Read it.

Bernie is a squirmer.

Read it.

You can’t make this stuff up.

I’m sure the smugglers are gearing up and rubbing their hands.

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You know, as he does.

If all of the people who were convinced that they have the right to determine how you ought to spend your money were gone, the world would be (a) far less populated and (b) far more pleasant.

Read it.

Hey, people vote there. Do they vote in Somalia? Not that I’ve ever heard.

I laugh out loud when Islam is called a ‘religion of peace’.

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Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) may shed more than $40 billion worth of power purchase agreements after the California utility was driven into bankruptcy by liabilities for sparking deadly wildfires, The Wall Street Journal reports.

PG&E wants the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Francisco to rule whether the company must honor $42 billion worth of contracts with about 350 different energy suppliers, mostly solar and wind plants.

The court’s decision could have a major impact on California’s renewable energy industry and power makeup. Many green energy suppliers only do business with PG&E, California’s largest utility. Shedding those contracts would likely drive those companies under and cripple California’s ability to meet energy goals set by the state government.

Read it.

When I was a kid, everyone knew the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service, which was inscribed on the principal New York City post office: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” I think it was true, once, too. But not any more: Wednesday mail delivery canceled:

The U.S. Postal Service announced late Tuesday afternoon that deliveries and other services in Minnesota and several other states will be suspended Wednesday in the wake of a deep freeze unmatched for nearly a quarter-century.

The National Weather Service is forecasting a high of minus-17 in the Twin Cities on Wednesday, with windchills tumbling to the minus-50s.

So I won’t get any mail tomorrow. I will, however, be in my office, like most private sector workers.

Ace of Spades dishes the dirt.

Actually this was evident before, not that Arbiter of Truth and “The National Hall-Monitor” (as I think Instapundit calls it) CNN noticed.

But now an government ethics commission officially rules he took bribes gifts, and finds that there’s probable cause of a crime.

Possibly as a result, CNN has offered him a job as a ‘political commenter’.

“And I say to you: Make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity; that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.”

Read it.

Congresswoman #BitterBeerFace has her eyes on your wallet and her fingers are itching.

Read it.

Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Never was an American politician more aptly named.

Read it.

Both sides can play the ‘resistance’ game.

(Do you ever ask yourself what The Guardian is guarding? I’d like to know.)

Read it.

Let’s compare another prominent case of alleged lying to Congress with Stone’s treatment.

On March 12, 2013, Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr., President Obama’s director of the Office Of National Intelligence, testified under oath before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Responding to a question from Oregon Sen. Ron Wyder on whether the U.S. government was collecting “any type of data at all” from American citizens, Clapper paused and said, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.”

Three months later, when Edward Snowden dumped millions of stolen government documents into the public domain, it became abundantly clear that Clapper lied. The U.S. government was, in fact, vacuuming up details about virtually every electronic communication by every American citizen. When asked directly about his answer to Wyden, Clapper said that his response was “the least untruthful” answer he could give.

Parse Clapper’s response. “Least untruthful” means not truthful. Not truthful means a lie.

Read it.

Foreign asylum seekers make up the vast majority of Portland, Maine’s population growth and occupy nearly all of the space in its shelters, pushing the city’s abilities to provide resources, according to reports.

Portland has seen a steady growth in population since 2010, according to the World Population Review. Much of that population growth, however, has resulted from foreign-born persons, most of African descent, traveling to the city to seek asylum, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Between 2011 and 2016, foreign-born persons accounted for over 75 percent of the city’s growth, according to a city report, WSJ reported.

Rule by Democrats can be expensive.

Read it.

The most entertaining aspect of this kind of political activity is that the burden falls on the fools who (a) vote for these clowns and (b) stick around to have their pockets picked to pay for it.

A self-correcting problem.

Read it.

Parents from Indiana to South Carolina who expect to have a voice in what their children are taught in public schools find that more difficult, state lawmakers and policy analysts say, because the federal government has overstepped constitutional boundaries and interjected itself in state and local affairs.

The problem with pushing for national uniformity in an area by regulating it at the federal level is that of ‘capture’ by the federal regulatory bureaucracy by a single point of view that may not accord with the point of view of the general citizenry. Of course, that’s the prime motivation by most special interest groups that push for federalization of a question. Prohibition is the classic poster child for this approach, both in how it can succeed without true public support and how it will inevitably fail, as all programs fail that the people themselves refuse to follow.

If a whole lot of people break a certain law, it’s a good sign that the law itself probably ought not to be a law. Unfortunately, the self-righteous are rarely persuaded by this empirical reasoning. It is enough for them to see a certain course of action as being detrimental to those who choose it to justify their substituting their ‘obviously superior’ choice, even by force, on the ‘obviously defective’ choices of their targets. This never works except superficially. As Scott Adams pointed out in a recent Periscope episode, there is no way to break an addict of his addiction if the addict in question prefers that addiction to clean life. It just can’t be done without close incarceration of the person in question, and it will work only so long as that incarceration is maintained.

If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to fail, the freedom to screw yourself up if that’s what you choose to do. That unpleasant truth is why socialism and other forms of totalitarianism are so popular.

Read it.

In the latest example of the liberal broadcast networks burying the scandals Democratic politicians, ABC, CBS, and NBC ran away at full speed from Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who was forced to step down from key posts Wednesday following accusations she mishandled a rape allegation by a female staffer. This, after they pushed aside the breaking news last week.

“Democratic Congressman Sheila Jackson Lee, of Texas, is stepping down from two major roles as she fights off criticism of her handling of a sexual assault claimed by a former aide,” reported anchor Bret Baier during Wednesday’s Special Report on the Fox News Channel. “Jackson Lee is giving up the chairmanship of a key House Judiciary subcommittee. She is also resigning as chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.”

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The periscope itself is not the rotating tube most people think of thanks to Hollywood movies. Nowadays, the Pilot reported, subs are equipped with two photonics masts that rotate 360 degrees. High-resolution cameras send back images that are displayed on large monitors that everyone in the control room can see.

“The Navy got together and they asked a bunch of J.O.s and junior guys, ‘What can we do to make your life better?’” said Lt. j.g. Kyle Leonard, the USS John Warner’s assistant weapons officer. “And one of the things that came out is the controls for the scope. It’s kind of clunky in your hand; it’s real heavy.”

In an effort to cut costs, Lockheed Martin and Navy officials were looking at off-the-shelf technology, and for crew members who grew up playing video games, the answer was simple. The Xbox controller typically costs less than $30. The Pilot’s report said the photonic mast handgrip and imaging control panel cost about $38,000.

Rather convincing evidence that our military procurement process is horribly broken.

Read it.

The mayor of Gordon, Alabama, was removed from office last week after a jury found him guilty on two felony counts of absentee ballot fraud. Both he and his one-time constituents are learning firsthand the high price of voter fraud.

The Associated Press piece on which most news articles you can find through an internet search didn’t mention what party he belonged to, so I bet you can guess what it is.

Need another hint? Elbert Melton is black. Now can you guess?

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

Experts quoted in the story ascribe the flight to several reasons, not the least of which is the reduction of the local and state tax deduction. People with the kind of wealth we’re talking about often have more than one home and can go live in Florida where the taxes are more manageable. Financial advisors are recommending their high net worth clients to move out of state if possible to avoid the tax burden and many are taking their advice.

Oh, yeah.

Read it.

President Donald Trump brought up House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s multimillion-dollar vineyard Friday to criticize her for planning to travel out of the country during the shutdown after he banned her from using military aircraft for the trip Thursday.

“Why would Nancy Pelosi leave the Country with other Democrats on a seven day excursion when 800,000 great people are not getting paid,” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday. “Also, could somebody please explain to Nancy [and] her ‘big donors’ in wine country that people working on farms (grapes) will have easy access in!”

Pelosi and her husband own a California vineyard and mansion worth at least $5 million that brings in thousands of dollars in grape sales each year, according to TIME Inc.’s Money magazine. California’s “recruitment of agricultural guest workers has grown sevenfold” since 2011, and it ranks fifth among states hiring for foreign workers, reported The Los Angeles Times.

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline dishes the dirt.

Sen. Kamala Harris styles herself a “progressive prosecutor.” But Harris wasn’t nearly progressive enough for Lara Bazelon, a law professor and former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the [allegedly] Innocent in Los Angeles.

In a New York Times op-ed, Bazelon rips Harris for her “regressive” conduct and positions during her time as a district attorney in San Francisco and then California’s attorney general,

Read it.

Apparently Cloud People don’t have to follow the same rules as Dirt People.

Read it.

When is a government shutdown not a shutdown? When there’s money available.

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Trump sent a letter to Pelosi informing her that she would not be allowed to use military aircraft to travel to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan for a “public relations event” during the shutdown. The president added that Pelosi would be allowed to fly commercial to make the trip if she so chooses.

Pelosi’s dick isn’t long enough to get into a pissing contest with Donald Trump.

Read it.

And then when the shut-down ends, they’ll get back pay, so what’s not to like? Get a government job!

Read it.

Congresswoman #BitterBeerFace seems to think quite highly of herself.

Somebody needs to let her know that any hedge fund manager on Wall Street could have her whacked for what he pays for Starbucks for one year, and the only reason no one has done that is because she isn’t worth it.

Read it.

Today is the third anniversary of a particularly proud moment US history in which our President Obama smashed Pablo Escobar’s personal record for most cash plastic-wrapped on shipping palettes in a single delivery. Four hundred million dollars in mixed currencies arrived in Tehran at the same time that the departure of a plane with four Americans held hostage was coincidentally delayed.

Read it.

‘Nice government job you got there. Would be a shame for anything to happen to it.’

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‘Constituent Services’ is the branch of Congressional administration designed to give the appearance that your Congresscritter cares what you think without actually bothering him/her/it with your actual opinions (unless, of course, that opinion is accompanied by a large check, the larger the better).

To cut it down to its essence:

1. The unpaid intern opens the letter; determines if it’s someone mildly important or unimportant, and just enough to know what they’re talking about.
2. Based on those two data points he routes it to the appropriate LC or LA
3. The LC or LA reads the letter just enough to know if the writer is ‘for’ or ‘against’
4. The LC or LA sends a form letter.

This piece examines how that process can be automated to make sure that no public employee is ever bothered  by the opinions of unimportant (i.e. non-donor) citizens.

Read it.

There seems to be a common thread here. The foreign policy establishment doesn’t want to strike at Iran, so (reportedly) we don’t have contingency plans to do so, and a request for such plans is deemed “mind boggling.” The foreign policy establishment doesn’t want to withdraw forces from Syria, so (reportedly) Trump’s team is caught short when Trump announces a withdrawal, and Trump is accused of being “erratic,” as the Post puts it.

Read it.

The chief functional difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats never forget which side their on, and some Republicans often lose track. Sadly, those people often wind up in the Republican ‘leadership’.

Read it.

The Department of Health and Human Services created rules allowing employers to opt out of birth control coverage due to religious or moral objections. Employers otherwise have to offer health insurance that covers a range of birth control options, from the pill to intrauterine devices to emergency contraception, at no cost to patients.

The decision to block the rules from taking effect was issued Sunday by Judge Haywood Gilliam, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama and previously blocked an interim version of the exemptions.

Stalin reputedly once said that it didn’t matter who voted, it mattered who counted the votes. Similarly one might with equal justice say that it doesn’t matter what the law is, what matters is how it is enforced.

The Deep State is everywhere. For evil to triumph it is merely necessary for judges to pick oppression over freedom.

Read it.

Of course he will. He’s falling behind in the Pander-Bear race.

Read it.

Or, alternatively, we could get rid of the TSA, saving taxpayer money and making travel more pleasant for all of us.

But that won’t happen.

Read it.

With Republican ‘leaders’ willing to take their own troops out and shoot them over ThoughtCrime, who needs Democrats? If you’re wondering why Democrats are always winning, look no further.

Read it.

Time once again to thank God you don’t live in New York City.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio defended his plan to provide health care to all New Yorkers — including illegal immigrants — on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper. He stopped short of explaining exactly how he planned to offset the cost, saying only that the “wrong people” had all the money and he planned to correct that.

Once again, talking past the sale. Tapper takes quite a while to work his way around to asking why these are ‘the wrong people’, but it’s astonishing that a CNN ‘journalist’ even heads in that direction.

Tapper opened the segment by quoting Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum — who had proposed a similar plan for his state, but noted that unless other states joined the program, it would be financially impossible. “He was saying in Florida they could do it only if other states joined him because otherwise, all sick people would just come to Florida,” Tapper explained.

Shock! It would appear that Gillum has at least two brain cells to rub together. How did that happen?

“What’s to stop sick people from flocking to New York and overburdening the system?”

De Blasio shrugged off the question, saying, “I don’t see that happening.”

It would appear that DeBlasio does not. No surprises there.

He concluded by blaming politicians starting with Republican President Ronald Reagan who, through tax policy and other policies, had implemented a “systematic agenda to take that money and put it more and more in the hands of the few.”

Here we see the consistent Democrat belief that any money belongs of right to the government and that it wound up in the ‘hands of the few’ because — what? They snuck around and scooped it up while Democrats weren’t looking?

Read it.

Next they’ll be requiring children in public schools to rat out their parents, just like in the old Soviet Union.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Scott Johnson at Powerline looks at Democrats reverting to type.

Democrats now freely display the sort of anti-Catholic bigotry that JFK was thought to have vanquished in the 1960 presidential campaign. As they have done with so much of their history, the Democrats have deposited JFK and the 1960 campaign down the memory hole.

I wrote about the anti-Catholic bigotry on display in the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017. It was the subject of my City Journal column “The unfunniest senator” (that was Minnesota Senator Al Franken, before the fall). At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Seventh Circuit, Senators Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein conducted a mini-inquisition of Barrett’s religious views. “Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” Durbin asked. Feinstein concluded her questioning by telling Barrett that “the [Catholic] dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” They all but asked Barrett whether she is now or ever has been a member of the Catholic Church.

How soon before they ask her whether she takes her marching orders from the Pope? (You know, that child-abuse enabler in Rome.) The Democrats were known for their anti-Catholic sentiments during the Jim Crow era, and they seem to be sneaking up on their traditional anti-Semitism. How long before they start dissing black folks? It’s only a matter of time….

Read it.

Hey, if that’s what it takes to get the government out of the economy, I’m good with it.

Read it.

You might have thought that the ‘government shut down’ shut down the government, including the legislature. But you’d have been wrong.

Good thing we’ve got all those rich people in Congress who don’t have to depend on their actual salaries.

Read it.

A year after the passage of a sweeping law that capped deductions on state and local taxes — hitting homeowners hardest in places like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, where state income and property taxes are among the highest — brokers from low and no income-tax states like Florida are racing to get the word out about how rich the savings are in their markets, above all for top earners.

Guest laugh by David Middleton.

So… NASA and the EPA can maintain essential operations with only 5% of their workforce, evolutionary biologists are nonessential drains on the taxpayers, NOAA meteorologists can’t attend the American Meteorological Society convention on the taxpayers’ dime… Maybe I’m just a bit jaded, but how does the word “vital” fit in here? Can you think of a better example of a nonessential government employee than an evolutionary biologist?

The ugly underside of the rock is the assumption that if the government doesn’t fund science then no science will get done. Certainly that has become the expectation among scientists in these degenerate modern times.

Scott Adams lays it out.

Scott points out, correctly I think, that politicians are no longer ‘playing to the crowd’ but rather ‘playing to the press’.

Read it.

California, Land of Fruits and Nuts.

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The 28 nation bloc was upgraded from an international organisation to a member state in 2016, under former president Barack Obama.

…

The US president is a vocal supporter of Britain’s exit from the EU – he dubbed himself Mr Brexit in 2016 – and has regularly criticised the bloc for its approach to trade with America.

Heh.

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Boulder’s newly enacted “assault weapons” ban is meeting with stiff resistance from its “gun-toting hippies,” staunch liberals who also happen to be devoted firearms owners.

Only 342 “assault weapons,” or semiautomatic rifles, were certified by Boulder police before the Dec. 31 deadline, meaning there could be thousands of residents in the scenic university town of 107,000 in violation of the sweeping gun-control ordinance.

“I would say the majority of people I’ve talked to just aren’t complying because most people see this as a registry,” said Lesley Hollywood, executive director of the Colorado Second Amendment group Rally for Our Rights. “Boulder actually has a very strong firearms community.”

The ordinance, approved by the city council unanimously, banned the possession and sale of “assault weapons,” defined as semiautomatic rifles with a pistol grip, folding stock, or ability to accept a detachable magazine. Semiautomatic pistols and shotguns are also included.

Read it.

Snap quiz: Convicted felon — Democrat or Republican?

Since the House Democrats know that they can’t get any of this crazy shit through the Republican-c0ntrolled Senate, we can expect even more crazy shit — from impeaching Trump to Occasional-Cortex wet dreams — during the next two years, like kids pounding on the glass of the rattlesnake’s box.

EXAMPLE: Democratic Lawmaker Introduces Constitutional Amendment to Abolish Electoral College

EXAMPLE: Ocasio-Cortez Says 70% Ultra-Rich Tax Could Pay for Climate Plan

Read it.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

Plenty of room down here in low-tax Texas, y’all….

Rep. Hank Johnson Says He Didn’t Compare Trump To Hitler But Does It Again

Kennedy, Watters Take Aim At Marie Harf For Equating A Rep. Comparing Trump To Hitler To Birtherism

‘Impeach The Motherf****r’: Democratic Lawmaker Goes After Trump On Her First Day In Office  Democrats: Party of Fear, Party of Hate, Party of Death.

US Congresswoman declares war on Trump: ‘We’re going to impeach the motherf***er’ Talk is cheap.

Tlaib talks trash  You can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the girl.

California Democrat Eric Swalwell Predicts There Will Be A Race For Who Can Kick Out Trump First

Rick Wilson Refers To Trump Supporters As His ‘Rube, 10-Tooth Base’ For Believing Border Wall Promise  Tough talk from a bald shrimp with a chin-beard. I suspect any random Trump supporter could break him in half.

Democrats Refused To Listen To Border Security Briefing, So Trump Sent It To All Members Of Congress  They keep acting as if Trump were the Same Old Republican President they’re used to working over.

The Favourite: Olivia Colman appears to compare Trump to Queen Anne in award acceptance speech

Read it.

The New York Times reports that when Nancy Pelosi was asked whether she considers herself President Trump’s equal, she replied, “The Constitution does.” It’s difficult to say which is more staggering, the ignorance or the arrogance of that boast.

But not unexpected.

Read it.

Their idea is a border less secure than Obama’s house.