Trump Makes Another Masterful Move.

During a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel's late night show, Donald Trump hinted that he might be willing to debate Bernie Sanders before the California primary. As we all know this sent the pundit class into hyperdrive. Opinions varied from speculation that it would finish Hillary to it made her look irrelevant to accusations of Trump attempting to interfere with the Democrats primary elections.  One thing was for certain, Trump had managed to completely dominate yet another news cycle.

Then that news became surplanted by another hammer blow to Hillary's campaign in the form of the State Department IG audit report.

After three days, it was time for Trump to make another move to above the fold. So of course he "decides" it would not be proper to debate "the second place finisher". Mission accomplished. Quickly the story and speculation became centered around Trump's decision and why he made it.

Not being a psychologist I can only guess at Hillary's mental state at this point. Her ride from presumptive coronation to political dogfight to possible criminal indictment has to be an emotionally taxing roller coaster even for a longtime political operative like her. Yet some how I'm sure Donald Trump is taking that into consideration in his ongoing calculations on how to build and maintain his own psychological advantage over Clinton and the Democrats.

By first agreeing to debate Sanders and then reversing himself, he certainly risks looking indecisive for the moment but he gains the advantage of keeping both Clinton and Sanders off balance and having to recalculate their next moves. All the while I would bet that Trump already has his next three moves already planned and ready to launch.

While Bernie Sanders can still concentrate on securing a victory in California, Hillary must divide he attention and resources in three directions, against Sanders in the still not finished primary fight, against a seemingly never ending investigation by the FBI and against Trump's building and relentless attacks against both her history and character. Now throw in the added and obvious irritant of a new investigation into long time Clinton operative Terry McAuliffe for potential campaign finance violations while working for the Clinton Foundation slush fund.

While Hillary must be feeling positively besieged if not paranoid, I can almost see Trump sitting back with an irrepressible smile on his face thinking that that is just the conditions he wanted to create.

Is Hillary's Grip On The Machinery Going To Fail?

Each passing week brings more bad news for Hillary and her bid for the White House. Today's release of the State Department summary of their internal audit of her operations as Secretary is quite scathing.

Not only does it conclude that she had failed to comply with both record keeping requirements and established procedures for turning in all records upon leaving office but also that her staff had been warned on more than one occasion that her system was not in compliance with Dept. requirements but that her staff either ignored or brushed off those warnings.

If Hillary and her company of sycophants can't be trusted to behave in a legal manner at the State Dept. why would anyone have even the slightest expectation that she would operate within the bounds of law as President?

It's not George Orwell but Joseph Goebbels that comes to mind. "We were not legal in order to be legal, but in order to rise to power. "We rose to power legally in order to gain the possibility of acting illegally."  
Joseph Goebbels as quoted in Deutsche allgemeine Zeitung, nos. 549-550, Nov. 25, 1934.

Some Random Thoughts For A Thursday.

If we're  all supposed to be so worried about global warming, why are we in the SE having such a miserable "English summer"?

JFK pretty much set his legacy with his "We will put a man on the moon..." speech. Looks like Obama's legacy is going to be, "We will put men in women's bathrooms."

The news media got all up in Trump's face when he came out immediately saying that the Egyptian Air disaster was "yet another terrorist act." Some saying we shouldn't jump to any conclusions. I even heard one pontificating putz say that as the plane "only" had 66 souls aboard it wasn't a high profile enough target to warrant the attention of terrorists and that it wouldn't make a "big enough splash" for their purposes.  Can we drop a couple of these assholes into the Med. from 37,000 feet and see how big a splash they would make? Can we sell tickets?

So now of course we get wall to wall coverage of the event once somebody who knows what they are actually talking about uttered the words "possible  bombing".

Will any of these media douchebags point one of their crooked little fingers at Hillary or Obama and speculate that it might have something to do with their feckless Middle East policy?

Meanwhile instead of doing that, they will get their panties all in a  Over/under because the Republicans in the House shot down another piece of LGBT legislation.

On a related note I have to wonder how many month after the election Hillary and Huma come out of the closet as lesbian lovers. I'd say carpet munchers but some might think that that was offensive to Muslims. Oh wait Huma is already a rug sucker, why not a carpet munchers ad well? Or perhaps it will be Obama and Reggie posing for the cover story in "The Advocate".  Ah one-upsmanship among the Democrats, got to love it. Over/under Dix months anyone?

What with Loretta Lynch having her hands full trying to keep the lid on the Hillary investigation and shove sexual freaks into little girls rooms at school is she going to have time to defend Obamacare from all the insurance companies that are filing suit to force the government to pay the reimbursements the legislation requires?

Maybe not because she's to busy working with HHS trying to figure out a way to push the coming massive premium increases out past the election in the second prong of the "Defense of Hillary" operations.

Just another boring Thursday. I might need a cup of coffee.

Creating A Moralless Society.

The American economic and political model,as opposed to the British Imperial one, wasn't built upon enslaving more and more people as part of its forward projection. Just the opposite. No where have we ever built machines of mass slaughter as the British did in India or the Nazi and communist did across their empires.

Yes we had slavery, and it's immediate dissolution was an insurmountable obstacle to national unity at the Constitutional Convention. However that very Constitution put in place structures and indeed obstacles to its long term growth and the power of the states where the practice still held sway.

The genius of Hamilton's vision was that a developing domestic industry would build the physical machinery that once applied to agriculture would make slave labor economicly inefficient and obsolete. His failure was that he could not foresee the intransigence of the Southern plantation class's stuborn rejection of industrialization and social modernization or the England's willingness to exploit it for their own gain and to undermine the republic tself.  


Our founders for the most part envisioned steadily improving social and economic conditions, not impossible dreams of government enforced perfection. Perhaps their greatest vision was their realization that social conditions and technology will always drive what is perceived as best for current and future generations and the key to that was keeping government out of the way of individual inventiveness as much as possible. The struggle between Hamiltonian individualism and natural progression and Jeffersonian egalitarianism goes on.


Rather than grasping that the American Revolution and its Constitutional government were natural out growths of the Magna Carta, the Enlightenment and the traditions or parliamentary representative government they doubled down on their opposition to everything it stood for. The result was not only the War of 1812 but was also a contributing factor in  Southern intransigent opposition to industrialization and clinging to a cotton/slavery based economy that remained largely dependent on English textile production as a source of income.


Had they instead entered in an economicly and politically cooperative relationship a hundred and fifty years earlier, not just with the US but with the rest of their colonial empire, human social and economic progress for all involved would have advanced far quicker and perhaps would have averted a lot of unnecessary wars and death.  Indeed socialism itself may have never set root beer as deeply as it has.


So now here we are, approaching two and a half centuries into our history and we have all but fully regressed into the moralless, might makes right perspective of British Imperialism. We have all but forgotten that our Revolution was based in a desire to bring morality into the structures of government and international relations.

The Torment Of Hillary Clinton Gets More Delicious By The Week.

Poor Hillary, after tonight's results in Kentucky and Oregon she must be soiling her Depends®. The nomination, indeed the Presidency was supposed to be hers on a silver platter in 2008. Then the usurpor Obama stole her glory.

Now after eight more years of fecklessness, corruption and incompetence, Obama's, Congress's and particularly her own, public disgust has brought forth Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. All Hillary can do at this point is watch as her prize once again appears to be slipping from her grasp and hope that she can out run the primary process.

All eyes will be on California. If she loses there by any kind of margin it may well be Hillary and the Democrats that face a brokered convention and political chaos.

If anyone had written the story of this year's political season as a piece of fiction, no publisher would have touched it. They would have dismissed it as too absurd to be believed.

The Collapsing Left South Of The Border.

Fully engaged as we are in our own tumultuous political season, the growing chaos in Latin America is getting little attention in most American media outlets, particularly those on the ideological left. I have no doubt that they see it all just to embarrassing to their own undisguised political bias.

Although some outlets have recently brought themselves, however grudgingly, to finally declare that the "Bolivarian Socialism" of Venezuela has indeed failed, you won't find much in-depth analysis of the causes of the failure, namely that socialism itself breeds the corruption that destroys the nations where it takes root. Completely absent will be any perspectives that the emerging human tragedy in Venezuela, the political crisis in Brazil, the just announced indictment of the former Argentine President for corruption and the various other states of general lack of development, all grow from the root of the same poisonous tree, collectivist socialism.

Call it what you will, Bolivarian Socialism, Peronism, Jesuitical egalitarianism or just plain old naked communism. They all stagnate at best or utterly fail because of the belief in the corrupt notion that government must provide "positive rights" as opposed guaranteeing "negative rights".

Such a statement of course requires that we define those terms before we go any further: Never mind that I personally think that, as with most leftist arguments, they have deliberately reversed the terms to distort the readers perception of intent, we will go with their terms for the momment as it won't really effect the my deconstruction of their argument.

To understand "negative rights" one need not do much more than carefully read the Preamble to and the text of Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. It very clearly explains that the American founders understood that governments are a necessity of large societies, but that it is also a double edged sword that must be held in check lest the society they are intended to protect and foster slip back into the kind of tyranny the Revolution was fought to rid us of.

As to "positive rights", the concept was pretty much summed up in the last two elements of FDR's "Four Freedoms" speech, "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear".

While negative rights are limitations on the power and authority of government they are also positive affirmations of the supremacy of the individual over the collective just so long as the exercise of individual liberty does not impede others from exercise those same liberties for their own benefit.

Positive rights, on the other hand, while sounding all warm and fuzzy and oh so magnanimous are inherently destructive of the individual's rights to freedom from government interference in the exercise of liberty. The government cannot give to one individual or group of individuals with one hand what it has not taken by force from other individuals and groups of individuals with the other hand. This is of course a very simple concept and balance of logic, but it is the very thing that the collective leftists want considered in any political or economic analysis.

For the collectivist wealth is a finite quantity and government must intervene to provide some equiminious distribution of its limited amount. The individualist however realizes that wealth is produced by the action of the individual acting within the boundaries of a free exchange system. Those boundaries must include prohibitions of monopolies, trade restricting cartels as well as trade restricting government regulation and taxation structures that incentiveses moving those very wealth producing operations to foreign locations that in turn interfere with the individuals right to access to the job market and thus his economic and political freedom.

This is the basis of the Hamiltonian argument that the economic responsibility of government is to act in the national interest by fostering the means of internal production and transportation and the means of conducting trade internationally, not owning and controlling the means of production and distribution.

So now we can return to the subject of how, within these established contexts, "democratic socialism", to use a term currently popular with leftists, is failing in such a dramatic way.

It is because governments dare not to put limitations on human "freedom from want" or the social interference that comes from trying g to produce "freedom from fear."

Government of every tyrannical stripe and degree have tried again and again to produce these utopian fantasies. But what they actually become are communities of the equally poor, equally hungry and equally afraid. Except of course for the "Leader" and his or her minions who live in same mansions of the rich that they railed against before, directing the confiscation of the means of producing wealth, making their operations work at only a fraction of the efficiency of before because by eliminating competition they destroy efficiency and drastically reduce the profit needed to feed their dreams of egalitarianism. What they don't reduce is the amounts that they skim off from the top for their own personal benifits.

Then through bad decisions and inherent corruption the system breaks down to where either the people react to Constitutionally remove and punish the corrupt leaders, as we now seeing in Brazil and Argentina or the corrupt government uses the military and police as instruments of repression against popular anger and uprising over empty store shelves and empty stomachs. As is now happening in Venezuela.

Unfortunately throughout Latin America the traditions of government as provider of goods rather the protector of rights is old and well established. So what we get are the never ending cycles of rapid and violent swings between governments of utopian redistributionist fantacy and outright military repression.

Unfortunately for us north of the border the same fetid dreams of egalitarianism and economic redistribution by force have taken hold. Unless we soon return to more sane perspectives of individual rights and thr freedom to produce as the primary driving force of society and the economy that built our nation in the first place, we are in danger of slipping into the same pit of instability and indeed want and fear we see unfolding before us in Latin America and Europe.

Russia, China and Islam await the chaos  seeking to fill the voids to feed their own never long gone dreams of empire.

My Red Badge Of Courage

Your humble correspondent has just received a most distinguished honor. It would appear that I have gotten under the skin of the oh so self-righteous and sanctimonious, dare I say it ASSHOLES, at National Review. Calling out George Will and the rest as a bunch of bitter losers who have just been told that no they don't own the Republican Party and the rank and file voters no longer feel any obligation to either listen to them or acknowledge their existence has shown them up for what they are, a bunch of thin-skinned whining little crybabies with George Will leading the pack.

Please feel free to scroll through the logs of my disqus alter ego, FVS. You will readily note the big red "Removed" flags coming mostly from National Socialist Review.

https://disqus.com/by/FVS/

Dear George and NR, I hope you will enjoy you bourgeoning irrelevance. I know I will. Being blacklisted by you neocon con artists is a badge of honor!

David Cameron, The UK's John Kerry.

In short he's an arrogant asshole. His latest statement that if the UK leaves the European Union if could result in war, is such patent stupidity it defies reason. While much of the rest of Europe has as come to the conclusion that they are already at war with an invading army of Islam, Cameron openly declares his cluelessness, because that is what he has been told to do do by the globalist elites in the City of London.

Closing the Trap, An Addendum

What is clear is that much of the material in question originated from within a "SCIF" (Special Compartmentalized Information Facility).

Anyone who has worked within such a facility knows that no one is allowed to remove information from within a SCIF in an electronic format, unless it is encoded and being sent to another SCIF that has been cleared to receive such information. This is done to protect not just the obvious information in the document but more importantly the metadata behind it that is an espionage operation's wet dream.

Computer systems within a SCIF are programed so that simply plugging a thumb drive into one will set off an alarm in the security office traceable to the specific computer and the individual logged onto it at the time.

Paper copies of any material are only allowed to be removed AFTER they have been reviewed and if necessary edited by the facility's security office to remove any traceability to original sources. Additionally any such paper removals are supposed to be logged by date, program, name of the individual removing it and the name of the security officer doing the review.

It certainly appears that the Clinton run State Department had some serious holes in their security set up. Gives a whole new meaning to "most transparent administration ever."

He Just Can't Help It.

Back in November I published a short piece titled "John Kerry Is Still An Asshole". http://theeveningchronicle.blogspot.com/2015/11/john-kerry-is-still-asshole.html?m=0

Mind you I still don't think that this steaming pile of elitist garbage is worth much ink, but his commencement speech today at Northeastern University condemning Donald Trump's plan to build a wall on the Mexican border and telling the graduates that thry should prepare for a "borderless world" only reinforces my previous conclusion.

He is correct that no wall will stop all determined terrorists from commiting their evil acts. Yes John, we know because your administration has already allowed rafts of them entry, as was recently demonstrated in San Bernardino. This low grade moron however thinks that that means we should just leave the windows and doors open and give them an open invitation to walk on in.

On second thought, asshole just doesn't cover it. Kerry is a profoundly corrupt man of evil intent. He is the epitome of the globalist con game that Trump condemned in his recent foreign policy speech. To call him a mere asshole is an insult to other assholes. Apparently he suffers from having his alimentary canal working backwards, because what comes out of his mouth is nothing but shit.

Closing The Trap.

Recent headlines declare that some of Hillary Clinton's closest advisors have already been interviewed by the FBI. The stories further clame that Hillary will be called for an interview within weeks.

Hillary is going to have to do some very careful maneuvering to avoid being caught in the narrowing gap between a rock and a hard place.

One the one hand the FBI can't compel her to to answer any questions. On the other hand a string of "I refuse to answer under the protections of the 5th Amendment" answers in the midst of a political campaign is some pretty damaging optics.

So much for the rock. The hard place being that although she may think she has a certain degree of certainty as to what her aids were asked and answered, she can have absolutely no certainty as to what information the FBI has from other sources that contradicts their answers or could contradict hers. Additionally each of those aids was told before leaving that they were not to discuss their interview with anyone other than their attorneys, under penalty of obstruction of justice charges. That then presents her with another jagged lobe of the aforementioned rock. Namely lying to an FBI agent during a criminal investigation is itself a serious felony that carries real prison time. Just ask Lewis "Scooter" Libby.        

Just this week during an interview with Andrea Mitchell she was asked directly if there was any evidence that her email server had been hacked. Rather than answer that she was not an expert in computer forensics so couldn't answer with certainty, she answered just as directly, "no". She had to take the risk. To answer otherwise she would have appeared incompetent, reckless or both.

Neither Clinton nor Mitchel may have realized it at the moment but this might prove to be what is called a "gotcha" question. Seeing as the FBI has the server and rafts of computer forensics technicians you can bet that they already have a definitive answer of their own to Andrea's question.

One cannot be sure either way if Hillary is absolutely certain in her answer or is simply being short sighted, covering her ass or supremely arrogant in her answer. You can bet however that if the Bureau has any evidence to the contrary they will weave a careful series of questions to not just investigate the comings and goings on her email server but to also catch her in a lie.

To think that there aren't elements and agents within the Bureau that would love to hang Hillary's scalp from their belt and cynically don't care what they get her for is supremely naïve. Again, ask Scooter Libby what happens when you get caught lying to the FBI.

If I might exercise a bit of my own cynicism, this is a women who said in another recent interview "I don't believe I have ever lied to the public". A weasel statement if ever there was one that pretty clearly reveals that she thinks that there are lies and then there are lies. Can there be any doubt as to why some 40% percent of people in her own party have said they regard her as dishonest?

Time For The Politicians And Pundits to Grow Up.

"Mommy, Donald took my toy party away!" That pretty much sums it up as the neocon wailing shifts gear from "never Trump" to calls for a third party. The likes of George Will And Bill Kristol are beside themselves with vitriolic rage. Once Kristol even hinted he might consider "never say never" he quickly back peddled. His puppet masters no doubt called him up and threatened to take away his toy front operation, The Weekly Standard.

It's not just the regular neocon outlets like The Weekly Standard and National Review that are getting into the act. The Washington Post and The New York Times will scrape up every ex-Bush operative they can find to run this bloody third party flag up the pole to see who will salute. The Post started in today.

Well step up boys, be the men you claim to be. Throw YOUR hat in the ring. No? What a shock. Your not going to put your personal nuts in the ringer, you're going to go looking for some naive sucker to do it for you. Someone else needs to hang the albatross around their neck, not you guys.

I just wish they had the balls to come out and admit that electing Hillary had been the underlying goal since the day Jeb got his ass handed to him. Neither do they want to admit this is all about maintaining their grip on the reins of power and absolutely nothing to do with Trump not being a"true conservative".

If the voters are smart enough to be fed up with all their lies and RINO betrayals, they aren't going to be stupid enough to buy their sanctimonious  claims of ideological purity. They told us McCain and Romney were they best we could get, we held our noses and voted for them. Well no more.

It's pretty clear that the rank and file Republican voters are taking THEIR party back. If the neocons and RINOs don't like it, well maybe Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes etc. can go have one of those ocean cruises they sponsor every year and have a "pity party" for themsrlves because it's going to be the only party they've got left. Just please take Paul Ryan with you and leave him on some island some where.

Changing The Tune Before The Changing Of The Guard.

Even before Donald Trump marched to an over whelming victory in his native New York and swept through the rest of the Northeast by phenomenal margins, the meme coming from the Cruz campaign and the legless "stop Trump" operations was that the Indiana primary would be "pivotal" and would at last change the momentum of this primary season.

Well the Indiana primary is but two days away and now we are hearing that it is California that will be "pivotal". Seriously? Either these camps think we have short memories or little comprehension of the English language.

I get it, Indiana is a tough state when it comes to political polling. The divide between upstate and downstate are marked. Trump is up, Cruz is down, Cruz is up Trump is down. If I had the copywriter on the phrases I could have made a small fortune. If the is one thing however that has been consistent it has been the failure of the "experts" of the pundit class to predict what Donald Trump will do and how the public will rally around him.

In poker there is something called a "tell". That Cruz and the RNC establishment have pivoted from call in Indiana to now applying it to California is s big fat "tell" that their internal polling numbers and their own readings of the on the ground situation aren't living up to their public bluster and propaganda.

It would be foolish to think that Cruz will drop out of the race after Tuesday. There are bigger issues in play than just Cruz's maniacal quest for power. Namely the neocon establishment's faltering grip on the reins of power. They have held them firmly since Ronald Reagan left office if not before before. They won't let go without a fight.

There is another tell in play. That being the growing calls in the media and from party insiders for a third party candidate "should" Trump secure the nomination. They tried it in 1980 when Reagan won the nomination with an unknown Republican Congressman who stood not a bit of a chance, whose impact was nonexistent and who quickly passed into oblivion.

For all their bluster about Trump no being a conservative the real choices they will have to make is quite simple: Do they fear and loath Trump enough to risk at least 4 years of another Clinton in the White House?

There have been several propaganda pieces lately about so-called mainstream Republicans definitively saying they would never accept the VP slot running with Trump. More importantly there has been absolute dead silence about who will step forward to have the albatross put around their neck of putting Hillary in the White House and possibly shoveling the dirt onto the grave of the Republican party. Oh they might find another John Anderson but not a single one from the neocon establishment from Mittens to Kasich will risk being that sacrificial lamb. They will all run away to fight another day and hope that as the standard bearer Trump doesn't replace the RNC in it entirety.

But then what should we expect? They have proven themselves spineless cowards time and time again for the last eight years. They aren't about to evolve from the blood sucking lampreys they have always been into something else overnight. Let's be rid of them for once and for all.