EU: “Bad Hungary! We are going to sanction you for thought crimes against the European elite!” Poland: “Hey EU! Get stuffed!” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Bureaucrats try to strip the title of heroes from the defenders of the Alamo, and the elected state board of education stops them cold. (By the way, I recently watched John Wayne’s version of The Alamo, and it’s a much better film than its reputation.)
And it’s not just missed sleep: Trump Derangement Syndrome made a Democrat attempt to get all stabby on a Republican congressional candidate in California.
R.S. McCain on modern dating: “Guys, when women say they want you to ‘share your feelings’? Don’t believe it. All that stuff you read about how women want men who are ‘sensitive’ and ‘vulnerable’? This is a gigantic load of crap. Don’t fall for it.”
“Author of ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ Charged With Murdering Her Husband.” What are the odds?
“Facebook has banned Brandon Straka, the former Democrat who founded the ‘Walk Away’ campaign and its viral hashtag #WalkAway, after he linked to Infowars.com – which has been banned from the platform.” Evidently even linking or mentioning an official “unperson” can get you banned…
Via Ann Althouse comes this dramatic depiction of just what a 6′ and 9′ storm surge looks like:
“Google Rep Issues Heartfelt Apology For Anti-Conservative Bias While Wearing ‘Kill All Republicans‘ T-Shirt.” “We want Google to be completely free from bias, even against Republicans who need to die violent deaths for disagreeing with us. That’s what inclusivity is all about.”
I saw this over at Say Uncle and I may have to pick some up:
Remember Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that came up with the ludicrously fake Trump Dossier? They were called to testify before congress…and plead the fifth. “So you have what seems to be the Democrats, and Fusion GPS and these officials — intelligence agency bureaucrats — all blocking every single attempt we’re making to get the most basic information about this document, which … may have been the single document that sparked the entire Russia investigation in the first place.”
The media only hires nominal conservatives who already agree with liberals, liberals have no idea what real conservatives think or why. This is the reason they end up baffled when they lose and lose and lose again – sure, Felonia von Pantsuit was also stupid and drunk, but you get the point. As Sun Tzu observed, and I believe this is a verbatim translation from the original Chinese text, a wise general must seek to know and understand the true nature and schemes of his enemy lest he end up as forlorn and humiliated as a foxy fern in the Miramax head office.
This piece on how Facebook changed the 2016 election is peppered with the usual left-wing slant (has any liberal media outlet ever been labeled “hyperpartican”?), but is also filled with nuggets of insight on how liberal complacency and conservative mastery of social media blind-sided Democrats.
In short, among the truly contested states in 2016, the only ray of hope for the Democrats is Colorado, and even there, the trends have flattened some. They have stabilized New Jersey and Delaware, but Republicans continue to gain significant ground in Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada, and above all, Pennsylvania. If these trends continue through 2020, Florida would be have a slight Republican registration edge, North Carolina would be nearly even, and New Mexico would be close enough that it could never be taken for granted. Moreover, Pennsylvania and Iowa would be solid Trump states.
The remarkable thing about the Republican trending states is that they have moved steadily ever since last November, in almost every case without a single break. Democrats continue to lose voters, and they are not becoming independents. All of this appears to be due to Trump and Trump alone, as the Republican Party has not offered any reasons to embrace it.
It’s been a week, so enjoy an extra-late Friday LinkSwarm
There’s lots of meat in President Trump’s tax reform proposal:
Individual Reform
Tax relief for American families, especially middle-income families:
Reducing the 7 tax brackets to 3 tax brackets of to%, 25% and 35%
Doubling the standard deduction
Providing tax relief for families with child and dependent care expenses
Simplification:
Eliminate targeted tax breaks that mainly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers
Protect the home ownership and charitable gift tax deductions
Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax
Repeal the death tax
Repeal the 3.8% Obamacare tax that hits small businesses and investment income
Business Reform
15% business tax rate
Territorial tax system to level the playing field for American companies
One-time tax on trillions of dollars held overseas
Eliminate tax breaks for special interests
Texas House passes anti-Santuary City bill that fines officials for violating federal immigration laws.
North Korean ballistic missile test fails. Cue the sad trombone.
Obama’s Iran deal was even worse than we thought. “By dropping charges against major arms targets, the administration infuriated Justice Department officials — and undermined its own counterproliferation task forces.”
The highest-profile Democratic-party supporters are increasingly smug Hollywood actors, rich Wall Street and Silicon Valley elitists, and embittered members of the media, along with careerist identity groups and assorted protest movements — a fossilized 1972 echo chamber.
Democrats’ politically correct messaging derides opponents as deplorable racists, sexists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes, and nativists. That shrill invective only further turns off Middle America. Being merely anti-Trump is no more a successful Democratic agenda than being anti-Nixon was in 1972.
Dishonest medical equipment startup Theranos used a shell company to secretly buy outside lab equipment to actually run the lab tests they were faking as coming from their own equipment. And check out that picture caption: “[CEO] Elizabeth Holmes speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.” Because of course she did.
Liberals love denouncing the imaginary Christian theocracy of The Handmaid’s Tale (now a miniseries) because it keeps them from having to think about the real Islamic ones oppressing women all over the world right at this very moment.
Welcome to April Fool’s Eve! Don’t believe anything you hear tomorrow. Especially if it’s from CNN…
Representative Moe Brooks of Alabama offers up a one sentence repeal of ObamaCare: “Effective as of Dec. 31, 2017, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.” Get on it, GOP… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Single-payer’s future is Venezuela’s present: “The communist model for healthcare will result in everyone having a right to healthcare and no one getting any of it. There will be black market health care for those who can afford it, a lovely parallel system for the politically well connected, and a crumbling system of overworked, over-regulated providers working to give some care to all the rest of us.”
Scott Adams: “With the failure of the Ryan healthcare bill, the illusion of Trump-is-Hitler has been fully replaced with Trump-is-incompetent meme.”
CrowdStrike, Patient Zero in the “Russia hacked the Democrats” vector, backtracks key claims.
“Filibustering Gorsuch might be a pointless exercise when it comes to keeping him off the court, but it would have the advantage of giving angry Democratic activists something they desperately want: an opportunity to lash out in fury at Republicans.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Hosni Mubarek freed in Egypt. But I mainly want to talk about the Times piece of an example of sins of omission by the newspaper of record. “The first democratic election, in 2012, brought to power a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi. But he lasted only a year, making a series of political blunders that cost him the support of the military, crucial parts of the security apparatus and millions of Egyptians, who gathered in the streets in June 2013 to call for his removal.” Yes, one might call “engineering a murderous rampage and instituting a dictatorship in order to fully Islamicize Egyptian society” a “blunder”…
So how’s that boycott against North Carolina over the tranny bathroom law panning out? Not so hot. “Tourism has thrived: Hotel occupancy, room rates and demand for rooms set records in 2016, according to the year-end hotel lodging report issued last week by VisitNC, part of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina.” (Hat tip: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Twitter feed.)
“Former Obama Official Describes Last-Minute Rush to Spy on Trump Team, Conceal Intel Sources.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Someone in a small circle of Obama intelligence officials who knew the identity of that American No. 1 committed a felony by leaking Flynn’s name to media.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s baby parts selling scheme indicted on felony eavesdropping charges in California. By an amazing coincidence, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra received donations from Planned Parenthood. What are the odds?
There’s an actual Wikipedia article for a list of grenade attacks in Sweden, which have exploded (ha) since 2012. Many occurred in Malmo. Gee, what could possibly be driving all these grenade attacks?
Attorney General Ken Paxton’s trial venue is being moved, which is a victory for the prosecution. Given the dismissal of the SEC charges the case is based on, I still think the long-term prognosis points to acquittal or dismissal.
“Spiders could theoretically eat every human on earth in a year and still be hungry.” Obviously this cries out for a research grant and a pilot program…
Don McLean’s “American Pie” added to the National recording registry. “I’m really delighted that the government has taken notice of me in this way, and not by tapping my phone or something.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Last week the Texas Senate approved SB-6, the bill that rolled back the Obama Administration’s illegal imposition of tranny bathrooms on the nation.
Remember when Obama campaigned on letting middle-aged men in dresses use the girl’s bathroom?
Me neither.
Out beyond a small but very vocal minority of Social Justice Warriors, no one was asking for tranny bathrooms, and outside of locales like San Francisco, I doubt even Democratic politicians are willing to campaign for them. That is why they had to be introduced by stealth and fiat.
Tranny bathrooms represent the high-water mark of the hard left’s attempts to impose the idea of “gender as social construct” (as opposed to the obvious scientific truth of two biological sexes) on a resisting nation. That is why the cultural elites have been so desperate to defend the idea despite its widespread unpopularity. If you can get people to pretend a man wearing a dress has been magically transformed into a woman, despite the XY chromosomes in his body, you can get them to pretend to believe in just about anything.
That’s why the left has fought the rollback so hard, why North Carolina had to be “punished” for daring to respect obvious scientific and time-honored truths rather than “gender fluid” fad popular among liberal elites.
It remains to be seen whether Texas House speaker Joe Straus will bow to the will of the people, or to the cowardly business interests desperate to avoid elite wrath. Since Straus has never met a Democratic interest he wasn’t willing to cave to, it may require a concerted effort (perhaps by way of a discharge petition) to get HB 1362 voted on.
What happens when you actually start enforcing the law? Oddly enough, lawbreaking goes down.
The same is true of enforcing laws for border control and immigration.
There’s been a lot of news on the border control and immigration front, starting with President Trump issuing a revised executive order banning travelers from terrorism-exporting nations. This version is more narrowly tailored, excludes Iraq, and spells out that it does not apply to existing visa and green card holders.
Daniel R. DePetris at the National Interest thinks the new Executive Order is much improved. “Overall, the second version of the ‘Presidential Executive Order on Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States’ is far and away a better product than the first. It’s more detailed, comprehensive and bureaucratically vetted than the original.”
Other border control news:
Illegal alien border crossings were way down during President Trump’s first month in office. “In January, 31,575 individuals were taken into custody between ports of entry on the southwest border. That contrasts with an average of more than 45,000 for each of the previous three months, according to a CPB report released Monday.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
And that trend appears to be continuing. “The Homeland Security Department said Wednesday night that people caught crossing the border illegally had plummeted from 31,578 in January to 18,762 in February.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Likewise, the illegal aliens themselves are “panicking” over the possibility of being deported. Let’s let Professor Rock break down how people may avoid this fate:
Further: If you’re already breaking the law, maybe you shouldn’t appear at a pro-illegal alien press conference and tell people how you’re breaking the law, or you might get deported.
The crackdown has led to what conservatives have said would happen all along: self-deportation. “Trump talks tough about a crack down on illegals and a step up of deportations. ICE goes out, does a few raids and deports a few illegals and the dolts in the press publicize it everywhere, wholly unaware that they have become unwitting allies of Trump. Illegals witness the hysteria in the press and decide to turn tail and run.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
It seems that a lot of sanctuary cities that loudly proclaimed they were going to defy President Trump over border enforcement are backing down. “Miami-Dade county rescinds ‘sanctuary’ status over Trump’s threat to withhold federal funds.”
Although increased enforcement is attracting all the attention, another big part of President Trump’s immigration reform is selecting immigrants based on skill rather than family preferences.
Pacheco supports Trump even though he’s one of the 11 million undocumented immigrants who could be deported. “Trump for me is a good president,” he says. “He has to fix things here. There’s a lot of drugs being sold around here. A lot of people sell drugs. And they hide within the workers. They even come here, or hide other places around here. They hide among us.”
As promised at his joint address, President Trump has created Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement, an office to serve U.S. victims of illegal alien crime.
Illegal alien arrested for chopping off his own mother’s head. “Oliver Funes-Machado, 18, is originally from Honduras and is accused of repeatedly stabbing his 35-year-old mother in their Zebulon home Monday. He allegedly beheaded her and then walked outside, holding her head in one hand and the knife in the other as he waited for Franklin County deputies to arrive. He was the one who called 911.” No word on whether he was one of Obama’s “Dreamers” or not… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
There are commentators who take it as a given that Trump is going to lose the black vote by a larger margin than Republican Presidential candidates usually do.
I doubt it.
First and foremost, Obama is no longer on the ballot, and it is deeply unlikely that Hillary Clinton get as many black votes as the real first black president.
Second, if you consider Trump not as a standard Republican, but as a celebrity candidate (which he most obviously is), his chances among black voters begin to look a lot better. Take, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The former body-builder, former Kennedy-in-law, was up for re-election in 2006 in one of the bluest states in the country. He was re-elected by a huge 17-point margin and won 27% of the Black vote in California. Schwarzenegger also won 39% of the Hispanic vote and a huge 62% of the Asian vote and 63% of the White Vote.”
Trump may not get 27% of the black vote (though I think that’s far more likely than Clinton getting the 96% of the black vote Obama got in 2008), but he doesn’t have to. Getting somewhere between that and the 10% of the black vote Republicans have historically garnered in Presidential elections will be enough to doom Clinton in several swing states.
“Trump saw a 16.5 percentage-point increase in backing from African-American voters in a Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California tracking poll, up from 3.1 percent on Sept. 10 to 19.6 percent through Friday. Meanwhile, the same poll showed Clinton’s support among that group plummeting from 90.4 percent on Sept. 10 to 71.4 percent.”
There are also some signs that Trump’s economic message is resonating with at least some parts of the black community the same way it has blue collar white voters.
Chicago attorney Brunell Donald-Kyei, a former Bernie Sanders supporter and Barack Obama voter, believes that Donald Trump’s economic message is resonating in American’s urban centers and elsewhere as well.
Donald-Kyei is now the vice chair of the Trump campaign’s diversity outreach coalition and has been making media appearances on behalf of the Republican presidential nominee during the campaign season. The lifelong Democrat who once ran for Illinois lieutenant governor explained in a previous interview that “I was a Bernie Sanders girl. Once… I saw how we were treated at the Democratic National Convention, I knew that I would not vote for Hillary Clinton, and the Trump Train just kept calling my name.”
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there’s real enthusiasm for Trump in some quarters of the black community, enthusiasm that simply wasn’t there for previous Republican Presidential candidates.
While Hillary racked up overwhelming support among black Democratic primary voters, enthusiasm about her in the black community at large has been noticably lacking. “Clinton and her entire campaign don’t care about black people unless their bodies are lifeless and cold, donating to her foundation, or paying them to give speeches…Nothing about this woman is genuine. Nothing.” Indeed, Democrats themselves are fretting about an enthusiasm gap among black voters for Clinton, and talk that the Clinton campaign is in panic mode over lack of black voter enthusiasm in Florida.
The entirety of the George Soros-funded #BlackLivesMatter seems to be a desperate attempt to keep the black community riled up about an imaginary epidemic of police brutality in order to get them to vote for Hillary. Whether it will work, or whether it can more than offset the white voters and police officers turned off by the tactic remains to be seen.
Finally, Trump has garnered some black celebrity Support. Some of those might strike you as pretty crappy black celebrities (like Mike Tyson), but the fact that there are some willing to publicly support him despite the relentless demonization of Trump by the mainstream media, and that many of them (Tyson, Herschel Walker) have worked with Trump, have to be encouraging signs for Team Trump.
As has been proven many, many times in this campaign, Donald Trump is such an unusual candidate that many of the usual rules simply don’t apply to him. “Blacks never vote for Republicans in Presidential races” may be one of those rules.
Then-Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature had quietly, virtually without notice, decreed a massive, retroactive increase in state employee pension benefits, which was quickly emulated by hundreds of local governments.
At the time, CalPERS was ringing up big earnings from the 1990s’ bullish stock market — so big that it had reduced contributions from member governments to near zero. Public employee unions hankered for a share of the bounty and pressed for a benefit increase.
The CalPERS board, dominated by public employees and union-friendly politicians, sponsored the increase, Senate Bill 400, with assurances that it would cost taxpayers nothing. A state Senate analysis of the bill said CalPERS “believes they will be able to mitigate this cost increase through continued excess returns of the CalPERS trust.”
Years later, it emerged that the assurances reflected the most optimistic of several scenarios developed by the CalPERS staff. More pessimistic scenarios were kept secret — but they were the ones that came true. By the time Seeling delivered his dark appraisal in 2009, the state was being hammered by an ultra-severe recession, and the CalPERS trust fund was losing what turned out to be nearly $100 billion in value.
Seven years later, CalPERS and other pension funds still haven’t fully recovered, and they’re sharply raising mandatory “contributions” from state and local governments to cover the gaps left by meager investment earnings.
California is deluding itself if it thinks it’s “turned to corner” and is on the path for sustainable growth:
Between 2000 and 2015, Austin has increased its jobs by 50 percent, while Raleigh, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Nashville, Orlando, Charlotte, Phoenix and Salt Lake City – all in lower-tax, regulation-light states – have seen job growth of 24 percent or above. In contrast, since 2000, Los Angeles and San Francisco expanded jobs by barely 10 percent. San Jose, the home of Silicon Valley, has seen only a 6 percent expansion over that period.
Obviously this runs counter to the notion of California being business friendly, since the ratio of jobs to workers is lower here than in Texas and the rest of the United States, and sometimes a lot lower.
Snip.
Gov. Brown has achieved bragging rights by suggestions of a vaunted return to fiscal health. True, California’s short-term budgetary issues have been somewhat relieved, largely due to soaring capital gains from the tech and high-end real estate booms. But the state inevitably will face a soaring deficit as those booms slow down. Brown is already forecasting budget deficits as high as $4 billion by the time he leaves office in 2019. As a recent Mercatus Center study notes, California is among the states most deeply dependent on debt.
The state’s current budget surplus is entirely due to a temporary tax and booming asset markets. The top 1 percent of earners generates almost half of California’s income tax revenue, and accounts for 41 percent of the state’s general fund budget. These affluent people have incomes that are much more closely correlated to asset prices than economic activity, and asset prices are more volatile than economic activity generally. Brown’s own Department of Finance predicts that a recession of “average magnitude” would cut revenue by $55 billion.
More critically, the state continues to increase spending, particularly on pensions. Outlays have grown dramatically since the 2011-2012 fiscal year, averaging 7.8 percent growth per year through FY 2015-2016. Seeing the writing on the wall, the state’s labor leaders now want to extend the “temporary” income tax, imposed in 2012, until 2030. This might not do much to spark growth, particularly in a weaker economy.
During this recovery, California has made minimal effort to eliminate the state’s budget fragility. To use a recently popular term, this is gross negligence. It is, thus, no surprise that credit ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service ranked California second from the bottom in being able to withstand the next recession. Someday the bills will come due.
Note that across the entire decade the unemployment rate in California was consistently greater than that in the United States, averaging 1.5 percentage points greater overall and maxing out at 2.9 percentage points in January and February of 2011. Except for the first six months of 2006, the same story holds true for California and Texas, although the differences here are more pronounced: an average of 2.5 percentage points greater and a maximum difference of 4.2 percentage points at various points in 2009 and 2010. Also note how long double-digit unemployment persisted in California (43 months) during this decade compared to the United States (1 month) and Texas (0 months).
Also: “Texas outperformed California in 9 of the 10 years. And Texas had a CAGR of 3.1 percent, meaning its economy grew at more than twice the pace of California’s each year.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
This is what Krugman and others really get wrong about the Texas miracle.
The state had its last major recession from 1986 to 1987, after oil prices collapsed and the real estate and financial sectors crashed. Back then, the mining sector, dominated by oil and gas activity, was directly related to about 21 percent of the real private economy and roughly 5 percent of the labor force. Today, mining is 15 percent of the real private economy and less than half of the labor force share. As a result, the combination of more economic diversification and pro-growth policies has produced a much more resilient economy. Texas in 2016 looks a lot different than Texas in 1987.
“A major impediment to economic growth and a factor chasing people and businesses away from California is the state’s high tax rates and poorly structured tax code. California levies the highest top marginal income tax rate in the nation at 13.3% and has the country’s 6th highest overall tax burden. Such a hostile tax climate has consequences. During the last decade, from 2000 to 2010, California had a net outmigration of over 1.2 million residents move to other states. Those former Californians took over $29 billion in income with them.”
Residents of San Diego, Newport Beach, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and many other cities and towns across California enjoy beautiful scenery and enviably pleasant weather year round; while folks in Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston ride out their hot and humid summers by staying indoors as much as possible. Yet Texas has been the number one recipient of California refugees. While the physical climates found in states that are the top recipients of California refugees don’t hold a candle to the Golden State’s, the business tax climates are far more hospitable.
California imposes the nation’s highest income tax, while Texas is one of nine states with no income tax. While Texas has the 10th best business tax climate in the nation, according to the non-partisan Tax Foundation, California has the country’s third worst. During the last decade, over 225,000 people moved from California to Texas, bringing over $4.4 billion in income with them to the Lone Star State. After Texas, Nevada is the number two recipient of ex-Californians. Like Texas, Nevada can’t compete with California’s natural beauty and climate, but the Silver State makes up for it by having no state income tax and the nation’s 5th best business tax climate.
California’s Democrat-dominated local governments are riddled with nepotism in their hiring practices. In San Diego, “Investigators uncovered an employee vetting process they allege was ‘abused’ — so that in a third of the cases reviewed, ‘friends and family members’ of city staff were hired ‘to the detriment of public job applicants.’” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Liberal complains about how San Francisco’s progressive policies killed affordable housing. “Instead of forming a pro-growth coalition with business and labor, most of the San Francisco Left made an enduring alliance with home-owning NIMBYs. It became one of the peculiar features of San Francisco that exclusionary housing politics got labeled “progressive.” Do note this piece is from a year ago. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Speaking of San Francisco, three of the city’s supervisors have decided that he would like to take the goose that laid the golden egg (i.e., the city’s high tech employers), smother it with locally source rosemary, thyme and organic butter, and broil it at 450° in the form of a payroll tax for those companies that earn $1 million or more in gross receipts.
“In 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m).” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“Relocation of Highway 99 in Fresno, a key part of the bullet train project, is over budget, behind schedule and will cost millions of dollars more to complete.” (Hat tip: Cal Watchdog.)
“DAE Systems is relocating its headquarters to Catawba County and intends to create 46 new jobs and invest $6.8 million during the next three years, Gov. Pat McCrory’s office announced Monday. The California-based company, which is moving to Claremont, will receive a grant of up to $110,000 from the One North Carolina Fund that is dependent on the company meeting job-creation goals.”
Nothing says “adult oversight” quite like playing strip poker with teenage camp counselors. Take a bow, Stockton Mayor Anthony Silva! (Hat tip: Dwight, who also notes that Silva is a member of the criminal-ridden “Mayors Against illegal Guns.”)
Noted for the record: Mayor Silva comes up twice at the very top of Stockton real estate developer Dan Cort’s Facebook page. (Previously.)
“Trump is the warning shot. He’s the food riots before the revolution. He’s the stack of letters to the editor in protest over some issue. People do not go from happy to bloody revolt overnight. It’s a process and the early stages are warnings, at least they should be viewed as warnings. If the people in Washington insist on flooding the country with helot labor, despite what’s happening in the election, the people are going to insist on building scaffolds in Washington. The Trump phenomenon is the warning.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“The Hillary Story is far less entertaining than The Trump Story…Clinton is rich, and morally and ethically corrupt. So is Trump. But at least he’s entertaining.” Note: That’s from Jonah Goldberg, with whom Trump has exchanged numerous rounds of insults and putdowns. Goldberg seems much further along the Kubler-Ross cycle than his NRO compatriots…
Larry Correia visits Europe. “I would like to institute autobahn style rules on I-15 in Utah. Sure, a few thousand people would probably die in the first weekend, but after that it would be awesome….The Czechs are a fun people. They have this kind of to hell with it sense of humor that meshes really well with mine. They’re big on long meals and animated conversations. They really hate socialists.”
Research following contestants on The Biggest Loser brings bad news about dieting: “As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.”
“The GOP has required that its nominees receive a majority of the vote from its delegates for 160 years now. And this requirement has been consequential: Along the way, multiple candidates have received a plurality of the vote, yet failed to become the nominee.”
“I’ve got nothing in particular against Rubio except that he let Chuck Schumer snooker him on immigration, but I keep hearing what a great candidate he is, and he keeps sucking in the actual votes.”
Floridians for Immigration Enforcement, a group that opposes illegal immigration, supported Rubio in his campaign for Senate that election cycle, in part due to an hourlong-conversation they had with him on that fateful day in 2009. During that meeting, Oliver said, Rubio pledged never to support “amnesty or legalization of people” in the United States without documentation.
“He ran for president as a graceful way to exit. He would have lost the Senate seat if he had run for reelection.”
