Financial pundits and media narrative engineers cancel the recession!

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance brings us more good news about the economy.

Last week U.S. economic data included the Labor Department’s report on initial filings for unemployment benefits, at historically low levels. Also last week, the Commerce Department reported the U.S. housing market (new homes and permits) was the strongest since 2007. Then came the Philadelphia Fed’s index of manufacturing business activity in September, more than doubling estimates as factories continue to expand. And if that wasn’t too much winning, the Commerce Department then announced August retail sales growth was double expectations. Main Street USA is very strong.

None of the economic data supports the almost month-long ‘recession narrative’ pushed by financial pundits and media narrative engineers, and next week the second estimate of Q2 GDP growth will be released. Attempting to retain the smallest remaining whiff of credibility, the Bloomberg economists now announce they’re canceling the recession.

Yes, in a piece titled “Hold That Recession – U.S. Indicators are Trouncing Forecasts“, Bloomberg admits the economy doesn’t match their gloomy narrative:

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy is outperforming expectations by the most this year, offering a fresh rebuttal to last month’s resurgent recession fears fueled by the trade war and a manufacturing slump.

The Bloomberg Economic Surprise Index has reached an 11-month high after four indicators released Thursday, including existing home sales and jobless claims, each surpassed expectations.

Read more here.

He gained viewers!

In Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds asks, "What did Alex Jones do that CNN and MSNBC don't do every day? In his comments section, Jquip answers: Gain viewers.
Read more here.

"The tech elite has financed a Democratic Party that now appears to favor socialism over capitalism."

In City Journal, Joel Kotkin writes,

...In the 1980s and 1990s, Silicon Valley, like many industries, placed its bets on both political parties. Moderate Republicans like Pete McCloskey, Ed Zschau, and Tom Campbell routinely won congressional elections, as did similarly minded members of the state legislature. But over the past few decades, the Valley has become politically monochromatic, with virtually no elected Republicans. Almost all contributions from Silicon Valley tech owners and employees in the 2016 and 2018 elections went to Democrats. Tech money helped Newsom outspend his GOP rival by three to one—with major contributions from former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Lauren Jobs (widow of the Apple founder) at the top of the donor list. Former Google chairman Eric Schmidt heads data efforts for several Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and arch-populist Elizabeth Warren. Tech employees are, if anything, more progressive-leaning in their political contributions than their corporate masters.

Just a few years ago, these investments seemed to be paying off. The Obama administration was deferential to tech firms, steering away from any hint of antitrust action. Google representatives met in the White House weekly, and more than 250 people shuttled between working for Obama and Google during his presidency. Now, this power is being challenged. Google is being sued for monopolistic practices by 48 states. Though progressive California has stayed out of the fray, AB5 demonstrates that the tech moguls are losing ground there, too, to better-organized and more politically savvy public-employee and service unions.

The new legislature’s makeup reveals how much power has shifted to the unions. Beyond protecting gig workers, organized labor has broken with tech on education reform, long a Silicon Valley hot-button issue. Under the current legislative super-majority, the Democrats have worked overtime to make sure that California’s schools—ranked 40th on Education Week’s composite score of national school performance—remain mediocre by undermining charter schools, eliminating exit exams, banning suspensions for unruly students, and, as a recent proposal suggests, introducing a new ethnic-studies curriculum for public school students.

The Californian ruling caste’s progressive sentiments have not translated into broad-based economic benefits. According to an analysis by Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, California has created surprisingly few high-wage jobs over the past decade, with 86 percent below the median pay and some 40 percent paying under $40,000—in one of the nation’s most expensive states. In a tech-dominated economy, virtually every other sector has grown slowly, well below results in such key competitors as Texas and Arizona. And even the bounty of Silicon Valley has not helped the state’s middle class, since some 40 percent of all tech jobs have gone to foreign workers.

How long will Silicon Valley’s leaders accept these conditions? Both Lyft and Uber have shifted some of their operations out of state, Lyft to Nashville and Uber to north Dallas. Apple has opened a huge new operation in the suburbs outside Austin. But there may be no escape if the ascendant Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ends up in the White House, particularly with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. In these circumstances, Big Tech is likely to be treated in Washington with the kind of scorn that Amazon faced in New York City from local congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now increasingly the national voice of the party grassroots. If Warren wins, tech companies and their high-wage upper-tier workers will have to deal with demands to put workers on their boards and pay huge taxes to fund expanded Social Security and Medicare programs. Privacy legislation could impede their highly profitable tracking and data-collection businesses, and antitrust enforcement could see the breakup of companies like Google and Facebook. At least one progressive, Oregon senator Ron Wyden, has even suggested that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg face “the possibility of a prison term.”

The tech elite has financed a Democratic Party that now appears to favor socialism over capitalism. A socialist movement is even percolating among Silicon Valley tech employees, many of whom see little opportunity to amass enough wealth to buy a house in the exorbitant Bay Area. Like those French aristocrats who backed revolutionary ideas in the late-eighteenth century only to find themselves riding tumbrels through angry crowds, tech elites have spent a fortune promoting a “woke” politics that is turning against them. They may not lose their heads, but they could find their riches fleeced by former allies. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving, self-involved, and cognitively gifted group of . . . well, idiots.

Read more here.

Doomed?

Twitchy: Cory Booker praises his campaign for being transparent and courageous enough to claim it’s doomed unless people send $1.7 million FAST

Shooting itself in the foot

In a comment on the latest Kavanaugh smear, Glenn Reynolds reminds us in Instapundit,

the party that has relied heavily on rule by judiciary is still shooting itself in the foot if it delegitimizes the Supreme Court.

Read more here.

Real news

via Steven Hayward

Our evolving skulls

At One Zero, Katherine Reynolds Lewis writes,

about 250 years ago, our faces began to change. Boyd argues that industrialization interrupted the ancestral patterns of weaning and feeding, with babies nursing on demand for years while also trying solid foods under adults’ watchful eyes. Boyd says that the widespread adoption of bottle feeding, pacifiers and soft processed food deprived toddlers of practice chewing and distorted the shapes of their mouths. (“In modern society you have Gerber’s baby food,” Corruccini told me. “Etruscan kids had to chew once they were getting off breast milk. Babies have remarkably powerful chewing capabilities.”) Just like diabetes and heart disease, malocclusion — the misalignment of jaws and teeth — followed industrialization around the globe. Meanwhile, people in societies that never industrialized enjoyed well-aligned teeth and jaws.

Read much more here.

The President seems to have some expertise on this subject matter!

Salt Reactors

hat-tip Glenn Reynolds

U.S. sending troops to Saudi Arabia to defend against air and missile strikes

CNBC and others are reporting that the Pentagon

will deploy U.S. forces to the Middle East on the heels of the Iranian attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announced Friday.

“The president has approved the deployment of U.S. forces which will be defensive in nature and primarily focused on air and missile defense,” Esper said, adding that Saudi Arabia requested the support.

Read more here.

"The Obama administration’s actions threatened not just Trump and his presidency, but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States."

In Spectator, Roger Kimball writes,

...The world was surprised when, at the end of August, it was announced that inspector general Michael Horowitz would produce not one but two reports on alleged wrongdoing in the Department of Justice’s conduct of the investigation into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The first dealt exclusively with allegations that James Comey, the disgraced former director of the FBI, had mishandled classified information. A report concluded that Comey had ‘failed to live up to’ his responsibility. ‘By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment,’ the report concluded, ‘and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees — and the many thousands more former FBI employees — who similarly have access to or knowledge of non- public information.’

...On and on this kaleidoscopic onion has unpeeled, one skin after the next, each revealing another layer and additional personalities. Finally, however, I believe we are nearing its hollow center. Attorney general William Barr — aided not only by Michael Horowitz but also by US attorney John Durham —is proceeding methodically, inexorably to expose the origins of the spurious, illegal Get Trump extravaganza.

What began in 2016, or late 2015, and continued until and beyond the day Robert Mueller deposited his nearly 500-page report clearing the president of ‘collusion’ was not a hoax at all. It was an attempted coup. We should face up to that unpleasant fact and call things by their real names.

The Obama administration’s actions threatened not just Trump and his presidency, but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States. As this fact becomes more widely appreciated, expect James Comey’s tweets to take on a more elegiac, ‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’ tone. Don’t expect an apology. Do expect a shifty sort of reticence and backpedaling.

Read more here.

"They didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Party left them!"

CNN's Martin Savidge speaks with voters in a Democratic stronghold in Minnesota as local attitudes about politics begin to shift.
-----
Democratic voter on President Trump: He's our guy pic.twitter.com/EOvAUQ6eHU

— TrumpPatriot🇵🇱🇺🇸 (@TrumpPatriotPL) September 20, 2019

Twitter suspends the accounts of Latinos for Trump. Gives no explanation.

After Trump's rally in New Mexico, Twitter has suspended the accounts of the leadership of Latinos for Trump. Laura Loomer has the story here.

"The highest level of sanctions ever imposed on a country."

Civil rights won by Gandhian, non-violent protests?

In Spectator, George Parry writes,

Gun control doesn’t work, not even when the government uses all of its powers to keep an oppressed citizenry disarmed and submissive. The Deacons for Defense and Justice and thousands of other armed black civil rights advocates proved that conclusively. And society at large is better for it.

Our enlightened progressive betters mock as paranoid fantasy the idea that there would ever be a need for American civilians to arm themselves in order to resist government oppression. That sort of governmental abuse, they tut-tut, won’t and can’t happen here. But it has happened here, and, as recently as the 1960s, armed civilian resistance to tyranny did work. Just ask the Deacons for Defense and Justice.

Read more here.

President Trump shares a hot dog with Michael Savage

Michael tells the story in American Thinker.

"Rhetorical sleight-of-hand."

Oregon Muse does his Morning Rant in the Ace of Spades blog.

"Hey look, everybody, the progs have invented a couple of new terms. The first is 'BROWN-face'. It's kind of like "blackface", but its use is reserved for prog politicians in order to minimize any potential damage to their careers or reputations. See, 'brownface' is not as bad as 'blackface'. This will come as good news to Justin Trudeau. You don't ever want to be caught in 'blackface'. But if there's a photo of you in 'brownface', hey, it's all good. If you're a prog. Republicans, needless to say, will never be caught in brownface, only in the blackest of blackface.

"The second term the progressives have just made up is 'credible accusation'. It's been used extensively in the recent media coverage of those two NY Times hack reporters who set out to smear Brett Kavanaugh by resurrecting bogus charges that didn't pass muster the first time around. In order to add rhetorical 'oomph' to the old, previously discarded accusations to make them look like new accusations, they got magically turned into 'credible accusations.' So, you might ask, what is the difference between an 'accusation' and a 'credible accusation'? Well, a 'credible accusation' is much better than a standard, run-of-the-mill accusation. How so? Well, a 'credible accusation' is one that you should believe, that ought to be believed. Why? Because it's 'credible'.

"No one has ever said why exactly these accusations have suddenly become 'credible'. Particularly since no new evidence has been introduced and none of the principal actors actually remember anything. It's kind of like the 2004 election when the media kept referring to the Swift Boat veterans' testimony about the character of John Kerry as 'discredited', as in 'the discredited Swift Boat vets', although I never saw any of the actual discrediting that supposedly took place. They were just assuming what they needed to prove. Or, more precisely, they wanted you to assume that what they needed to prove had already been proven. That, since they had used the word 'discredited', it had actually been 'discredited' (even though it really hadn't).

"What it boils down to is that the latest round of accusation against Kavanaugh are 'credible' because a couple of progressive hack NY Times reporters say so.

"Progressive definitions of words are like progressive definitions of gender, i.e. fluid, amorphous, and, basically, whatever suits their purposes at the time. It's just rhetorical sleight-of-hand."

"If we can just keep politicians from screwing it up!"

"Much of America’s serious violent crime is perpetrated by repeat offenders who, in many cases, could have been (but were not) behind bars at the time of their offense."

In the Manhattan Institute, Rafael Mangual reports on the issue of mass decarceration.

The size of America’s prison population is driven by the incarceration of violent felons. These felons are held mostly in state prisons, which account for nearly 90% of inmates nationwide. Most prisoners are serving time for violent or weapons offenses, and the vast majority of them—even those incarcerated for nonviolent drug and property offenses—will go on to re-offend, sometimes by committing serious or violent felonies.

Slashing the prison population to match levels in the Western European democracies would require releasing significant numbers of violent and chronic offenders serving time for crimes that most Americans agree should lead to prison. Reducing or eliminating sentences would diminish the incapacitation benefits of incarceration and, given the extremely high rates of recidivism, would expose society to large numbers of people likely to commit more crimes.

1. Most prisoners are serving short sentences for serious, violent crimes.

60% of state prisoners are serving time for murder, rape, assault, robbery, or burglary—four times the number convicted only of drug offenses.
Despite the portion of prisoners in for serious and violent offenses, less than 15% of state felony convictions result in more than two years served in prison; even 20% of those imprisoned for murder, and nearly 60% of those imprisoned for rape or sexual assault, serve less than five years of their sentences.

2. Most prisoners will re-offend post-release.

83% of released state prisoners are arrested for a new offense at least once after their initial release.
More than one-third of those convicted of violent felonies in large urban counties had an active criminal-justice status—that is, either on probation, parole, or out pending the disposition of a prior case—when they committed their offense.


...Much of America’s serious violent crime is perpetrated by repeat offenders who, in many cases, could have been (but were not) behind bars at the time of their offense. Large-scale decarceration promises to make the problem worse.

Read more here.

"When the president tells you he fired me, I really will have quit!"

Today, Andrew examines the question as to whether we should bomb Iran in retaliation for Iran's bombing of Saudi oil production facilities. On the one hand, there is Senator Lindsey Graham who wants Iran to "pay a price." On the other hand, there is Senator Rand Paul, who never wants to fight anyone.

Andrew says it is an easy choice: the Iranians are bad guys who want to destroy us. The Saudis are bad guys who want to work with us. Trump thinks out loud as a microphone is shoved into his face. He goes back and forth thinking about what to do. As Andrew says, you never know what to do with Iran. Hillary's vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine blames Trump's sanctions on Iran as the cause of Ian's actions. Iran wants to draw us in. Trump is doing the right thing to avoid doing that, says Andrew.

Why has it taken years for the gay community to hold Ed Buck accountable? Or the politicians like Adam Schiff and Gavin Newsome?
And what about the abortion doctor in South Bend? Mayor Pete hopes it "doesn't get caught up in politics!"

Andrew's guest is Chris Rufo who writes for City Journal. Chris speaks about the addiction crisis (heroin, fentanyl, and meth), combined with progressive policies that have turned into regimes of permissiveness. The "New Left Urbanists" think that for every problem there is a physical infrastructure solution. Chris believes we have got to get conservatorship laws in place at the state and local levels for seriously mentally ill persons like schizophrenics and people with bipolar disorders who may have drug addiction problems on top of that. There is also a magnet effect of permissive policies, decriminalization policies, no-strings-attached benefit policies. Chris wants emergency shelter facilities to be built, and to disallow camping on the streets.

The return of the Punitive Liberals

In the Washington Examiner, James Piereson writes,

...it was perhaps inevitable that the policies of the Punitive Liberals would give us the worst of all worlds--weakness and embarrassment abroad, inflation and unemployment at home, and a public that was beginning to lose hope in its future. By 1980, the nation had seen the results of its experiment with Punitive Liberalism, and was beginning to look for an alternative vision.

Fortunately for all of us, Ronald Reagan stepped into the void and supplied that vision. He understood, more than any other candidate of the time, that the pervasive negativism of the Democratic party was largely responsible for our national difficulties. And thus his pragmatic proposals for tax cuts, deregulation, and defense spending were accompanied with inspiring rhetoric about national pride and a hopeful future.

Read more here.

What will be Trump's 2020 game plan?

In PJ Media, Stephen Green wargames the electoral college and tries to preview Trump's 2020 game plan.

...bunch of states have signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. If Trump wins the popular vote, he'll carry the entire West Coast (including Hawaii), plus Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Delaware, New York, and the bulk of New England's ECs. Even being super-generous and lettin+g the Dems hold on to MN in the case of a Trump landslide, look at what the NPV compact could do to the map.

...I would expect that if the election starts looking like a blowout, you'll see an awful lot of blue state assemblies scrambling to see who can pull out of the compact the fastest. Failing that, some well-financed moderate Dem or NeverTrumper might just jump in, in an effort to deny Trump a popular majority.

But back to Trump's expanded battlespace. Playing in places like New Jersey and Oregon is quite the longshot, but unlike any other Republican candidate of recent vintage, Trump is willing to try.

That alone makes me really like his chances -- not just of winning, but of winning bigger than many people expect.

Read more here, including some very interesting graphs.

Socialism? Are you serious?

Roger Kimball writes in Spectator,

I do not think it is properly appreciated just how bizarre it is that socialism appears to be making a serious comeback, not just as a common-room amusement among ignorant students who have no idea what socialism is, but also among presidential candidates and members of Congress, some of whom, anyway, know only too well what that murderous ideology entails.

Winston Churchill was too kind when he said that socialism was ‘the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.’ All that is correct. But beyond that, socialism rests upon two fundamental goals, the abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth. A corollary to the achievement of those goals, as socialist totalitarians the world over have instantly realized, is terror and a police state. And yet here we are with serious proposals to institute socialism in the United States.

Read more here.

"The decisions that keep Comey from being indicted were made by Strzok and Paige!"

"Horowitz is giving cover!"

Cruz refuses to accept gun control plan being circulated by DOJ and White HOuse

AWR Hawkins reports in Breitbart,

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) rejected the White House/Department of Justice (DOJ) universal background check plan that was circulated in a memo on Wednesday.
Breitbart News reported that the memo largely mirrored Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) gun control bill and would require the issuance of a “bill of sale” and the preservation of a “chain of title” for gun sales that do not currently require government oversight.

The Hill reports that Attorney General William Barr tried to talk Sen. Cruz into supporting the gun control, but Cruz would not.

Background checks have proven no barrier to mass shooters in America as nearly every mass shooter of the past 12 years acquired his guns via a background check. All the while, criminals are arrested on gun charges but not prosecuted to the fullness of the law.

Cruz summed this up, saying, “If we want to stop crimes, we need to focus on the bad guys, not the good guys.”

Read more here.

Will we hang tough?

On the third anniversary of his Morning Report, JJ Sefton writes,

...this President has utterly exposed them because they have attempted the same thing on him since July of 2015. The big question is will Kavanaugh hang tough? Indeed, will all of us who have teachers, employers and our peers as well as the professional goon squads and pressure groups arrayed against us hang tough as well?

Read more and click on his links here.

Trump is fighting a culture war

In Town Hall, Victor Davis explains that President Trump is engaged in an all-out culture war against progressives.

Certainly, Trump's agenda of closing the border, using tariffs to overturn a half-century of Chinese mercantilism, and pulling back from optional overseas military interventions variously offends both Democrats and establishment Republicans.

Trump periodically and mercurially fires his top officials. He apparently does not care whether the departed write damning memoirs or join his opposition. He will soon appoint his fourth national security adviser within just three years.

To make things worse for his critics, Trump's economy is booming as never before in the new 21st century: near-record-low unemployment, a record number of Americans working, increases in workers' wages and family incomes, low interest rates, low inflation, steady GDP growth and a strong stock market.

Yet the real source of Trump derangement syndrome is his desire to wage a multifront pushback -- politically, socially, economically and culturally -- against what might be called the elite postmodern progressive world., it appears to Victor Davis Hanson that President Trump is engaged in an all-out culture war against progressives.

... new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care and abortion on demand.

An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.

No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.

Trump variously goes after antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities and, above all, the media -- especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

For all the acrimony and chaos -- and prognostications of Trump's certain failure -- a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.

In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran Deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord mere virtue signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller's bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.

Some of the most prominent Trump haters -- Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci and Rep. Adam Schiff -- either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.

Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved further to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred, he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.

In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.

Read more here.

Will law enforcement officials remember their Constitutional oaths?

In light of Beto O'Rourke's gun-grabbing threats, Kurt Schlichter has some questions for law enforcement officials.

Remember, the Normal Americans who Beto and his pals presume to unleash their forces upon are the same people who show up for jury duty. And a lawyer like me only has to convince some of them that you were wrong to go barging into some guy’s house because you thought he had naughty pew-pews, and you can kiss your life savings good-bye. Oh, and that’s if you are lucky. Pray you don’t hurt someone and get a DA willing to charge you criminally. Because, “Well, I knew what I was doing was unconstitutional but I was too weak to say ‘No’” will not cut it.

“I was just following orders” stopped working at the end of the rope in Nuremberg. Today, you have a bad shoot in a raid on some drug dealer and you get our benefit of the doubt because you’re our knight and it’s a tough job. But if you smoke some 12-year-old for twitching after you break down her daddy’s door because somebody thinks maybe he’s got a scary black rifle somewhere in his condo then you’re the bad guy.

You.

Is saving your pension worth that risk?

Or will you choose the hard road of upholding your oath if ordered to make war on your fellow Americans?

Read more here.

John Bolton speaks to Gatestone Institute supporters.

Politico has a story about it here.

In VDARE, Ann Coulter expresses her opinion on the latest attempt to slime Justice Kavanaugh.

Read it here.

"This is a nation's youth fighting for the preservation of its future!"

Three robbers' careers cut short

Headline in Ace of Spades:

Georgia Man Kills Three Youths With Semiautomatic Assault Weapon
PS, The Three Youths Were Trying to Rob His Home and Were Shooting at Him

Read the story here.

"a new colossus rising from the ashes of yesterday's despair."

In PJ Media, Salina Zito writes,

...They may look like ordinary construction cranes to someone unfamiliar with the history of this region. But if you're from here, they look like something different. Building the ethane cracker plant, each of these cranes looks like a new colossus rising from the ashes of yesterday's despair.

Building the plant has brought in 6,000 good-paying jobs, with more to come. Ultimately, there will be 600 permanent jobs at the plant, with industry analysts predicting triple that amount in supporting industries.

Jobs postings are everywhere touting opportunities, no matter the skill level -- high school education, trade school certificate, chemists, engineers, information technology, labor. If you reliably turn up for work, there is likely a career for you in the oil and gas industry.

Read more here.

Footage discovered of Joe Biden taking down Corn Pop!

hat-tip Oregon Muse

Unstoppable!

In Science alert, Michelle Starr reports,

According to new research, the dead may not always rest in peace... quite literally. For more than a year after death, corpses move around "significantly", and this finding could be important for forensic investigations.

Researchers at an Australia-based decomposition research facility - colloquially known as a "body farm", a term some scientists find disrespectful - made the startling discovery after using time-lapse cameras to film decomposing corpses.

Read the article here.

Good idea!

When will he stop? No, Joe, you do not sound like a wonk.

Despite a US population of only 330 million, Joe Biden says child tax credit would put 720 million women back into the workforce.

That’s like double the population of the US. pic.twitter.com/DgChhZRzFl

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) September 17, 2019

"We are all Brett Kavanaugh now!"

JJ Sefton writes about the latest attempt of the New York Times to smear Brett Kavanaugh.

The coup to take out candidate Trump and then President Trump is exactly the same as this, or more to the point, this is merely an extension of it. On the granular level, the courts since perhaps the time of Marbury and most definitely since the FDR administration were where the Left went to ram down our collective throat all of their insane policies that never stood a chance at the ballot box. And once ruled the law of the land, it was forever etched in stone. So now that the courts are gradually realigning themselves back towards justices who swear loyalty to the Constitution and not the Communist Manifesto, plus a detectable undercurrent of popular revulsion for the purveyors of same, there can only be one recourse for the Left: De-legitimization. And that goes hand in hand with the ongoing de-legitimization of American history, western civilization, the Scottish Enlightenment, Judeo-Christian morals and values and all that goes with it.

Whether the Left's leaders see and understand their 100-plus year slow motion hijacking of the nation is possibly slipping through their grasp or truly believe their own agitprop about the evil of America is irrelevant. The end result is still the same; a growing threat of lawlessness up to and including the use of violence to maintain the power they have and perhaps attempt a grand coup.

From shooting unarmed lawmakers at a softball field and nearly beating them to death on their front lawns to confronting them in restaurants, threatening their families and children or smearing them to such an extent as to virtually ruining their careers and livelihoods, the Left has declared war on us. And, gentle reader, they are coming for you. Masterpiece Cake Shop, Memories Pizza and now "social credit scoring" are the tip of the iceberg. They will not leave us alone. We will be made to cheer them on and woe to anyone who stops applauding first. We are all Brett Kavanaugh now. High time we wake up to that fact.

Read his links here.

"No Blood For Oil"

In the Ace of Spades blog, CBD writes,

...we have the intelligence-gathering capability that can assist our allies against the Iranian regime. And we have the logistical capacity to move huge quantities of whatever may be needed; whether that is resupply of armaments or oilfield and refinery equipment remains to be seen. And we have air power and anti-missile technology that Iran would find difficult, if not impossible to counter.

Notice what is missing? Troops! Aside from naval support and airpower, we should not...must not...put boots on the ground in the Middle East. "No Blood For Oil" may sound like a leftist screech, but in this case, it is 100% correct.

Read more here.

Tomorrow's headline: "Massive protests at the Trump Rally in New Mexico" (Two People)

"Crucially for your state, we have ended the last administration's war on American energy. Natural gas production has gone up 40 percent in New Mexico since Trump was elected. Crude oil production has more than doubled.

Energy revenues are up by nearly two-thirds. This means more jobs, higher wages, and energy independence. We are now a net exporter of energy. Revenues from energy production provide up to 25% of New Mexico's budget. They have generated nearly one billion dollars of budget surplus in New Mexico!

We have created six million new jobs since my election. Since my election, the number of new business applications has increased by more than 30 percent in New Mexico; more than any other state! Median income surpassed $50,000 for Hispanic Americans for the first time ever!"

Trump seems very serious, determined, and confident of winning New Mexico in 2020.

Bigger than Pearl Harbor?

In PJ Media, Roger L. Simon explains why he believes President Trump

Must Punish the Mullahs Severely for Attack on Saudi Oil Fields.

The raid on the Saudi oil fields was at least as big as Pearl Harbor, possibly bigger, if you think about it, especially in terms of the amount of physical damage done. Whether this was accomplished directly by Iran or by one of its proxies or whether drone or cruise missiles or both were involved are distinctions without a difference. It happened and the repercussions, financial and otherwise, are already being felt.

...At this point too, it would be unwise, in fact, counter-indicated, for Trump to talk to Iran's leadership. Our president--at the behest of the French president, who looks like a fool at the moment-- was rumored to be meeting with Rouhani at the U. N., even though the Iranian president is nothing but a figurehead. (An American president should be meeting with Ayatollah Khamenei, the country's Supreme Leader, and dictator.) Furthermore, this isn't like talking with Kim Jung-un, who fired some missiles into the ocean for show. The weapons here were fired directly at the world's largest oil refinery with disastrous results. What the mullahs--a regime of religious psychopaths--will do next is anybody's guess, but stopping their behavior without making them pay in the strongest way seems impossible now.

This absolutely should not mean putting American boots on the ground under any circumstances. It should be an air obliteration of anything associated with the mullahs and their Revolutionary Guard, including oil fields, ports, factories, military installations, and nuclear sites. Keep doing it until they scream. Leave the results for the Iranian people to sort out when we're done.

Read more here.

Negotiations with China

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance once again explains how Trump's team deals with China.

The dance with the dragon is a complex geopolitical relationship between two large economies. China’s view within the dynamic is shaped by their own internal ideology and outlook. The panda mask dynamic was/is strategic and has served them well for decades, but now President Trump -while engaging a structural confrontation- has used the panda strategy against Beijing's interests. China is flummoxed.

Each of President Trump’s trade team members have a specific role; each member also has a specific opponent within the dance:

♦Peter Navarro is the blue-collar hawk. He focuses on the administration’s Wall Street adversaries; and the U.S. multinationals -American companies- who have aligned their interests with Beijing. Navarro’s focus is internal to U.S. interests. Navarro confronts U.S. corporations, Wall Street interests, who are working against Main Street.

♦Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin carries the economic-financial weapons (represents the dollar), and he faces toward global adversaries (IMF, World Bank, European Central Bank, etc.) who have also aligned their interests with Beijing and the status quo.

♦Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, coordinates the punitive actions that keep Beijing in a position of compromise. Ross reviews prior agreements, trade legal specifics, searches through contractual obligations and ultimately controls the tariffs, if/when triggered by President Trump. Secretary Ross faces down the World Trade Organization (WTO).

♦U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is the contract writer; the primary negotiator; and he is at the center of the trade group where the details are constructed. Lighthizer writes the terms based on the objectives of President Trump. Only POTUS approves the new agreements.

♦White House Economic Council Chairman Larry Kudlow is the explainer, the trade diplomat. The communication bridge between what is happening in the big picture and what the subsequent consequences mean. Chairman Kudlow is to remain affable, optimistic and approachable by any interests who have concerns. The PR guy.

“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones”

~ Machiavelli

Read more here.

Walk it back!

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reports

former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, accused of lying under oath, lied about the production of character witnesses who the defense claimed were going to speak about McCabe’s integrity. In essence, he lied about the character witnesses.

Read more here.

Some suggestions for the GOP

Did you know there is a September 30th federal budget deadline? Daniel Horowitz has some suggestions for the GOP in Conservative Review.

Which brings us to the September 30 budget deadline. Republicans have already given away the farm on the budget caps. They will spend us into oblivion. They are left with no narrative headed into the election. Why not have the Senate bring a continuing resolution to the floor that defunds cities that violate federal law and shield illegal aliens arrested for crimes from detection? Voters care a lot more about the release of illegal alien child sex offenders than a risk of a partial, temporary government shutdown. Republicans sure won’t fight on anything this time next year, right before the election, so now is the only time to do it.

Today, congressional Republicans are meeting in Maryland at their annual policy and strategy retreat to cast around for a winning agenda. The irony of the location for their retreat is likely lost on them because they almost never discuss sanctuary cities, MS-13, or the massive illegal alien crime wave. But perhaps if they peek out their hotel windows, they will be reminded that the winning agenda is staring them in the face.

Read more here.

Confronting a gangsta

Real Clear Politics has the video of Joe Biden telling about how he confronted a gangsta at a swimming pool in Delaware in 1962. Watch it here.

Now read the Morning Rant by Oregon Muse in the Ace of Spades blog to learn some discrepancies in Joe's account.

Not even worth free?

This is the cover of the Washington Post's free Express newspaper today on its last day of publication. Read more here.

Journalistic malpractice

I was glad to see Ace of Spades address the new New York Times hit piece on Judge Kavanaugh today.

New York Times Runs Yet Another Smear Against Brett Kavanaugh; Alleged Newspaper Forgets to Mention 1, the Alleged Victim Denies Any Memory of This Silly Tale, and 2, The Person Claiming He Remembers Hearing About It Is... A Clinton Lawyer.
—Ace of Spades
What a fusion of common backgrounds, common social circles, and common political agendas.

Read it here.

Can we start by acknowledging some problems?

Rachel Bovard writes in the Daily Caller about the difficulties younger American adults are having.

In fact, we can’t even make enough money to get married, have kids, and buy a house — the very steps conservatives say will save us, and save civil society. Perhaps relatedly, suicide is now the second leading cause of death among ages 10-34. And we’re killing ourselves on opioids.

Given all of this, is it any wonder even a vague understanding of socialism sounds better?

Socialism is no cure, but if we’re going to win back millennials, it has to start acknowledging the problems. Saying “free market” really loudly isn’t going to suffice when much of what plagues millennials is linked to government manipulating the so-called free market — in many cases, with backing from the right.

...The hikes in tuition can be traced back to federal involvement in student loans. The tax code continues to be manipulated in favor of corporations, and less toward individuals and families. Health care is an uncompetitive cluster made worse by the government. Financiers on Wall Street benefit and manufacturing jobs disappear as our economic policies allow China to use the dollar against us. The government-backed housing giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, egged on by lawmakers who did nothing in response to their role in the market crash a decade ago, are again loading up financial markets with subprime mortgages.

...Capitalism has made us the richest and freest country in the world. But those on the right need to confront the flaws and excesses in the system — and posit means to address them — if they have a prayer of defending it with the rising generation.

Read more here.

Kaepernick is so yesterday!

Colin Kaepernick: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”

Hong Kong: pic.twitter.com/92dw1hzemY

— YAF (@yaf) September 9, 2019

Kellyanne Conway holds true as the President's Counselor

Isn't she fabulous? I absolutely do not for one moment understand how she tolerates her husband's hateful words toward our president.

A great prayer!

hat tip MTC

Keeping busy

Live look at viewers watching this marathon CNN town hall on climate pic.twitter.com/Lxzqdd9z4Y

— Greg Pollowitz (@GPollowitz) September 4, 2019

via Oregon Muse

"the Democratic presidential candidates pretty much pledged themselves to the destruction of the energy economy of America."

Oregon Muse writes this morning,

"So, during the CNN Climate Change Town Hall Meeting, every single one of the Democratic presidential candidates pretty much pledged themselves to the destruction of the energy economy of America. They were falling all over themselves and each other into supporting every cockamamie energy idea ever thought up by imbeciles: punitive carbon taxes, stop all fracking, close all of the coal mines, and shut down oil refineries. Kamala Harris thinks the government should tell us what to eat and what straws to use. Bernie wants there to be fewer brown people.

"You can't make this stuff up. They actually got up in front of a TV camera and said these things. If I was an SNL writer trying to write a parody of the Democrats, I'd reject this for being too ridiculously exaggerated. Granted, it was CNN, so you know everyone else was watching 'My Mother the Car' reruns on Nick at Night, but still, I'm starting to think this was a stunt pulled by some hitherto unknown genius prankster deep down inside the GOP to see how big a fool he could trick the Dems into making of themselves. And aside from the minuscule audience, it looked like the prank was a spectacular success. All the Dems now look like a bunch of raving lunatics who want to hurt America. If our media was even within shouting distance of being honest, the Democrats would be finished as a national party."

3 reasons why we elected Trump

To the people who fly private but lecture us about the environment.
To the people who live in gated communities but lecture us about building walls.
To the people who travel with armed guards & lecture us about guns:

Your bottomless hypocrisy is why America chooses Trump.

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) September 4, 2019

C'mon Brit; don't bother us with facts!

“U.S. CO2 emissions are down to where they were in 1985–a third of a century ago, when the GDP was half what it is now in inflation-adjusted terms, and the population was smaller by a quarter. No other industrialized country has come anywhere close.” https://t.co/G3oWy8Yejr

— Brit Hume (@brithume) September 4, 2019

When it itches, sometimes you just have to scratch!

"Guns are a girl's best friend."

In Red State, Brandon Morse argues that

If anyone should be advocating for the rights of gun owners, it’s women.

Read more here.

“Making news out of nothing at all.”

Bookworm makes some excellent points today. Here are some.

It would be an excellent thing if Trump would make 10-15 minute videos in which he explains in simple, but serious, language the rationales behind his policies. He needs to explain why he won’t jump on board the anthropogenic climate change bandwagon; why he believes illegal immigration is bad for America and for Latin America; why Israel is our ally; why socialism is bad; why the Second Amendment matters; why 3rd trimester abortions are wrong; etc.

Trump does reference all or most of those issues at his rallies. However, even though the rallies are lots of fun, the really important policy ideas or factual statements tend to get lost. Sometimes they’re awkwardly phrased, which diminishes their power; or they’re buried in a mountain of issues so no one notices them; or they’re broken up, so that the whole picture only shows if you listen to every rally speech he’s given. That’s not good enough.

Thinking about it, I would love it if whoever does the PragerU videos would go to the White House and give President Trump’s staff a primer in doing similar videos to those PragerU produces: short, honest, incredibly clear, pointed, and informative. It would be hugely helpful to political discourse in this country if serious Americans had a little more to hang on to than tweets and disjointed campaign speeches. I know we have a short attention span in modern America, but surely we can handle an intelligent 5-10 minute video from our president explaining important matters of public policy.

She also makes some good points about our knowledge of weather history. For example,

The reality is that we have no idea what the worst weather events are in history because our knowledge of history when it comes to weather is so minute as to be useless for purposes of ranking weather events. So it really gets my goat to see media outlets try to terrify people with historically illiterate claims.

Two other points she makes effectively concern children's medical records and making news out of nothing at all.
Read them and more here.

"We can no longer have any expectation of good faith, sound process or common sense. In this environment, it’s preposterous to believe that we can start putting asterisks on the Second Amendment and hope that it will survive."

Ann Coulter writes on her website,

Americans used to be able to rely on two bulwarks to protect us from stupidity:

1) Legal process -- The genius of our founders was to strictly limit the power of capricious, and often armed, government officials and to create a government of laws that made major changes difficult, but not impossible.

You want a new amendment to the Constitution? Get 38 states to ratify it, two-thirds of the Senate to vote for it, the president to sign it. There -- you’ve changed the constitution. You oppose a law? Run for office, put a proposition on the ballot, donate to a campaign, persuade your fellow citizens -- or move to a different state.

2) Common sense -- We also used to be able to assume that a basic reasonableness undergirded our society, flowing across generational lines, political divides, racial differences and policy disputes. Until the 1970s, for example, federal courts mostly enforced actual legal and constitutional rights on the books. The other branches of government tended to perform their roles in good faith -- or at least not in obvious bad faith.

Whether you were a Taft Republican or a JFK Democrat, you believed that we had a border, that people here illegally would be processed according to law, that there were two sexes, that free speech was a hallmark of our nation, and that a kid could dress up as a cowboy or Indian for Halloween without being branded a “racist.”

Naturally, therefore, my first instinct was to assume that our shared respect for process and decency remained. But I now realize that’s wrong.

...We’re dealing with people who are not honest brokers. We can no longer have any expectation of good faith, sound process or common sense.

In this environment, it’s preposterous to believe that we can start putting asterisks on the Second Amendment and hope that it will survive.

We can’t entrust our liberties to your dirty hands.

Read more here.

President Trump halted it

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance writes in part,

Think about how much leverage James Comey would have held over the institution of the Office of the President if they had succeeded. If the sum total of dirt on Trump filled a bucket, by comparison Hillary Clinton owns a landfill.

Thousands of bills written by the multinational lobbyists were awaiting her arrival. Think of the scale of multinational effort behind TPP (Asia), TTIP (Europe), Paris Climate Treaty (Global), etc. Literally tens of trillions of graft and scheme within reach of those global financial networks; at the fingertips of the multinational Big Club,… until Donald Trump.

Think of the scale of wealth, all headed to the top of the pyramid, that President Trump halted. Domestically, all of those lobbyist bills worthless on November 9th, 2016. All of the DC politicians, sales people indulged to sell those bills, left teetering on the border of functional obsolescence…. It’s quite stunning to think about.

Thus, after the initial shock, all of those interests lashing out in rage; weaponizing every group they can muster. Dispatching urgency to the corporate media forces. The pure unmitigated hatred that started immediately becomes much more understandable in this context.

Years of leftist planning led to President Obama’s ability to weaponize government without being held accountable in the process. Years of assistance by corporate media allies, all building toward the same end goal. How rich would Hillary and Bill have become by simply allowing phase two, “the monetization“, to proceed?

Remarkable to contemplate.

Read more here.

Tucker Carlson blasts Walmart's woke executives

The Daily Caller has two video clips of Tucker Carlson blasting Walmart for its decision to stop selling certain kinds of ammunition in its stores.

The Fox News host criticized the retail giant, explaining its critical role in lost jobs, low wages, and the decline of the American middle class.

In 2005, 20 percent of Walmart employees worked part-time. Today, the majority do. It’s the simple cruelty of math: If Walmart keeps employees’ hours low enough, it can avoid paying benefits. Can people really live like that? Not for long.

...Knowing that taxpayers will “subsidize” the low wages with welfare, Walmart is able to continue the practice.

“So to restate what just happened,” Tucker concluded. “The company more responsible than any other for destroying and degrading rural America — for making our towns uglier and cheaper and poorer — the same people who push the appalling lie that brightly-colored plastic crap from China is going to us happy — that company is now lecturing normal Americans — the very Americans they’ve hurt so badly— about how immoral they are for daring to protect themselves with firearms. And everyone in Washington, New York and LA is applauding them as they do it. It’s not a good sign.”

Read more here.

I have immense respect for Tucker Carlson and I agree with his criticism of Walmart's woke executives on gun control but I am and will continue to be a Walmart shopper. I eat a lot of fresh produce every day. They have the best selection at the best prices. I seriously doubt that Tucker's family shops there, so they don't know what they are missing! I also shop at the Dollar stores that beat Walmart's prices on many items. Walmart hires many people here in New Mexico who would not be hired by Walmart's competitors in the grocery business. In rural New Mexico Walmart is the place people shop for groceries. I seriously doubt that many Walmart employees qualify for welfare.

Biden blood vessel burst

The Washington Examiner is reporting that

Former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to have a blood vessel burst in his left eye while participating in CNN's town hall on climate change.

A broken blood vessel in the eye, also known as a subconjunctival hemorrhage, can be caused by several things, including high blood pressure, bleeding disorders, blood thinners, or even excessive straining.

Biden, 76, has long been plagued by health issues. In 1988, he suffered an aneurysm that burst and required him to undergo emergency surgery. The then-senator was so close to death that a Catholic priest began preparing to administer the sacrament of last rites.

Months later, surgeons clipped a second aneurysm before it burst. Biden then took a seven-month leave from the Senate following the surgery. Describing the operation, he once said, “They literally had to take the top of my head off.”

Jill Biden said in her recently released autobiography Where the Light Enters that, at the time, she feared her husband would never be the same. "Our doctor told us there was a 50-50 chance Joe wouldn't survive surgery," she wrote. "He also said that it was even more likely that Joe would have permanent brain damage if he survived. And if any part of his brain would be adversely affected, it would be the area that governed speech."

Doctors removed a benign polyp during a colonoscopy in 1996. In 2003, Biden had his gallbladder removed.

He suffers from asthma and allergies and takes a prescription drug to lower his cholesterol. He has also taken medication for an enlarged prostate.

Biden hasn’t disclosed his medical history since 2008 when doctors found he had an irregular heartbeat.

Read more here.

How much Fentanyl does it take to kill a person?

Via Bookworm

Which one is subsidized by the government?

Via Bookworm

Then and now

Yeah, that's a hard one

Great news from Hong Kong!

Reuters reports,

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam on Wednesday announced the formal withdrawal of a controversial extradition bill that has plunged the Chinese-ruled city into its worst political crisis in decades.

The bill, which would have allowed extraditions to mainland China where courts are controlled by the Communist Party, triggered months of unrest and posed the gravest challenge to Chinese leader Xi Jinping since he came to power in 2012.

Can we live up to their respect for us?

via Oregon Muse

"bridging the communication barrier between deaf and hearing people"

In Blackbusiness.com, we learn about

Roy Allela, a 25-year old engineer and inventor from Kenya, has found the ultimate solution to bridging the communication barrier between deaf and hearing people. He has invented the Sign-IO gloves that can translate signed hand movements to audible speech so deaf people can "talk" even to those who don't understand sign language.

Read more here.

There are a few good Hollywood Celebrities

From Understanding Compassion.com:

Ashton Kutcher may be well known for being silly and funny on television, but he’s recently revealed that his organization, Thorn, which helps find sex trafficking and child pornography victims and their abusers, has helped rescue around 6000 victims.

Read more here.

Biden gets his mojo back

View of Dorian lightning from space

Lightning tonight in Hurricane Dorian. Breathtaking view from space. pic.twitter.com/pWyhhMb9Rh

— Science And Nature (@InterestingSci1) September 2, 2019

Regular updates on Hurricane Dorian

In the invaluable Conservative Treehouse, Sundance is giving regular updates on Hurricane Dorian here.

Infected

American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes another masterpiece.

...even after the damage of the 1960s, there remained still in the early 1970s vestiges of why the university had once won public confidence, and was seen as essential to the upward mobility of the postwar baby boom.

..What went wrong? The former students of the 1970s came into power and gradually began to reject the very code of conduct and training of those who taught them. And in turn they taught a new generation who for the first time had little first-hand knowledge of the great campus scholars and icons of the past.

Politics increasingly infected courses as competence eroded—logical for faculty and students since the former required far less of the latter. Across the curriculum, race, class, and gender studies found their way into art, music, literature, philosophy and history classes. Deduction now replaced the old empiricism. Grades inflated; the therapeutic triumphed over the tragic as how students felt was almost as important as what they learned and knew.

...New progressive doctrines insisted that because the traditional elements of American society and culture—the family, church, community, and government—were biased, the university was needed as a counterweight to these nefarious conservative forces. Thus, the university could and should itself become prejudicial and openly propagandistic—a legitimate way of offering “balance” to the various institutional forces that brainwashed young Americans with conservative doctrines.

The Costs
In sum, the damage that the modern university has wrought has now outweighed its once-positive role.

Let us count the ways higher education had done its part to nearly harm the United States. A new generation owes $1.5 trillion in student debt—a sum that an increasing majority of debtors either cannot pay back or simply will not.

One’s 20s are now redefined as the lost decade, as marriage, child-rearing, and home buying are put off, to the extent they still occur, into one’s 30s.

Bitterness abounds when graduates gradually learn that their liberal anti-capitalist professors and administrators were part of a profit-rigged system by which peasant students became financial cannon fodder. For all the hipster left-wing campus atmospherics, the university operated more or less as a Madoff/Ponzi scheme: for each newly admitted class of students, the fed backed another round of usurious loans that could never be paid back by those of little means, and the university upped its prices.

The result was reduced teaching, a bonanza of release time, administrative bloat, Club Med dorms, gyms, and student unions, and epidemics of highly paid but non-teaching careerist advisors, and counselors.

The university was now in loco parentis, a sort of granny that babysat men and women of arrested development and encouraged the idea that they were helpless. The more students were considered “adults” in matters of loud and boisterous protests, obscene speech, binge drinking, common drug use, and hook-up sex, the more they wished to be treated as Victorian children. Suddenly kids were shocked that the inebriated acted dangerously and boorishly, upset that the targets of their attack did not like them, and furious that sexual congress without commitment and love was often manipulative and embedded within male callousness and deceit.

...There were and are ways to save the university, but in classical Livian style, the medicine is felt worse than the disease.

The Prescription
Mandatory exit standardized tests could calibrate whether students learned anything after spending or borrowing $250,000 for a degree. If a certain minimum SAT or ACT score is considered necessary for admittance (to calibrate the relative merit of various high school grade point averages), why would not such a similar exit exam be necessary for a bachelor’s degree? The university double-checks the competency of high-school degrees, but not its own?

Universities should be held responsible for repaying a large percentage of the loans they issued and yet in advance knew well could not and would not be repaid. The government should get out of the campus loan insurance business.

...The chance of reform? Zero.

Indebted students, many with largely worthless degrees, and few employment opportunities sufficient to repay their loans, have become a loyal progressive constituency. How odd that an entire generation, in psychologically and financially suspended animation, is seen as useful by the very politicos who created this labyrinth of exploitation in the first place.

Read more here.

Trump is right about opening up mental health institutions to treat severely mentally ill persons

Penny Starr writes in Breitbart,

The debate about America’s mentally ill and how best to help them — and protect the public if they pose a threat — goes back decades to the deinstitutionalization movement that started in the 1960s with the best of intentions but led to streets and prisons filled with victims of the failed idea.

...A more recent report on the website The Balance sheds more light on the journey from having places to care for the mentally ill to a nation that virtually ignores it, which can have unintended consequences:

Between 1955 and 1994, roughly 487,000 mentally ill patients were discharged from state hospitals. That lowered the number to only 72,000 patients. States closed most of their hospitals. That permanently reduced the availability of long-term, in-patient care facilities. By 2010, there were 43,000 psychiatric beds available. This equated to about 14 beds per 100,000 people. According to the Treatment Advocacy’s Center’s report, “Deinstitutionalization: A Failed History,” this was the same ratio as in 1850.

As a result, 2.2 million of the severely mentally ill do not receive any psychiatric treatment at all. About 200,000 of those who suffer from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are homeless. That’s one-third of the total homeless population. Ten percent are veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or other war-related injuries.

More than 300,000 are in jails and prisons. Sixteen percent of all inmates are severely mentally ill. There were about 100,000 psychiatric beds in both public and private hospitals. There are more than three times as many seriously mentally ill people in jails and prisons than in hospitals.

“A lot of our conversation has to do with the fact that we have to open up institutions,” Trump said when discussing El Paso and Dayton. “We can’t let these people be on the streets.”

Read more of this excellent review of the history of deinstitutionalization here.

Biden: Ban magazines that can hold multiple bullets!

Please note Biden also ridules texas for allowing worshipers to defend themselves.

Mostly true, er, I mean mostly false

"...the only actual scandal that is close to being exposed is the possible misuse of federal agents and spies by Barack Obama in an underhanded attempt to keep his opponents out of office."

In the Daily Wire, Andrew Klavan writes in part,

Journalism today is a corrupt shadow of even its biased former self. Competition, cutbacks and desperate attempts to appease a dwindling audience have turned former newspapers like the New York Times into little better than college rags run by starry-eyed leftist children and answerable to an audience that demands to have their prejudices confirmed.

As a result, the reportage on the Donald Trump administration has been a two and a half year hit job. The constant, breathless reporting of the incipient end of the administration — this is a tipping point, the walls are closing in, the president will be impeached! — has been nothing but the out-loud infantile fantasies of under-read underage make-believe radicals who are not equipped to do the job they are paid to do.

...Like the Nixon takedown, the attacks on Trump come after years of turning a blind eye to the corruption of a Democrat. Obama's IRS campaign against the Tea Party? His lies about Benghazi? His Fast and Furious fiasco? His shutdown of a massive drug investigation to appease Iran? No big deal. Obama was, as almost every mainstream outlet has declared, "scandal free."

And yet unlike during the Watergate years, a virtual army of conservative bloggers, podcasters and talk show hosts have given voice to the opposition. As a result, the only actual scandal that is close to being exposed is the possible misuse of federal agents and spies by Barack Obama in an underhanded attempt to keep his opponents out of office.

This time, "Watergate" may have backfired. This time, perhaps, we will be able to say: History repeats itself, once as leftist deception, and once as the truth.

Read more here.

In praise of Melania Trump

In the New York Post, Miranda Devine enthusiastically praises our first lady, Melania Trump.

...She has the humility to understand that she is not the main game. Such command of ego is the first requirement of a first lady.

Melania is much more than an airhead former model, in any case.

Italian entrepreneur Paolo Zampolli: I — not Jeffrey Epstein — introduced Trump to Melani
For starters, she speaks six languages: her native Slovenian, English, French, Serbian, German and Italian.

She may not have finished college, but she had the street smarts to escape her tiny town in an impoverished Eastern Bloc country and survive on her wits in America. She’s no political naïf, either: If your family has experienced communism firsthand, you have a pretty attuned sense of politics and ideology.

At the recent G-7 in France, she did not put a foot wrong.

With the eyes of the world on you, it must be nerve-wracking to ensure you don’t trip or have a wardrobe malfunction or say something silly to embarrass your husband and nation. Anyone who has accompanied a spouse to an important business function would know the pressure.

But Melania always looked lovely and engaged charmingly with world leaders. She kissed Canada’s Justin Trudeau on the cheek (and was accused, weirdly, of coming on to him). On an excursion to a Biarritz beach, she got on so well with French first lady Brigitte Macron, they wound up holding hands.

The inclusion of spouses makes these international powwows as much about personal relationships as highfalutin’ policy, and Melania’s schmoozing ability is an asset that shouldn’t be underrated.

She is a woman whose poise and dignity speaks volumes.

When people say, “Poor Melania,” she says, “Don’t feel sorry for me. I can handle everything.”

Any honest assessment of her track record would tell you there’s no doubt she can handle anything. The Trump haters will have to find a new victim.

Read more here.

Now for the investigation "that decides who to indict and will obtain those indictments from one or more grand juries convened for that purpose."

In the American Spectator, Jed Babin writes in part,

The IG investigations are a sideshow. The real investigation, being conducted by John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, will be the one that decides who to indict and will obtain those indictments from one or more grand juries convened for that purpose.

...The evidence shows — and should be used in court to prove — that at least the leaders of the conspiracy — Strzok, Priestap, Comey, Brennan, and probably Haspel — should all be brought to justice for their abuse of power.

Make no mistake: their abuse of power is the worst in American history. Nothing any president has done even comes close. Durham and Attorney General Barr need to throw the book at them.

Read more here.

Sanctuary county in Maryland protects rapists from being deported

Kevin Lewis of ABC reports that since July 25, there have been seven illegal aliens arrested for sex crimes in Montgomery County, Maryland. Montgomery is a sanctuary county, and it has a heavy presence of MS-13 gang activity, according to Lewis. Ryan Saavedra has more here.

Is it time to decertify California statehood?

In his Morning Report today, JJ Sefton said this:

...California just curb stomped America, Americans and the rule of law by overturning the gun conviction of the five-times deported illegal alien animal who killed Kate Steinle yet was not found guilty of murder. Now out goes the only thing holding him and one assumes he gets to go free. Way past time to decertify California's statehood, dissolve its legislature, remove its Senators and Congressman, reapportion its electoral votes to Oklahoma and Texas, and appoint a territorial governor.

Read more here.

Go away, Dorian!

JJ Sefton leads off his Morning Report today with these thoughts:

The end of the Labor Day weekend is here and with it comes both the impending potential disaster of Hurricane Dorian and the tragedy of another mass shooting in Texas and the attendant descent of Leftist jackals to use the victims as a pretext to disarm the American citizenry.

We'll get to that in a moment but the latest on Dorian is that it has been upgraded into a catastrophic Category 5 storm. The governor of South Carolina has ordered a mandatory evacuation of the entire coast while in Florida, Broward County was ordered evacuated yesterday. The DHS is reporting that it has already deployed 3,000 personnel in advance to help coordinate/mitigate disaster relief. The storm has slammed into the Bahamas and the current track has it nearing the Florida coast and then tracking north along the shore. If you are anywhere near where this thing is going to hit, grab your family, pets and essential items and get the hell out when the order is given. Stay safe and prayers for the victims.

Read more here.

Venezuela leads the way

From the Babylon Bee: NEW YORK, NY—In an interview on Meet the Press Sunday, Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scolded American leaders for not setting the minimum wage as high as Venezuela, whose hyper-inflated currency is forcing minimum wage increases all year long.

Ocasio-Cortez then pointed out that if we would just raise the minimum wage to somewhere in the millions as the socialist South American country did, everyone would be a millionaire.

“Venezuela's minimum wage is, like, millions per month, and ours isn’t even close to that,” she said. “Our minimum wage is, like, seven bucks or something. We call ourselves a developed country, but we don’t even just like print nearly as much money as Venezuela and give it out for free, because of businesses and corporations and things like that.”

She also called Venezuela’s leaders “really smart” for overloading the economy with more currency, and called on America’s leadership to do the same. “It just goes to show that socialism is better because you can inflate the currency to a lot more, and more is better than less, obviously.”

“It’s just common sense, and you know, like, human rights and stuff,” she added.

"But, you're not saying the right things!"

From the Babylon Bee:

U.S.—After some confusion was expressed by casual observers of apparent hypocrisy in their denunciation of Dave Chappelle's most recent comedy special, liberals from around the country clarified that they only want black voices to be heard when those voices are saying liberal-approved things.

The offended white progressives asked black comedian Dave Chappelle to "keep it down" and "maybe not talk so much" after his comments made them feel uncomfortable, sources confirmed Thursday.

"Yeah, we're glad you're a minority and we're happy that your black voice is being heard," said Zender Mollison, 32, Portland, he/him, in an open letter to Chappelle. "But you're not saying the right things." Mollison then offered to send Chappelle a list of the things that are OK for black people to say, such as that white people are evil, that everyone should be canceled for literally anything they tweeted a decade ago, and that Donald Trump is Hitler.

"When black people agree with me, I very much want their voices to be heard," said Helga Bannerman, 28, Portland, she/they/her/xen. "When they don't agree with me, they're pretty much just not black anymore. They're basically an evil white person like me at that point. And the last thing we need on this planet is more white people like Dave Chappelle."

"Will you apologize?" "What temperature is it in Hell right now?" "Is it snowing?"

Official Magazine of the Democratic Party!

Via Doug Ross

AI is transforming surveillance cameras

Ivan Moreno reports in AP,

AI is transforming surveillance cameras from passive sentries into active observers that can identify people, suspicious behavior and guns, amassing large amounts of data that help them learn over time to recognize mannerisms, gait and dress. If the cameras have a previously captured image of someone who is banned from a building, the system can immediately alert officials if the person returns.

At a time when the threat of a mass shooting is ever-present, schools are among the most enthusiastic adopters of the technology, known as real-time video analytics or intelligent video, even as civil liberties groups warn about a threat to privacy. Police, retailers, stadiums and Fortune 500 companies are also using intelligent video.

Read more here.

Are we ready to investigate now?

"The last thing we want is for the U.S. Postal Service to become the nation's largest drug dealer,"...

CBS News reported this morning,

Law enforcement officers in Virginia have seized enough fentanyl to kill 14 million people, busting a massive three-state drug ring as part of what they called "Operation Cookout." Thirty-five suspects were arrested, and four others are on the run.

"This opioid crisis is not an issue that is happening someplace else, or to someone else. It's happening right here in Norfolk," said G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

In total, authorities seized over 30 kilograms of fentanyl, 30 kilograms of heroin, five kilograms of cocaine and over $700,000. It's the largest drug takedown in Virginia in 15 years. They also seized roughly 24 firearms, including an AK-47.

"We're not talking about $500 and $600 deals, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars," Terwilliger said. "You know, $20,000 in the trunk of somebody's car in a gym bag, you know, behind a local restaurant."

Terwilliger said the bust spanned three states and that one of the 39 people charged ordered fentanyl from Shanghai and had it delivered to Virginia through the mail.

"The last thing we want is for the U.S. Postal Service to become the nation's largest drug dealer," he added.

Hampton Police Chief Terry Sult said the case should serve as a warning to other dealers. "If you're out there, you're using firearms, you're dealing drugs and you're hurting people in our communities, this is the group of people that's coming after you," he said. "And we're relentless."

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard announced Thursday that the crew of Coast Guard Cutter Robert Ward has seized about 2,800 pounds of cocaine during their first drug patrol in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The cocaine was worth an estimated $38.5 million.

Terwilliger said that most fentanyl comes from Chinese labs. There's been an increased effort to hold China accountable for drugs like fentanyl that are manufactured there and smuggled to the U.S. A bipartisan bill in the Senate would sanction Chinese labs and traffickers that export the drug.

Video here.

It's the synthetics!

What is the biggest cause of death by opioids? Well, here is a graph made available by New Hampshire showing that the biggest cause of deaths there are the synthetic opioids that come from China across our southern border.



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Hiding information

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance once again does a superlative job digging through available documents to try to find the truth about the goings-on at the FBI and Justice Departments. Here is a small sample of his writing today.

On May 15th, it appears the SSA was finally notified of the Comey memos because the small group already knew Robert Mueller was going to be appointed.

Comey, his lawyers and Lawfare allies, together with the small group, coordinated to leak and publish the NYT article (May 16th) the day Mueller was interviewing President Trump in the oval office. They knew Mueller was going to be appointed the following day, May 17th. The NYT leak was cover and ammunition for Rod Rosenstein to fulfill his role.

This is the Special Counsel as the insurance policy deployed.

Everything was a set up by the small group; exclusively executed by the small group; kept hidden from other FBI agents and officials; and Mueller’s visit with President Trump was part of that investigative effort.

This overall conspiracy/plan is why the SSA turned to the Inspector General and requested Whistleblower protection. This is also why IG Horowitz was motivated to carve out the Comey memos in his report. KEY POINT – OIG Michael Horowitz has outlined the Special Counsel appointment as fraudulently predicated.

Read more here.

Hong Kong democracy protestors persist

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance posts this photo of Chinese military or Hong Kong police spraying protestors with semi-permanent blue dye so the protestors can be identified if captured after leaving the scene of the protests. This is the thirteenth week of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Read more and see videos here.