WHY IS THE USMC CONDUCTING LIVE FIRE EXERCISES IN LATVIA?: Russia’s Crimea invasion imperiled 21st century peace.
RELATED: Chapter Four of Cocktails from Hell.
Archive for 2019
March 21, 2019
BUT OF COURSE: Bernie hires Hugo Chavez fanboy as campaign Senior Advisor and Speechwriter. “David Sirota penned the now infamous ‘Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle,’ and has been secretly helping Bernie while working as a journalist, then deleted the evidence. Nobody saw that coming.”
Sirota does seem to have a type.
ROCKET FIRE IN LATVIA: A USMC HIMARS rocket launcher conducts live fire training in Latvia’s Adazi Training Area.
REMEMBER WHEN THE WASHINGTON POST WAS A REAL NEWSPAPER? Elizabeth Harrington’s analysis in the Washington Free Beacon dissects how the present-day Post created a Trump violation of the law out of a suit filed against his predecessor.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Conservative students told by police to stop tabling.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: National conversation on John McCain. “Recently, information has surfaced that McCain was an active participant in the coup against Trump. McCain and his associates were actively circulating a compilation of gossip and RUSSIAN-generated disinformation, alleging Trump and some of his associates were compromised and working for the RUSSIANS. McCain was promoting the idea that Trump was committing espionage. ESPIONAGE. This was after Trump won the election. He was the president-elect. McCain was trying to overthrow the president.”
The media seems to spend much more time covering what Trump said than what McCain did.
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Mike Gravel, 88, is going to make the 2020 primary rock.
Just like he did in the 2008 election cycle!
LEFTISTS USE EVERYTHING AS AN EXCUSE TO HURT THOSE WHO DISAGREE WITH THEM: Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life removed from Whitcoulls following Christchurch terror attack.
RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Australia to Cut Number of Migrants Under New Population Plan.
I’M SO OLD I CAN REMEMBER WHEN THEY WERE ACCUSING TRUMP OF WAGING WAR AGAINST TIME-TESTED AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS: David Harsanyi: Democrats Want To Kill The Electoral College Because They Fear The Constitution.
AT AMAZON, Deal of the Day, AeroGarden Ultra (LED) with Gourmet Herb Seed Pod Kit.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Sweeping The Chessboard. “But changing the rules is tacit admission Plan A has failed. Nobody’s talking about a ‘rules based international system’ any more because changing the rules is Plan B. The progressives are already creating their own world order to replace the old world order. The system Hillary hoped to lead is gone. . . . In this context the spate of proposals to change the rules — lower the voting age, abolish the electoral college, expand the Supreme Court and spend trillions on a Green New Deal — should come as no surprise. They are the domestic equivalent of building a brand new America. Although they come at a destabilizing price it is one ideologues are willing to pay since their vision is imperative enough. After all, to paraphrase Recep Erdogan ‘the rules are like a tram ride: when you reach your stop, you get off.'”
Plus: “If one were to predict between comity and authoritarianism in the coming years the odds would favor authoritarianism. Never has so much naked ambition disguised itself as virtue and the more loudly political factions proclaim they’re out to save the world the more ruthless they are likely to be. Liberty will come under assault from the banner of tolerance, fascism will advance in the guise of grievance.”
BUT OF COURSE: EU gives tentative OK to Brexit deadline extension — with conditions.
I’ve stopped thinking of it as Brexit, as it seems less and less likely to happen. Instead I use “May’s Mess.”
Patti Davis, who was never on the same page as her late father, Ronald Reagan, made a pronouncement the other day on how her father would have felt about Donald Trump. Ron, Jr. has done the same in the past and his eldest son, Michael, has chimed in, too.
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The dead should not be puppets to be manipulated into endorsing or opposing current policy questions. Honor them, admire them, but do not reinvent them.
Read the whole thing.
WAKE UP CALLS FOR THE GOP APPARAT:
If you care about 2020, spend less time on the Internet and more time volunteering in a campaign or with your local party.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: 3rd Circuit Upholds University Of Pittsburgh’s Right To Cut Tenured Prof’s Salary By 20% Due To Poor Student Evaluations, ‘Stagnant’ Research Agenda.
MACKUBIN OWENS: Ignoring Socialism’s Countless Corpses.
HMM: US Navy’s carrier-based F-35C stealth fighters may not be ready for combat after all.
“The F-35C is ready for operations, ready for combat and ready to win,” Vice Adm. DeWolfe Miller, commander of Naval Air Forces, said last month as the Navy announced that the fighter had achieved initial operating capability. “We are adding an incredible weapon system into the arsenal of our Carrier Strike Groups that significantly enhances the capability of the joint force.”
But the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit government-accountability group, warned Tuesday that despite these claims, the F-35C, like the other variants, “continues to dramatically underperform in crucial areas including availability and reliability, cybervulnerability testing, and life-expectancy testing.”
While still secretary of defense, Jim Mattis demanded last fall that the Navy and the Air Force strive to achieve a fleet-wide mission-capable rate of 80% for their fighters by October 2019. The Navy’s carrier-capable F-35 variant is apparently nowhere close to that target, having consistently achieved unacceptably low fully mission-capable rates.
The Project on Government Oversight began life as The Project on Military Procurement, criticizing the cost and design flaws of the M-1 Abrams — which of course went on to become one of the deadliest and durable tanks in history.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: John Hickenlooper explains why he went to see an X-rated movie with his mother.
CYBERSECURITY: Why Phone Numbers Stink As Identity Proof.
I don’t give mine out unless I simply must, and even then it’s usually a fake.
JAMES P. PINKERTON: Democrats Set the Wayback Machine to the 1930s. “From court-packing to Weimar Monetary Theory, their new ideas feel distinctly retro.”
We can observe that for most of the 20th century, the specters of war, fascism, and communism had the effect of trapping American capital in the U.S.; that is, money just wasn’t safe in most places. And yet today, thanks, ironically enough, to U.S. victories in various hot and cold wars, easily 20 countries and jurisdictions around the world qualify as not just tax havens, but plausible places to hold citizenship, and perhaps even to inhabit.
So while one can lament the ingratitude of tax exiles, what one can’t do—at least not without an extraordinary amount of effort—is collect money from them. To be sure, it’s possible to imagine an international regime in which enforcement and harmonization make tax exiling and other kinds of tax avoidance more difficult, even dangerous. But as we have learned, it’s hard to get the world to agree on much of anything. Moreover, there’s always the concern about killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
So perhaps the better answer is to set reasonable rates and then seek to truly collect revenues from rich individuals and profitable companies that never seem to pay anything.
Much more at the link. I’d just add that the current push for ultra-high income taxes isn’t about collecting revenue, but about increasing control and creating new opportunities for graft.