Matt Lewis: "Everybody’s Wrong: Donald Trump Won the Chuck-n-Nancy Meeting, and Here’s Why"

It has long been axiomatic that Republicans would always get blamed for a shutdown—regardless of the merits. This was partly a function of it being less plausible to believe that Democrats, seen as the party of big government, would want to shut down governmental functions. Trump is the first Republican president I’ve seen who defied this rule.

Here, we have a president displaying not only that he isn’t afraid of a shutdown battle with Democrats, but also that he welcomes it. “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it,” he said.

National Review editor Rich Lowry believes this was a tactical mistake for Trump. “The first rule of shutdown fights is never to say that you want a shutdown,” Lowry writes. The only problem here is that the old rules don’t apply to Trump.

Trump has been known to grandstand, only to back down later (just as he has been known to be conciliatory, only to backslide later). He can sometimes justify this as a negotiation tactic, and other times he simply pretends he never said it. It seems implausible that Trump would actually accede to being blamed for what Pelosi (who arguably started this whole thing by using the words) termed a “Trump shutdown.”

It’s impossible to know how this will play out, but I score the opening round in Trump’s favor.

Check out the sweet matching tattoos on these democratic socialists

The only killers with more blood on their hands than the Nazis are the Communists.

These hands never saw any labor ... but it doesn't take any physical labor to order the murder of millions of people.

Victor Davis Hanson: In Order to Justify His Deviation from the Law, Robert Mueller Has Also Embraced Unequal Justice

Mueller probably knew there was no "collusion" from early days, but, to justify his mandate and appease the leftwing media culture which is demanding he reverse the 2016 election, he has gone after a series of process crimes, crimes that did not precede the investigation, but occurred during the investigation -- claiming Flynn "lied" to investigators, for example. (Despite the fact that the investigators Flynn "lied" to say he didn't lie at all.)

Mueller has gone after peripheral figure racking up pleas for process crimes not associated even remotely with his actual ambit, which is Russian collusion.

Well then, Victor Davis Hanson asks -- if you've gone beyond your brief to prosecute peripheral process crimes, why are you ignoring a rather large number of crimes committed by Hillary's Minions to set this all up?

Read the whole thing.

Good Advice

Trump repels alien invasion

The Virginia Pilot reminds us that Trump was alone in standing against the thousands of Central American invaders who attempted to storm the American border illegally.

Via the scare headline:  U.S. to Begin Pulling Troops from Trump's Border Mission they remind us that Democrats, the Press and the Virginian Pilot (but I repeat myself) were all on the side of the would-be invaders.

Thanks to  President Trump,  the U.S. military and the border patrol, they did not succeed..

D'Souza addresses massive crowd at Marine Military Academy in Texas

Fearing False Accusations, Men Are Asking Women To Create 'Consent Videos' Before Sex. Feminists Are Not Happy.

A consent video is exactly what it sounds like: a woman telling a camera lens that she is fully onboard with having sex with so-and-so once the record button is turned off.

And they say romance is dead.

According to a recent article from the Evening Standard, consent videos are becoming a popular trend in the world of hook-ups. Writer Rachel King recalled a recent night she spent with a man she knew fairly well at his London flat. At around 3:30 a.m., while she "sat astride him," the man grabbed his phone and asked her to make a consent video:

“Could you really quickly just say that you want to have sex with me?” he said, holding the phone out, wide-eyed and earnest, his Voice Notes app open as if he was poised for some kind of chatty red-carpet interview.

“What?” I said, blinking.

“Could you just say that you consent to having sex with me?”

Of course not having casual sex with people you are not married to could also solve this problem.

Academic Stabbed to Death for ‘Insulting Mohammed’ During Lecture

The original reporting was in the Daily Mail (UK) because this is something the MSM typically covers up..

Deadly refutation of multiculturalists who claim all cultures are equal.

Is diversity really our strength?

An Irish lecturer was stabbed to death by a student outside the Paris university where he taught on Wednesday for allegedly insulting the prophet Mohammed by displaying a drawing of him during class.

John Dowling, 66, was speaking with a student, identified by authorities only as Ali R., following a lecture when the 37-year old student fatally stabbed him 13 times in the throat and chest.

French authorities have said there is no existing evidence that Ali, a native of Pakistan, was radicalized by a terrorist organization but rather that he was simply very “pious” and an “obsessive patriot.”

“We don’t have proof of radicalization, but rather a feeling that we’re dealing with someone who is very religious, very pious, very practicing.”

An Evening with Tucker Carlson: America's Elites Are on a Ship of Fools

Is This It?: A Trump-Hater’s Guide to Mueller Skepticism

Vanity Fair starting to worry that there's no Russian conspiracy.

T.A. Frank:

We see the familiar cycle of hype, and there’s no use fighting it, but, once heart rates have slowed, the same old question remains: so what? Some of the news, such as a Guardian story that Manafort met three times with Julian Assange, seems to be based on nothing at all. But even the solid news turns out to be generally non-earth-shattering. As the journalist Aaron Maté has been pointing out, we already knew the timeline of Cohen’s Moscow efforts, because BuzzFeed had already detailed them in May, painting a picture of a bumbling duo getting high on their own supply. (As for the latest revelations, did Sater and Cohen really think a president of Russia would move into a free $50 million penthouse provided by a U.S. presidential candidate? You have to wonder if they were hitting each other on the head with bricks.) Those who hope that Mueller reveals a shambolic operation with a lot of rascals engaged in sleazy and embarrassing behavior will be happy with the fruits of his labors. But those who hope for an unveiling of indictments linking Putin and Trump in a grand conspiracy have no more reason to celebrate than they did a week or a month ago.

Certainly, Trump’s ethical standards are low, but if sleaziness were a crime then many more people from our ruling class would be in jail. It is sleazy, but not criminal, to try to find out in advance what WikiLeaks has on Hillary Clinton. It is sleazy, but not criminal, to take a meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer promising a dossier of dirt on Clinton. (Just as, it should be mentioned, it is sleazy, but not criminal, to pay a guy to go to Russia to put together a dossier of dirt on Trump. This is one reason why the Clinton campaign lied about its connection to the Steele dossier, albeit without the disadvantage of being under oath.) It is sleazy, but not criminal, to pursue a business deal while you’re running for president. Mueller has nailed people for trying to prevaricate about their sleaze, so we already have a couple of guilty pleas over perjury, with more believed to be on the way. But the purpose of the investigation was to address suspicions of underlying conspiracy—that is, a plan by Trump staffers to get Russian help on a criminal effort. Despite countless man-hours of digging, this conspiracy theory, the one that’s been paying the bills at Maddow for a couple of years now, has come no closer to being borne out.

Not to pick too many nits, but there are quite a few questions about what's sleazy and what's not.  Is it really sleazy to take meeting with people who say they have "dirt" on your political opponent?   Do you think that anyone running for public office would say "go away, I don't want to know?"  Is it really sleazy to find out what WikiLeaks has on Hillary?  Is it sleazy to run your business while also running for office?  Feel free to elaborate.

Democrats really do love Republicans — when they’re dead

Michael Goodwin

He was a patriot, a hero, a ­genial gentleman and a great American. You can’t pick up a newspaper or go near a television without hearing leftists gush with praise for the late President George H.W. Bush. Who knew they felt this way?.....

The heydays of press hatred for Bush and McCain came during their presidential campaigns. Long before they were saluted for their late-in-life stances against Trump, Bush 41 and McCain were declared unfit to be president.

The New York Times, which last endorsed a Republican for president in 1956, backed the hapless Michael Dukakis over Bush in 1988, and Bush went on to win in a landslide, picking up more than 53 percent of the popular vote and 426 electoral votes.

Four years later, the paper supported Bill Clinton, ripping Bush’s economic management as “exasperating” and his positions on individual rights as “infuriating.” It accused him of stoking racial resentment, of going to “radical ­extremes” in supporting right-to-life measures, and said his “capacity to govern has collapsed.”

When Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991, he and Thomas got the same kind of character smearing that Trump and Brett Kavanaugh got this year.

Now, in his coffin, Bush is a model of American greatness.

After Trump is dead and Barron Trump is President, The Donald with be known as the Good Trump.

We Over-Honor Our Presidents

I feel the same way as I told my wife.

Today the stock market will be closed, the federal government shut down, the mail will not be delivered and classes will be suspended. Why? George H.W. Bush died.

Irrespective of whether he was a great man or a poor one, George H. W. Bush was a public employee. He was not a king. He was not a pope. He did not found or save or design the republic. To shut down our civil society for a day in order to mark his peaceful passing is to invert the appropriate relationship between the citizen and the state, and to take yet another step toward the fetishization of an executive branch whose role is supposed to be more bureaucratic than spiritual, but that has come of late to resemble Caesar more than to resemble Coolidge.

In life they derided him and called him an elitist, clueless about real people and a Nazi (a title they give all Republicans).  Now that he's dead his political enemies on the Left call him a good guy. 

But he was a one term president and was elected to be Ronald Reagan's third term.  He had the good fortune to preside over the global successes of the Sainted Reagan. 

He did OK and lived a good, long life. 

RIP.

Census confirms: 63 percent of ‘non-citizens’ on welfare, 4.6 million households

A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans, a Census Bureau finding that bolsters President Trump’s concern about immigrants costing the nation.

Are we in the Based era?

Could be because the current system is becoming ever more disfunctional:

Corporations can pillage our privacy and pocketbooks without it being anything beyond a two-day news cycle. In Japan, more men are choosing digital girlfriends than actual female mates. And they’re not mating, obviously. Europe is shushing its no-go zones, raping ghettos, and has criminalized speech. In America, the media, which has been wrong about everything, resists reform forcing them into a parallel reality not rooted in anything but the perception of popular opinion. Our oligarchs obsess over automation, AI, and algorithms. We’re told the future is full of sex robots, soy meals, fiat digital currency, and unavoidable spying.
The Based Era runs contrary to the current leg of the Information Age because it fulfills some of the first hopes of the Age of Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the original promise of the Information Age.

Based men and women are the pioneers, the rebellion, the dissenters, the crazy ones, the rabble rousers.

Toning down the rhetoric

Dust to dust

Why we hate the media - v.one billion

The ruling class has failed, and their failure is now becoming obvious to everyone

Eye opening moment: when I heard former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Janet Yellen proclaim that the U.S. economy's natural growth rate was 2% and that the ideal inflation rate was 2%. 

This was her gospel and these were the goals of Federal Reserve policy under her watch.

I was briefly dumbfounded that someone with a doctorate in economics and with the great power of the most central of central bankers should have such simplistic and dogmatic of ideas about two fundamental aspects of a great nation's economy.

Why should nations be content to grow their economies at 2%?  

And what's the benefit of 2% annual inflation when that degrades the purchasing power of currency for those on fixed incomes?  At 2% inflation a dollars today will lose 33% of it's buying power in 20 years. 

When did the loss of buying power for middle Americans become a good thing? 

Here's one perspective: those with wealth and power are just fine with a stagnant economy and the slow erosion of purchasing power when they have more than enough to live in great comfort.  Not so for  those who live closer to the economic edge.

Roger Salus at Seeking Alpha opines:

• Western countries are demarcating into two distinct economies, consisting of higher- and lower-tiered earners.
• With the shrinking of the once-strong middle class, the political intelligentsia loses credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of increasing numbers of voters.
• As unconventional parties and candidates gather popularity, our elites grow increasingly defensive, enraged, and unable to constructively deal with events occurring beyond their bubble.
• As the bubble surrounding mainstream politics deflates, economies will be affected, along with assets ranging from currencies to stock markets to precious metals. Nothing is exempt. Be warned.

As promised, dear readers, your humble author concludes his look at the "two economies" phenomenon by discussing the inevitable political consequences that are already unfolding. The growing class divide within developed economies has been happening since at least the 1960s, but it was the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 that shook the political status quo to its core. Whether that will be good or bad remains to be seen, and open to interpretation. What's not in doubt is that our political class is mortally wounded, and there will be consequences for asset values, whether stocks, precious metals, or even currencies.

Until now, the political elites of developed nations have been either ignorant of, or in outright denial about growing class divisions. In my previous three articles (see here, here, and here), I discussed how outdated economic indicators, like GDP, inflation, and unemployment have disguised the slow stratification of society into two classes due to disappearing job opportunities, punitive living costs, and decreasing social mobility.

Since 2008, the chasm between grass-roots voters and mainstream political elites has grown wider. The result has been the rise of unconventional political parties and candidates in the West and worldwide. This will inevitably affect our investments and asset values.

Brexit, for example, demonstrated how political earthquakes can affect national currencies and precious metals. The Trump White House attests to the fact that previously sacrosanct notions, like freer trade, are no longer sacrosanct. The latest Italian standoff proves that unconventional governments now have the popular backing to challenge the political establishment....

In a two economies world, the net result has been that for high earners wage-increases have kept up rather well with living standards and living costs, but bottom-tiered earners are being crushed. All the hedonic adjustments in the world can't disguise the fact that 50 years ago a sole bread-winner could support a family and still hope to retire. Today, for much of the population, two bread-winners are needed if families are to merely keep up with advancing technologies and living costs, and even then, ever fewer can realistically hope to retire.

Socialism leads to violence

Dan Bongino Presentation of “Spygate”…