Obama, Who's Totally Not a Socialist and It's Racist to Suggest He Is: Hey, Let's Give Everyone a Income from the State for Doing Nothing At All

From Ace of Spades:

In his first major speech since leaving office, former President Barack Obama endorsed the idea of providing a universal basic income. 

Speaking at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in South Africa on Tuesday, Obama raised the notion of guaranteed income as a way to reduce what he called "yawning disparities" in wealth, education, and security across different socioeconomic groups. "It's not just money that a job provides," said Obama. 

"It provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose. So we're going to have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income, review of our workweek, how we retrain our young people, how we make everybody an entrepreneur at some level. But we're going have to worry about economics if we want to get democracy back on track." 

Um, a job provides dignity because the worker knows he's doing something productive, and it provides structure because employment usually requires a start time. Paying someone for nothing at all cannot provide dignity, as the recipient of the dole understands he's not doing anything productive, and cannot provide structure, except that twice a month, maybe, he feels he should probably go over to the check-cashing place to cash his welfare check. 

Oh, and by the way: Soak the rich. 

He additionally called on the rich to support higher taxation, saying that "you don't have to take a vow of poverty just to say 'let me help out a few of these folks.'

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.

Robin Trower

Bridge of Sighs

Stephen Cohen: Reaction To Trump's Russia Comments Like 'Mob Violence'

SEDITION!!!

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) Calls For A Military Coup To Unseat President Trump

Oil Prices Plunge as Saudi Arabia Prepares Record Output

Oil prices declined sharply Monday amid reports that Saudi Arabia is heeding to President Trump’s request to keep the energy market well supplied. OPEC’s kingpin is stepping up its contractual obligations to key Asian markets amid disruptions from Venezuela and Libya, among others.

Oil Prices Drop

Crude futures in New York and London were down more than 4% on Monday. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) contracts for August settlement bottomed at $67.92 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest in nearly a month. Prices would later consolidate at $68.11 a barrel for a decline of $2.90, or 4.1%.
ICE Brent futures for September delivery bottomed at $71.80 a barrel, the lowest in three months. It was last down $3.16, or 4.1%, at $72.17 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia Ramping Up Production

Bloomberg reported Monday that the Saudis are planning to offer extra crude volumes to some of their Asian buyers less than a month after Riyadh convinced fellow OPEC members to crank up daily production levels.
Saudi Arabian Oil Co. has offered extra cargoes of its Arab Extra Light crude to at least two buyers in Asia, Bloomberg said. If approved, the additional supplies will be shipped for August.
Last month, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed to raise production by 600,000 barrels per day, paving the way for an eventual 1 million-barrel-per-day increase for the cartel and its allies. The Saudis are planing to pump at record levels to offset supply disruptions elsewhere.
OPEC’s secondary sources indicate that the Saudis began ramping up production before the biannual meeting in Vienna on June 22, where cartel members agreed to ease supply restrictions. According to the data, Saudi Arabia boosted its daily output by 405,400 barrels in June compared with May.
Riyadh is also looking to pick up the slack from Iran, which faces renewed sanctions after U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal. The Saudis are said to be targeting crude output at 10.8 million barrels per day, the largest on record.

Trump Succeeding in Reining In Oil Prices

President Trump has criticized OPEC’s policies and has called on producers to raise their output in order to cap runaway price growth.
“Oil prices are too high, OPEC is at it again. Not good!” Trump tweeted in June. Earlier this month, he said: “The OPEC Monopoly must remember that gas prices are up & they are doing little to help. If anything, they are driving prices higher as the United States defends many of their members for very little $’s. This must be a two way street. REDUCE PRICING NOW!”
With political pressure to rein in oil prices intensifying ahead of the midterm elections, the Trump administration has announced it is considering tapping the nation’s emergency crude supply. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve currently houses a total inventory of 660 million crude barrels, though options under review suggest that figure is between 5 million barrels and 30 million barrels lower.

Lisa Page Tosses FBI Sweetheart Peter Strzok Under Bus – Tells Congress Their Text Messages “Mean Exactly What They Say”

On Monday former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who was having an extramarital affair with fellow FBI Agent Peter Strzok during the 2016 presidential campaign, testified before Congress behind closed doors.
This follows Strzok’s horrendous testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees on Thursday.
According to at least one GOP lawmaker Lisa Page tossed her former lover under the bus during her testimony on Monday.Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) told FOX and Friends on Tuesday that Lisa Page admitted her text messages with Peter Strzok meant “exactly what they say.”

Judge Jeanine Pirro EXPOSES Deep State, ANTIFA, And Anti-Women Sentiment In Democrat Party

As a box of rocks...

 

In case you have never seen one,

this is what a deer in headlights looks like

 

More Ocasio-Cortez: Low unemployment rate is because more people have two jobs, you know

Ed Morrissey

Jazz earlier described Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a gift to the GOP, but perhaps more accurately, she’s a gift that keeps on giving. So too for that matter is her appearance with Margaret Hoover on PBS’ Firing Line this weekend. Not only did she fumble an answer on the “Palestinian occupation,” Ocasio-Cortez managed to err completely on a basic economic question — despite her supposed expertise in the subject.

As Geico once said, that’s not how this works — that’s not how any of this works. The unemployment rate is actually a fairly simple calculation, based on the Household Survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS calls tens of thousands of respondents a month and extrapolates the number of people who have no job at all and who still are looking for jobs across the entire population as the Department of Labor has always defined the measure, emphasis mine:

The nation’s unemployment rate is widely recognized as a key indicator of labor market performance. This is in large part because of the objective manner in which the concept of unemployment is defined. To be classified as unemployed, a person must be without work, be available for work, and have actively searched for work.

The BLS then divides that extrapolated figure by the extrapolated number of people in the entire workforce. That’s how we get the U-3 standard unemployment rate each month; we divide the number of working-force-active people with no jobs by the total workforce. People who have two jobs, three jobs, or eighteen jobs are not counted within that group. If they have multiple jobs, they are counted among the employed — a fairly obvious fact that somehow Ocasio-Cortez missed on her way to her degree in economics. Boston University might want to recheck her grades.
This is no small matter, not for an economist and certainly not for a candidate for Congress. Unemployment figures tell a specific, if sometimes unclear, story about the national economy and the need for wise policy. Grasping the mechanics of those statistics is a baseline requirement for crafting such policies. Not only did Ocasio-Cortez not learn it in school, she has apparently had no desire to teach herself about it before preaching her interpretation publicly to the media. It’s a strange combination of arrogance and ignorance that’s fast becoming the Ocasio-Cortez trademark.
That arrogance may be why even her fellow Democrats are getting tired of her schtick:

“She’s carrying on and she ain’t gonna make friends that way,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.). “Joe conceded, wished her well, said he would support her … so she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about.”
“She’s not asking my advice,” he added, “[but] I would do it differently, rather than make enemies of people.” 
Asked if Ocasio-Cortez is, indeed, making enemies of fellow Democrats, Pascrell didn’t hesitate. 
“Yes,” he said. “No doubt about it.”
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) offered a similar message, saying success in the 435-member House comes slowly — and hinges largely on the ability of lawmakers to forge constructive relationships with other members. Alienating more senior lawmakers within your own party, he warned, will only stifle the ability of Ocasio-Cortez to get anything done — even despite her newfound celebrity.
“Meteors fizz out,” Hastings said. “What she will learn in this institution is that it’s glacial to begin with, and therefore no matter how far you rise, that’s just how far you will ultimately get your comeuppance.” 
He added: “You come up here and you’re going to be buddy-buddy with all the folks or you’re going to make them do certain things? Ain’t happening, OK?”

Ocasio-Cortez would be better served by remembering the old axiom: It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Addendum: It’s worth noting, contra Ocasio-Cortez, that job openings have been at or near all-time highs this entire year. In another mark of a strengthening job market, voluntary departures hit a 17-year high in June, showing that worker confidence in mobility is peaking again. There are reasons to suspect that the U-3 and U-6 might still have some discouraged-worker overhangs, but the trend has been positive for some time and unemployment is actually dropping — despite some people having more than one job, not because of it.

Deep State is in a Panic Fearing Putin Shared with Trump Devastating Information Not Yet Reported Deep State is in a Panic Fearing Putin Shared with Trump Devastating Information Not Yet Reported

Deep State is in a Panic Fearing Putin Shared with Trump Devastating Information Not Yet Reported

Hungary’s Baby Boom

From The Vlad Tepes Blog:

This is VERY important. Leftists have tried to tell us that we stopped having kids as a result of affluence, and that we must replace ourselves with third world muslims. But that would make humans unique amongst species as every other species reproduces based on resources available to them. Clearly it has to do with the degradation the left has brought to Western people’s self image.

I remember back when I was a very young blogger, I was invited by Pamela Geller to participate in a group interview of Mark Steyn to herald the release of his book, America Alone.

I posed a question to him about whether or not the demographics stats laid out in his book were indeed inevitable, or whether, perhaps, there was an opportunity for the West to avoid such destruction through a return of pride in our culture. I cited a baby boomlet which happened in America in the wake of 9/11.

To my surprise, Steyn scoffed at my question.

Perhaps the reason he did was that he saw the context of my question as running counter to the narrative presented in his book.

I wonder if he would scoff at the notion now.

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy

He blew his mind out in a car
He hadn't noticed that the light had changed

New Text Messages PROVE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE Was Involved in Early Stages of Trump-Russia Investigation (VIDEO)

New Text Messages PROVE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE Was Involved in Early Stages of Trump-Russia Investigation

Putin Says US Intelligence Helped Move $400,000,000 to HILLARY Campaign!!

Putin: For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder, in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia and never paid any taxes neither in Russia or the United States and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent [a] huge amount of money, $400,000,000, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Well that’s their personal case. It might have been legal, the contribution itself but the way the money was earned was illegal. So we have solid reason to believe that some [US] intelligence offers accompanied and guided these transactions. So we have an interest in questioning them.

Browder does SEEM like the kind of guy who would facilitate a $400,000,000 transfer to Hillary Clinton. If anyone was going to do such a thing, it would be Browder.

Don't know if we can necessarily believe all this about Browder. Putin and he have some history:

Hermitage Capital Management is an investment fund and asset management company specializing in Russian markets founded by Bill Browder and Edmond Safra. Hermitage Capital Management headquarters are in Guernsey, whilst it also maintains offices in the Cayman Islands, London and Moscow, Russia.

Its main investment fund, the Hermitage Fund created in 1996, has been extremely successful, earning 2,697% between 1996 and December 2007. It has been ranked the World’s Best Performing Emerging Markets Fund over the 1996-2001 five-year period by Nelsons.

Bill Browder is the grandchild of the former HEAD of the Communist Party of the USA.OK? When the USSR came apart and we all sent up a cheer, Browder and Safra jumped in under Yeltsin as soon as the USSR giant companies were being privatized. Hermitage got involved to the tune of MANY MANY of millions of dollars in part ownership of many Russian entities. They must have had sway. By leverage they probably had some measurable influence at the national economic level.

Now maybe Safra had a lot of money, access to it, and Browder well at Boston Consulting group, but at THAT level? Maybe. Or maybe an interested entity with a 3 letter abbreviation had interest in the grandchild of the CPUSA chief grabbing influence in the emerging Russia.

They are both Jewish, Safra was Arab jew whose family is from Aleppo.

Browder grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and attended the University of Chicago where he studied economics. He received an MBA from Stanford Business School in 1989. In 1998, Browder gave up his US citizenship and became a British citizen. Prior to setting up Hermitage, Browder worked in the Eastern European practice of the Boston Consulting Group in London and managed the Russian proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers.

He died in a fire that attracted wide media interest and was judicially determined to be due to arson, IOW, he was murdered. Remember this(?)

Hermitage is an activist fund. One of its main tactics is to expose corporate corruption in the companies it is holding, in the hope of improving managerial behaviour and lessen the significant discount that corruption has on share prices. Most famously, Hermitage has helped to expose several high-profile cases of corruption in Russia’s largest company Gazprom between 1998 and 2000. In October 2000, Hermitage reported that “investors are valuing this company as if 99 percent of its assets have been stolen. The real figure is around 10 percent so that’s good news.”

AND THEN THERE'S THIS:

Crooked Hillary Desperately Tries to Deflect After Putin Drops Bombshell ‘US Intel Helped Move $400,000,000 to Clinton Campaign’

AND THIS:

Ex-CIA Chief John Brennan Unhinged: Trump’s Press Conference ‘Exceeds High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Nothing Short of Treasonous’

AND THIS:

Comey Lashes Out at Trump After Putin Drops Bombshell Claiming ‘US Intel Helped Move $400,000,000 to Hillary Campaign’

Jamey Johnson

Willin'

Friend Of The Devil

Ocasio Cortez admits she has no idea what she is talking about

and this is a shocker to whom, exactly?

Ocasio-Cortez Attacks Israel, Pleads Ignorance



Ryan Saavedra  🇺🇸‏Verified account @RealSaavedra 19h19 hours ago

 

Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacks Israel, calls them the occupiers of Palestine. When pressed on what she meant she struggled to give an answer and then admitted she does not know what she is talking about.

 

By Stephen Green

In her own words, Ocasio-Cortez describes the "occupation of Palestine" as: "Oh, um... [long pause] I think it, what I meant is, the settlements that are increasing in some of these areas... where, um, Palestinians are experiencing, uh, difficulty in accessing to, um, their housing and homes." She added, "I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue."

Not ready for prime-time player, is what she is.

You don't know whether to laugh at Ocasio-Cortez for embarrassing herself so badly, or to cry for the Democratic primary voters of New York District 14 for saddling themselves with this pretentious know-nothing. Or maybe it's the other way around. Or both.

This clip of Ocasio-Cortez is revealing in two ways. The obvious, even superficial reveal is either "See what she really thinks of Israel" or "Look at how ignorant she is." And I suspect both are true.

But put the two together you get the Big Reveal.

It isn't just that Ocasio-Cortez hates Israel, or that she's dangerously uninformed -- it's that she's dangerously uninformed about an important issue. Reflexively so.

All Ocasio-Cortez really seems to know is that the Progressive Left sides with the Palestinians -- and so she does, too. I suspect that's as deep as her commitment to "Democratic" Socialism goes. All the Smart Pretty People believe in Nice Things like high-paying jobs for low-skilled work, Medicare For All, and the Palestinian Authority. And she's one of the Smart Pretty People, so she buys into all that stuff without the prerequisite of, you know, actual knowledge about any of that stuff.

Ocasio-Cortez has a bachelor's in economics and international relations from Boston University, yet was working as a bartender seven years after graduating -- how much did she really learn, and did Boston teach her anything of value? These are fair questions to ask of a graduate in economics and international relations who peddles starry-eyed (and discredited) economic theory, and who admits to such ignorance about one of our thorniest foreign affairs issues.

 

And while it might be unfair to millions of sharp millennials, Ocasio-Cortez fits perfectly the generational stereotype of being pretentious and smugly certain about issues of which she's comically ignorant.

I fear she'll go far.