Wednesday round-up

Kevin Williamson, in a NRO piece about the Most Equal Comrade's latest imposition of fuel-efficiency standards on the trucking industry, points up the suffocating paternalism at the core of the Freedom-Hater mindset, as well as the economic ignorance upon which it is proudly predicated:

President Obama: I demand you save yourselves billions of dollars! 

Truckers: Oh, we’d never thought of that! Thanks, and blessings be upon you!

The answer, of course, is that improving fuel efficiency comes at a price. You don’t just throw away your old tractor-trailers and buy new ones: The current, slightly less-fuel-efficient models cost around $200,000 a copy and there are about 2 million of them in service, along with another 13.5 million commercial trucks in other configurations. Brady Dennis of the Washington Post reports that the new fuel-efficiency standards will add about $14,000 to the price of a big rig — or $28 billion, more than a third of the commercial-trucking industry’s annual revenue and many times more than its annual profit. 

Michelle Malkin at Townhall says that, in hiring thug / corruptocrat / champion of using climate hooey as a tool for tyranny Ken Salazar to manage her transition team, she is connecting with a kindred spirit.

And Squirrel-Hair has just made drooling sycophant and Breitbart poohbah Steven Bannon his campaign manager.

And what force stoked ongoing rioting in Milwaukee after the first night?

A tiny faction of old, radical communist revolutionaries is helping to lead and organize the violence which has engulfed Milwaukee in the wake of the police shooting death of a black man who, police say, raised a semiautomatic handgun at pursuing officers.

The fringe-left group is the Chicago chapter of the Revolutionary Communist Party — a Maoist outfit which advocates violent insurgency. Its membership is mostly white.

Revolutionary Communist Party members managed to turn a generally peaceful Sunday evening in Milwaukee into another night of violence by organizing a several-blocks-long march, Milwaukee police chief Ed Flynn told the Associated Press.

The radical communists “showed up, and actually they’re the ones who started to cause problems,” Flynn said at a Monday press conference.

And Russia - yeah, the Russia that is also using an Iranian airbase for staging sorties into Syria - smells Western weakness and is readying its next bite into Ukraine:

The Pentagon has identified eight staging areas in Russia where large numbers of military forces appear to be preparing for incursions into Ukraine, according to U.S. defense officials.

As many as 40,000 Russian troops, including tanks, armored vehicles, and air force units, are now arrayed along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.

Additionally, large numbers of Russian military forces will conduct exercises in the coming days that Pentagon officials say could be used as cover for an attack on Ukraine.

“Russian units will likely practice reinforcing the [Crimean] peninsula through such activities as amphibious landings and air defense exercises, and this may involve the change out of equipment and long convoys of military vehicles,” one defense official said.

The military exercises are an ominous sign. Similar large-scale Russian exercises were conducted near Ukraine a month before Moscow carried out the covert military operation to take over the strategic Black Sea peninsula in March 2014.

Navy Capt. Danny Hernandez, a spokesman for the U.S. European Command, told the Washington Free Beacon that the upcoming Russian exercises are being closely monitored.

“We are extremely concerned about the increased tensions near the administrative boundary between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine,” Hernandez said. “We urge both sides to avoid provocative steps or rhetoric that could escalate the situation.”

Russian forces do not appear to be building up inside the occupied Crimean Peninsula along the border with Ukraine, he said.

However, over the past several months large numbers of Russian troops and tanks have been moving into eight bases stretching from Yelnya, near Smolensk and northeast of Ukraine, southward through Rostov—a city located very close to eastern Ukraine.

And Squirrel-Hair wants closer relations with this bunch.