Skip

We don’t have a revenue problem – we have a spending problem that gives us these huge annual deficits leading to a $20 Trillion national debt (reformatted, emphasis mine).

Real federal spending in fiscal 2017, which ended on Sept. 30, was higher than in any year in the history of the United States other than fiscal 2009, which was the year that President Barack Obama’s $840 billion stimulus law was enacted. Fiscal 2017 also saw the second highest real federal individual income tax totals of any year in U.S. history, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.  Total federal tax revenues were the third highest in U.S. history.

Read more

Over at the Concord Monitor is a piece on House Democratic Leader Steve Shurtleff’s extra-rules attempt to put in a new bill to ban “bump stocks” AFTER the cutoff date (Sept. 22) for doing so had passed. By rights, he shouldn’t have bothered – after all, both Republicans and Democrats in the House agreed to that rule. But of course, what are rules to Democrats when “WE MUST DO SOMETHING!!!” intersects with more gun control?

Read more

Yeah, I know – I’ve been spending perhaps a bit too much time over at a couple of Lefty sites lately.  Once again, yet another defense against deportation that forgets to bring up the MOST important question / answer.  It’s almost as if this ACLU lawyer (“Jeanne Hruska is policy director for ACLU-NH”.) did it on purpose in this Concord Monitor Op-Ed (reformatted)?

Nearly two decades ago, Christian families from Indonesia fled persecution in their country and sought refuge in the United States. Dozens settled in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and have since become valued members of their communities. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Boston field office, recognizing the families’ good standing in the community and their real fear of persecution should they ever return to Indonesia, began a program several years ago that enabled the families to stay in the United States. The program was heralded as a success for keeping members of our community here in New Hampshire in exchange for voluntary and regular ICE supervision.

Read more

Right after the Las Vegas murders, almost before the bodies had cooled to ambient temperature, Democrats were falling all over themselves about banning bump stocks and a number of folks on the Right started to agree with them.  And then of course, they just couldn’t help themselves – the Democrats couldn’t just leave it at that. Like a tiger who can’t change their spots, the Progressive Civilian Disarmament crew decided that given that inch, they were going to take more.

House Democrats have introduced a number of new gun control measures in the wake of a deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas. Among the proposals are HR.3962 to ban online ammunition sales, H.R. 4025 requiring gun dealers to report the sale of two or more rifles to the same person in a five-day period, and HR. 4052, which would ban magazines able to hold greater than 10 rounds. “Several of my colleagues and I have introduced commonsense legislation that, if enacted, would reduce gun violence and the tragic impact it has on our communities,” said U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, the New Jersey Democrat sponsoring the Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act.

Yep, the tired litany of stuff that the Dems peddle all the time.  While these get trotted out after almost every mass shooting (except after a typical weekend / month in Chicago), two things are clear:

Read more

That’s the headline over at DCWhispers and they make a point worth considering, given how chummy the two regimes have been in the past. The operative question is this How did North Korea’s Nuclear Tech Get So Good So Fast? (Reformatted, emphasis mine):

$33.6 BILLION. That is the amount then-President Barack Obama had shipped under cover of darkness to the world’s #1 state sponsor of terrorism. It was literally pallets of cash and gold that was part of the shockingly one-sided nuclear agreement between Iran and the Obama administration. That amount was nearly 10% of Iran’s entire economy paid out between 2015 and 2016, an unprecedented cash windfall for what had been up to then an economically struggling Iranian regime.

Now consider this. Prior to 2016 North Korea’s missile testing capability was sporadic at best and prone to high failure rates. This was due in great part to budget constraints. The isolated military nation was cash poor and couldn’t afford a more expansive nuclear testing program. And yet just two years after Barack Obama’s nearly 34 billion dollar cash and gold payment to Iran we see this headline:

How did North Korea’s Nuclear Tech Get So Good So Fast?

Read more

The headline over the weekend on a post about Obamacare:

Trump’s blow to Obamacare jolts health consumers, politics

President Donald Trump’s abrupt move to cut off federal payments to insurers jolted America’s health care and political worlds alike on Friday, threatening to boost premiums for millions, disrupt insurance markets and shove Republicans into a renewed civil war over their efforts to shred Obamacare.

Defiant Democrats, convinced they have important leverage, promised to press for a bipartisan deal to restore the money by year’s end. That drive could split the GOP. On one side: pragmatists seeking to avoid political damage from hurting consumers. On the other: conservatives demanding a major weakening of the Affordable Care Act as the price for returning the money.

“The American people will know exactly where to place the blame,” declared Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., all but daring Trump to aggravate what could be a major issue in the 2018 congressional elections.

Makes it sound that Trump just decided, on a whim, just lashed out against Obamacare and that ONLY Democrats can ride over the crest of the hill to save the day, right?  Hey, why is Pravda on the Merrimack all that surprised – or complicit?

Read more

Ah yes, the technocratic Administrative State “experts” that get bewildered when we Normals blow them off? Once again, a sterling example of the wide divergence of opinion of Who Is In Charge from Treehugger – that bastion of Environmentalism crossed with Big Government:

Eric Reguly on how self-driving cars will kill cities, not save them

I lived in Boston for 7 years as I went to school and I also have family in Southie.  However a “walkable” town it may have been, I have no compulsion to return – too noisy, too dirty, too smelly; country folks are nicer, the pace slower, and the wide open spaces allow for, wait for it….., quiet.  The woods, the lakes, the mountains, and the open fields – sorry, city folks and Treehuggers!  Anyways, this was a post about autonomous cars that would wreck ALL of the “urban planners” that know better than we do are now seeing their vaunted transportation plans for the rest of us about to go out their collective tailpipes (emphasis mine):

However since that time a lot of skepticism has crept in. Being seriously into walkable urbanism and cyclable cities, I began to worry about how self driving cars will interact with pedestrians. Whether they would promote sprawl. Whether they will be the worst thing to hit our cities since, well, the car. Whether Jon Orcutt is right: a car, whether uber or self-driving or electric, is still just a car. Others are worried about the same thing; Patrick Sissons talked to a few planners for Curbed. Don Elliot, a planner in Denver, tells him:

“I’ve seen the blood run out of people’s faces,” he says when talking about the impact of automated vehicles on transportation, land use, and real estate. “For years, planners have been fighting for a 1 or 2 percent change in transportation mode [getting more people to use transit or bike instead of drive]. With this technology, everything goes out the window. It’s a nightmare.”

Sissons worries that “the convergence of three new technologies—automation, electrification, and shared mobility—has the potential to create a whole new wave of automation-induced sprawl without proper planning and regulation.”

Oh God spare us a future without the guiding hand of Government experts (many of which reject the guiding hand of God, or so studies show)!

Read more

Treehuggers want Government to use force to get the rest of us to get in line. They are just blind to the fact that they keep proving the phrase Watermelon Environmentalists – ostensibly “green” on the outside but Red on the inside (the old political version for communism/socialism):

Why plastic straws should be taxed

Plastic straws.  In this case, over plastic straws and a failure to persuade (emphasis mine, reformatted).

A small charge has helped people move away from plastic shopping bags, so why not the same approach for straws?

Read more

Yesterday, Meet The Press (MTP) was no better than the Concord Monitor on the insurance bailouts, and it was quite clear, right from the start, that this was going to be nothing more than a Trump bashing and it was clear why.

MTP shows its journalistic bias just as clearly as the Concord Monitor. Chuck Todd is the host/moderator as well as the starting narrator/voice-over (former Democratic staffer to Senator Tom Harkin; married to Kristian Denny Todd – a former communications person for the Democratic Party):

This Sunday, trying to undo the Obama presidency. On Obamacare, President Trump moves to eliminate subsidies to help low-income Americans.

Read more

JUST DO SOMETHING!

No, that is, in a lot of cases, the WRONG thing to do.

The only knock that I have on Tucker Carlson as an interviewer is that he allows his guests to talk over him especially when they are refusing to answer a pointed question that they know will ruin their narrative.  Other than that, he does really well in getting the Liberal “I can beat Tucker at his own game” in either slipping up or making fools of themselves.

This is one of those latter cases.  Richard Painter, law professor in Minnesota, was an “ethics” lawyer in the Bush Administration and it is clear that at least on the topic of guns, believes that Big Govt, especially the part with guns, should know every detail of your life if you own guns.  And, truth be told, as a Progressive Republican, he’s no better than the Progressive Totalitarians like Democrat Diane Feinstein.  In this case, it is clear that he doesn’t want ANYone to have them.  Yet, this raving nitwit (don’t believe me?  Just watch the whole thing) of a lawyer is absolutely fine with disregarding that whole “shall not be infringed” bit from our Bill of Rights:

OK, let’s parse and unwrap what he wants:

• Tired of “NRA blood money” funding politicians’ campaigns – DO SOMETHING!
• Fix our permissive gun laws and protect us – DO SOMETHING!
• Those of us that disagree with him have blood money on our hands

Is that last bit akin to being a “climate denier”?  Those of us that don’t agree with him are morally bankrupt?  That seems to be the standard M.O. – accuse their opponents on any issue of not just being wrong but morally corrupt – “Othering” those that simply disagree, especially those than can quote real facts that put their emotionally laden talking points to shame. His remedies?

Read more