Via Ace of Spades

I love this because it's clarifying.

Team GOP acts as if conservatives owe them their votes. "Why aren't you focusing on Democrats?" "Why do you want Hillary to win?" It never seems to occur to them that politics is transactional. If you don't deliver what I want, I won't deliver what you want and I'll go find someone who will. But even if I don't, you're out. Plain and simple. It's a version of Mutually Assured Destruction.

I've argued before conservatives need to take this kind of cold blooded approach to politics and stop pretending we're all on some team and have to stick together.

You know who gets this? Big business.

GE told Dallas business leaders in recent days it would look elsewhere for alternatives to its Connecticut home, said the people, who asked not to be identified because details aren't public. They said GE cited some Texas lawmakers opposition to the U.S. Export-Import Bank, an important source of financing for some overseas sales.GE isn't the only way turning the screws.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is indefinitely postponing a slate of political fundraisers for Republican candidates this fall, saying the influential business group must instead focus its resources on reauthorizing the embattled Export-Import Bank.NAM's decision underscores frustration within the business community over GOP attacks on the 80-year-old bank, which helps finance private sector projects in overseas markets. The bank's charter lapsed on June 30 and many conservatives oppose its renewal.

"We are postponing all political activity fundraising," said Ned Monroe, NAM senior vice president of external relations. "We had to prioritize away from political activity and back toward legislative activity."

Nice campaign you have their, be a shame if anything happened to it.

Read the rest here...

Via Zerohedge

This year, some American executives who heeded loud calls for across-the-board wage hikes for America’s lowest-paid workers received a complimentary refresher course in undergad economics courtesy of the free market. 

Take Dan Price for instance, the 31-year old CEO of Seattle-based Gravity Payments Systems who found out the hard way that setting the pay floor at $70K comes with all manner of unintended consequences. 

And then there’s Wal-Mart.

Earlier this year, the retail behemoth became one of several corporate heavyweights to raise wages for its meagerly compensated workers, around 500,000 of which are now set to receive at least $9/hour and $10/hour by Q1 2016. The move will cost somewhere around $1 billion this year. 

Now one thing that should have been abundantly clear from the start is that if ever there were an employer that could ill-afford a $1 billion across-the-board pay raise without immediately making up the difference by either firing some employees, cutting hours, or squeezing the supply chain it’s Wal-Mart. After all, they’re the “low price leader”, and you don’t hold on to that title by passing labor costs on to customers.

Predictably, the company moved to extract more “value” from its suppliers and when that didn’t prove sufficient, the folks in Bentonville brought in the “plumbers.” 

But the story didn’t stop there. Late last month we highlighted an internal memo circulated at Arkansas recruiting firm Cameron Smith & Associates which looked to be an attempt to prepare the firm’s employees for layoffs at Wal-Mart’s home office. Then, not a week later, Bloomberg ran a story detailing the grievances of some senior Wal-Mart employees whosuddenly realized that although they may still be making more than their subordinates, the wage hierarchy had been distorted and that distortion had nothing to do with merit. As we put it, “higher paid employees don’t understand why everyone under them in the corporate structure suddenly makes more money and if people who are higher up on the corporate ladder don’t receive raises that keep the hierarchy proportional they may simply quit which means that, for Wal-Mart, raising the minimum for the lowest paid workers to just $9/hour will end up costing the company around $1.5 billion if you include the additional raises the company will have to give to higher paid employees in order to retain their 'talents'and avoid a mid-level management mutiny.”


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Via PJ Media

2. The Law

The old canard that without law there is nothing did not resonate with voters in connection with illegal immigration until the 21st century. As long as there were only one or two million illegal immigrants apparently the public turned a blind eye. No longer. Extremists took legal noncompliance to an entirely new level of Orwellian arrogance. Suddenly, as if by fiat, the illegal-immigration lobby banned the term “illegal alien” — as if they had never read a word of 1984or Animal Farm. They dreamed up “sanctuary city,” a reactionary, neo-Confederate idea of legal nullification, whose logical trajectory is the implosion of the entire idea of federal laws constitutionally supreme to state and local statutes. They lied by insisting that entering the United States illegally was simply a minor misdemeanor, when most Americans knew such unlawful entry was the beginning, not the end, of negating the law — inaugurating years of fake IDs, false Social Security numbers, second and third identities, and deliberate filing of untruthful federal and state documents.


Then the myth arose that criminality among illegal aliens was in fact lower that found in the general population, as if it mattered not at all that a quarter of all federal prisoners were in the United States illegally, or that some states reported that more than a fourth of their felonies were attributable to illegal aliens, or that around 20,000 illegal aliens from south of the border were routinely incarcerated in California prisons alone. Completely lost in the back and forth was the old notion that an immigrant, legal or illegal, was supposed to be a guest, whose behavior should be the model, rather than defended as no worse than those whom he joined.

The public tired of the unfairness in the applicability of the law. How had it come to pass that illegal aliens were not subject to enforcement of federal laws in the manner that all citizens most surely were? All Americans file through passport control when flying home; they are met by stern uniformed bureaucrats who are not an especially forgiving bunch for missing or lost documents. How could it be that millions by virtue of their ethnic fides were not subject to the same scrutiny? And if one law were to be waved, why, the public wonders, not others equally inconvenient?

People finally tired of the postmodern notion that to stop endemic illegality we were supposed to change the language rather than the reality. Americans are not quite yet ready to be Soviet subjects who are to embrace Newspeak, and apparently resented the assumption that they were.


Read the rest here...

Via The Daily Signal

The love by liberals for Planned Parenthood and its founder seems to know no bounds. A professor, blogging at the New York Times, has argued for placing Margaret’s mug on the $20 bill.

And alas, even the Smithsonian, America’s museum, boasts a handsome bust of Sanger in its stately National Portrait Gallery.

>>> To read more on this topic: 13 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger 

Margaret is there enshrined in the Smithsonian’s vaunted “Struggle for Justice” exhibit.

This brings me to my reason for writing here today: a group of angry African-American pastors are demanding the removal of Sanger’s bust from the Smithsonian.

The letter from Ministers Taking a Stand states:

“Perhaps the Gallery is unaware that Ms. Sanger supported black eugenics, a racist attitude toward black and other minority babies, an elitist attitude toward those she regarded as ‘the feeble minded;’ speaking at a rally of Ku Klux Klan women; and communications with Hitler sympathizers. Also the notorious ‘Negro Project,’ which sought to limit, if not eliminate black births, was her brainchild.”

The pastors quote an infamous December 1939 letter from Sanger to Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Eugenics Society, where, in the context of discussing the Negro Project, Sanger wrote: “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

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NASHVILLE, August 27, 2015– As a Major in the United States Army Special Forces, I learned a thing or two about strategy. One of the strongest tactics you can use on the battlefield is to confuse your enemy. Unfortunately, Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) seems to view Tennessee conservatives as the enemy. I have to give it to him. For someone that has never stepped foot on the battlefield to serve his country, Corker sure knows how to confuse his enemies. One may ask why someone that has never worn the uniform of America’s armed services is the Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Perhaps it’s because Corker is nothing more than a brilliant politician– they also know how to confuse their enemies. Corker has used every weapon in his arsenal to mislead Tennesseans on the details of President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. Whether you support the deal or not isn’t my focus. My intent is to expose how a Washington politician has been fast at work deceiving Tennesseans for months. The truth is, Obama needed Corker to save his Iran deal and Corker delivered.

It should be noted that Corker and Obama have a very close relationship. They have teed off on the golf course and enjoyed dinner together on more than one occasion. They aren’t exactly enemies. In fact, many in Washington would even say they are quite close.

Therefore, when Corker introduced legislation earlier this year to “give Congress a vote” on the Iran deal, eyebrows should have been raised. Initially, Obama said he would reject the bill, but quickly flipped and said he supported Corker’s bill. As Obama has said, he has a pen and a phone. He has no qualms when it comes to sidestepping Congress. So, why would Obama support a bill by Corker that supposedly gives Congress the power to kill his negotiations with Iran? Again- the stated purpose of the bill was to stop Obama’s Iran deal, but Obama couldn’t wait to sign it. Odd- Is it not?

The plain and simple truth is that Congress had a vote before Corker’s bill and Obama never actually rejected Corker’s bill. In fact, Obama wanted and needed Corker’s bill, and his brief “rejection” was nothing more than political theater to help Corker trick Tennesseeans into believing the bill was bad for Obama’s agenda. Now the bill is law.

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Via Zerohedge

If the Gallup World Poll had been around in the early 1770s, one wonders what percentage of colonial Americans would have said they believed there was widespread corruption in government. Whatever the percentage might have been, we know where colonial America’s disgust with British corruption led: a revolution that replaced a monarchy with a Republic.

The American Founders were determined to create a Republican form of government that would pit special interests against each other so that constitutional outcomes would represent the common good. As Weekly Standard writer Jay Cost writes in his new book, “A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption,” “[p]olitical corruption is incompatible with a republican form of government. A republic strives above all else to govern for the public interest; corruption, on the other hand, occurs when government agents sacrifice the interests of everybody for the sake of a few.”

Cost is so good at describing the problem of corruption that I wish to quote him at length below. Read his explanation and ask yourself whether Cost is describing your views about corruption and government.

“And so we return to one of the earliest metaphors we used to define corruption: it is like cancer or wood rot. It does not stay in one place in the government; it spreads throughout the system. When a faction succeeds in getting what it wants at the expense of the public good, it is only encouraged to push its advantage. By the same token, politicians who aid them and reap rewards for it have an incentive to do it some more, and to improve their methods to maximize their payoffs. Moreover, these successes inspire other politicians and factions to try their hands at raiding the treasury to see if they can do it, too. Thus, a vicious cycle is created that erodes public faith in government, which further contributes to the cycle. When people stop believing that anything can be done to keep the government in line, they stop paying attention carefully or maybe cease participating altogether.

“Ultimately, the public is supposed to be the steward of the government, but how well can it perform that task when it no longer believes doing so is worth its while? How does a democratic government prosper over the long term if the citizenry does not trust the government to represent its interests? How will that not result in anything but the triumph of factionalism over the common good?

“The legitimacy of our government is supposed to derive from the people, and the people alone, who consent to the government because, they believe, it represents their interests. In its ultimate form, corruption eviscerates that sacred notion. The people stop believing that the government represents their interests, and the government in turn begins to operate based upon something other than consent. Put simply, corruption strikes at the heart of our most cherished beliefs and assumptions about republican government. That makes it extremely dangerous to the body politic, regardless of what the Bureau of Economic Analysis says about the rate of GDP growth.”

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Via Zerohedge

Here is the issue – as I have ALWAYS said, economic collapse is not a singular event, it is a process. The global economy has been in the process of collapse since 2008 and it never left that path. Those who were ignorant took government statistics at face value and the manipulated bull market as legitimate and refused to acknowledge the fundamentals. Now, with markets recently suffering one of the greatest freefalls since the 2008/2009 crash, they are witnessing the folly of their assumptions, but that does not mean they will accept them or apologize for them outright. If there is one lesson I have learned well during my time in the Liberty Movement, it is to never underestimate the power of normalcy bias.

There were plenty of “up days” in the markets during the Great Depression, and this kept the false dream of a quick recovery alive for a large percentage of the American population for many years. Expect numerous “stunning stock reversals” as the collapse of our era progresses, but always remember that it is the overall TREND that matters far more than any one positive or negative trading day (unless you open down 1000 points as we did on Monday), and even more important than the trends are the economic fundamentals.

The establishment has made every effort to hide the fundamentals from the public through far reaching misrepresentations of economic stats. However, the days of effective disinformation in terms of the financial system are coming to an end. As investors and the general public begin to absorb the reality that the global economy is indeed witnessing a vast crisis scenario and acknowledges real numbers over fraudulent numbers, the only recourse of central bankers and the governments they control is to convince the public that the crisis they are witnessing is not really a crisis. That is to say, the establishment will attempt to marginalize the collapse signals they can no longer hide as if such signals are of “minimal” importance.

Just as occurred during the onset of the Great Depression, the lies will be legion the closer we come to zero hour. Here are some of the lies you will likely hear as the collapse accelerates...

The Crisis Was Caused By Chinese Contagion

The hypocrisy inherent in this lie is truly astounding, to say the least, considering it is now being uttered by the same mainstream dirtbags who only months ago were claiming that China's financial turmoil and stock market upset were inconsequential and would have “little to no effect” on Western markets.

Read the rest here...

Just remember as we go forward from here, the media and the ruling class will lie and lie and lie and even in the face of obvious truth...will lie again...remember this?

Via Gateway Pundit

Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth was shot dead execution style around 8:30 last night.
The suspect continued to fire at the deputy until he died in the parking lot.

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And then there's this...
TEXAS DEPUTY EXECUTED DAYS AFTER BLACK RADICAL GROUP CALLS FOR KILLING COPS

Via Gateway Pundit

St. Louis police released store surveillance video of a mob of dozens of people looting Kings Beauty Supply, STL Custom Designs and Nail Spa during the August 19 riots protesting the police shooting of aspiring gangsta rapper Mansur Ball-Bey.

The video was posted to the YouTube channel of the St. Louis police.

Dozens of people are seen looting the store in the one-minute-fifty-two second video. Many of the looters took steps to conceal their identity.

The looting of the store went unreported at the time.

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