Let's check in with Squirrel-Hair

How about his change of tune re: the overthrow of Gaddafi?

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump has come down hard on the Obama administration for intervening in Libya to help topple Muammar Qaddafi. Trump says, for example, that the world would be better off with Qaddafi in power. Indeed, he has argued that “frankly there is no Libya; it’s all broken up; they have no control; nobody knows what’s going on.”

Trump probably isn’t far wrong in his assessment. However, as Andrew Kaczynski at BuzzFeed documents, Trump strongly supported the U.S. intervention in Libya at the time it occurred. 

According to Kaczynski, in 2011, sounding every bit like Samantha Power in her pre-power days, Trump had this to say:

I can’t believe what our country is doing. Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around, we have soldiers all [around] the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: It’s a carnage.

Displaying both his ignorance about Libya (according to this analysis piece about 1,000 people, most of them combatants, had been killed in that country when we intervened) and his scant knowledge of history, Trump continued:

You talk about things that have happened in history; this could be one of the worst.  Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives. This is absolutely nuts. We don’t want to get involved and you’re gonna end up with something like you’ve never seen before. . . .

We should do on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.”

He wants your next iPhone to cost $1500:

in the span of a few sentences, he insisted that he’d impose a 35 percent tax on businesses producing goods overseas while claiming to support free trade. At the end of his rambling, decidedly non-MLK-themed speech, he said this:

“We’re going to get Apple to build their damn computers and things in this country instead of other countries.” 

Now, Apple already builds its Mac Pro in the US, at a factory in Austin, TX. As for its other computers and devices, much of the manufacturing and supplying happens in Asia. Foxconn, the sprawling factory complex in Shenzhen, China, is an iPhone production hotbed. Lots of other tech companies also outsource to Foxconn, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

An all-American Apple sure sounds nice—it would create jobs, it would help ensure that the factory workers have decent working conditions. It’s also an empty applause line. The US president does not have the power to ban a company from outsourcing, nor does the president have the power to completely overhaul the global economy.
Sure, Trump could advocate for legislation designed to prevent outsourcing, perhaps through penalizing taxes on offshore manufacturing. But he would have to champion laws that would fundamentally alter free trade to make it financially advantageous for Apple to upend its manufacturing and supply chain. 

Apple outsources because it maximizes profit, but that is not the only reason. Asia’s electronics supply chains are much larger than what the US has to offer. Not only would Trump have to come up with a way to penalize Apple for outsourcing so harshly that it’d make sense to change its manufacturing model—he’d also have to help US manufacturing catch up to China so that Apple could feasibly begin production here. 

 Anybody who identifies himself or herself as a conservative and has been carrying S-H's water is henceforth a liar when so identifying after this doubling-down on the support for ethanol subsidies:

Donald Trump said Tuesday that federal regulators should increase the amount of ethanol blended into the nation’s gasoline supply.

Speaking at an event hosted by the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, Trump, a real estate mogul and the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ought to follow the ethanol volumes Congress set in 2007.

“The EPA should ensure that biofuel ... blend levels match the statutory level set by Congress under the [renewable fuel standard],” Trump said.

The mandate is popular in Iowa, which hosts the nation's first caucuses.

In setting the ethanol blending mandate for 2016 last year, the EPA used a provision in the law that allows it to waive the specific volumes Congress set out, citing lower than expected gasoline demand, among other factors.

Trump spoke very briefly about the ethanol mandate at the beginning of his speech, reading from notes in a straightforward fashion, before continuing onto other subjects in the more lively manner he usually shows in stump speeches.

The event came hours after Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R) told voters in the first state to choose presidential candidates that they shouldn’t vote for Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas), one of Trump’s most potent challengers.

And I don't care how long ago it was when he said this. (It's from a 2007 book called Think Big and Kick Ass, which sports an appropriately vulgar cover.) The fact that he put it out for public consumption has to be a deal-breaker. We have principled conservative Pub prez candidates who would never consider doing this, much less bragging about it:

“Beautiful, famous, successful, married – I’ve had them all, secretly, the world’s biggest names, but unlike Geraldo I don’t talk about it.” 

He decides to use Ted's calling McConnell a liar as something worthy of attack.

And then there is Barracuda's endorsement, confirming that she falls into the kook camp rather than the worth-taking-seriously-camp on the right side of the spectrum.  She's also opted to become a crass opportunist:

Alas, there is no grand principle on display here. There is nothing but opportunism and ego. For a long time now, Sarah Palin has been apt to say anything and everything to keep the cameras buzzing around her hive. This rotten endorsement completes the decline. What, we might ask, has become of Palin’s beloved Tea Party? What, too, of her purported admiration for limited government, and of her ostensible hatred of heretics and fakers? The prospect of a mass movement that was earnestly committed to libertarianism was always a little too good to be true, but even I didn’t imagine it ending like this. All that talk of the Constitution and the Declaration; all that energy expended against the cronies and the rent-seekers; all those purifying voter drives — and for what? So that Sarah Palin could add a few zeroes to her bank balance and Donald Trump could go from the purchaser to the bought? Today was the day that Rick Santelli’s famous yelp finally melted into populism and avarice. Today, at about ten minutes past six, P. T. Barnum beat out Hayek for the soul of the insurgent Right. Today, the rebels became the charlatans they had set out to depose. What comes next will be anybody’s guess. 

Pray. Pray hard.