Only the Most Equal Comrade could make trimming bureaucracy cost more

He has an odd notion of streamlining:

The Obama administration’s effort to eliminate red tape added $16 billion in regulatory costs, according to a new report by the American Action Forum obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

“President Obama signed executive orders (13,563 and 13,610) as part of an effort to ‘eliminate red tape.’ Federal agencies were told to ‘modify, streamline expand, or repeal’ existing regulations,” according to the report released by AAF, a center-right nonprofit led by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

The American Action Forum has found the reviews consist mostly of recycled regulations by federal agencies that have actually increased regulatory costs.

“The recent ‘retrospective reports’ from the administration reveal that executive agencies have added more than $16 billion in regulatory costs, up from $14.7 billion in the previous update, and 6.5 million paperwork hours,” the report said.

The agency reviews are a result of President Barack Obama’s initiative for a “government-wide review of rules on the books,” which the White House claims to have led to $28 billion in net five-year savings since 2011.

However, the American Action Forum has found retrospective reviews often add additional costs to the economy. A review in 2014 added $23 billion in costs and 8.9 million paperwork burden hours.

“Too often for this administration, regulations are regularly expanded and rarely repealed or modified,” the organization said.

The most recent review listed 409 rules, up from last year, with agencies averaging 20 regulations apiece. The rules increased net costs by over $16.4 billion, with only two agencies reducing costs. One silver lining of the report was the Department of Transportation, which eliminated $847 million in costs and more than 21 million hours of paperwork.

Regulations from the Department of Health and Human Services were far and away the most costly, including Obamacare regulations and a proposed rule entitled the “Protection of Human Subjects” that would cost $13.3 million while saving only $2.7 million.

“Once again, HHS is the runaway leader by imposing $16 billion in net costs and more than 25 million paperwork burden hours,” the report said. “The agency is, amazingly, responsible for 101 percent of the net cost increase, due to cost-cutting measures from other agencies.”

The report also found the number of hours needed to comply with federal regulation rose by 6.5 million.

The American Action Forum said the result of the regulatory reviews have not had the results the administration intended.

“Current Harvard law professor and former regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, wanted to instill a ‘consistent culture of retrospective review’ when he helped to advance the president’s executive orders,” the report said. “Looking at the number of new initiatives in the retrospective reviews reveals that many agencies simply ‘cut and paste’ from their previous work.”

The report found that the “vast majority” of agencies recycle regulations they have used for past reviews. Eighty-five percent of regulations listed in the most recent review had been used before.

The Department of Agriculture recycled 93 percent of its old rules; the Department of Energy 95 percent; Health and Human Services 95 percent; the Environmental Protection Agency 96 percent; and Veterans Affairs recycled a full 100 percent, and reviewed no new regulations.

Do our overlords really think that entrenched paper-pushers drawing a paycheck from money coerced at gunpoint from the post-American cattle-masses are really going to be motivated to trim or revamp anything?

Squirrel-Hair the statist

Charles Hurt, Conrad Black, Laura Ingraham, Wayne Allen Root, Ann Coulter, I defy you to defend this:

In a moment that seemed to stun even moderator Anderson Cooper, Donald Trump named federal involvement in education and health care as top functions of the federal government, along with national security, at the Milwaukee candidates forum in Milwaukee last night. Apparently unaware that conservatives believe that a federal role in education is unjustified, and that many, including Ted Cruz, want to abolish the Department of Education, and that federal involvement in health care is anathema to his party’s base, Trump spoke of both as among the top three priorities for the feds.

Putting on his surprised face, Cooper attempted to give Trump a chance to address his base. Shoshana Weissmann of the Weekly Standard describes the debacle:

Anderson Cooper tried to clarify. "So in terms of federal government role, you're saying security, but you also say health care and education should be provided by the federal government?"
Trump replied, "yeah, those are two of the things. Yeah, sure. there are obviously many things, housing, providing great neighborhoods—"
Anderson, confused by Trump's response, asked, "aren't you against the federal government's involvement in education? Don't you want it to devolve to states?"
"I want it to go to state. Absolutely," said Trump, entirely flip-flopping on what he said moments earlier.
Cooper replied, "that's not part of what the federal government's—"

Trump interjected, "the federal government, but the concept of the country is the concept that we have to have education within the country and have to get rid of common core and it should be brought to the state level."

Cooper added, "and federal health care run by the federal government?"

Trump said, "health care. We need health care for our people. We need a good—Obamacare is a disaster."

Cooper asked, "is that something the federal government should be doing?"

Trump affirmed. "The government can lead it but it should be privately done," which sounds more or less like Obamacare. "It should be privately done so that health care, in my opinion, we should probably have—we have to have private health care."

What a pathetic dumbass. Within the space of a few sentences, he says that health care is a primary function of the federal government and then says it's properly a private-sector  activity.

Bots, get a clue. This empty suit hasn't given a half-hour of thought to health-care policy in his 69 years. Let alone the proper role of government, including its limitations, as asserted by Hamilton, Jay and Madison.

He's no conservative. Hell, he's no refined intellect. He's - to use his own vernacular - a disaster.

Some may try to distinguish her from Bernie as the non-socialist Dem candidate, but . . .

 . . . it doesn't fly. She still wants to use government's monopoly on the legitimate use of force to corner private organizations into making unprofitable decisions. And should they balk, the penalty for doing so would get spent on all kinds of family-destroying "goodies".

Wednesday at a campaign rally in New York City, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton delivered a populist message to rallygoers in attendance.

Clinton threatened a “exit tax” on companies fleeing the United States for lower taxes and vowed to use those proceeds to reinvest in the communities left behind by those companies.

“Here’s how I see it,” she said. “We’ll make companies that ship jobs overseas give back the tax breaks they got here at home. And if they try to move their headquarters to a foreign country to skip out on that tax bills, we will slap a new exit tax on them. And then we’ll put that money to work in the communities and the people that were left behind. We can break down the barriers holding back the parents and families in this economy. Isn’t it time for quality affordable childcare, early childhood education, and paid family leave?"

Did they not offer any economics courses at Wellesley, Hillionaire?

Second thoughts among the bots?

Is Ann becoming Cold-Feet Coulter? Says, in the wake of the Heidi Cruz dustup, that being slavishly devoted to Squirrel-Hair is like continually bailing one's sixteen-year-old son out of the hoosegow.

And Newt Gingrich lets loose on the same subject, calling it "utterly stupid."

Now, this doesn't mean they've abandoned him.

They’re still onboard, they’re just alarmed that the captain won’t steer away from that iceberg that keeps getting closer. Trump’s fans within the commentariat have, I think, convinced themselves that his boorishness is strategic, something he can turn on and off at will to command the media. It’s served him well but now, facing a de facto head to head race with Cruz, he should be sealing the deal by shifting to a more low-key “presidential” approach. Reassure Republican undecideds in the remaining primaries that you’re up to the job. Impress delegates at the convention that you won’t be a loose cannon as nominee. Attract swing voters in the general election by demonstrating that the vulgar, street-fighting Trump of the primaries was a persona adopted for electoral advantage, one that will be discarded to defeat a new opponent in Hillary Clinton. I think it’s dawning on Newt (and Coulter in the other clip) that maybe the boorishness isn’t strategic. Maybe it’s who Trump is. Maybe he can’t resist attacking Heidi Cruz, no matter how obviously stupid that is, because he’s spent his life being rewarded for boorish aggressiveness that supposedly proves his alpha-male dominance. What you’re seeing, in other words, is Gingrich contemplating possibly for the first time that Trump’s campaign really might turn into a dumpster fire in November because he’s too indisciplined and too much of an egomaniac to fiddle with a dangerous approach that’s worked for him in other contexts. 

S-H's descent into this level of sleaze sure ought to give anyone pause, given his negatives with female voters.

This is one fissure I'd like to see widen. In fact, I'm praying for it.

Oh, and have you heard that S-H has dropped his pledge to support the Pub nominee, even if it's not him? Yes, I realize Ted Cruz wiggled through the same question in full politician mode. But in S-H's case, it was a key to his "legitimacy" as a Pub candidate. Now the cat is out of the bag. The GOP, like everything else in this world, gets dropped like a hot potato the instant it's no longer useful to him.

Monday morning roundup

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, a two-term Pub, caves to the goose-stepping jackboots of the Human Rights Campaign, several major corporations and the NFL and vetoes a religious-liberty bit that mirrors the national-level bill that Billy Jeff the Zipper signed into law in the 1990s, the gist of which is that the burden is on government to prove there's some compelling interest to make Christian business owners conduct business in violation of their faith. (No, such bills don't specifically mention Christians  - or homosexuals, for that matter - but does anyone doubt why such bills are necessary?)

San Francisco's mayor bans official travel for city employees to North Carolina over that state's legislature overturning a law that would have permitted Girls (who think they're boys) and boys (who think they're girls) from using each other's restrooms. Of course, the city by the bay has a history of using such bans to make statements. In 2010, the state was Arizona and the issue was immigration, and in 2014 the state was Indiana and the issue was a religious-freedom law.

Oh, sheesh, now there's a lawsuit about North Carolina's action, filed by a group of the terminally confused.

Speaking of California, the Land ofLa-La offers more proof that the minimum wage is bad and wrong:

deal that would raise California's minimum wage to $15 an hour was met with a mixture of joy and anxiety across the state Sunday.

Some workers and labor officials hailed it as a breakthrough in providing higher-wage jobs in fields where it's a struggle to make ends meet. But some business owners feared the shift would hurt their bottom lines -- and perhaps even put them out of business.

The debate is likely a preview for the weeks ahead as the minimum wage proposal works its way through Sacramento.

Selwyn Yosslowitz said that minimum wage hikes add increased pressure to restaurants, which already operate on very slim margins. With the minimum wage going up, Yosslowitz said he's going to have to rethink his menu and what dishes his restaurants serve.

"First, you have to raise prices, otherwise you'll be out of business," said Yosslowitz, president of the Marmalade Café, which operates seven Southland restaurants and an outlet at LAX. Restaurant owners also have to think about "re-engineering the menu" to require fewer kitchen workers.

"We will try to re-engineer the labor force," he said. "Maybe try to reduce the number of bus boys and ask servers to bus tables."

Death toll in the jihadist slaughter of Christians in that Lahore park is now up to at least 72.

When it comes to supposed anti-corruption icons to admire, Hillionaire share knows how to pick 'em:

The Brazilian president praised for “setting a global standard” on how to fight corruption by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton now has protestors calling for her impeachment thanks to her own alleged corruption.

The New York Times reported that this month’s protests calling for Dilma Rousseff’s ouster, including a 500,000-person gathering in São Paulo, were the largest since the protests that toppled Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1980s. Recent polling shows that 68 percent of Brazilians want the legislature to impeach Rousseff, who has made clear she will not step down and plans to fight the charges against her.

Clinton praised Rousseff in Brazil in 2012 at the first meeting of the Open Government Partnership, an international initiative co-chaired by Brazil and the United States aimed at fighting corruption.

“I want to commend and thank Brazil, in particular President Rousseff, for the leadership that they have given to this initiative,” said Clinton at the April 2012 meeting in Brasilia. “There is no better partner to have started this effort and to be leading it than Brazil, and in particular, President Rousseff. Her commitment to openness, transparency, her fight against corruption is setting a global standard.”

Despite this praise, Rousseff’s potential impeachment is based on charges that her administration illegally used money from state-run banks to cover up budget shortfalls amid the country’s economic problems

An audit court found that Rousseff borrowed up to $26 billion to pad government accounts in 2014, hiding economic problems that could have ended her reelection bid.

Brazil’s Superior Election Court is also looking into charges that Rousseff brought in money for her 2010 and 2014 elections through an illegal scheme involving state-owned oil giant Petrobras. Rousseff chaired the company’s board of directors from 2003 to 2010.

Rousseff claims that she knew nothing of the illegal Petrobras graft scheme, but other politicians implicated in the scheme say that’s not the case. 

One senator, a political ally of Rousseff who was arrested last year for trying to bribe Petrobras executives to keep quiet about his involvement, recently said that Rousseff “knew about everything” and “benefited from the scheme” she inherited from her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

And from the files of the-pattern-of-the-architect-of-post-America's-planned-decline-getting-his-outstretched-hand-gestures-to-evel-totalitarians-responded-to-with-contempt, check out this statement from the architect of the Cuban revolution:

President Barack Obama did not meet with Fidel Castro during his historic visit to Cuba last week, but apparently that does not mean that Castro did not have any thoughts about el presidente norteamericano in his country.

Castro ripped into the president and his words during the visit in El Granma, the official state newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, bringing up Obama's relative youth, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the role of both countries in ending the apartheid in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent in an article titled "El hermano Obama."

Native populations do not exist at all in the minds of Obama," Castro wrote. "Nor does he say that racial discrimination was swept away by the Revolution; that retirement and salary of all Cubans were enacted by this before Mr. Barack Obama was 10 years old."

Referring to the 1961 failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Castro wrote of the U.S.' "mercenary force with cannons and armored infantry, equipped with aircraft ... trained and accompanied by warships and aircraft carriers in the U.S. raiding our country. Nothing can justify this premeditated attack that cost our country hundreds of killed and wounded."

Castro referred also to Obama's invocation of both countries' role in the end of apartheid in South Africa, remarking upon his country's 1975 intervention in Angola backing the leftist People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola against other U.S.-backed revolutionary forces. Ridding apartheid South Africa of nuclear weapons "was not the goal of our solidarity," he wrote, "but [rather] to help the people of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and other fascist colonial rule of Portugal."

In referring to the origins of South Africa's nuclear weapons, Castro mentioned the "help that racist South Africa had received from [Ronald] Reagan and Israel."

"I do not know what Obama has to say on this story now," Castro wrote, adding, "although it is very doubtful that I knew absolutely nothing."

"My modest suggestion is to reflect and do not try now to develop theories about Cuban politics."

And weep not for the polar bears:

A new study by Canadian scientists once again debunks the notion polar bears are currently being harmed by global warming. Researchers with Canada’s Lakehead University found “no evidence” polar bears are currently threatened by warming.

“We see reason for concern, but find no reliable evidence to support the contention that polar bears are currently experiencing a climate crisis,” Canadian scientists wrote in their study, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

Scientists looked at 13 polar bear subpopulations and found “much of the scientific evidence indicating that some polar bear subpopulations are declining due to climate change-mediated sea ice reductions is likely flawed by poor mark–recapture sampling.” This means researchers aren’t able to put together accurate “demographic parameters.”

And that's the state of things on the third stone from the sun.

Death rattle of Western civilization

Britain obliterates its own foundations:

A British father has been banned from taking his son to a church after the boy’s Muslim mother won a controversial court order preventing the boy from attending.

The father – a non-practising Muslim who has forged close connections to his local Christian community and is divorced from the boy’s mother – has been warned that he could be denied access to 

the nine-year-old if he attempts to take him to church or to a leisure centre it runs.

Now the father, who was born in the UK to Pakistani parents, is challenging the ruling made by District Judge Williscroft at Derby County Court earlier this month.

They may not have to dirty-bomb us. A few key court rulings may do the trick.

The Most Equal Comrade's foreign policy is a pathetic joke - today's edition

A classic case of right hand and left hand not knowing what each other is doing:

Clashes between militias trained by the CIA and the Pentagon are intensifying as bitter fighting has broken out near Aleppo and the Turkish border.

Chicago Tribune:

The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.
In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.
"Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it," said Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq.

Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud.

The attacks come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time.
"It is an enormous challenge," said Rep.Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as "a fairly new phenomenon."
"It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield," he said.
The area in northern Syria around Aleppo, the country's second-largest city, features not only a war between the Assad government and its opponents, but also periodic battles against Islamic State militants, who control much of eastern Syria and also some territory to the northwest of the city, and long-standing tensions among the ethnic groups that inhabit the area, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.

If anything demonstrates the incompetence, futility, and danger of the president's policiy in Syria, it's this almost comic clash between fighters trained by two separate wings of our national security apparatus. 

Did it really have to be like this? In late 2011, the main organized force fighting President Assad was the Free Syrian Army. At that time,. FSA was made up of deserters from Assad's army and were almost entirely secular in nature. No Islamist militias. No Gulf states support for extremists. No ISIS. No Hezb'allah or the Russians assisting Assad.

It was a critical point. Should the US arm and train the Free Syrian Army? I acknowledge there were serious arguments on both sides of the question. The president feared that supporting the overthrow of Assad would commit the US to a course of action that may eventually have required ground troops. Even back then many people realized that if America were to commit ground troops to Syria, it would force Russia to intervene.

But Assad's army was falling apart. Thousands were deserting or refusing to fire on civilians. This little history lesson is necessary because we forget there were alternative paths that Hillary Clinton and President Obama didn't take. A strong show of support for the FSA supplied with heavy American arms might have brought the civil war to a relatively quick end without the fractured, quarrelling  opposition and extremist militias wreaking havoc on anyone who disagrees with them.

But Clinton-Obama played it safe and now we are presented with a Gordian Knot that appears hopelessly tangled. Each strand that is unravelled leads to another strand tightening. 

This is why Russia, Iran and Assad are the shapers of events in Syria and post-America is utterly irrelevant.

Today's deep thoughts from Squirrel-Hair

He's obviously done a lot of reflecting on this subject:

Donald Trump says Easter “represents family and get-together and — and something.”

Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” on Easter Sunday, Trump was asked what Easter means to him and if he had an Easter tradition. The real estate mogul replied, “Well, it really means something very special. I’m going to church in an hour from now and it’s going to be — it’s a beautiful church. I’m in Florida.”

“And it’s just a very special time for me. And it really represents family and get-together and — and something, you know, if you’re a — a Christian, it’s just a very important day,” Trump said.

Don't forget to show up next week, S-H. First Sunday of the month. That's when they take their little wine and little cracker and it makes them feel cleansed.

Jihad never sleeps - today's edition

Targeted specifically because they were Christians:

A breakaway Pakistani faction of the militant Taliban group has claimed responsibility for an Easter Sunday bombing in a park in the eastern city of Lahore that killed 65 people.

Ahsanullah Ahsan, spokesman for Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, told the Associated Press that a suicide bomber with the faction deliberately targeted the Christian community.

The explosion took place near the children's rides in Gulshan-e-Iqbal park — which was crowded with Christians celebrating Easter — local police chief Haider Ashraf said. He said the explosion appeared to have been a suicide bombing, but investigations were ongoing.

The explosion killed 65 people and wounded over 300, said Deeba Shahnaz, a spokesman for Lahore rescue administration. 

They will not stop until the world is rid of infidels.

 

Another factor in the possible ways things could go for post-America

The post below examines the slowdown in innovation and economic growth in the nation since 1970, and the probability that the future will not see the kind of dramatic changes in the way we live that the 1871 - 1970 period did.

But lest we think that it will just be doldrums and distractions, consider the plans post-America's enemies have for us.

North Korea is ramping up the bellicosity:

North Korea released a propaganda video on Saturday that depicts a nuclear strike on Washington, along with a warning to “American imperialists” not to provoke the North.
The four-minute video clip, titled “Last Chance,” uses computer animation to show what looks like an intercontinental ballistic missile flying through the earth’s atmosphere before slamming into Washington, near what appears to be the Lincoln Memorial. A nuclear explosion follows.
“If the American imperialists provoke us a bit, we will not hesitate to slap them with a pre-emptive nuclear strike,” read the Korean subtitles in the video, which was uploaded to the YouTube channel of D.P.R.K. Today, a North Korean website. “The United States must choose! It’s up to you whether the nation called the United States exists on this planet or not.”

And ISIS says we ain't seen nothin' yet:

The deadly terrorist attacks in Brussels last week and in Paris last November are dress rehearsals for a coming “big” attack inside the United States, a leading Islamic State-allied militant claimed in an exclusive interview.

Abu al-Ayna al-Ansari, a Salafist movement senior official in the Gaza Strip, made the claim in a pre-recorded, hour-long interview to air in full on Sunday on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” the popular weekend talk radio program broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM in Philadelphia.  Klein doubles as Breitbart’ssenior investigative reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief.

Ansari is a well-known Gazan Salafist jihadist allied with Islamic State ideology.  During the interview with Klein, Ansari seemed to be speaking as an actual IS member, repeatedly using the pronoun “we” when referring to IS and even seemingly making declarations on behalf of IS.

IS has been reluctant to officially declare its presence in Gaza for fear of a Hamas clampdown, but the group is known to be active in the coastal enclave and Ansari is a suspected IS leader.  IS-aligned militants have taken responsibility for recent rocket fire from Gaza aimed at Israel.

Klein asked Ansari whether IS maintains cells inside the U.S. and if the terrorist group is “planning anything in America.”

Ansari responded:

Aaron, the battle with America is a very long one, a very tough one, a very hard one. America has a black record with the mujahedeen, and this black record will not be purified but with blood, and lots of blood. Only blood will cleanse what America did to the mujahedeen. And I can confirm that our leadership made it very clear that what happened in Paris, what happened in Brussels was only a small rehearsal before the big thing that will happen in America.

This is the commitment; this is the engagement of our leadership to the mujahedeen. I cannot give details and the truth is that I don’t know the small details – how many agents we have and where we have them. This depends on our leaders, the Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the general military commander, Abu Omar al-Shishani. They will decide when and where to strike in the United States.

But I can tell you that when we are in touch with our different components, with the leaders of the Islamic State.  They confirm, they make it very sure and very clear that it is only a question of time when there will be a strike in America.  And as I said before, what you saw in Paris, what you saw in Brussels will be only a small rehearsal in comparison with what will happen in the United States.

Could be that all this will blow over and we can have a summer full of waves and tangos.

Then again . . .

Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone

A book that came out in January, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon, the Stanley G. Harris Professor of the the Social Sciencesat Northwestern University, has been garnering kudos across a wide ideological spectrum, as well as engendering a conversation that is more significant than most we're having these days.

George Will's NRO piece about it is a worthy contribution to that. He begins by providing a glimpse of the book's gist:

Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth argues that an unprecedented and unrepeatable “special century” of life-changing inventions has produced unrealistic expectations, so the future will disappoint: “The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique. . . . No other era in human history, either before or since, combined so many elements in which the standard of living increased as quickly and in which the human condition was transformed so completely.”

In many ways, the world of 1870 was more medieval than modern. Three necessities — food, clothing, shelter — absorbed almost all consumer spending. No household was wired for electricity. Flickering light came from candles and whale oil, manufacturing power from steam engines, water wheels, and horses. Urban horses, alive and dead, complicated urban sanitation. Window screens were rare, so insects commuted to and fro between animal and human waste outdoors and the dinner table. A typical North Carolina housewife in the 1880s carried water into her home eight to ten times daily, walking 148 miles a year to tote 36 tons of it. Few children were in school after age twelve. 

Then along came Edison's light bulb, Karl Benz's internal combustion engine, the Wright brothers' airplane, radio, Henry Ford's assembly line, air conditioning,  penicillin, heart transplants, moon landings and the like.

And then the pace of innovation, as well as economic growth slowed.

Today the inflation-adjusted median wage of American males is lower than in 1969, and median household income is lower than when this century began. If the growth rate since 1970 had matched that of 1920–1970, instead of being one-third of it, per capita GDP in 2014 would have been $97,300 instead of $50,600.

Gordon's view, shared by Will, is that neither central planning nor labor-saving gizmos will usher in another boom era:

Gordon doubts the “techno-optimists” who think exotic developments — robots, artificial intelligence, etc. — can match what such by-now-banal developments as electricity and the internal-combustion engine accomplished. There is, however, no reason to expect that medical advances have been exhausted. And there are many reasons to believe that the rapid expansion of regulatory, redistributive government, which can be reformed, has contributed to — it certainly has coincided with — the onset of (relative) economic anemia.

he “fatal conceit” (Friedrich Hayek’s term) is the optimistic delusion that planners can manage economic growth by substituting their expertise for the information generated by the billions of daily interactions of a complex market society. Gordon’s stimulating book expresses a pessimist’s fatal conceit, the belief that we know the future will be less creative than the “special century.” 

Mark Steyn made much the same point in America Alone, arguing that the past several decades have been devoid of the kinds of big inventions that so dramatically changed life for the previous two or three generations. And way back in 1941, James Burnham, in The Managerial Revolution, accurately foresaw the rise of an administrative elite that would occupy not only an increasingly bloated government but many if not most of the world's largest, bureaucratic-to-the-point-of-being-unwieldy corporations and financial institutions.

Of course, some as-yet-unrecognized mind could prove all these folks wrong. How likely is that, though, in an age in which the plodding yet comfortable pace of life has infantilized everyone from university students to presidential candidates?

The Most Equal Comrade's worldview, unfiltered

Here's what the totalitarian son of a bitch told a group of Argentine students:

“So often in the past there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical, and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory. You should just decide what works.”

Of course, that's just one piece of a Latin American junket that included doing The Wave with Raul Castro at a Cuban exhibition baseball game,  the photo op in front of the Interior Ministry building (the Cuban government department that harasses and arrests dissidents) sporting a giant Che Guevara mural, and the tango video. All while a multiple-site, well-coordinated ISIS attack rocked Brussels and a separate such attack was thwarted in Paris.

What a steaming chunk of dog vomit.

Squirrel-Hair's kids: he's by no means the main factor in how they turned out

How is it that Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka seem to have grown up to be reasonably together, sharp, successful people?

There's a lengthy, in-depth article in New York magazine about that very subject that I recommend. Executive summary: nannies and grandparents. S-H was as absent as you'd presumed.

H/T: Neo-neocon

The essence of what the Squirrel-Hair-bots have to answer for

This:

 . . . at this momentous crossroads for our civilization, we choose as our standard-bearer…Donald Trump?

I shouldn't say "we," because many of us do not.  But for those who do, allow me to caution that you are providing irrefutable justification for those on the left who have always suggested we are phonies when it comes to being champions of family values.

Why?  Here's Trump in his 1997 book, The Art of the Deal:

Often, I will tell friends whose wives are constantly nagging them about this or that that they're better off leaving and cutting their losses.  I'm not a great believer in always trying to work things out, because it just doesn't happen that way.  For a man to be successful he needs support at home, just like my father had from my mother, not someone who is always griping and b*******.  When a man has to endure a woman who is not supportive and complains constantly about his not being home enough or not being attentive enough, he will not be very successful unless he is able to cut the cord.

You simply lack all credibility if you claim to be "pro-family" while actively and vocally supporting a man who writes things like that.  It's clear that not only is Trump advocating the destruction of family, he is staggeringly clueless about its purpose and design as a godly institution.  The concept of loving your wife as Christ loved the church, which involves patience, forgiveness, perseverance, and above all self-sacrifice, is about as far removed from what Trump is espousing as you can imagine.

Again, I'm not talking about a guy who knows the truth about marriage and family but has failed or is failing to perfectly apply that truth.  I'm not talking a man who made or makes mistakes. 

I'm talking about a man who doesn't think such failings are failings.  I'm talking about a man who is promoting those mistakes as necessary for "success."  Not even Hillary Clinton is that clueless.

Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, all you comment-thread Kool-Aid guzzlers, I hereby declare that you are the vilest kind of moral cowards unless you can respond to this in some kind of credible way.

Post-America's partner in patty-cake - today's edition

This is the regime we thought it was so noble and visionary to sign an "agreement" about its nuclear ambitions with:

Seven hackers tied to the Iranian government were charged Thursday in a series of punishing cyberattacks on a small dam outside New York City and on dozens of banks -- intrusions that reached into American infrastructure and disrupted the financial system, federal law enforcement officials said.

The hackers were charged in indictments unsealed and announced at a Justice Department news conference in Washington.

All seven worked for Iranian computer companies that did work on behalf of the Iranian government, the U.S. said.

The attacks on the U.S. financial sector from 2011 to 2013 disabled bank websites and caused tens of millions of dollars in losses, the charges say.

One of the seven is accused of gaining access to the control system of the Bowman Avenue Dam, a small flood-control structure in Rye Brook, about 20 miles north of New York City.

Though the individuals are not in American custody, officials said the goal is to put cybercriminals on notice that they cannot act with impunity.

"The message of this case is that we will work together to shrink the world and impose costs on these people, so that no matter where they are, we will reach them," FBI Director James Comey said.

Fox News first reported the Iranian connection on March 10. The State Department declined to comment on the incident that day, instead deferring to the Justice Department. 

Let's see; three sanctions-violating missile tests since October, the arrest of a crew of US Navy boat sailors, the erecting of a stature of their arrest as a "tourist attraction," the Revolutionary Guard head saying that post-America remains Iran's number-one enemy, and now this.

Anybody sense a pattern?

Postcards from post-America

As you know, LITD is strongly anti-Squirrel-Hair, but this is pathetic. Students at Emory University discovered the phrase "Trump 2016" scrawled in chalk in various places around campus, and took their traumatization to the highest level of the school's administrative bureaucracy:

The school’s president, James W. Wagner, was “called into the board room by students and listened at the head of the table while they described how the appearance of the chalkings made them feel,” the Emory Wheel reports. (In case you’re wondering, those feelings included “frustration,” “fear,” trauma, and copious tears.) 

“What do we have to do for you to listen to us?” the students asked Wagner, to which he responded, to his credit, “Good gracious! How on earth are you going to survive in the real world, you goofy participation-trophy loons?” 

Just kidding! Here is how the university president actually responded: “What actions should I take?” Wagner later followed up with a sympathetic campus-wide email, paired with a promise to review footage from security cameras in an attempt to find and punish the pro-Trump chalkers. Emory’s student government, meanwhile, has offered emergency counseling for traumatized students.

As we know, the pop-culture machinery of post-America would have us believe that Austin's annual SXSW conference / festival is the last word in hip, but this year, gun-related incidents involving hip-hop crowds are proving a real bring-down.

If you like your sociocultural observations unvarnished, this tidbit from the comment thread under the linked article may be your cup of tea:

It is always amusing when the smug leftist pukes get to meet the real deal people who actually live the culture they created. It is a hard world, and watching these restive animals slap around sissy leftists for fun gives me a type of prurient enjoyment I know must be sin. 

Old hands from the foreign-policy field are not too impressed with the team Squirrel-Hair has assembled to advise him in that area:

Donald Trump’s decision to release the names of five foreign-policy advisers on Monday may have been meant to dispel mounting anxiety over the GOP front-runner’s unfathomable worldview. If that was his intent, the move failed miserably. Far from assuaged, many in Washington’s foreign-policy crowd are now more apprehensive than ever about the people who have Trump’s ear. Most had never heard of any of the advisers, and what they have heard hasn’t exactly inspired confidence. Nearly all say that Trump’s move to surround himself with neophytes and fringe players suggests he doesn’t grasp how Washington’s network of decision-makers collaborate on important global decisions. Should he become president, most believe that lack of understanding would bode ill for America’s geopolitical future.  

And when you've lost the Morning Joe crowd . . . 

The panel on MSNBC’s Morning Joe hit President Obama hard on Thursday for his response to the terrorist bombings in Brussels, Belgium.

Obama, who was in Cuba at the time of the attack, devoted little time to talking about the attack when he spoke to reporters. After Obama left Cuba, he traveled to Argentina where he was seen doing the tango at a State Dinner.

“I was critical yesterday, I think of the optics of the baseball game. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have gone, I feel like it should have been handled differently, everything about it,” host Mika Brzezinski said.

“The advance person who let him do the tango, that person ought to be looking for work on somebody’s campaign very, very far away. That was a tremendous mistake,” said Richard Haas, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Guest co-host Nicolle Wallace was less kind to Obama.

“I think Michael Hayden offered the best explanation for it. These were not advance staff gaffes, I mean it’s so easy to blame the staff, that’s not who this was. This was Obama’s policy choice. His policy choice was to proceed with everything on his schedule and not to react to the threat of terrorism, and that is his prerogative,” Wallace said.

“It puts him vastly out of step with the entire American public, not just Republicans. You heard Democrats yesterday, increasingly uncomfortable with the choices he makes at a moment of crisis.”

And that's how it is on the land mass between Mexico and Canada.

How dire is the West's predicament?

This dire:

ISIS has trained at least 400 of its fighters to attack Europe in a series of waves, Associated Press has found. The attacks would be similar to those in Paris and Belgium, and timed to cause the most possible destruction and chaos across the continent.

The ranks are made up of terrorists from a range of origins who undergo training in Syria, Iraq, Libya and the former Soviet Union. After completing their training, they will work semi-autonomously as they infiltrate Europe and prepare their attacks.

Many of these would come from the 5,000 Europeans who have already traveled to Syria in order to join jihadist groups.

The project has already shown results; the mastermind behind November's attack in Paris reportedly entered Europe in the company of one such cell. His companions then split up and went "more or less everywhere."

European authorities are now focused on finding Najim al-Ashrawi, who was seen leaving the Brussels airport only minutes before the suicide vests he had prepared went off.

"Not only did he drop out of sight, but he did so to organize another attack, with accomplices everywhere. With suicide belts. Two attacks organized just like in Paris. And his arrest, since they knew he was going to talk, it was a response: So what if he was arrested? 'We'll show you that it doesn't change a thing,'" says French Senator Nathalie Goulet, who co-heads a commission to tracking terror networks.

A security official, who asked to remain anonymous, explained why the danger is far worse today than it was in the past.

"The difference is that in 2014, some of these IS fighters were only being given a couple weeks of training," he said, using another acronym for ISIS. "Now the strategy has changed. Special units have been set up. The training is longer. And the objective appears to no longer be killing as many people as possible but rather to have as many terror operations as possible, so the enemy is forced to spend more money or more in manpower. It's more about the rhythm of terror operations now."

Is this going to be the new normal? That is, until they blow us to smithereens?

If not, what do we do to see that it isn't?

Squirrel-Hair once again shows how unfit he is to be president

Michael Tanner has a piece at NRO today that summarizes pretty well the litany of daunting - make that hair-raising -  challenges facing the person who takes the oath of office as president next January: the return of rising deficits, the "A"CA's slow-drip failure, slow economic growth and too few jobs, an increasingly dangerous world stage, the dilemma of how to protect American freedom while gathering the intelligence we need to stay on top of the dangers, and a fractured post-American populace.

It's his last couple of paragraphs, though, that one ought to keep in mind as one encounters the daily twists and turns of the campaign trail from here to November:

Dealing with these challenges would be difficult for any president. And the candidates we currently are watching offer little reason for confidence that whoever is elected this November will be up to the task. But, if the new president isn’t, this country will be left weaker, poorer, and more divided than we already are. Yes, things could actually get worse.  

Every four years, someone tells us that “This might be the most important election of our lifetime.” This time it might be true. When we step into that voting booth, whether for the remaining primaries or in November, we should be asking whether the candidate we are intending to vote for is really up to the challenge. 

For instance, consider Squirrel-Hair's reaction to a political ad created by operative Liz Mair, whose principles are sound but who prides herself on being a bit over the top.

Short version: Make America Awesome created an anti-Trump ad which featured a nude pic from a modeling gig (link here) done by Donald’s Trump current wife* – said pic was used in a Facebook ad targeting Mormons in Utah – and for some reason Donald Trump was inexplicably not pleased that such a vital ingredient of his own self-image was being used against him in such a mocking fashion. And what does Donald Trump do when that happens?  Why, he lashes out.  And he lashed out at Ted Cruz, apparently, with a threat of blackmail:

That’s a screenshot because, as Politico has noted, Trump’s already deleted the tweet once. [UPDATE: Trump reposted the Tweet] Cruz, by the way, is just a little bit contemptous towards Trump on the subject, because, again, Trump knows perfectly well that the ad didn’t come from Cruz.

Ted then tweeted: "Pic of your wife not from us. Donald, if you try to attack Heidi, you're more of a coward than I thought."

Quite so.

In the course of perusing the latest from the pundit-sphere this morning, I came across a piece at The Federalist, for the most part a great site, that was so stupid I'm not going to even link to it. It was by D.C. McAllister, and the gist of it was that it's time for the anti-Trump forces to realize that they are about to kill the Republican party, and that they need to unify behind Squirrel-Hair and focus on the real enemy, the Left.

She has the second part of that right, but she could not be more wrong about the first component of her formulation. We need to unify behind Ted Cruz, the only distinguished, principled grownup on either side in this entire race.

Donald Trump is unfit to be president. There is no saying that enough.

Just how shameful was the Most Equal Comrade's conduct in Cuba?

Ben Shapiro at Townhall lays it out in disgusting detail:

This week, President Obama visited Cuba. There, he was snubbed on the tarmac by tin-pot dictator Raul Castro; he took a staged photo before a massive building-sized mural of genocidal murderer Che Guevara; he smiled and bowed to Castro when they met. Castro treated Obama to a harangue about America's moral inferiority, blustering, "We defend human rights." He adds, "Actually, we find it inconceivable that a government does not defend and ensure the right to health care, any patient, social security, food provision and development, equal pay and the rights of children." Obama nodded along, then stated placidly, "I personally would not disagree with that." He then added, idiotically, "The goal of the human rights dialogue is not for the United States to dictate to Cuba how they should govern themselves, but to make sure that we are having a frank and candid conversation around this issue. And hopefully that we can learn from each other."

The United States does not need to learn from Cuba; Cuba needs to learn from the United States. But in his desire to glorify his own name, in his even deeper desire to level the global economic playing field, and in his greatest desire to tear out Americanism at the roots, Obama kowtows to some of the worst people on the planet.

And kowtow he does. After that awkward exchange, Raul Castro grabbed Obama's wrist; Obama went limp, and allowed Castro to raise his hanging hand high in the air. Then, hours later in a press briefing, the State Department did not directly say anything about the crackdown on hundreds of dissidents who were jailed just before his arrival. The Cubans arrested one of the dissidents' leaders scheduled to meet with Obama. Ben Rhodes, Obama's national security advisor, shrugged all of that off, stating that the United States understands that the Cuban government sees these political prisoners as criminals under Cuban law. Obama himself did not directly say whether he would give Castro a list of political prisoners for release.

In other words, Obama went to Cuba with the express purpose of snuffing out the last hope that Americans would be willing to stand with freedom. In the end, he won't succeed. America remains free, and Obama's self-congratulatory virtue signaling on behalf of a terroristic authoritarian nightmare doesn't change that. But Obama's actions in legitimizing one of the worst regimes in modern history will damn at least one more generation to their tender mercies.

Remember that the Most Equal Comrade sat in the pews of Trinity Church for twenty years, listening to the jeremiads of a dyed-in-the-wool liberation theologian. "Reverend" Wright had participated in junkets to Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua to express solidarity with those regimes.

The plain fact is that the MEC admires how effectively the regime in Cuba has implemented the Great Leveling Project.

He still has several months to implement it here in post-America.

The magnitude of the threat

Europe doesn't have the resources to deal with the present degree of jihad being waged against it.

Europe's counterterrorism defenses have cracked because there are simply too many threats to track. An unnamed Belgian counterterrorism official made a similar point during a recent interview with BuzzFeed News. Citing this official, BuzzFeed reported that "virtually every police detective and military intelligence officer in [Belgium] was focused on international jihadi investigations."

"We just don't have the people to watch anything else and, frankly, we don't have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links, as well as pursue the hundreds of open files and investigations we have," this same official told BuzzFeed.

As a result, we have reached a point where known terrorists are slipping through the West's defenses. And jihadist networks targeted by counterterrorism officials are still able to carry out attacks even though, in many cases, their members are being hunted.

The West is in mortal peril, people.