TRUMP, HILLARY POSSIBLE CABINETS

Trump cabinet:

DOJ-Ken Cuccinelli

Energy-Sarah Palin

State-Lt. Col. Ralph Peters

Defense-General Jack Keane

Treasury-Arthur Laffer

Agriculture-Victor Davis Hansen

Labor-Scott Walker

Commerce-Steve Forbes

Transportation-Dale Earnhart Jr.

Health and Human Services-Ben Carson

Interior-Ammon Bundy

Education-Mike Adams-UNC Wilmington

Housing and Urban Development-J. C. Watts

Veteran's Affairs-Col. Allen West

Homeland Security-Rudy Giuliani

EPA-James Imhofe

White House Press Secretary-Ann Coulter



Hillary Clinton Cabinet

DOJ-Tamara Holder

Energy-Al Gore

State-Huma Abedin

Defense-Bowe Bergdahl

Treasury-Bernie Madoff

Agriculture-Jorge Ramos

Labor-George Lopez

Commerce-Bernie Sanders

Transportation-Ralph Nader

Health and Human Services-Vernon Gosnell

Interior-Al Bundy

Education-David Brock

Housing and Urban Development-Spike Lee

Veteran's Affairs-Keith Ellison

Homeland Security-Morris Dees

EPA-Tom Steyer

White House Press Secretary-Elijah Cummings

KILL NAFTA AND WE'LL ALL BE RICH!

Brietbart fills us in on a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which clearly demonstrates that South Carolina has lost a third of its manufacturing jobs since NAFTA's signing in 1994.

Clear as day, isn't it? See Breitbart article HERE. Go read it, but please come back.

It's NAFTA!

And what's more, heavy-handed regulations on the part of EPA, OSHA, and the IRS.......Obamacare, labor unions, prevailing wage laws, double taxation of foreign profits, racial and gender quotas, legal hamstringing of employment application processes, affirmative action, high corporate income taxes, irrational product liability court decisions, along with entrenched subsidies to favored industries, Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the massive anti-capitalist funds supporting the vilification of commercial progress and NIMBY anti-construction movements in the country.........have absolutely nothing to do with the loss of South Carolina manufacturing jobs since 1994.

And South Carolina is one of the more business-friendly states in the union.

Nope, it's NAFTA, and it's NAFTA alone.

There was a time when cheap labor was the primary driving force, but today, labor cost is far down the list of reasons for a domestic manufacturer to move production to another country. Additional shipping costs and training costs nearly completely obliterate the benefit of lower labor expense. Mexico and China both have huge hoops for manufacturers to jump through in order to produce on their soil, and in recent years their labor costs have been increasing exponentially. It's just that the USA has become, to put it kindly, inhospitable.....ok, no.......downright HOSTILE to business in general, and manufacturing in  particular, in this country.

I'm not saying that free-trade agreements don't have trade-offs, and yes, Donald probably could have negotiated a better deal, but we've identified a bit player here, our problem doesn't speak Spanish or Chinese. It speaks English.

"Giant Sucking Sound"? Sure, there's some vacuum. But the suck is minuscule in comparison to the BLOWING GALE from the epicenter in Washington DC.

We've BLOWN OFF our jobs with egregious environmental and financial regulations, resulting in the siege-like strangle of corporate decision making, a paralyzing punitive legal smog, and the pervasive ill effects of creeping liberal social engineering.  Hey boys, you can make stuff here, but don't get anything dirty. And if you do get through this intentionally red-tape-filled gauntlet we have for you, we want you to put up a bunch of trees and shrubs to hide your ugliness! You need to use water?  Really? You'll need a separate permit for that. You're going to move dirt too, so we'll want to see some impact studies. Of course, you'll have to pay for those. A smoke stack? You mean, with smoke coming out of it? We're going to really have to tax that.

We could not do a better job of making our manufacturers feel more like the declared enemy of tax and regulatory policy, and they'll never tell us the real reasons when they hit the door, as they have to deal with the feds long after they make the decision to leave. Can't afford to ruffle Big Bird's feathers any further.

CEOs get it from both sides now. Cheaper costs mean cheaper prices for consumers? Who cares about the consumer? We still have Walmart. "They'll just move and then increase their margins". In the complete absence of competition, yes they will. Liberals have their reasons too.

The candidate for President who has the best grasp of the immigration issue and the problem with Islam is saying we should tax Mexican-built Fords. There are better solutions Mr. Trump. Actually some of the solutions are in his tax plan, and those of other candidates. Reduce regulations, reduce corporate taxes, ditch Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, Sarbanes-Oxley, and rein in or eliminate the alphabet corporate predator agencies, then we'll be focussing on the big blow, instead of the little suck.

For extra credit:

Who can name a country in the world more inhospitable to manufacturing than the United States of America in the year 2016?

Ok, maybe Venezuela.

MOHAMED "BARRY", OR MOHAMED BARRE?

What else are they not telling us about Mohamed Barry?

Yesterday in Columbus Ohio, a Somali immigrant walked into a restaurant, asked "where the owner was from", and, having been told the owner was from Israel, went back to his car, re-entered the restaurant, and began machete-hacking patrons. Four were injured, and later Mohamed Barry was chased down, and after attempts to subdue him with tasers, police shot him dead.

Mohamed "Barry". My first thought was that this is a strange last name for a Somali. So I googled and found that there's a famous Somali former ruler named Mohamed Barre. Mohamed Barre ascended to power in Somalia in 1969 in a military coup, when he was 50 years old. Barre died in exile in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1995. Mohammad "Barry" would have been born in 1985 or 1986.

Hmmm.....could Mohamed "Barry" be a descendant of once very powerful Mohamed Barre?

Mahamed Siad Barre's Wikipedia entry shows that he had two wives, but shows nothing about children. Mohamed Barrry could have been a son or grandson, no?

At any rate, maybe Somalia should be one of the first Muslim countries President Donald Trump should put on the the list of those from which America will take no more immigrants. You know, until we can "sort this out".

NO MORE BOOZIN' WITH THE GOPe

So who's having the hissy fit now?

The New York Daily News speaks for the GOP establishment the morning after Donald Trump's New Hampshire victory.  Article HERE.

While the GOP establishment--that would be Karl Rove, National Review, Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, Fox News, on and on--cannot entertain the thought of a Donald Trump presidency, they are equally thoughtless as to why he's so popular among conservatives.  They must feel like Al Gore when global-warming confabs get snowed out. They've been mystified from the get-go about what for them is Trump's inexplicable appeal.

They're clearly looking in the wrong places in order to figure him out.

Brain dead? Of some 500,000 votes cast yesterday in the Granite State primaries, nearly half were divided between a self-declared socialist, and an undeclared one. And the Trump voters are brain dead?


Because the punditocracy is looking at Trump instead of his following, they aren't seeing the root causes of the emotional uprising that is happening right before their dis-believing eyes. They are oblivious to the intensity of the emotions--the frustration, the anger, the tedium with the status-quo that exists outside their warm, brightly-lit-but-opaque bubble. They don't get us, so they call us names.

Admittedly, the Trump phenomenon is not reason-driven. We need to accept that the establishment thinkers probably have that part correct. No, it is emotion driven. We are having a hissy fit. So what? Don't answer that.

 We don't know who to trust anymore, so we're just going to go with our gut on this one. Sometimes, emotions just need to rule. Do revolutions occur without them? After all, what good has believing in the pundits and their chosen ones done for us? We're tired of having our minds controlled and our words inhibited.

In defense of the punditocracy's futility at putting a finger on the pulse of Trump's following, it must be acknowledged that we don't know why we are so drawn to him either. We have other perfectly good candidates yet we're drawn to Trump. It's a gut thing. Something triggered a bond, what was it? Something very powerful sustains it, what is it?

When Donald Trump stood on that stage in the first Fox debate and declared that he had had enough of political correctness, it was a cathartic moment for us. When I say "us", it's apparently not limited to frustrated conservatives.  We all watched for him to back down like all the rest. He didn't back down, heck, he doubled down. A significant emotional event it thus became. Then he gored the media's ox. That struck a nerve too.

Many Americans instinctively sense that no solutions to the political problems we face can be contemplated until the trajectory of the culture is altered, better yet, reversed. And political correctness is the first dragon that must be slain. 

For 50 years PC had policed our words, ascribed nefarious intent to innocent expressions, imposed awkward new phrases, invented new words and required their use. Redefined old ones. PC insulted the religious among us, put a wall up between the races, altered the relationships between men and women, and ultimately exacted real-world consequences.

Seemingly innocuous at first, in the end political correctness had imprisoned our very thoughts. All to protect fragile sensibilities, all to coddle myriad victims of the "established" ways of thinking. Our nature is that we don't want to be "offensive". Initially, it didn't seem to be a big sacrifice. So we put up with it. A slippery slope it most surely has become.

We held it in, we dutifully became the land of the once-free. We did nothing when transgressors were publicly punished.


We can’t open doors for our women, or compliment them on how they look in the workplace.  There are needless awkward moments when the check comes on the first dinner-date. Chivalry, under attack. Chastity and modesty, nope, can't even present them as an option. At the ATM, we have to "choose" English. And those damned "para espanol, oprima el numero cinco" phone prompts. 

Our cherished symbols are under assault. Some flags are now evil. Some statues are deemed "offensive", unless they're naked. We can’t say certain words, we can’t profile criminals in a sane way. Speaking of profiling, we're human, we can’t stop thinking the thoughts we think when encountering a Muslim in a mall, or an airline queue. And we’re made to feel guilty about it. They're claiming the ability to read our minds, while simultaneously requiring us to read minds in order to determine which of these people want to kill us, and which of them don't. 

We've kept it all in. For so, so long. Go along to get along. Maybe some booze will help. 'Don't say anything, it'll just rile 'em up." "Here, have a drink" we were told, by our own. "Listen to us", they said, "not all Muslims want to kill us. It's RADICAL Islam, get that? Have another drink on me."

We probably thought we had our anger under control. We no doubt sublimated it, and that only caused the anger to seethe, and grow. More recently we see PC being wielded as a weapon against us by enemies, people who want to kill us, so PC was no longer benign, it had become existential.

We must have been drunk for decades, not sure how long. What's been going on with us is not unlike an addiction.  At first harmless, and so rewarding, then the consequences.  But we just couldn't stop. We were one big, collective hangover, head pounding, about to throw up......

And then Donald Trump spoke those words.

He's tired of this PC crap. Oh my God, so are we! Is this our opportunity to ditch the bottle? Right or wrong, we saw in him perhaps our last chance to finally slay this dragon.

From Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats: A song called "S.O.B."

My heart is achin', my hands a-shakin' , Bugs a'crawlin' over me....

Yep, that was us.

That was us when George W. Bush finished his term having grown the government by just shy of a third. That was us when we were handed John McCain as our 2004 nominee. That was us when Barack Obama said "you didn't build that". That was us when Nancy Pelosi marched across the front yard of our Congress wielding that big ol' gavel. That was us when Mitt Romney- Mitt Freakin' Romney-,who had provided the template for Obamacare, was shoved down our gagging throats.

And after each and every setback, we acquiesced, we stuck by our old drinking buddies, and we sang the second line of Nat's song....

Son of a bitch! Gimme another drink!

Then....

Mitch McConnell sold us out. The Corker amendment greased the skids for the Iran Nuclear agreement. Then Paul Ryan increased the debt ceiling, all the way to March of 2017. And our old drinking buddies said we were going to have Jeb Bush as our next nominee. "Now, now, here, have another shot!"

My heart is aching', my hands a'shakin', Bugs a'crawlin' over me.....

Another drink?

Not this time. Nope. We've had enough of the sauce. Donald is going to be our AA sponsor. We're ditching our drinking buddies, we're getting new friends, and the old ones can take a hike.

We prefer friends now our old drinking buddies don't like at all. And Donald doesn't even drink.

Ok, so there is an element of irrationality. Yep, our reverence for The Donald is absolutely born of anger, fear, and sheer tedium with what our addiction to fake conservatism has wrought. I think I speak for others when I say we know he's not a conservative's dream. For us to dream of the day when we can be purists again, may require that first the PC dragon be slain. Right now, he's the only dragon-slayer we see. We have not the luxury of being purists anymore.

We really don't like Trump's penchant for "making deals". Making deals at the executive branch level is what got us into much of this mess. We don't like his solution for the outsourcing of jobs. A 35% tax on vehicles made in Mexico? Really? There are better solutions. Between sips, we'll talk with him about those things.

At least Donald Trump has the big issues right. He sees immigration as the biggest problem, and he sees how immigration is indelibly linked to the Muslim problem. His announcement that maybe we ought to put immigration from Muslim countries on hiatus indicates that he gets it. Apparently he's the only one that gets it. PC bedamned. Hallelujah! This problem simply cannot be solved without saying PC bedamned. Donald Trump is the only one to suggest that maybe there is no solution to the problem of Islam that doesn't involve consequences that may, by necessity, have to accrue to all Muslims in this country. All Muslims. And that isn't politically correct. Donald Trump gets something we all sense. He said it, and now we can say it.

And he doesn't even use a teleprompter! How refreshing is that! From his mind right straight to his mouth. Outspoken? You bet, that's what we want to be. Again. The specter of having our minds and mouths freed is exhilarating and intoxicating. I know, I know, what do you expect from a bunch of former drunks?

Make no mistake, Donald Trump struck a huge nerve when he railed against PC. This is where the anger and the frustration resides, deep in our psyche. Stuck in our craw. Even we don't realize how angry we are. We sense PC is run-amok, downright dangerous, and we instinctively know we must change the cultural trajectory, or the politics can never change.

This is why we continue to give Donald Trump a pass on his less-than-staunch conservatism, why we will keep on giving him a pass, and why the pundits can't figure him out. They're looking in the wrong place for answers.

Intoxicated with Donald Trump? Just the opposite, he's helping us get clean.

So we've left the pub and our old drinking buddies behind, and we're going to have a few sodas with the Donald.

Son of a bitch! Gimme another drink!

LIBERALISM'S LAST STAND, ON NOT FEELING THE "BERN".

I was once a liberal. In my late teens and early twenties. Membership in the liberal club offered an abundance of emotional balm and psychic salve for what ailed the pre-adult me.  Cured everything but my acne.

Liberalism welcomed me, as it does all young people, with open arms.  I knew immediately that I could "belong" if I'd just follow the path laid out before me. I really wanted to belong. To something, anything. Once a member of the club, I could reap its benefits. Love, respect, enhanced feelings of being important, having my ego massaged, and all that in exchange for merely being against war and capitalism.

Wow.

Everything that was once so hard became so much easier, why, I could even get girls.  Besides, at the time, they seemed to be right about the war, and about capitalism, based on what I could see. Why can't we all just get along, and.......share? It felt so right, so good.

It sure seemed like a club, a family. Once initiated, I found it to be more like a tribe. It was only when I attempted to leave that I realized it was a freaking cult.

I think I mentioned "getting girls." I don't know if conservatives realize how powerful the psycho-social trappings that liberalism affords its members actually are, and a big part of it, today as before, involves the sexual urge. Believe it or not, even for those with hormones raging,  it wasn't the only reason that leaving the liberal plantation was the hardest thing I ever had to do.

When I checked out of the liberal hotel, I instinctively knew I'd never get a room there again. I knew I'd suffer the loss of my friends. And I did lose them. I knew I was leaving a warm, cozy place for the street. I could just feel the loss of the sense of belonging, the very powerful admiration and esteem for my views, yep, the love. The respect. A loss of the intoxicating feeling of occupying the moral high-ground.

All because I had an economics professor who, having fled Cuba,  convinced me not so much that capitalism was perfect or had been falsely maligned, but that socialism was simply not deserving of another go.

Liberals have always been psychologically connected in a way that conservatives are not. They were hard-wired long before the internet. They "see", therefore they conclude,  they "feel" therefore they are, then they believe, therefore they become......ONE.

We shouldn't be surprised, nor should we fret that our kids are drawn to Bernie Sanders. It's not the socialism.  Never has been. Though we scoffed at her comment, Gloria Steinem got it right when she said that young girls are attracted to Bernie because "that's where the boys are". This is not new. Our penchant for packing the kids up and sending them off to college at the age of eighteen is a formula for alienation, a tried and true recipe for subjecting our young to the liberal siren song. From our family to theirs.

So back to Bernie's kids.

Relax, there are not that many of them anyway. Remember, they're unemployed,  so they have lots of free time. They're wired together now, hard-wired. Makes them easier to be manipulated. Not difficult to get them to show up. But are they really there for Bernie? No, they're there because they're drawn to each other.  And Bernie promises to legalize weed. Bernie's place is just another party without Mom and Dad. They won't vote in any great numbers, not for Bernie, not for Hillary, not for Trump. Theirs is not a political world, it's a social one. And voting is not a social event.

But. just to be sure, what can we do?

Liberalism may never be defeated, but it can be marginalized. It can be managed. Liberalism has no Achilles' heel. It does have wiring protected by the emotional reward structure. Liberalism can be short-circuited.

First, conservatives must begin to realize these people are wounded. Yes, they are. Take it from a former member of the "Movement". We railed against the "establishment". Liberalism is now the establishment. We must do unto them what they have done unto us. They are weaker at this moment than they have ever been, we must know this too.

Wounded. Not dead. They are wounded not so much psychologically-as we can see, they can function rather well-but....wounded they are.... emotionally. This is why ridicule is so powerful, so important if we want to hit 'em where it hurts. Proof? Liberals are prone to tantrums. Hissy fits. The emotional integrity of the collective is breaking up. Sarah Palin literally unhinged them.

The strength of liberalism lies in the emotional interconnectedness of its membership, which is ironically its biggest weakness. They're a tribe without a chief. A collective Borg without a CPU. They don't need a chief, a CPU. They never have. This is why when the Stalins and Maos go away, they don't. We conservatives dwell so much on their perceived leadership-Obama this and Hillary that, and we think all we have to do is decapitate them, when it's the wires that connect them that must be cut. We must deprive them of the emotional rewards, this is where they're weak.

If we realize this we can send them packing, for a while...they'll never go away for good.

While the anti-war sentiment once insulated the liberal wiring, it does so no more. For them, pacifism was a fad, liberals and their ilk-socialists, communists, utopians all, have never really been opposed to violence, now have they?

Anti-capitalism is to this day part of the insulation on the liberal wiring, and opposing capitalism has its feel-good rewards for sure, but it ain't sex, and everyone has food and a cell-phone now.

No, the essential underpinning for the liberal house of cards has been reduced to abortion, and abortion alone.  Radical feminism, gender wars, LGBT issues, and feigned-victimhood are its teetering cross-beams.  The foundation is shaking, yes it is.  Sex, gender issues, this is their chosen battlefield, and they were winning, for a while. As with all social issues, choices have to made. Choices, drip, drip, drip-have consequences. Liberals have succeeded in allowing the banal urges to rule, and the consequences are beginning to become manifest.

Turns out that consequence-free sex is a myth. So abortion has become harder to sell.

Therefore liberals simply had to hate Sarah Palin. It was an existential issue for them that she be destroyed. It should be instructive for us that the left's reaction to Sarah Palin was so visceral, so extreme, so much panic there. Hissy fit. The left was telling us where it hurts the most.

Bad news for the left, you didn't kill her, Sarah's still kicking, and more Sarah's are on the way.

Young people see the house that's been built for them. It's teetering, hell it's crumbling, and the young'uns ain't going to want to move into this house. Too much evidence that this house is on a dead-end street. Too much blight all around it.


Liberals are wounded. By arrows from their own quiver. Sure, they own the institutions-the media, higher education-but their problem is that they still believe they own the moral high-ground, and they don't any more. Abortion is instinctively morally wrong. Even liberals have trouble justifying the killing of a fetus, especially for the sake of convenience. They know they're wrong, but it's a trade-off, and a mental high-wire act. Very difficult to maintain sanity while believing it's ok to kill a fetus in the womb, and simultaneously believing that capital punishment is wrong, and lab rats should be spared physical pain. Is it any wonder Sarah Palin literally drove them crazy?

The media, having served to salve the wounds through constant affirmation of failed beliefs, have been exposed and marginalized. Sure, they've revised history, it's part of the required medicine, but for today's young people history is a decade, and this last one's been a doozy. The media can no longer hide the consequences, they're there for anyone to see. Liberalism today, even for the young, especially for the young, is a hard sell.  Just as our young are naturally attracted to feel-good-kumbaya tribalism, they are not predisposed to being pro-abortion. For the same reason they don't get the argument for capitalism, they don't get the argument for killing a fetus in the womb. Only for the entrenched, hard-core leftist stakeholders is abortion an existential issue. It's their power, their glue, and the glue is melting. What our young are being asked to buy is no longer a vision, it is a harsh reality. Liberalism has been instituted, it has been tried, and its sorry consequences revealed.

The education establishment is therefore no longer hospitable to the young, urging them to move into that run-down, dilapidated house liberalism has created for them.

The young "rebel" today, while eschewing the conservative label and not necessarily embracing conservative values, is nonetheless rejecting the liberal allure. Today's young people already have sexual freedom, it is no longer a reward for the left to lure them with, and this is no small development as we move forward. It was inevitable. The good news is there never has been a third way.

So, we conservatives need to know we have liberals on the run. We need to know our way is winning, or at least we need to act like we're winning even when there's evidence to the contrary. Seize the moral high-ground. Just take it. War ain't easy, and this is war.

We have to realize we are only winning now in the political arena because we are winning in the trenches. Abortion is the key. For liberalism, it's the tie that binds. Being pro-life is the moral high-ground. Conservatives, stay the course. Do not compromise this issue. Do not sell it in exchange for a concession on fiscal issues. Seize this ground and liberals will have nothing left. Vote? Sure, but more importantly we must redouble our efforts to teach our children. I know it's hard, so much opposition. The good news is that liberals actually got their way, and there are consequences to observe. I don't need to tell you what they are, you see them everywhere. Point them out. Ridicule the opposition, abortion in particular is immensely fertile ground for shaming. Make them defend Lena Dunham.

Want some confirmation that we can win with the young? Check out Russell Wilson. Our kids like rebels. Russell Wilson is a rebel. And there are many more like him. The values of chastity and modesty can be re-sold. It's the new moral high-ground that our young will naturally find alluring, what with all the societal devastation that cam be pointed out with the alternative.

So teach the children. They instinctively grasp that it's just wrong to kill a fetus. It's not a hard sell, if we get to them before the liberals do.

Abortion's the key.