Legal US gun owners have 300 million guns, and over a trillion rounds of ammo. Seriously folks, if we were a problem, you'd know it. – Inconvenient fact.
George Rebane
News media reports on Americans’ attitudes about paying taxes includes this little bagatelle – only 39% disapprove of the poor not paying any federal taxes, which is represented as the lowest ranking tax concern in the land. Well, no s#!t Red Ryder! According to the government 47%+ pay no federal taxes at all, so it’s a no brainer they would not rank this as a high concern. That means that 73.6% (39/53), or almost 3 out of 4, of those who do pay federal taxes are concerned about not everyone having skin in that game. This little wrinkle seems to evade our nation’s crack journalists (including on the vaunted FN).
Here’s another gaffe on FN by James Rosen, one of their premier journalistic intellects. Rosen calmly reported yesterday that Donald Trump publicly solicited Russia to steal Hillary’s emails. The post-Rupert FN must have fired all their real editors to let this significant error get on the air. Most people who paid attention last year know that at the time of Trump’s tongue-in-cheek question, Hillary’s emails had already been stolen, presumably by Russia, and she claimed that the remainder had been erased. So what Trump and the rest of America wanted to see (and still do) was what was in Hillary’s already purloined emails, some of which would later be released by Wikileaks. It is double-dumb or pernicious to take this ‘request’ for revelation as the original solicitation for the theft of the emails. The lamestream, of course, has made hay on this fake news for over a year now.
OK, so everyone not limited to lamestream outlets knows that Team Hillary and the DNC solicited the generation of the infamous and fake Fusion “dossier” on Trump. Not surprisingly, Perez and Wassername, the current and past DNC chairs, know nothing (a la Sgt Schultz) of this admission and its first report in the Washington Post. But what’s more important is that the lamestream is treating this in a radically de minimis fashion (as of this morning CNN had devoted 20 seconds to the report), and where it is reported, it is as a side-mention of just some “opposition research” that Hillary and the Dems were doing on Donald. This means that most Americans today know nothing of the potentially treasonous collusion with a foreign government which Trump’s opposition instigated, launched, paid for, publicized, and used as fake ‘intelligence’ to launch the FBI and now Mueller investigations of Team Trump. And here the rest of us thought that opposition research meant digging out and not manufacturing the dirt on your opponent.
A bit more on Hillary includes her trip to South Korea during which publicly and repeatedly dunned President Trump. Back in the old days American politics stopped at the coastline, but that all changed with Obama and his pointedly political apology tour. So I don’t know what all this continuing crap is about accusing each other of collusion, since openly soliciting the partisan support of foreign governments seems to have been accepted today as just another tool in the politicians’ bag of tricks.
For those leftwing troglodytes who still insist that the lamestream provides ‘fair and balanced’ news, we offer the confessions of the former CEO of National Propaganda Radio as reported in the NY Post (here). The import of this is as further evidence for the inevitability of the Great Divide, for the Left continues to refuse the growing deluge of evidence extreme leftwing bias in the popular media which has been available for decades in America’s public forums. (H/T to reader for this link)
Finally, our favorite Union columnist and RR reader George Boardman believes “millennials have become punching bag for people who fear change”. In his 23oct17 column (here) Boardman writes a somewhat confused commentary first outlining the acknowledged and widely recognized intellectual shortcomings of Millennials, and then flips to criticizing conservatives for recognizing such shortcomings and attempting to preserve American culture from the rapid rate that it is being abandoned by Millennials, who are overwhelmingly graduates from anti-American courses of study profusely available in our unionized public schools. His attempt to redeem Millennials by citing the accomplishments of the few in the tail of the cohort’s distribution provides comic relief for the numerate reader for whom Mr Boardman’s offering is clearly not intended.
But it is apparent that our keen observer of the social scene does believe that people like me “fear change”. He deduces that from my frequent and factual criticism (search RR for ‘Millennials’) of America’s “dumbest generation”, in the process painting all conservatives as sharing that fear. But one of the most profound political lies of the 20th century, still taught today, is that conservatives promote stasis and progressives are the champions of, well, ‘progress’. The available record is replete with exactly the opposite, save for the pace at which the two sides want to abandon America’s nominal culture and constitutional government. And I am happy to claim that I personally have been on the forefront of benevolent change during all of my career and continue those efforts as witnessed by the reporting in these pages.
Lucky Strike Extra in the reader service department. A correspondent sent me this link that purports to be the “one-stop shop for practical resources for emerging technologies in government” that is offered by our General Services Administration.
[28oct17 update] A couple of little items for future forensic data archaeologists. In this early decade of the 21st century we are witnessing the spread of wholesale ignorance as never before seen since before the Renaissance, and most certainly before the Enlightenment. In days of yore, western civilization could count on succeeding generations becoming smarter and more informed as science flowered, technological wonders were adopted into the mainstream, and the earth was explored in the age of sail. In these pre-Singularity years this has come to a grinding halt. The dumbth of our Millennial and the post-Millennial generation (e.g. iGeners), as mourned in these pages for some years, has again outdone itself and now passeth all understanding. Daily Signal reports that University of Wisconsin-Madison Students Protest Abraham Lincoln Statue Because ‘He Owned Slaves’. There is nothing we can add to that.
The US economy again grew at an annualized 3%+ rate during 2017Q3. During the eight-year administration of President Obama, the apologetic socialist, our economy struggled to reach the 2% level under his regulatory reign, as he bypassed Congress with phone and pen. His best economic brains solemnly advised the country that from now on 1.5-2% growth will be the ‘new normal’; to expect more would be folly. Of course they were right, were the socialist tax and regulatory policies of the Democrats and their carefully nurtured Leviathan to continue. President Trump has breathed new life into our land with his upbeat outlook, regulatory reductions, restructured tax policy, and the continuing promise of repeal/replace of Obamacare and other onerous legislative muck. The progressives have noticed this and are scrambling to explain that all this good economic news is made possible only through the assiduous preparation and groundwork laid by Team Obama, which foresaw none of this, did all they could to thwart economic growth, and delivered the slowest and most Sisyphean recovery (if it could be called that) from a recession in US history.
It is turning out that damn near every senior Democrat has lied about when, how, and who commissioned and generated the fake ‘Trump dossier’. WSJ national correspondent Holman Jenkins Jr puts all the pieces together into the most plausible picture yet of how that dastardadly deed was done, and its effect on the election in his ‘The Trump Dossier Dam is Breaking’ which describes how “a U.S. political party applied to a hostile power for lurid stories about a domestic opponent.” Stock up on your favorite beverage and popcorn, and fasten your seatbelts; this roller coaster will put to shame the ones in the amusement park – fun times ahead.
