THE SAD SHAMEFUL SPECTACLE OF SARAH PALIN
With great fanfare, former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Tuesday this week (1/19) endorsed Donald Trump for President of the United States.
Mr. Trump has spent much of his life endorsing (and living) socially liberal causes. Although he now says he is pro-life, he’s on the record multiple times as “very pro-choice.” He is in favor of government health care that is even more comprehensive than Obamacare. He’s had four bankruptcies that hurt countless people and businesses. In short, he’s no conservative.
Why then would the Queen of the Tea Party movement stand up for him? Because Mr. Trump is the show. The spotlight shines where ever he goes and Sarah Palin loves, indeed craves, the spotlight.
Former Gov. Palin has made a fortune in the seven years since she and Sen. John McCain lost to Barack Obama, and more power to her for it. But in the year 2016 the shine has worn off, the novelty is gone, while she is still hungry for the attention, the fame and the money.
She is so hungry in fact, that she prioritized Donald Trump, her springboard back into relevance, ahead of her own suicidal son.
Join the forum discussion on this postTHE CALIPHATE CURVE
Islamic Supremacist organizations like ISIS can be graded on “the Caliphate Curve.” The Caliphate Curve is based on how quickly an Islamic organization wants to achieve the Caliphate. What we describe as “extreme” or “moderate” is really the speed at which an Islamic group seeks to recreate the Caliphate. ISIS is at the extreme end of the scale, not because it tortures, kills and rapes, but because it implemented the Caliphate immediately. The atrocities for which ISIS has become known are typical of a functioning Caliphate. The execution of Moslems who do not submit to the Caliph, the ethnic cleansing and sexual slavery of non-Moslems are not aberrations. They are normal behavior for a Caliphate. This behavior is not a temporary aberration, but dates back to Mohammed’s men raping and enslaving non-Moslem women and young girls as a reward for fighting to spread Islam. The Moslem Brotherhood is on the moderate side of the Caliphate Curve not because it doesn’t want to bring back the Caliphate, it does, or because it doesn’t want to subjugate non-Moslems, it does, but because it wants to do so gradually over an extended period of time using modern political methods.
But whether you take the long road along the Caliphate Curve or the short one it still ends up in the same place. Everyone on the Caliphate Curve agrees that the world, including the United States, must be ruled by Moslems under Islamic law and that freedom and equal rights for all must come to an end. This is why ISIS is in some ways our least dangerous enemy.
SUPPORT SPIKE LEE’S OSCAR BOYCOTT!
Someone called Spike Lee is threatening to boycott this year’s Oscars for having failed to include a sufficient quota of black talent on their nominations list.
This is an excellent campaign and one I shall definitely support once I’ve managed to discover who this Lee gentleman actually is.
According to some rumors, he was once the recipient of an Academy Award himself. But I can find no record of this: I’ve looked up the Oscars in the likely categories – “gaffer”, “best boy”, “key grip”, “dolly”, etc – but there’s definitely no Spike Lee mentioned.
Did he perhaps once go under the pseudonym Bruce? There’s a Bruce Lee on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The problem here is that this particular Lee seems to have died some years ago, didn’t look very black, and also was likeable, amazingly talented and made movies that everyone wanted to watch. So I don’t think it can be the same person.
Anyway, as a great believer in Social Justice, I totally support this campaign by this man who may or may not be the son of Spiderman creator Stan Lee, or someone with a similar surname. But I just don’t think it goes far enough.
A GLOBAL DEBT DEFAULT?
The global financial system has become dangerously unstable and faces an avalanche of bankruptcies that will test social and political stability, a leading monetary theorist is warning.
On the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, here’s what William White, the Swiss-based chairman of the OECD's review committee and former chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), told me:
"The situation is worse than it was in 2007. Our macroeconomic ammunition to fight downturns is essentially all used up. Debts have continued to build up over the last eight years (which) will never be serviced or repaid, and this will be uncomfortable for a lot of people who think they own assets that are worth something.”
Mr. White says the Fed is now in a horrible quandary as it tries to extract itself from QE and right the ship again. "It is a debt trap. Things are so bad that there is no right answer. If they raise rates it'll be nasty. If they don't raise rates, it just makes matters worse," he says.
THE RECESSION OF 2016
There will be a recession in the United States and much of the rest of the world in 2016.
After reading the above sentence, you should be thinking, what possibly could the writer know that the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration do not know given all their resources and all of their professional economic forecasters?
If one looks at the forecast record of the IMF and the Fed over the past several decades, one will not find any case in which a year of positive growth was followed by a year of contraction in which the IMF or Fed anticipated the recession in April of the growth year.
Given the evidence, economic forecasting is far from an exact science, and forecasters and model-builders have much to be modest about. In fact, I do not know for certain that my opening sentence is true or not, but the following is my case for why my assertion is more likely to be true than the various official forecasts. There’s a quartet of reasons.
THE PROGRESSIVE WOMAN’S GUIDE TO RAPE JIHAD
The Cologne Mayor's recent advice on how women should handle themselves with immigrants/refugees did more harm than good, in terms of our progressive dreams and hopes. In hopes of perfecting our Progressive world, women must learn their proper progressive place when it comes to state decisions on immigrants and refugees. One must make themselves subservient to the state. As such, we have put together a helpful guide for progressive women. Copies are free and can be found at any local DNC chapter or local Planned Parenthood. Mothers - get one for your daughters. Daughters - get one for your mothers. Fathers - get one for yourself - just in case. From the guide:
HALF-FULL REPORT 01/15/16
Ted Cruz Makes Donald Trump His Mitch. That’s got to be the best headline on last night’s Pub debate. And it was so satisfying to hear the audience boo Trump as he made a horse’s ass of himself.
Beyond the fireworks and one-liners, however, was a useful lesson in morality and patriotism….
Meanwhile, I’m breathing easier this morning with Cruz looking like he’ll win Iowa after all. Trump lied last night when he said he was leading in all the latest Iowa polls. Plus this bleak story Wednesday (1/13) in the NYT about how lousy Trump’s ground game is in Iowa. Then there are the two Gallup polls released Wednesday…
Now that’s all out of the way, let’s get to the best news of the week: The PIAPS is going over the edge. Here she is on Tuesday (1/12) equating “white terrorism” and “police violence” with ISIS…
We’ll also have some fun, explain why food prices are sky high, reveal a wonderful Hero of the Week, and close with a personal thank you from me.
THREE STRIKES AND I’M OUT
I’ve never used TTP as a confessional, but there’s always a first time. I’m in a state of existential crisis.
Maybe it’s sparked by what happens tonight in Charleston, South Carolina. It could be a pivot point of history – for the world, for America, and my own life.
Strike One for me was my countrymen in the millions being literally deranged enough to elect a man who wanted God to damn America.
Surely, I thought, this must be a temporary insanity. Normal people have the capacity to go around the bend, then come to their senses, happens all the time. As Zero proved himself to be just as evil as I knew he was, I comforted myself in the conviction that the Curse of Zero would be over in 2012. It was impossible, inconceivable, unimaginable, that Americans would re-elect him.
Yet they did. It doesn’t matter that the Dems rigged the vote. What matters is that the election was close enough for them to cheat and rig it. That was Strike Two.
Still, it never occurred to me that there would ever be a Strike Three. Now it has.
AMERICA’S PROBLEM IS DEMOCRATS, NOT GUNS
America's mass shooting capital isn't somewhere out West where you can get a gun at the corner store. It's in Obama's own hometown. Chicago is America's mass shooting capital. 2,995 people were shot in Chicago last year. Shootings were up, way up, in Baltimore. With an assist from Al Sharpton and #BlackLivesMatter, Baltimore beat out Detroit. But Detroit is still in the running.
Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit all have something in common. They're all run by the party of gun control which somehow can't seem to manage to control the criminals who have the guns. These cities are the heartland of America’s real gun culture. It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in red state territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base. Gun violence is at its worst in the cities that Obama won in 2012. Places like New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, St. Louis, Kansas City and Philly. The Democrats are blaming Republicans for the crimes of their own voters.
CHINA IS TRAPPED IN THE IMPOSSIBLE TRINITY
China is perilously close to a devaluation crisis as the yuan threatens to break through the floor of its currency basket, despite massive intervention by the central bank to defend the exchange rate.
The country burned through at least $120bn of foreign reserves in December, twice the previous record, the clearest evidence to date that capital outflows have reached systemic proportions.
“There is certainly a sense that the situation is spiraling out of control,” says Mark Williams, from Capital Economics.
China’s reserves have dwindled from $4 trillion to $3.33 trillion and are no longer far from the $2.6 trillion deemed to be the prudent threshold by the International Monetary Fund, given China’s $1.2 trillion dollar liabilities.
In economic parlance, China is trapped in what is known as the Impossible Trinity.