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It has been 12 long years since a major hurricane (Category 3 or above) has hit the US mainland and Harvey is turning out to be catastrophic. Just watching the news last night was terrifying. Not only had it strengthened wind-wise, the ensuing wobbling will keep in the southern part of Texas for a few days lambasting the residents there. I thought that 41″ of rain that was forecasted a couple of days ago (YIKES – three and a half FEET of rain in 4 days????) – last night I heard up to 50″!

Already, I’ve heard reports that Ground Zero, Rockport, has all but been wiped out by 135mph winds.

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The notion of the “art of association” can be traced back to Tocqueville, who noted America’s robust civil society that consists of an array of social associations and networks.  These associations and networks were not the result of government design or legislation, but instead evolved through the ingenuity of self-reliant citizens acting entrepreneurially.  Associations stand between the government and the market.  They allow people to come together and solve common problems without relying on government.  In doing so, they serve as a check on government power because private individuals do not become overly reliant on government to solve the problems they face.  The emergence of a robust civil society is only possible when people’s right to free association is established and protected.  Where this right exists, people can invest in establishing social associations and networks, which can potentially play a crucial role in the wake of crises.

– Chris Coyne (“Constitutions and crisis”)

The proprietor of Cafe Hayek, Prof Don Boudreaux adds this truism:

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“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small,but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.” – President Obama, Inauguration (2009)

And then we get this: IRS Rehires Hundreds of Employees Fired for Fraud, Theft, Abusing Taxpayer Data

The Inspector General for Tax Administration has discovered that under Commissioner John Koskinen, the Internal Revenue Service re-hired 212 employees it had previously fired for offenses including tax evasion, theft, and abuse of taxpayer data.  The title of the report makes it clear that the IRS “continues to rehire former employees with conduct and performance issues.”

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Kurt Schlichter has a piece at Townhall that I thinks speaks to a lot of the Republican base, especially those from the TEA Party movement, on the GOPe (Establishment GOP and NeverTrumpers).  While he rails against mostly the latter (but plenty for the former), this caught my eye:

…Oh yeah, we’ll repeal Obamacare. Oh yeah, we’ll defend the border. Oh yeah, we’ll defund the baby-butchering cartel. Oh yeah, blah blah blah blah blah. All lies, but they didn’t care. They had their power and prestige and the promise of a fat paycheck down the road when they moved from Congress to K Street. Actual conservative ideology? Well, that was for the rubes. And we were the rubes. We in the base, who are suffering from the establishment’s incompetent mismanagement of the society it had been foolish to try to micromanage in the first place, tried to warn them. But the Fredocons wouldn’t listen, because they’re smart, not like everyone says, like dumb…

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I only caught only a little bit of the Free Speech Rally on TV yesterday. The one that struck me the most was before the “official” rally started on the Boston Commons band. All of the local Boston channels had roving reporter / camera guy crews roaming the crowd on the outside of the barriers that were erected to protect the few dozen actual Free Speech Rally attendees.  The snippet I saw was about a single older gentleman surrounded by a “micro-mob” of 20/30-somethings (many of the college kids in that area) screaming all kinds of foul language at him.  The least foul word was “Nazi” – which was hurled his way (in screams and hand gestures).  His “failure” to meet the fanatics opposing him?

While the gentleman stood stoically on that rise, taking the vileness from these “tolerant” people whose message they keep telling us is “love”, the reporter relayed that he hadn’t been talking, hadn’t been engaged in debate (neither in calm or in yelling), or mindless screaming his position.  No, all he had done to rile them up was to silently hold up a single sign:

“Abortion is Hate“

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Sigh.  Just sigh. This professor, I guess, thought she was grabbing her eclipse sunglasses but reached for her racial glasses instead (and couldn’t tell the difference). I present Prof. Alice Ristroph a fine graduate of one of our most enlightened centers of higher learning – Harvard.  (How sweet).  First the run-up:

Totality is everything, say those who chase solar eclipses. When the moon fully obscures the sun and casts its shadow on Earth, the result is like nothing you’ve seen before—not even a partial eclipse. A merely partial eclipse does not flip day to night, because the sun is bright enough to light our fields of vision with only a tiny fraction of its power. But when the sun and moon align just so, a little piece of Earth goes dark in the middle of the day. In this path of totality, night comes suddenly and one can see the shape of the moon as a circle darker than black, marked by the faint backlight of the sun’s corona. Astronomers and eclipse chasers chart carefully to be sure that they can watch from exactly the right place at the right time. They know that you cannot compromise with the sun. For a dark sky, the sun must be banished altogether.

On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will arrive mid-morning on the coast of Oregon. The moon’s shadow will be about 70 miles wide, and it will race across the country faster than the speed of sound, exiting the eastern seaboard shortly before 3 p.m. local time. It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people.

Presumably, this is not explained by the implicit bias of the solar system.

Who knew that an entire planetary system had an implicit sense of racial animus and that it is DELIBERATELY, as Obama said, figuratively crossing the “solar system” street like his grandmother (as he implied his Grammy was a racist)??

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Jerry died today.  I grew up watching all of his zany movies of which almost all were funny but some, even as a child, had moving and serious parts to them as well.  His movies with crooner Dean Martin were just the best.  But that’s not what I remember best about Jerry.  The MDS (“Multiple Dystrophy Society”) Telethon was ALWAYS watched when I was growing up – it was all about Jerry’s Kids.  Sure, lots of money was raised (and I remember waiting for each and every update to be introduced by long term MDS sidekick, Ed McMahon) especially during the last hour; will they make it, will they make it?  Most years, yes, but not all years.

I also remember the family across the street

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“You really won’t like the New Rules”*

We got a comment from Mary Anderson on Steve’s post “Is it Time to Change Everything Named after Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd?”

Why not tell the whole story of Robert Byrd or doesn’t it fit in with the premise of your story? Byrd belonged briefly to the Klan before entering public service. He spent a lifetime apologising for his involvement and atoning for it. He fought for civil rights. When he died the NAACP issued a tribute praising him.

Oh, but it does.  You see, for so long the Left has maintained, through its speech and actions, that once is enough.  If you violate OUR rules, even once, no matter your intent, no matter your history, no matter what you did or say, if WE say you are to be shamed, shunned, or destroyed, well, so be it.  Sorry Mary, that’s what I’ve watched for the last dozen years.  We on the Right didn’t make them up, didn’t offer suggestions to modify them, and we certainly didn’t assent to them.  But they’ve been applied to us (and for the vast majority of times) too often to count.

And now we are using YOUR rules (just like

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From Robert Conquests Three Laws of Politics (sometimes also called O’Sullivan’s Law):

2) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

I, along with a lot of other people, have been watching Fox New moving from being that network that came into being by serving the audience that the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) and the existing cable news networks disdained – conservatives – to being what I’d now call “Fox News Lite”.  It’s hard edge has softened and it seems that it’s rightward stances are moving, faster and faster, to the middle and sometimes, left of center.  Lately, I’ve been wondering how much longer it would keep its value add for conservative – a network that doesn’t necessarily pander to us but certainly didn’t insult us outright.  It hasn’t gotten to the latter yet but as it continues its slide from the Right, is it just a matter of time?  This snippet is from a post over at American Thinker that brings up how Fox is sinking in the ratings – it seems that a good chunk of audience is saying BUH-BYE:

Fox News did come in second to MSNBC and CNN depending on the audience metric, so the ratings picture could have been worse – except when you consider that one year ago, and for the fifteen years before that, Fox News almost always won the ratings in both total viewers and the preferred demographic by wide margins, sometimes with higher numbers than both CNN and MSNBC combined.

So it is clear that the lineup it has right now ain’t doing the job.

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Those proponents of bringing more railroad projects are lazy and greedy.  This is because they refuse to go the capitalist route and do it themselves privately.  Heck, that’s a TON of work they’ have to do and a VERY expensive proposition to boot.  They’re hypocrites at best – believing that this brand new fangled 19th century technology, that can’t pay for itself ANYWHERE without large taxpayer subsidies, should be foisted upon us that would never bother to ride it.  That’s ok, it’s other peoples’ money they are demanding to take to pay for their foolish obsession.

One of their reasons is that rail is so much better than flying – just look at the comfy seats that are shown when Amtrack does its ads.  Sure looks like the lap of luxury, right? Easy-peezy, just buy your ticket and hop on board, right?  Er, maybe in the near future, not so much.  Let’s just bring the same Kabuki security theater of the TSA to this “no hassle” idea of Donchess:

Coming to a public transit station near you . . . Metro Tests Firearm, Explosive-Detecting Body Scanners

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DACA – the Obama self-declared law (“Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals”) was an Executive Order that basically violated the existing immigration Law duly passed by Congress.  It made a “safe space” from keeping kids, these DREAMERs, that were brought here illegally by their illegal immigrant parents free from being deported.  As I have said before, while the Democrats and MSM concentrated on the kids (Oh, how can you hold them at fault!), they used this to skip over the responsibility of their parents from putting them into a situation where they WOULD be deported.  And we are still seeing the MSM going after the Republicans for enforcing the Law that a Democrat broke.  However, even as Trump has not killed DACA off yet, it’s time may well be coming due:

On June 29, Texas and nine other states informed the Justice Department that it had until September 5 to make DACA a lawor they would sue to have DACA declared illegal. The suit would be heard by the same judge who issued the previous injunction. Today, the judge showed that the threat is real:

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MEET THE ANTIFA: Jake Tapper makes note of ‘disgusting,’ unprovoked attacks on journalists. Weird how this kind of thing never happened at Tea Party rallies.

(emphasis mine, above) While we were boisterous, flag waving, and upset with how the country was going, we were pretty much middle class with middle class politeness and the idea that when you left the public areas where the rallies were held, you left them cleaner than when you arrived.  We had a sense of “normalism” and normal behavior even after the Left, the media, and the GOPe, I think successfully, twisted the truth of it to influence the non-political population as they had the money to do it as we didn’t.  For the former as we were an existential threat to their sense that the State should be in control and not We the People with our concentration on Constitutional boundaries and the latter as a threat to the power they believe was their’s.  The media?  Two items driving them: keeping fights going to gain eyeballs and “Democrats with bylines”.

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(Image H/T: UL)  Previously posted:

Cicero: You may not be interested in politics but be assured, politics is interested in you.

Muslim Jihadist translation:  You may not be interested in our Jihad but be assured, we don’t care what you think.

Antifa corollary: ALL you Republicans are Nazis (and thus far game for us).

Steve beat me to the punch on posting about the graffeti’d NH GOP HQ but he had a different picture.  So mine tells a different picture and so does NH GOP Chair Jeanie Forrester’s response:

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Katherine Rogers has been charged with assault and needs to step down immediately from her position as the State Representative for Concord’s Wards 8, 9 and 10. She is a former Concord city councilor and Merrimack County Attorney and is still serving on the House Finance Committee. This is behavior unacceptable for a State Representative let alone one who is a lawyer.

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