Hubris and Nemesis

On the horns of a deadly dilemna

Posted on April 26, 2020April 26, 2020 by Mike

AG Barr is between a rock and a very hard place.

REMINDER – United States Attorney General Bill Barr was not around in 2017 or 2018 when the DOJ was faced with the issues resulting from an investigation of intelligence leaks and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Security Director James Wolfe.

When the prosecution of SSCI Director James Wolfe was being considered, AG Jeff Sessions was recused; the Robert Mueller probe was ongoing; and as a consequence Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and U.S. Attorney for DC Jessie Liu were decision-makers.

I’m not going to repeat all the issues, you can re-read them HERE; however, the baseline is that Wolfe could not be prosecuted without running the risk of collapsing key institutions of the U.S. government. The consequences of a Wolfe prosecution were beyond the capacity of Rod Rosenstein, or the DOJ to handle. There would have been massive constitutional crises created and the literal definition of ‘sedition‘ was at the center of it.

When you truly understand this context you also understand why Joseph Pientka III has a blanket protective order over him. The all-encompassing protective order is as much about preserving and protecting the institution of the DOJ as it is protecting the fulcrum of corrupt activity Supervisory Special Agent One, Joseph Pientka III, represents.

The DOJ had to throw a bag over Pientka or eliminate him. Thankfully, and not surprisingly, they chose the former and now he’s under federal protection; so they can continue the cover-up. If it had been an Obama/Clinton AG, they’d have just killed him.

In 2018 DAG Rosenstein could not prosecute James Wolfe without exposing ‘seditious‘ activity within the U.S. government itself. Not pretend sedition or theoretical sedition, but an actual pre-planned subversive operation with forethought and malice.

Likewise AG Bill Barr could not prosecute Andrew McCabe without exposing the same ‘seditious‘ activity; which also encompasses the activity of Rod Rosenstein. Whether Barr wants to protect Rosenstein is moot; if Barr wants to protect the institutions from sunlight on two years of actual seditious activity, he has to protect Rosenstein.

It’s the underlying activity that cannot be allowed to surface; the institutions of government are not strong enough, nor are they set-up to handle, prosecutions that overlap all three branches of government.

However, that said, now AG Bill Barr is facing a downstream and parallel issue within the prosecution of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. How can Michael Flynn be sentenced for lying to the FBI when the DOJ is necessarily refusing to prosecute Andrew McCabe (at least what has been made public) for the exact same behavior?

Against this dynamic, the DOJ has two options: (Option A) go even harder at General Flynn using additional charges that are not as comparable to McCabe. (Option B) find a way to drop the prosecution.

Take the totality of all these issues together. Think about them for a while…

…Now do we see why AG Bill Barr needed President Trump to shut up?

When Barr said “he’s making it harder for me to do my job”, in essence President Trump was making it harder for Barr to protect his institutions. Trump is too much sunlight.

At the heart of the matter, in the real activity that took place, there was a multi-branch seditious effort to remove President Donald J Trump. From the perspective of those charged with the actual administration of justice – there is no way to put this in front of the American public and have the institutions survive. What we are witnessing is a dance between increasingly narrowing rails and the DOJ, via Bill Barr, trying to find an exit.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Personally, I’m surprised they haven’t tried to take Sundance out yet.

Bait and switch

Posted on April 25, 2020April 27, 2020 by Mike

Uncle Gropey might be about to join Albert “Arnold The Pig” AlGore, Bolshevik Bernie, and HILLARY!™ in the official ranks of Those Who Will Never Be President.

While the mainstream media has mostly kept a lid on this story, the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden aren’t going away soon. As PJM’s Rick Moran reported earlier this week, the D.C. police are treating the allegations as an “active and ongoing” investigation. Many liberals are turning a blind eye to the story, but there are some who have a vested interest in keeping this story alive and front and center: Bernie Bros.

In fact, Briahna Joy Gray, Bernie Sanders’ former campaign press secretary, who has been a vocal critic of Biden, suggested in an interview with The Atlantic that the allegations might just thwart Biden’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

Gray told Emma Green that the Democratic primary is far from over. “The Democratic Party would like us to believe [we’re now in the general election season], and they behaved that way even before Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race. But we are, in fact, still in a Democratic-primary season. Biden is only the presumptive nominee,” she said, before adding, “And there’s all kinds of whispers and rumors about whether or not something might happen at the convention, which might mean Joe Biden isn’t even the nominee.”

Try as Enemedia might to insert their fingers into their ears and loudly sing tra-la-la I can’t heeaaar you until it all goes away, Reade’s accusation is entirely credible, with far more evidence to support it than was ever the case back when the self-same rectal polyps were defaming poor Brett Kavanaugh.

OF COURSE Gropey did it; a leap of faith as gargantuan as Evel Knievel’s ill-fated Snake River Canyon fiasco would be required to believe otherwise, given his long history of sniffing, nuzzling, feeling up, and just generally forcing his unwanted attentions on every appalled female within his reach, whatever the victim’s age. How much that really matters to high-level Democrat-Socialist Party conspirators is another thing entirely.

Gray suggests that Democrat voters were conned into believing that Joe Biden was the most electable candidate while Reade’s allegations were ignored for over a year. A new report from The Intercept published on Friday says that new evidence supports the credibility of Tara Reade’s allegations against Biden.

I think it’s clear, based on Gray’s comments in her interview, that Bernie Bros who are not happy about Biden being the presumptive nominee are going to make sure the Tara Reade allegations don’t get swept under the rug, in the hopes that they can pull off getting a different candidate on the ballot. While this is highly unlikely, in my opinion, I’m inclined to believe that there are enough Bernie Sanders supporters who will do anything they can to thwart Biden’s nomination. Even without the Tara Reade allegations, there’s enough for Democrats to be concerned about. Biden has an enthusiasm gap that is likely not going to change, and his cognitive decline will likely become a huge liability in the fall.

Throw in Uncle Gropey’s rapidly-escalating cognitive dysfunction and there ain’t gonna be enough popcorn in the world for this shitshow.

“The economy is not a machine”

Posted on April 25, 2020April 27, 2020 by Mike

And even if it was, with many machines shutting ’em down is a lot easier than cranking ’em back up again.

The coronavirus is having a profound impact on our economies. Faced with economic downturns, governments have traditionally attempted to spur employment and restore economic health by propping up aggregate demand. Scholars differ on the track record of these interventions, yet all agree that governments, by stimulating demand, aim to provoke productive activity. Today, though, rather than trying to stimulate activity in the wake of the pandemic, governments are aiming to stop it. And at this task, everyone must agree, governments are performing splendidly.

Once the coronavirus is under control, restarting the economy faces many obstacles—especially social distancing. If we continue to remain at arms’ length from one another, we will hamper our natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,” identified by Adam Smith as a key source of economic growth.

An even bigger impediment to renewed economic vigor, however, is the theory and practice of mainstream macroeconomics. The brainchild of John Maynard Keynes, modern macroeconomics focuses exclusively on aggregates, especially aggregate demand, and GDP. The economy is modeled on what economist Arnold Kling calls “a GDP factory,” or perhaps a machine. This machine produces stuff (GDP) and does so at peak efficiency when properly fueled. The fuel is aggregate demand—total spending—and it’s the job of government to ensure that the supply of fuel into this machine remains adequate.

Even if government control of aggregate demand is necessary for an economy to function even tolerably well—and we aren’t sure that it is—such control is clearly not sufficient. If entrepreneurs can’t introduce new products, if businesses are denied access to low-cost supplies, and if prices are prevented from changing, the market process falters. It produces fewer of the goods and services that are the stuff of our prosperity. The same conclusion pertains if workers are prevented from showing up at farms, factories, and offices, in which case no amount of extra aggregate demand will cause markets to produce more. To stop people on the ground from producing is to stop the process by which people, cooperating in markets, generate prosperity.

Standard macroeconomic thinking is today especially counterproductive. By maintaining the fiction that the economy is a simple GDP machine that will always work as long as it is sufficiently fueled with aggregate demand, attention is diverted away from the problems introduced into the market process by government interventions, as well as by major disruptors, such as Covid-19. The myth is maintained that if government keeps pumping funds into consumers’ hands and businesses’ coffers, all will be okay.

In Europe, for example, attention is focused on devising ways for governments to increase their public debt, without paying higher interest on it. But how will entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers return to their normal activities? Imagining how the provision of some services will work in the future (will movie theaters survive?) is a fascinating intellectual exercise, but one with little practical utility. Solutions will be found by entrepreneurs through trial and error, the same way that progress has always happened. What we need is not more fuel pumped into the GDP machine but assurances that its internal processes aren’t blocked. Governments have purposefully stopped the economy. To get it moving again, we eventually must remove obstacles that keep individuals from participating in market processes, both as consumers and as specialized producers.

That will be the difficult part, since those obstacles have been gumming up the works since way before anybody every heard of the Shanghai sniffles, and are now firmly established and entrenched. Expect extremely stiff resistance from the hordes of paper-shuffling bureau-rats hired to perpetuate and expand them, too.

Let a million middle fingers rise

Posted on April 21, 2020April 23, 2020 by Mike

The spirit of American rebellion still lives, and is beginning to awaken at last.

Clearly, the greatest public- heath threat imaginable…a kid on a skateboard. Young people, remember, this is what Big-government statist Democrats do—they take away your freedom. https://t.co/VBCmnZRvfC

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 19, 2020

Now get a load of what happened next. Trust me, it’ll warm the cockles of even the most cynical heart.

It may not seem like all that much…yet. But it will be small, seemingly insignificant acts of defiance like this that will snowball into full-on revolt—which is something America has never in its history needed more desperately than it does right now.

Update! Washington state insurrection.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s draconian executive orders mandating business closures and stay-at-home status for all residents has been rejected by county commissioners in Franklin County. The motion passed unanimously. Now, the legal battles may or may not begin but in the immediate future, the county is official reopened for business.

“I move that Franklin County end recognition of the governor’s stay at home emergency proclamation that is now deemed unconstitutional. We support the reopening for all builders and small businesses that want to work,” Commissioner Clint Didier said during a meeting Tuesday morning.

This opens the door for other counties and cities to oppose the order based on RCW 43.06.220(4), which limits the governor’s state-of-emergency powers to 30 days unless the state legislature passes an extension.

Well, I gotta admit I didn’t see THAT coming.

Payback time update! Cockroaches get hit with a spotlight, to their great dismay.

Talk radio great Jamie Allman filed a Sunshine law request for the actual emails of St. Louis County residents who’ve snitched on local entrepreneurs trying to make a living. Most of the complaints were unfounded, involving people “turning in” companies that were deemed essential by the county.

But reading the actual complaints reveals just how terrified the media and corrupt academics have made good people. The complainants are truly scared. They believe that Coronavirus kills almost everyone who gets infected. They believe that washing your car, hitting golf balls at a range, or playing singles tennis can spread the disease to many people.

The 900-page file of complaints is, ultimately, sad. What could be more depressing than a mother begging government officials to put her daughter out of work? Or women asking the county to shut down their fiancé’s company?

Well, about the only thing I can think of is the thought of such despicable, craven panic-ninnies getting away with diming out friends and loved ones without paying a stiff price for such perfidy. Doxx the living fuck out of every last one of these diaper-dragging ratbags; if the old “snitches get stitches” bylaw can’t be practically enforced, then public exposure, scorn, and humiliation is the very least they have coming to ’em.

Must there always be a Harvard?

Posted on April 20, 2020 by Mike

Duh.

Woah.

I just noticed the bizarre cover image used for the Harvard Magazine article.

It shows a sad homeschool child imprisoned in a house while the other kids are outside playing.

Notice the house is made of books, one of them being the Bible ?? pic.twitter.com/IZfaVuIA0G

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) April 18, 2020

This is the part where I’d ordinarily toss off a snide comment or two, but I just can’t even.

Author Erin O’Donnell cited Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor with Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, to make the case for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling as a practice, arguing that the burden should be on parents to prove that they could educate their children in a manner approved by the state.

lolgetfucked, brainiac. Probably oughta have the nurse wipe the drool off your bib before you go making any more demands, seems to me.

Reality bites—HARD

Posted on April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by Mike

My brother called yesterday to say he’d been listening to the radio a bit, and Limbaugh sounded like he was in a near-panic. I checked the transcript, and it looks like he had it right.

Rush is a pretty smart fella, you know.

How can anybody sane be anything less than scared and outraged and mortified that 22 million people have been thrown out of work over something that may end up killing fewer than 50,000 people? It is unprecedented. And yet there are people who want to maintain the circumstances we are in. And it boggles the mind.

It befuddles the mind. It is so counterintuitive to Americanism. We cannot go on. Trump is gonna be announcing his reopening plans, and already Governor Cuomo has announced that he’s gonna get a consultancy group in there to work on competing ideas ’cause he doesn’t want to be bound by whatever Trump’s plans are.

Fine. I’m struggling for ways to break through, to permeate obviously existing great walls of resistance that some people have. Some people, when you start criticizing government, they just tune you out. They’re not interested in it. But this can’t go on! I can’t believe it has gone on this long. I can’t believe… In one way, I can’t believe the American people haven’t arisen in outrage over this yet.

Except the numbers don’t back it up. When you look at the reported infections and the reported deaths and then you look at the model projections, we started with 2.2 million — what a great way to scare people — then it was a hundred thousand, then it became a hundred thousand to 240,000, then last week was going to be the apocalypse.

And it wasn’t.

And now the modeler who has yet to be right — no personal criticism intended, just factual analysis. The modeler who has yet to be right is gonna revise his numbers downward again today to fewer than 61,000 projected deaths by August. There ought to be a lot more death than this. “Well, no, Rush, because we have been practicing social distancing and we’ve been flattening the curve.”

We are destroying people in a number of different ways. The idea that we’re saving people by destroying the U.S. economy is… It’s a nonstarter. It’s absurd. The idea that we can somehow save people by continuing a policy that destroys the U.S. economy — and it will. Let me tell you something about when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties.

My parents and grandparents’ most formative experience in their lives — in other words, the thing that was the top of the list in the way they raised us, the values they attempted to instill in us — was the Great Depression. My dad was born in 1918; my mom in 1928.

His parents never forgot it.

It shaped everything they did the rest of their lives. They had to put up with a lot of other things too. They had to put up with World War II, Korea. They had to put up with the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War threatening to wipe us out and imprison their grandkids. They had a lot on their plate, and the Great Depression was the formative thing because it was so horrible.

And as parents, they were doing everything they could to shield and protect me and my brother from having to go through it. It was the worst thing in their lives. And that’s where we’re headed, if this goes on. We are headed to Great Depression. All we need is a 30 to 40% contraction in this economy. We’ll hit Great Recession territory first and then depression, if this doesn’t stop — and the idea that there are people advocating for this!

But I’ll never forget the fear of the Great Depression my father had. I’d be snarky. “Dad, come on. I wasn’t alive. I don’t care how much you tell me about it, I can’t relate to it. I didn’t experience it.” I was like every kid. “Come on, Dad.” We’re sitting there in our night comfortable home, and we’re driving around. The thought of a Great Depression was the last thing in the world I could even conceive of.

So I’m snarky about it. He said, “Son, you better hope that you never have anything like that happen to you. You better hope you never live through it.” It was that bad for the people who did — and we’re headed for it, and we’ve done it to ourselves. It is not that our economy is falsely created. It’s not that our economy is a house-of-cards sham. It’s not that capitalism doesn’t work.

We are doing this to ourselves — and it’s amazing how quickly. Three years to revive an economy, create roaring circumstances. It took less than two months to wipe it all out. Twenty-two million people filing for unemployment compensation — 22 million — and the idea that there is not an angry outcry from all over the world that this must stop?

That outcry had better happen, because this… We’re beyond now saying this is unsustainable. This is untenable. This is cataclysmic. We’re in the midst of a self-created disaster that we could fix (snap, snap, snap) at the snap of our fingers. We could begin the process of reversing this tomorrow — we could do it May 1st, we could do it April the 30th, we could do it April 21st — and there are forces arrayed against doing that.

I’m in complete agreement with all this…right up until Rush asserts that we could fix all this “at the snap of our fingers.” In fact, I very much doubt—once our “leaders” took the unprecedented, stupefyingly arrogant step of shutting nearly everything down in leg-wetting terror over a virus—that restarting the economy with a hearty “Hey presto!” and a cheery wave of the government magic wand was ever even possible.

I hope and pray I’m being overly pessimistic about all this, mind, but my belief is that it’s way too late to do much of anything now. And whatever we DO attempt isn’t going to make a hell of a lot of difference anyway. In their supreme hubris, our “leaders” have meddled in matters that are much too big for them. Now, as I said last night, we’re all on the express train to the hurt locker. Unfortunately, there ain’t no brakes on this runaway ride, either.

We have made the biggest mistake in history. There will be hell to pay for it. Should it turn out that I’m wrong, nobody will be more ecstatic about it than I will. But I don’t think it’s the way to bet.

O Brave New World, that has such fascists in it!

Posted on April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by Mike

Some folks are shocked and/or angry about CooCooCoomo’s pronouncement, but I think he’s more right than wrong here. Although probably for the worst possible reasons.

(CNSNews.com) – New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo predicted “a new normal” when the state’s economy reopens – in the environment, economics, civil rights, and social justice.

“People are restless. We have to talk about the reopening of the economy. How do we do this? We have to build a bridge, from where we are to the reopening of the economy. Well, what does that look like?” he said during a press conference on Wednesday.

“Let’s say that where we’re going it’s not a reopening, in that we are going to reopen what was. We are going to a different place, and we should go to a different place, and we should go to a better place. If we don’t learn the lessons from this situation, that all of this will have been in vain,” Cuomo said.

“So we’re going to a different place, which is a new normal. We talk about the new normal. We’ve been talking about the new normal for years. We are going to have a new normal in public health. By the way, the way we have a new normal in an environment, the new normal in economics, a new normal in civil rights, a new normal and social justice, right? This is the way of the world now,” he said.

We are indeed going to find ourselves saddled with a “new normal” from here on out, pretty much no matter what anybody does. But it isn’t going to be a nice, happy place. Coomo’s statement, though, is one among several that puts the lie to recent Righty crowing about how the coronavirus panic has singlehandedly discredited so many cherished liberal tropes—globalism; densely-packed urban areas over surburbia; mass transit instead of private autos; open borders and unrestricted immigration; the desirability of big, intrusive government, etc—for good, thereby rendering them, shall we say, unsustainable.

Somebody should maybe tell the Left that, though, because from where I sit it sure looks like they fully intend to double down, rather than shamefacedly admitting the error of the Leftist Way and slinking off the national stage to rethink a few things, and current reality be damned. Interestingly enough, it seems some Leftard states are already making bold moves towards this New Normal.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced the Northeastern Directorate will keep all citizens within the region on lock-down through May 15, 2020, with a possible extension depending on an agreement within the Blue State alliance members.

Six other governors from within the Northeastern Directorate form the regional alliance.

Northeast states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Delaware have assembled an authoritarian alliance, without legislative approval and without legal precedent, to block any federal efforts to reopen the economy.

The Blue State leaders have determined it is in the best interests of the Northeastern citizenry for individual rights to be suspended under a post-constitutional framework. The government in this region will determine when the advancement of individual rights will be permitted and will set the parameters of permitted civic, social and economic engagement.

All citizens within the Northeastern Directorate are now captive to arbitrary rules on business ownership, property rights, contract terms, movement and assembly. Under the terms of a regional health emergency, as outlined by the command and control structure, currently citizens within the containment area are quarantined and not permitted to exit their homes, petition government or request redress for grievances.

But the Northeastern Directorate isn’t the only region to kinda-sorta declare its independence from the former Republic:

(Bloomberg Opinion) — California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America’s budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California’s multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear.

Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state” to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”

“Nation-state.” “Export.”

Hey, fine by me, and don’t let the door etc. Feel free to take some of the other Democrat-Socialist shitholes like, say, Chicago, Portland, and Seattle along with ya when you go, too. We ask not your counsels or your arms. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

Fish in a barrel

Posted on April 14, 2020April 14, 2020 by Mike

Another day, another sick burn.

Trump defended his response today to the coronavirus in order to fight negative reporting from the ‘Fake News Media’ in two different ways.

First, he layed out the timeline of his response…

And then:

President Trump just played a montage of the the media downplaying the Coronavirus in the White House Briefing Room

What a Savage ? pic.twitter.com/rZDio8F27V

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) April 13, 2020

It sometimes seems as if they’re actually trying to make it easy for him to kick their asses up between their shoulder blades, don’t it?

Above the fray

Posted on April 13, 2020April 13, 2020 by Mike

Being “elite” means never having to say you’re sorry.

Take any contentious issue—travel bans, the advantages of masks, the Chinese compromising of WHO, the entire industry of grievance politics infecting criticism of China’s despicable behavior, delayed testing by the Centers for Disease Control and FDA, modeling, the efficacy of antimalarial drugs—and our elite seem unable to admit they were wrong, and wrong with a great deal of costly arrogance.

It is no exaggeration to say that most models that the best and brightest offered the public, from the imported Imperial College in London to those from the University of Washington and many more besides, were not just inaccurate, but quite mistaken in two tragic ways: First, they were accepted as gospel by governments and thus their flawed assumptions became the basis for policies that in many cases may prove counterproductive. Second, the modelers themselves either did not promptly correct their warped inputs, or were not completely forthcoming about their data and methodologies, or blamed their flawed assumptions on others or circumstances beyond imagination, or claimed that their mistakes were in fact salutary—if not sorta, kinda planned—in galvanizing a presumably infantile public to accept draconian measures that it otherwise would not.

I know a plumber and an electrician, both skilled in the pragmatic engineering of pipes and wires, who would not dare to think they could offer a model of plumbing or electrical prediction if they had no idea of the real size of the denominator and were likewise unsure that the numerator was widely accepted as accurate and clearly defined.

When California Governor Gavin Newsom warned that 25.5 million Californians “will” get the virus in the eight weeks following March 18, albeit without his shelter-in-place orders, he was also essentially stating that, at a then 2.6 percent lethality rate for Californians known to have the active virus, about 1 million would die. As I write, 24 days out from his prediction and nearing the half-way point to Doomsday, about 23,000 Californians have tested positive, and either are fighting the disease or have recovered. Since late January, about 650 of 40 million Californians have died from the disease, in a state where well over 700 people die from some cause every day.

If 10 times that number of known positive tests are now actively infected, we legitimately could assume at least 222,000 residents are now active or past carriers. Those who advised Newsom to shut down the world’s sixth-largest economy, including universities like Cal Tech, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the commerce and livelihoods of 40 million residents, apparently did not factor into their models some possible collective immunity among thousands of Californians who, for months, were on the front lines of arriving flights from China.

Nor did modelers seem to factor in the ability of people to social distance even before the shutdown was ordered, or the fact that a virus that does not kill 95.5 percent of those who are infected, but not frontline health workers or over 60 years old, may be deemed by the public manageable in a way that does not require having multigenerational small businesses ruined, or careers destroyed, or retirement savings accounts wrecked, or key appointments with doctors postponed or canceled.

Elite wisdom, which in its allegiance to the scientific method eventually is likely to find an antidote and vaccination against the virus, still fails us in so many other ways in which it should not, in part also because its high priests rarely face the consequences of their own ideological and scientific pronouncements.

Whatever the end result of this crisis, few at the WHO, CDC or the state health directors are going to lose their jobs in a way the small restaurateurs and Uber drivers most certainly will.

In their boundless “wisdom,” the Ruling Class “elites” seem determined to leave us with pitchforks, torches, and heads on pikes as our only possible recourse.

Easy target

Posted on April 12, 2020April 12, 2020 by Mike

Dan Mitchell shoots, scores.

About three weeks ago, I unveiled the “Seventh Theorem of Government” to support the libertarian proposition that a smaller government will do a better job of fulfilling its legitimate responsibilities.

This should not be a controversial concept. There’s plenty of empirical data as well as academic evidence showing that smaller governments are more competent.

Many people in the D.C. bubble obviously disagree.

In his Washington Post column, Dana Milbank tries to make the argument that the fight against coronavirus has been hampered by inadequate government.

…then came the tea party, the anti-government conservatism that infected the Republican Party in 2010 and triumphed with President Trump’s election. …What you see today is your government…a government that couldn’t produce a rudimentary test for coronavirus, that couldn’t contain the pandemic as other countries have done… Now it is time to drown this disastrous philosophy in the bathtub — and with it the poisonous attitude that the government is a harmful “beast” that must be “starved.” It is not an exaggeration to say that this ideology caused the current debacle with a deliberate strategy to sabotage government. …Americans are paying for this with their lives — and their livelihoods.

There are some glaring inaccuracies in Milbank’s column, starting with the absurd notion that big-spender Trump (he increased domestic spending at a faster pace than Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama) is somehow connected to the principles that animated the Tea Party.

More relevant, he wants readers to believe that anti-government activism somehow blocked the production of a “rudimentary test” for the virus, yet I’ve repeatedly documented that the actual problem has been mindless red tape from bureaucracies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control.

Mitchell’s pwnage of Milbank gets even more humiliating from there. But hey, y’know, it’s Dana Milbank. Most any half-bright person could clean that witless pud’s intellectual clock in his sleep.

(Via Insty)

Update! Speaking of stupid.

One particularly terrifying consequence of the Chinese Bat Soup Virus that is not yet getting the attention it deserves is how this situation is making already stupid liberals even dumber, especially when they sound off about economics. In the wake of this pandemic, we’ve been subjected to a series of mind-numbing insights from the pinko blue check brain trust that reaffirms the clichéd but true observation that our elite is anything but elite. Leave it to our liberal betters to take a bad situation and seek to make it exponentially worse.

For example, Sally Kohn – oh, you know where this is going – offered an astonishing observation just as the Democrats were obstructing the vital relief our small businesses desperately need:

“I’m really tired of reading how business owners are “forced” to layoff workers. No one made them do that. They *chose* to do that. Not saying it isn’t a hard choice, during a hard time, but to say they were *forced* obscures their agency AND casts owners/CEOs as the victims.”

If that hasn’t plunged your IQ to new depths, consider ever-dumb Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), who tweeted out this brainstorm:

“We need to cancel rent until this crisis is over.”

Wow. Her economics advice is even worse than her relationship advice.

Okay, it seems like you would not have to explain this to allegedly educated people, but apparently there are still some people who need a lesson in Economics 101. Since I actually own a business, perhaps I have a perspective that C Tier social media personalities and commie grifters could find illuminating.

Here goes.

Are you people stupid? What the unholy hell are you thinking? When there is no income, what do you expect a business owner to pay his employees with? IOUs? Monopoly money? Feelings?

Schlichter goes on to consider the question of whether they’re stupid, or evil. Need to embrace the healing power of “and” there, buddy, no reason they can’t be both. Actually, with politicians and “journalists” you almost never see the one without the other, in what you might call a most wretched symbiosis.

Priorities

Posted on April 11, 2020April 11, 2020 by Mike

Ted Cruz lays ’em out, in another of his trademark bursts of unleavened awesomeness.

The Ayatollah leads chants of “death to America.” He pledges to destroy America, which he calls “the Great Satan.” And Senate Dems want to send him millions??? At the EXACT SAME TIME, Senate Dems are blocking desperately need relief to small businesses in America. ? #Priorities https://t.co/o44wqG9bOm

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 10, 2020

Backstory:

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz unloaded on his Democratic colleagues on Friday in response to Sen. Dianne Feinstein sending a letter to President Trump declaring that she is “disappointed” in his administration’s plan to block funding to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran. The Democrats’ demand of Trump to help Iran get $5 billion in aid, Cruz noted, comes “at the exact same time” that they are “blocking desperately need relief to small businesses in America.”

“The coronavirus has hit Iran hard, with the potential for even greater spread in the region,” the high-ranking Democratic senator tweeted Thursday along with a copy of her letter. “In the interest of international security, President Trump should support Iran’s request to the IMF for emergency funds to contain this virus.”

“I am disappointed to see reports that your administration intends to block Iran from receiving $5 billion in humanitarian aid from the IMF to combat the coronavirus pandemic,” the letter begins. “Providing these funds to Iran would help it respond more effectively to the disease and mitigate the risk of further destabilization in the region.” She goes on to urge Trump to reconsider so that the infamously tyrannical regime can receive the billions in aid from the IMF.

Feinstein’s letter was issued the same day that Senate Democrats blocked an urgent request from Sec. Mnuchin to increase the amount of cash in the emergency small business loan program recently established by Congress from $350 billion to $600 billion.

As the New York Post’s editorial board explains, instead of agreeing to the desperately needed increase in cash on Thursday, the Democrats “issued partisan demands”: “They insisted the new money include $60 billion for ‘community-based lenders’ that serve minorities, women, nonprofits and other groups. And the bill also had to OK an immediate $250 billion for cities, states, hospitals, food stamps and other needs.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) explained in response that “everything is an opportunity.” This was an “opportunity” to address “disparities” she suggested are plaguing the country.

“And if they don’t get their way, no one gets a dime more,” the Post’s editorial board noted. “Never mind that businesses face bankruptcy or that 17 million people filed for jobless benefits in recent weeks.”

Now, if you’re a Real American and not a despicable Commie toe-rag, you’d read that last sentence just as it is. But Pelosi and her fellow Democrat-Socialists see something more like this:

Never mind that evil capitalist running-dog exploiters face social justice or that 17 million people are now permanent wards of the State and reliably dependent Democrat-Socialist voters.

See? Easy peasy. As Cruz says, it’s all a matter of perspective.

STOP THE PRESSES!

Posted on April 7, 2020April 7, 2020 by Mike

Biden is right—not just once, but twice.

Sleepy Joe Biden said Tuesday during an interview from his home in Delaware that he is locked in his basement.

This is the best the Democrats have.

“…and I know I’m locked in a basement..” said Joe.

“Are they worried he will wander off and get lost?” Trump’s campaign said trolling Biden.

Biden also forgot the name of his own plan, calling it the “Make Work” checklist instead of “Make It Work.”

Ouch. Time for another nap, Grampa Joe.

Bearing the brunt

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by Mike

Grim tidings from one who oughta know.

Hotel operator Monty Bennett, the CEO of Ashford Inc., went on with Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night.

The hotel, travel, entertainment and leisure industries are being decimated by the coronavirus virus and media-spun panic.

Monty Bennett told Laura Ingraham, “I had to cut 95% of my employees. Even 9-11 or the financial crisis, it took us 5 years and 8 years respectively to fully recover from those calamities. And this tragedy is worse than those two put together time ten. It’s an absolute disaster for our industry. Morgan Stanley recently put out a note that US hotels are the hardest hit industry.”

Let’s pray our political leaders do not allow this pandemic to turn into a national depression.

Ooops, too late.

Update! The longer the shutdown, the more people will be hurt.

The economic predictions for the shutdowns may be as varied as those for the virus itself. The Federal Reserve’s James Bullard has noted that unemployment may rise to as much as 30%. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has estimated a possible unemployment rate of 20%.

Bullard’s number is higher than the unemployment seen in the United States during the Great Depression (25%), and both estimates are significantly higher than the unemployment during the Great Recession (11%). Even if we take the more conservative estimate of 20% unemployment, that is a 16.5% rise in unemployment from its recent historic lows of 3.5% unemployment.

Although it is difficult to estimate how long this downturn may linger, that is a severe shock to the economic system. It is possible that people return to work and economic activity returns in strength in short order after the shutdowns are lifted.

Even then, the costs of shutting down will have been quite large. However, it is also possible that some businesses who had to pause activity for a month or more may not be able to return at all.

Possible? It’s dead certain, a plain and simple fact of life. As is their wont, our incompetent “leaders,” with their arrogance in ignorance, are tinkering with things they can neither control nor comprehend. They aren’t the colossi or Masters Of The Universe they believe themselves to be; they’re very small men mucking about in affairs that are much too big for them—too big for anyone, in truth.

The recession could be longer than some economists are projecting. If the economy does linger in its downturn, the human costs to the shutdown will inevitably begin to increase.

Again: a certainty, a truism so obvious only a self-proclaimed “expert” could miss it.

At last, some GOOD news

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by Mike

A silver lining finally appears.

Due to the coronavirus and a healthy dose of karma, newspaper advertising is drying up, and these same newspapers are now laying staffers off and slashing salaries while the far-left New York Times’ media columnist screams for a bailout.

Before I get to the karma part, here are the details…

On Monday, we learned the Tampa Bay Times is suspending its print publication from seven to two days a week. That’s not a typo. A newspaper that had been printing every day of the week will now print only on Wednesday and Sunday.

This, however, is not due to a lack of clicks.

“The company reported a surge in traffic to its website … and growth in digital subscriptions over the last few weeks” but “the pandemic sent advertising sales into a plunge. In just the last two weeks, [advertising] cancellations have cost us more than $1 million, and there is no sign of quick recovery on the horizon. We must act now.”

More…

Gannett, one of the largest newspaper companies in the country, publisher of, among others, USA Today, the Des Moines Register, and Arizona Republic, announced a sweeping round of furloughs. A memo from Gannett CEO Paul Bascobert asked employees to immediately make a “collective sacrifice … as soon as this week.”

Poynter points out that this is in direct response to “big advertising declines.”

Finally, Chicago’s Daily Herald is slashing newsroom salaries by 15 percent and salaries at its parent company by 20 percent.

And with this news, all released on Monday (the floundering BuzzFeed cut salaries by up to 25 percent last week), the far-left New York Times published a panicked and ludicrous bailout proposal…

Well, boo fucking hoo for them. I can’t quite see how it could be possible, but Ace is enjoying Enemedia’s pain even more than I am.

Check out this CNN whine of a headline:

Hundreds of journalists are being laid off, right when the public needs them the most

We “need” them?

We DO in fact need journalists. We assuredly do NOT need these pusnutted reprobates. In fact, we NEED to rid ourselves of them, one way or another, once and for all.

Last week, a senior “reporter” decided he would “investigate” and call the mother of a Twitter rando whose opinion he doesn’t like.

Do we “need” him? Is he “essential personnel” in a time of crisis?

As far as I’m concerned, you can all fucking starve to death. I hope you all lose your jobs and you all wind up in the gutter.

Disagree. In my opinion, starving is a WAY less painful death than they deserve. I much prefer they be eaten alive by rabid wolverines, myself.

Full coverage of the frabjous day to be made available for all free of charge, natch, in various formats. With pics and video. Let the handful of real journalists handle it.

Riding the tiger

Posted on March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 by Mike

The unthinkable has now become all too thinkable.

It is a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating predictions about what comes after the great lock down. Trump is no longer talking about Easter as the back to normal date and has extended the lock down through April. Governors are now in a race to see who can come up with the bleakest prediction for when things get back to normal. The Brits now lead the race with six months as their estimate. This is an unprecedented time, which means what was considered unthinkable is very thinkable.

For example, ten years ago most Americans assumed the political classes had learned a hard lesson from Watergate. They had let the security services run wild for too long and suddenly they were a threat to the politicians. The days of a J. Edgar Hoover spying on people were over. Not only was that false, but there was a plot among FBI officials to interfere in the presidential election. They went so far as to concoct an impeachment trap in order to remove Donald Trump.

Six months ago is was unthinkable that these same security agencies would have the president removed by some other means. Six month ago we did not have a third of the country hiding under their beds. We did not have major cities turned into ghost towns by quarantine orders. How unreasonable is it to think that the same people who launched the seditious plot in 2015 would find themselves a Lee Harvey Oswald? It sounds crazy, but we live in an age where the crazy quickly becomes the norm.

What about something less cloak and dagger like martial law? State governors are getting pretty close to the line between state of emergency and assuming dictatorial powers over their states. New Jersey is supposedly issuing travel passes to citizens and arresting people for gathering in their own homes. Los Angeles has suspended the second amendment. Trump has contemplated a Federal quarantine of New York City, which would probably mean troops on the streets to enforce it.

If this does go on for months and the cracks in the ruling class begin to show, is civil unrest really unthinkable? Is civil war unthinkable? Rhode Island now considers New Yorkers persona non grata. Pennsylvania is doing the same. Mainers are now going vigilante on suspected New Jerseyites. Sure, concern for the virus is the stated reason, but a general dislike for New Yorkers is the real reason. There are lots of such divisions in this country. Is civil war really so unthinkable?

Just because something is possible, does not mean it is likely. It is possible to hit the lottery for a billion dollars, but the odds are very small. What we’re talking about here though are the things that were thought impossible or close to impossible just six months ago that are now suddenly possible. Maybe they are still unthinkable within the ruling classes, but we thought the FBI and CIA spying on presidential candidates was unthinkable until not so long ago.

Events have a way of reverbating through history, ramping up in ways the people who initially believed themselves capable of controlling them, of directing them for their own purposes, could never have imagined. And then?

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