We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Federalism, as enshrined in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, is an essential bulwark against despotism. In America, we don’t usually talk about “collective rights” and for good reason. But it’s important to understand that we have them. Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, gays, or whites (sorry alt-right), etc. don’t have collective rights — but communities do.
Specifically, the states. Vermonters have the right to live the way they want to live, so long as they don’t violate the constitutional rights of the Americans who live there. So, no slavery or Jim Crow (again, sorry alt-right). But that still leaves an enormous amount of wiggle room for Vermont to do things the people running the federal government at any given time may or may not like. And that’s good, because states, and the communities that make them up, have a better idea of how they want to live — and what will work for them — than people in Washington do. This is why federalism, within constitutional restraints, is the greatest system ever conceived of for maximizing human happiness.
Most readers can probably surmise that I think liberals have good reason to worry that Donald Trump’s fidelity to the Constitution is at best rhetorical. And even here the commitment is flimsy. Trump prefers to think in Nietzschean terms — Strength! Winning! — than in Lockean terms. But it’s worth bearing in mind that if the Constitution is an afterthought for Trump, it is a dangerous relic for most Democratic politicians.
The specter of identity politics is haunting the left. It shows up at teary-eyed election parties in Berkeley, debates over craft beers in Williamsburg and the editorial pages of the big opinion shaper papers.
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Democrats have to choose between identity politics and the working class. Abandoning identity politics would be a painful process while abandoning the working class has proven to be painless and disastrous. But identity politics without mass migration and social transformation is unworkable. Immigration determines the future of the Democrats. This election is forcing Democrats to make a choice.
Via Insty, "... many religious Christians of a traditionalist bent believed that liberals not only reduce their deeply held beliefs to bigotry, but want to run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions."
With Obama in office all of the news was good… or at least spun to look as positive as possible. For the next four years at least you can expect to see headlines like the one linked above. Everything is terrible and there is nothing good upon the land as long as Trump is in charge.
Here's what I told my 15 year old daughter: "Hillary's loss does not mean that your hopes and aspirations can't be fulfilled. And the path that Hillary blazed is still the best path for achieving those hopes and aspirations. So go to college, find a man who is bright and engaging and ambitious. Do everything you can to help him reach those ambitions. Stick with that husband, no matter how badly he treats you, because it is through his successes (and the credit that you deserve for those successes) that you can achieve your own success. "
So what does a Master Persuader do when he needs to create a good first impression to last for years? He looks around for any opportunity that is visible, memorable, newsworthy, true to his brand, and easy to change.
Once again, we are seeing what is a core failing of technocracy. Public policy is about trade-offs. In a liberal democracy, the people, through their representatives, wrangle over these trade-offs and arrive at a compromise that satisfies most people well enough to keep the peace. Logic is not what drives these deliberations. Tradition, culture and vested interests play the leading roles. Smart people know how to create a better health system, for example, but getting everyone to go along with it is impossible.
... the media had zippo to do with uncovering many of the major scandals that hit the Obama White House. Were we naive enough to count only on the media to uncover scandal, we would not know about the IRS, the myriad of surveillance improprieties, the truth about Benghazi, Fast and Furious, or the Clinton Foundation. Moreover, instead of uncovering scandal, our media did everything to ensure these inconvenient truths couldn't cripple Obama.
. . . want to make America great again? Then let us be America. Preside over a government that stops telling us how to do it, that pretends its “progressive” pieties are “our values.” Preside over a government that does well the few things we need it to do and gets reacquainted with its limitations. Do that and there will be no need in 2020 to explain how you can eke an electoral victory out of a popular minority
It is difficult to hold an "adult conversation" with uninformed or uneducated people. When almost anything can be politicized and anybody can become suddenly emotional or indignant, it is often best just to shut up. McInnes humorously discusses Reality Bites.
At first, Trump was just a clown. I thought so. Then he morphed into a dangerous crazy person. Now that he has been elected (I still have trouble believing it, but he has a misunderestimated Talent Stack), we sense that a new fear is emerging - a fear that he may be successful in some ways. Simon notes that Trump's optimism about America is driving gloomy leftoids crazy.
Best reason for optimism? We have Melania. From Dylan's political I Shall Be Free:
Well, my telephone rang it would not stop It's President Kennedy callin' me up He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow" ? I said, "My friend, John, "Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren" Country'll grow.
Recently, returning from another World Youth Day in Kracow, Poland, the Pope made the fantastic and disturbing claim that “Catholic violence” is just as much a problem as “Islamic violence”—and this right after the brutal assassination of Father Jacques Hammel by Islamist terrorists in a church in northern France. The only example of “Catholic violence” that Pope Francis could come up with was that of a baptized young man who had killed his girlfriend for clearly non-religious reasons or motives.
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Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Pope has no understanding of Communist theory and practice, that he associates Communists exclusively with those activists and intellectuals imprisoned or killed by the military government during the “dirty war” in Argentina during the 1970’s. In a word, his vision is remarkably parochial and blind to the greatest evil of the twentieth century, a totalitarianism inspired by viciously anti-Christian ideology.
Almost every major initiative that Obama pushed has largely failed. Obamacare is a mess. He nearly doubled the national debt in eight years. Economic growth is at its slowest in decades. The reset with Russia, the Asian pivot, abruptly leaving Iraq, discounting the Islamic State, red lines in Syria, the Iran deal — all proved foreign-policy disasters.
Yet Obama has been quiet about one of the greatest economic revolutions in American history, one that has kept the U.S. economy afloat: a radical transformation from crippling energy dependency to veritable fossil-fuel independence. The United States has become the world’s greatest combined producer of coal, natural gas, and oil. It is poised to be an energy exporter to much of the world.
Stop using Republican interpretive frames like "entitlements" to describe the very things that benefit the hopeless people who just granted unfettered power to Paul Ryan and his fellow granny-starvers. If Republicans are intent on gutting Medicare, do not under any circumstances compromise to make such a fiasco slightly more palatable. This is the only way for the Democrats to recapture power at a scale significant enough to fundamentally transform the American political system. And when this moment finally presents itself, in 2022 or 2024 or 2028, Democrats must have an extraordinarily radical agenda ready to roll: A massive amnesty. Compulsory voting. The end of plurality-rule elections. A new Voting Rights Act. Sweeping criminal justice reform. Medicare for all. Higher education whose cost is truly nominal. A basic income for all Americans. A Marshall Plan for climate change.
I was working tonight, but I gather from Mrs. BD that his speech was wonderful and uplifting, humorous, half-scripted and half off the cuff, and neither Republican nor Democrat but just plain American. It takes a lot to impress Mrs. BD, especially if you are not a Conservative (which Trump is not).
It reminded some pundits of Teddy Roosevelt. Things are getting more and more interesting.
If you heard or watched that speech, what did you think?
In just 24 hrs, Trump scored twice. First, by trolling the media with one little tweet about flag-burning and, second, with the Carrier deal. That is The Trump that baffles pundits.
A master of reality TV. This admiration from an ardent Lefty Dem who is wrong about the federal tax inducements (maybe state deals, though):
He is a Thatcherite, a devout Catholic, and a political realist. The fact that he won the primaries by a two-third majority is but another confirmation of the gap between elitist narratives and popular feelings.
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Fillon is also an outsider because of his social conservatism and of his foreign policy realism. He is a practicing Catholic in a country where religion is mocked by the elites (Fillon is dubbed a “Catho,” the secularists’ catchword to deride church-goers). He is a faithful husband of 36 years and a father of five in a country where divorce, mistresses and affairs are de rigueur for politicians. And while he has vowed not to repeal abortion and gay marriage, he is an unabashed and proud conservative when it comes to family and to education.
They let the peasants vote. That's what happens sometimes. Peasants can be wise, politicians are mostly just clever.
Iran regime even more oppressive since nuclear deal, dissidents say
Image via 
Image from a Mitchell piece on 
Miami
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Pic borrowed from 
A beginner’s guide to
Boycott