaction to this. Because the NSA, your colleagues, have essentially violated the Fourth Amendment rights of every American citizen for years by seizing all of our phone records, by collecting our Internet traffic, that is now spilling over to other aspects of law enforcement. And if you want to get this fixed, I suggest you write to NSA: the FBI should tell the NSA, stop violating our rights. And then maybe you might have much more of the public on the side of supporting what law enforcement is asking for.

Then let me just conclude by saying I do agree with law enforcement that we live in a dangerous world. And that's why our founders put in the Constitution of the United States—that's why they put in the Fourth Amendment. Because they understand that an Orwellian overreaching federal government is one of the most dangerous things that this world can have. I yield back

Now here's something the inequality warriors could work on that isn't totally destructive.

To date the two "brilliant" solutions that the neo Marxist class warriors have proposed to "save" us from the horror of  bitterly envying the rich have been double the minimum wage so that there are even more idle young men and raise taxes on the productive so they'll produce less. These two innovations also have the salutary benefit of raising the cost of everything the poor buy and driving out of business many of the small marginal businesses that the poor have historically used to bootstrap themselves out of poverty. But mox nix since the ever increasing cohorts of felonized and unemployed idle will burn them down anyway.

Here's another idea from Vox (I know, I know but blind pigs and acorns dontchaknow):

trolls aren’t the primary problem with the patent system. They’re just the problem Congress is willing to fix. The primary problem with the patent system is, well, the patent system. The system makes it too easy to get broad, vague patents, and the litigation process is tilted too far toward plaintiffs. But because so many big companies make so much money off of this system, few in Congress are willing to consider broader reforms.

A modern example is Microsoft, which has more than 40,000 patents and reportedly earns billions of dollars per year in patent licensing revenues from companies selling Android phones. That’s not because Google was caught copying Microsoft’s Windows Phone software (which has never been very popular with consumers). Rather, it’s because low standards for patents — especially in software — have allowed Microsoft to amass a huge number of patents on routine characteristics of mobile operating systems. Microsoft’s patent arsenal has become so huge that it’s effectively impossible to create a mobile operating system without infringing some of them. And so Microsoft can demand that smaller, more innovative companies pay them off.

But Bill and Warren and little Timmy Appleseed and Larry the Goog and the Fbook guy are all big Obama supporters and who are as we speak preparing to "Give a Hoot for Hillary" or "Love Lizzie 'Chop chop capitalism' Warren". So between the Obamacronies of the left and the corporatist trolls of the "moderate" right there is no way the looting will end. Lest the interests of the zabillionaires be impaired. Better to screw those with less clout and pretend we care about income inequality.

Fraud is so much easier than truth in our ever expanding kleptocracy.

Now Marty O'Malley's battered and tarnished halo has begun to slip

The fact is the Dems are hard pressed to find a single governor of their party that has done a decent job. When your party specializes in doing the wrong thing it's hard to find people who are good at doing the right thing. And then there are Dems like Gov. Jay Nixon of MO who have spent two terms doing NOthing.

More O'Mess here.

Now here's some good advice: "If you want to repeat or continue the experience of the last six years, then vote for the candidate who sounds most like Obama."

I think Jimmy Carter would call what we're experiencing "malaise".  But don't worry: "Climate soldiers and Hillary's coming, you're finally on your own. I can hear the headlines screaming 'economy's dead in O-hi-o!'."

Obama has piled as many new obligations on employers as possible. He has pursued new healthcare mandates, environmental regulations and labor policies that keep big union bosses as fat and happy as they can be in the sunset years of the labor movement. But none of these policies ever held forth the promise of causing a burst of job creation. Not only has national job creation been slow — relying mostly on the booming Texas economy to pad the statistics — but non-farm business wages are actually lower now than they were in 2012.

As the presidential candidates for 2016 begin developing their economic agendas and talking points, Americans should pay close attention. Some of the candidates will talk up a populist-sounding economic agenda consisting of empty platitudes about inequality and proposals (minimum wage, for example) that not only won’t pass but also won’t help.

"How many more (years 'til things don't suck)? How many more?"

I'm sure it's us "racist, homophobic" American's fault.