When you want to test the depths of a stream,
don't use both feet.
Chinese Proverb
Chart of the Day: The Insolvency of Ponzi Scheme Social Security
We don't have the manpower or the resources to serve as the world's unloved policeman
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) August 15, 2015
Image of the Day
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| Via Joshua Jones |
Bad Elephant of the Year Nominee: John Bolton and the Daisy Ad Redux
It's not just that Bolton is using an 8-year quote from Rand Paul, then involved in his father's 2008 campaign, 3 years before he was elected Senator, but let's remember that LBJ was trying to portray Goldwater as a trigger-happy anti-Communist, willing to set off a nuclear Holocaust at the drop of the hat. It's the neo-cons like Bolton who have been heavily cheering military intervention in countries that have never attacked us--Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada, etc. Not to mention numerous collateral damage victims in Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere? Who is exactly terrorizing who? The motivation of blowback to various foreign interventions is breathtaking; we're at $18T in debt, maybe another $93T in unfunded entitlement liabilities--we don't have the manpower or financial resources to be the world's unloved policeman.
Bad Elephant of the Year: Donald Trump
How many ways has Donald Trump earned this--I'm not sure that we have to wait for the rest of the year, because he has been so petty to so many people, it almost hard to see who could beat him. It goes beyond his personal attacks on FNC host Megyn Kelly, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Rick Perry, Rand Paul, and/or others--basically, anyone who dares criticize the thin-skinned right-wing populist demagogue. For an amusing exchange of tweets between Trump and two well-known conservative columnists, see here.
Facebook Corner
(Lew Rockwell). http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/13/fox-news-megyn-kelly-announces-10-day-vacation/
At least the lovely Megyn won't have to put up with the intolerable abusive behavior of that thin-skinned, unprofessional, incompetent failed businessman, Donald '"Four Bankruptcies" Trump.
(Peter Schiff). http://www.sovereignman.com/podcast/the-1-reason-why-donald-trump-is-the-chimpanzee-america-needs-17355/
Vote trump, because communism is better than socialism
Both Sanders and Trump are economic fascists.
(Judge Napolitano). Trump Stirs it Up "Judge Napolitano's Chambers" http://video.foxnews.com/v/4421521930001/
Judge Napolitano, I'm surprised at you giving this populist-authoritarian any tacit approval for stirring the pot. He's a right-fascist, someone who has no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law. This is a guy who out of the gate threatened to slap a tariff on any Ford vehicles insourced into the country, which is explicitly illegal under NAFTA. He has not only smeared the Mexican government with totally fabricated allegations of prison dumping across the border, but he is threatening trade wars all over the world, he is threatening to steal oil from Iraq, he promised to dictate prices to OPEC--this guy is freaking insane and dangerous. We know from the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries what happens with authoritarian populists. Stirring the pot is dangerous. The legitimate response to the bloated State is not an authoritarian demagogue--it's for a pro-liberty conservative like a Rand Paul.
(Reason). Success Academy, NYC's rapidly expanding charter school network, trounced traditional public schools in annual tests, including those in some of the city's wealthiest zip codes.
I want to know what they're doing different than a public school, and if it's working, why it's not implemented in public schools.
Anyone who does a modicum of reading on the topic (i.e., Success Academy vs. public schools) knows that part of the recipe for success includes: more active involvement of school administration in faculty development, higher discipline and expectations for students, more proactive communications from teachers to their students' parents, up to 11 hour days for teachers plus practice test Saturdays, less administrative or union workrule BS distracting from the learning experience, etc. Some of the commenters in this thread don't even bother doing 10 minutes on Google before printing lazyass comments.
(Rand Paul 2016). Obama says he could win a third term. He's wrong.
Without the Constitution, the President in Name Only would take a play out of his hero, the fascist FDR's playbook, and get us involved in a world war, arguing now is not the time to change Presidents...
(IPI). Nearly 50% of all inmates in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections are serving time for non-violent offenses such as burglary, fraud and drug crimes.
Establishing a restorative-justice pilot
program in Illinois, where the guilty party can repay the victim in lieu
of serving jail time, could save IDOC an estimated $780,500 in one
year.
Burglary!
Ok, let them stay out of jail by robbing someone else to pay back the
other person. What the hell! Who thinks that sounds right?OK, how many ignorant trolls like the lazy OP don't know how to read. Quoting:
"In Texas, the Bridges to Life restorative-justice program has been in operation since 1998. Under programs like Bridges to Life, if the person found guilty of a nonviolent property crime and the victim of that crime agree, the two parties enter mediation to work out terms that allow the guilty party to repay the victim in lieu of serving jail time. Victims, who often take a back seat in the design of punishment-focused criminal-justice policies, report greater levels of satisfaction under such restorative-justice programs, according to research from Right on Crime."How many other idiots think that a justice system that focuses on repaying the victim is worse than breeding recidivist criminals in prison, maybe even turning them into violent ones? IPI is spot on; American prisons have incarceration percentages that dwarf other "free" countries; we have to limit incarceration to violent felons
(Rand Paul 2016).Chris Christie's fact-free attack on Rand Paul
To be honest, I thought Rand Paul got the better of the exchange. Christie engaged in fear-mongering, implying that prosecutors needed more unconstitutional ways to go after the bad guys. He never made the case that metadata collection was cost-effective or led to the identification of a single terror suspect--and given an environment where TSA might get 5-15% right on a simulation test, even if somehow you might identify something out of a population of 318M or more, doesn't mean you will. But Christie's shameless demagoguery went beyond that; he even lied about his nomination. Whereas he may have notified of his contingent selection as a US attorney on 9/10/01, he still had to go through a background check, and White House press releases show "an intent to nominate" Christie in early December 2001, nearly 3 months later. Not to mention he made claims that he presented cases before FISC, although these are typically made by NSA attorneys. My inference is that this was a carefully crafted soundbite that was materially misleading, and what's particularly worrisome is Christie's authoritarian dismissal of Paul's legitimate constitutional concerns.
(Liberty.me) Since they are both children of immigrants, why do neither Trump nor Sanders acknowledge the value of open borders, not only as a human rights concern, but as a valuable asset to a nation that prides itself as being built on immigration?
Because the dark side of economic nationalism--whether it's the left-wing populist version of Sanders or the right-wing populist version of Trump--is that it moves class warfare to the international unit of analysis. I remember how liberals back in the day of Gerald Ford couldn't reconcile how a guy who would give someone down on his luck something out of his own pocket could veto social welfare bills.
The ugliness of the Know Nothings and the dark side of the xenophobes and bigots are the ancestors to the forces that (except for some ugly exceptions for Asian immigrants) were unable to halt the open immigration that led to American's rise to the world's greatest economy by the late nineteenth century until WWI. Of course both Sanders and Trump are economic illiterates who don't understand the compelling evidence of win-win immigration liberalism. Why would they be hypocritical about their own immigrant heritage? No doubt they'll resort to the same old same old excuse that their ancestors immigrated "legally" and pretend there's a difference between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants. It's crap, of course, which is why Romney's anti-immigrant rhetoric was a key reason behind his 2012 loss.
My Greatest Hits: August 2015
For those who are new or even regular readers who perhaps missed a few hosts, here are the most popular posts over the past month, starting with two one-offs:
- A Baby Boomer Tries to Mentor a Millennial
- Responding to a Marxist Nun's Viral Quote
- Miscellany: 7/19/15
- Miscellany: 7/31/15
- Miscellany: 7/28/15
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| Courtesy of Lisa Benson via Townhall |
Kenny Rogers, "The Factory"
