Maxine Waters may have boycotted the SOTU speech, but her face was there — every damned one of those Democrats looks as if he or she had been sucking on a lemon for the last 20 years.

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Tech Sgt Geraldine Lovely has been “removed from her supervisory role” after the Facebook post went viral over the weekend, officials at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas have said.

The Sergeant is female and apparently white or Hispanic.

“It pisses me the f*** off that they have no respect and constantly have attitude,” Ms Lovely says in the video. “What the f*** is up with that?”

That’s the way they were raised. Good manners have no value in the ‘hood.

The Air Force base said that they will be using the profane video to start a dialogue within their ranks.

Said ‘dialogue’ will be rather one-sided: ‘You WILL shut up about this.’ Been there, heard that.

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Saw THAT coming’….

Read it. And watch the videos.

Matching what Dems said then and what they say now.

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Democrats as Officer Obie: ‘And everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it….’

And Trump is going to make them look like full-diaper fools.

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Perhaps I ought to start a new category, Crooked Black Women Democrats. (Well, ‘Democrat” is probably redundant.)

Worst part of it is, she still gets a handsome pension.

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New proposed legislation, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener and co-authored by Sen. Nancy Skinner, that would require California cities to allow denser, taller housing developments near transit hubs and bus lines, has ignited controversy in Berkeley and nationally.

With some limitations, SB 827 would eliminate restrictions on the number of houses that can be built within a half-mile of BART and within a quarter-mile of major bus routes, including Muni and AC Transit. It would also block cities from mandating parking requirements.

For those curious as to why it’s impossible to find affordable housing in California.

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Illinois has been losing population for four years. The state’s outmigration crisis is so bad that Illinois has dropped from the fifth-largest to the sixth-largest state, falling behind Pennsylvania. Since 2010, the Land of Lincoln lost a whopping 640,000 people on net to outmigration. The state is shrinking so rapidly that it’s at risk of losing a House seat.

…

Illinois ranks near the bottom in terms of economic freedom compared with the rest of the country, according to the Fraser Institute’s recent Economic Freedom of North America, or EFNA, report, released in partnership with the Illinois Policy Institute. This report ranks states based on an index of 10 variables related to government spending, taxes and labor market freedom. Only 12 states were ranked lower. Unsurprisingly, blue states California and New York ranked at the bottom of the economic freedom list.

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And how many of them, do you think, would vote Republican?

That tells you everything you need to know about the push to grant felons the vote.

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Tim Cook is apparently determined not to make the Microsoft Mistake.

Read it.

Amazon has narrowed the list of places where it might put its second headquarters down to 20. Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, is so excited that Montgomery County made the shortlist that he’s offering Amazon a new $5 billion package of incentives.

“Amazon sent a clear signal that Maryland truly is open for business by selecting Montgomery County as one of an elite group of contenders for this transformative project,” Hogan said today as he unveiled the sycophantically named Promoting ext-Raordinary Innovation in Maryland’s Economy (PRIME) Act.

Not only is Maryland open for business, it appears to be for sale cheap.

Funny how Democrats who spend their working hours castigating rich people as the scum of the earth line up to kiss the butt of the richest one of all. But he’s a Democrat so that’s okay. I’m told that he’s officially a Republican. You can understand my natural mistake.

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The key issue here, of course, is how much of a Federal power grab by the bureaucracy the Supremes will stomach.

Historical evidence suggests Quite a Bit.

But we’ll see.

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In the movies, I’ve seen people who try to get out of a traffic ticket by telling the police officer they made a donation to the policeman’s ball, but those were comedies. I had no idea that no only does this exist there are official cards.

Yet another aspect of the city-as-corrupt-enterprise pioneered and refined by Democrat machine politicians.

I’ve always wondered why Republicans don’t publish statistics of the murder rate in jurisdictions run by Democrats versus that in jurisdictions run by Republicans.

UPDATE: NYC Police Union to Limit ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Cards

Read it.

You can see the problem immediately. Homicide in Baltimore, as in other cities, is mainly a black-on-black crime. But how are you going to police black areas of the city if, in doing so, you’re accused of discriminating against blacks?

This is made worse by having public officials who rode into office on a wave of identity-politics we-are-oppressed breast-beating, and have no idea how to run a city — and, really, no intent of doing so, as long as they can collect a fat public-employee salary while trashing their critics as racists. (Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have ridden that particular mule to the bank and back for decades.)

Read it.

Immigration authorities have detained in recent weeks two prominent activists who are themselves illegal immigrants, demonstrating the Trump administration’s commitment to expand the pool of deportable aliens.

The arrested men have openly lived in the U.S. for years and have until recently enjoyed a de facto immunity from deportation, thanks to their status as high-profile immigrants’ rights activists. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have denied the arrests are politically motivated, but they clearly show that immigration agents are now emboldened to arrest even the most connected of illegal immigrants.

Sounds like progress. If people who are obviously breaking the law act with impunity, it merely encourages others to break the law. It also encourages other public officials to not enforce the law.

Montrevil, who co-founded the New Sanctuary coalition, was taken into custody in early January near his home in Queens, touching off a firestorm of protest. Activists accused ICE of breaking an “understanding” that Montrevil would not be arrested while he appealed his order of removal. Despite the public outcry, ICE deported Montrevil to Haiti on Tuesday.

One down.

The week before Montrevil’s removal, ICE arrested Ravidath Ragbir during his check-in with officials at the ICE office in New York. The executive director of New Sanctuary and the public face of immigration activism in New York City, Ragbir came to the U.S. in 1991 as a legal permanent resident, but he was ordered deported in 2006 following a wire fraud conviction for which he served a two-and-a-half year prison sentence.

Two down. Both obviously deserve deportation.

Ragbir’s wife Amy Gottlieb, an immigration lawyer, has accused the Trump administration of singling out her husband because of his outspoken activism.

And rightly so. Scofflaws ought to be the first targets of genuine law enforcement. The law must not only be enforced but also be seen to be enforced.

Read it.

At issue is whether Trump can use his executive authority to enforce the law and undo President Barack Obama’s use of his executive authority to skirt the law.

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California lawmakers are targeting the expected windfall that companies in the state would see under the federal tax overhaul with a bill that would require businesses to turn over half to the state.

A proposed Assembly Constitutional Amendment by Assemblymen Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, and Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, would create a tax surcharge on California companies making more than $1 million so that half of their federal tax cut would instead go to programs that benefit low-income and middle-class families.

“Trump’s tax reform plan was nothing more than a middle-class tax increase,” Ting said in a statement. “It is unconscionable to force working families to pay the price for tax breaks and loopholes benefiting corporations and wealthy individuals. This bill will help blunt the impact of the federal tax plan on everyday Californians by protecting funding for education, affordable health care, and other core priorities.”

I hereby dub thee Taxifornia.

Steven Hayward of PowerLine yanks back the curtain.

It seems Senate Democrats are determined to have a government shutdown probably because of the default requirement of the Democratic base of “total resistance” to Trump. They are attaching the demand that DACA be “fixed” as a condition to funding the federal government (as OMB director Nick Mulvaney pointed out this morning, Democrats do not oppose any of the funding specifics of the continuing resolution), because they know that if DACA is part of larger immigration deal they lose a lot of leverage. More on that point in a moment.

Democrats are banking on the premise of the media-academic complex that a government shutdown will be blamed on Republicans. The second premise of the media-academic complex is that Republicans are supposed to forever be the Washington Generals to the Democratic Progresstrotters, and roll over for “the side of history.” Trump just might be the kind of person who will call an end to this perverse state of affairs. In addition, Mulvaney suggested this morning that the Trump Administration is prepared to hunker down for a good long while, as many agencies can use holdover funds and “transfer authority” to pay for priority services—something Obama refused to do back in 2013.

Read it.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will be participating in a drag show as a guest judge for a reality TV series later this year.

This confirms quite a few of my suspicions about Nancy Botox.

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Of course not. That was then, this is TRUMP.

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Washington Metro officials pretended to be shocked when a Red Line train derailed due to a broken rail on Monday. In fact, the break should not and probably didn’t surprise any of them.

“It’s like, God, didn’t we do all of the fixing, the bad areas, SafeTrack?” rambled Metro’s board chair, Jack Evans. “All that stuff was intended to prevent stuff like this from happening.” Actually, Evans knows perfectly well that the SafeTrack work was superficial and the system still needs $15 billion to $25 billion of maintenance and rehabilitation work.

Read it.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Steve Sailer explains it all to you.

Last Thursday, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) scheduled a meeting with the president to try to trick him into supporting their politically suicidal immigration bill. To their dismay, however, when they arrived they found that Trump had also invited realist immigration experts such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), and the president’s speechwriter Stephen Miller.

In the ensuing debate, Durbin and Graham were demolished. So Durbin, his plot foiled, tried the underhanded ploy of asserting to the press, perhaps inaccurately, that Trump had used the now-notorious vulgarity to characterize Haiti.

Of course, Haiti ranks 163rd on the U.N.’s Human Development Index while Norway ranks first, so, as usual, what drives the establishment most crazy about Trump is his tendency to tell the rough truth.

This situation illustrates quite nicely the Standard Operating Procedure of the D.C. political class. Senators think that if they come to a President with a ‘bipartisan’ deal, he is ipso facto required to support it. A Senator balked in that expectation is totally entitled to act like a spoiled child and have a tantrum in the press. The press are totally entitled to use anything handy to trash a politician that they don’t like or who disagrees with them. Etc.

Read it.

Lindsey Graham, the Arlen Specter of the South, has been trying to ingratiate himself with President Trump, his former adversary. By doing so, Graham hopes to achieve his longtime dream of granting amnesty to illegal aliens.

One happy byproduct of the unfortunate “S***thole” controversy is that, in all likelihood, Graham’s friendship with the president is at an end. It’s over not because of that controversy, but because of what led to it. Simply stated, Graham tried to bamboozle Trump.

As Harry Truman once famously said, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’ One of the distinguishing characteristics of politics, not just in America but almost anywhere, is that ‘friends’ of politicians will inevitably try to use that ‘friendship’ to gain some sort of advantage through the proxy use of that politician’s authority. This is a reversion to an earlier cultural type, still nearly universal in the Third World, where someone in power is expected to use that power, not for the general good, but for the particular good of that person’s ‘friends & relations’. One of the most significant aspects of ‘American exceptionalism’ is the weakening of this ancient expectation and its replacement by the expectation that public officials will act for the general good, not just that of their personal affinities.

Democrats, of course, are the primary proponents of preserving the traditional orientation, as any examination of that hoary Democrat institution, the metropolitan political machine, makes clear. This is, I suspect, one reason why the Democratic Party was the usual object of the affection of organized crime — they both have the same approach to the use of political power. (When was the last time you heard of the Mafia trying to steal an election for a Republican?)

Republicans, on the other hand, take their cues from the classical Roman republican tradition, in which the service fo the res publica, the ‘public thing’, was paramount over la cost rostra, ‘our thing’ (sorry for mixing languages). There are recorded instances of Roman fathers having their sons executed for theft and treason, which in any other ancient civilization would be considered insane. The Founding Fathers of the American Republic were, needless to say, thoroughgoing republicans, if not Republicans.

Read it.

Can’t wait to see how the Usual Suspects will spin this one.

UPDATE: Acosta Suggests WH Doctor Could Be Withholding Information About Trump’s Health

Journos Unable To Accept Results Of Trump’s Physical Exam

But He’s Crazy! Liberal Media Embarrass Themselves, Demand Doctor Insist Trump’s Mentally Ill

Normal people believe it when they see it. Proglodytes see it when they believe it.

Read it.

Yeah, everybody and his dog calling Trump a racist really got the Democrats what they wanted, didn’t it?

I am reminder of the tale of the Scorpion and the Frog.

Read it.

Cory Booker’s problem is that he doesn’t have enough name recognition to make him a Player in the Democrat power structure. This may be an attempt to raise his profile by being Mr Outrage, a niche in which Elizabeth Warren has so successfully accomplished.

This also lets him posture about his ‘blackness’, which isn’t as obvious as it is with, say, Maxine Waters. It’s always a problem for these you’d-never-know-they’re-black-if-they-didn’t-tell you folks.

Quiz — Find the black guy in this picture:

For reference, here is a picture of an actual black guy:

I’d be willing to bet money that Cory Booker has almost as many white great-grandparents as I do.

Read it.

I’m not sure what the legal theory would be behind such a move. Certainly there would be grounds form noncompliant local officials to be impeached, but most of them have at least the support of their local political establishments.

Read it.

In the Land of Fruits and Nuts, it is not allowable that one, by one’s actions, undermine the efforts of Democrats to build a permanent underclass dependent on government handouts.

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You’d think that the government would learn from experience, but the ‘war on drugs’ proves that they don’t.

When the Crust are dedicated to hunt down Heretics and Sinners, there is no such thing as ‘fact’, there is only dogma’.

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The rent is too damn high—so each year Congress appropriates billions of dollars to address the nation’s collective housing needs. The programs vary from loans to tax credits to straight-up subsidies, but a common feature is that federal taxpayers pony up the dough and then a motley collection of state-level politicians, financing agencies, and housing authorities decide how it’s spent. Can you guess where things go wrong?

In theory, oversight is provided by bureaucrats in Washington tracking every dollar and by local leaders increasing their re-election prospects by providing housing assistance to their constituents as effectively as possible. In practice, the feds turn a blind eye to inefficient uses of the funds while local officials gleefully engage in politically advantageous graft.

When the kids at tReason magazine aren’t lecturing us on behalf of proglodyte morality, they can do some good reporting.

Read it.

he City of Seattle probably didn’t expect pushback from Costco, seen by many on the left as retail’s “anti-Walmart,” after its “sugary drink” tax of 1.75 cents per ounce went into effect January 1. But that is exactly what has happened.

In moves the national press, which largely supports such taxes, has thus far ignored, Costco is itemizing the built-in cost of the tax on its Seattle store’s shelf tags, and informing customers that they won’t pay the tax if they shop at one of two other Costco stores outside Seattle’s city limits.

The use of taxation for ‘social engineering’ purposes, rather than for purely raising government revenue, is one of the characteristics of the Progressive era. It is an indulgence in economic ignorance beloved by activist politicians who are sure and certain that they know better how the common people ought to act than the people themselves do.

Of course, they are wrong. And unfortunately, it divides consumers into two classes: those who can afford to shop outside of the jurisdiction imposing the tax, and those who can’t. Hence it is ‘regressive’ in the purest sense, targeting the poor and being merely inconvenient for the not-poor.

It also is the root of ‘black markets’, because criminals are very adept at arbitraging these situations of government-imposed market distortion. I predict that the second effect of this tax (the first being non-poor people doing their shopping outside of the Seattle jurisdiction) will be lawbreakers smuggling untaxed ‘sugar drinks’ into the very areas from which politicians are trying to exclude them, thereby (a) canceling the effect of the tax, (b) avoiding any increase in tax revenue (because people aren’t paying the tax), and (c) encouraging a scofflaw attitude toward government. The whole history of tobacco taxes is rife with examples of this behavior, which politicians make a habit of ignoring, and the ‘war on drugs’ shows what happens at the extremes of such behavior.

This can only end badly for Seattle.

Steve Sailer brings the news that you probably won’t see in your local paper.

Asians, who are as numerous as blacks in Seattle public schools, have no color, apparently. They’re invisible-colored.

‘People of Color’ ™, of course, means black people (and not just any black people, but American black people; actual black people from, say, Africa don’t count).

It’s too bad Seattle doesn’t have any philanthropic billionaires to solve this problem.

Yup, it sure is. Perhaps they could import some from Texas.

Read it.

Eminent domain abuse has reared its ugly head in East Harlem. As Ginger Adams Otis reports in the New York Daily News, city officials plan to seize a family-owned dry cleaning business and then hand the forcibly vacated land to a wealthy private developer.

Democrats talk a good fight when it comes the the poor and downtrodden, but it’s all hot air.

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Drainin’ the swamp, drainin’ the swamp….

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Yeah, that First Congressional District looks kinda suspicious. And the 12th is right behind it.

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Yet Another Crooked Black Female Politician. Seems as if there’s a lot of that going around.

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Watch the swamp drain right in front of your eyes.

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Dude, you want to live in hipster-land, you get to pay hipster prices.

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And the Trump just keeps on winning.

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But of course you have to realize that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in his first year in office.

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The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Read it.

Further adventures of the Horndog in Chief.

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Hey, black people, hows that voting-for-Democrats-all-the-time thing working out for you?

UPDATE: JFK’s Nephew Says Rahm Emanuel Plans To Kick Black People Out Of Chicago

That would certainly solve a lot of his problems.

Read it.

The standard political attitude of ‘Do something, even if it’s wrong!’ has repercussions.  Walter Williams is one of the most prominent free-market economists alive today, and he’s seen it all.

The Federal Reserve Board controls our money supply. Its governors are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate and serve 14-year staggered terms.

They have the power to cripple an economy, as they did during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Their inept monetary policy threw the economy into the Great Depression, during which real output in the United States fell nearly 30 percent and the unemployment rate soared as high as nearly 25 percent.

The problem with central control of the money supply is that when they get it wrong, they get it wrong for everybody.

Read it.

Great. All you illegal aliens, go to Mexifornia. Go on. Shoo.

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Hee hee hee.

Why we’re giving those genocides money has always astounded me.

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Another Democrat Blue State boondoggle bites the dust.

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God forbid we should let them reproduce.

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Back when then-president Barack Obama used to lament and lament some more that the United States no longer builds amazing infrastructure projects like the Golden Gate Bridge (setting aside for the moment that it wasn’t the federal government that created America’s finest span), buzzkills like us would point out that A) the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included a whopping $105 billion for infrastructure, characterized by Obama at the time as “the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an Interstate Highway System in the 1950s,” and B) “Every dollar that governments spend on every level gets inflated by contracting rules, social engineering, environmental aspirations, and sops to public sector unions.”