Wisdom from Gulag Barbie

Kurt Schlichter examines the Democrats' current desire for free stuff.
With reasons why it won't turn out as hoped.
No one loves socialism quite like a moron who has never experienced it firsthand. No one hates it like someone who has seen it up close. I walked around in its ruins overseas; it’s an abattoir. My wife escaped it, though her granddad didn’t – he rotted in Castro’s prisons for nearly two decades because he refused to play ball with the reds. Then he died. Oh well, gotta break a few eggs to create a paradise where somebody else pays for your college, right?

Iran into more trouble

Powerline tells the latest woes from Iran.
Iran’s currency hit a record low on Sunday of 100,000 rials to the dollar amid a deepening economic crisis and the imminent return of full US sanctions.
100,000 rials to the dollar isn’t Venezuela territory, but it is getting there. Just a few more orders of magnitude to go!
The rial has lost half its value against the dollar in just four months, having broken through the 50,000-mark for the first time in March.
Going against President Trump costs you.

Facebook quote of the week

Saddled up heading where the front wheel take us. Work day is over.

Saturday song

K.C. asks you not to go, and the Sunshine Band agrees.

Do you mind if we dance with your dates

Add Animal House to the list of movies being questioned in the current cultural climate.
Give up?
Never.
It's not over until we say it's over.

Sticky issue

Twitchy has the news from San Francisco - be careful where you sit on public transit.
There was at least one needle found in the BART car, and they warned you to look for more.
Way to promote San Francisco and public transportation.

Where the gas will go

As Virginia battles over a pair of natural gas pipelines, we know where the gas could go.
Europe.
Thanks to President Trump's agreement with the European Union, more American liquefied natural gas will be going to Europe.
"The eurozone and Washington also agreed to lower industrial tariffs on both sides and increase liquefied natural gas and soybean exports to Europe, with an agreement to avoid tariffs on European auto makers also in the works," according to the Wall Street Journal.
The pipelines are needed.
To help the world go.

Bluefield to the Bronx

The Orioles traded Zach Britton to the Yankees last night.
As the news spread through the clubhouse, Britton remember his origins in the Orioles organization in 2006.
“Weird. Been here for 12 years, black and orange. Down in the bullpen I didn’t know it was official but I was just running through flying to Bluefield and Lenny Johnson picking me up at the airport and being 18, first time away from home. And then hitting Delmarva, Frederick, Bowie, Norfolk, every stop along the way. All of the coaches that helped me get to this point."
Like Cal Ripken and Boog Powell before him, Britton made his Orioles start at Bowen Field and built his talent to a great major league career.

Otto's sad story

GQ tells the story behind the eventual release of Otto Warmbier in the way to downplay President Trump's effort to get Warmbier home before he died.
"Was he really tortured?" the article asks.
As if only physical torture is torture.
The equipment tearing down North Korea's nuclear program should be named for Warmbier.
The country's reduced threat is Warmbier's legacy.

Can't stop the fire

Victor Davis Hanson sees the problem Democrats face.
Democrats privately acknowledge that Obama wrecked the Democratic Party—losing Congress, the presidency, state and local offices, and now the Supreme Court. But they must praise the forces of that wreckage and seek to trump them by becoming the party of hyper-identity politics. In other words, the Democrats know what sort of agenda might bring them back into power as it did in 1992. But they feel that Clintonesque cure is worse than the disease of being in the purer political wilderness without power.
So, for now, they rant, they rave, and they stew, accepting that they cannot do what might save them and therefore they only do more of what is destroying them. Out of that lose-lose dilemma was birthed Trump hatred. Without a persuasive argument, progressives came up with the mantra that Trump is a traitor, and that all they needed to do was to explain to supposedly dense voters that their current economic renaissance was actually jackbooted National Socialism.

Why the change of heart?

Michael Ledeen wonders why Democrats have changed their tunes on Russia.
As recently as the Obama-Romney debates, the Democratic candidate ridiculed the notion that Russia was America’s prime global enemy. The intelligence community notoriously understated the Soviet threat, as demonstrated by the Team B exercise, which demonstrated a far greater military threat, and more aggressive anti-American intentions, than official estimates had indicated. The IC supported a more benign interpretation of Soviet intentions. Today, it is astonishing to see former CIA director Brennan calling the president a traitor for failing to challenge Putin in Helsinki.

Can we keep the trophy?

Although Virginia and Florida State don't play very often now, there is a trophy given to the winner.
It's named after Thomas Jefferson and his grandson Frances Eppes VII, who served on the board at the founding of what became Florida State University.
But Eppes owned slaves.
So his statue of campus may be moved.
Even though students voted two years ago to keep the statue where it was.
Just give Virginia the trophy, and some of the money Florida State's football program earns.

Saturday song

ZZ Top gets your morning rocking.

Gunned down

Who wants to direct "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3?"
Thanks for your past service, James Gunn, but we're going in a different direction.
You'll have more free time to be on Twitter now.

There goes the neighborhood

For more than a dozen years, Yankee Phil and I have lived in the same neighborhood.
Finding his blog in 2008 got me going on this.
But it's time for change.
He's moving out of the neighborhood, while staying in the same county.
Whatever media he's on, it will be fun to check in with Yankee Phil.

Enjoying the real America

After surviving a lengthy trip with Iowahawk, Australia's Tim Blair tells his tale of traveling across the United States.
It was remarkably politics free.
Except that nobody wanted to talk about Trump, Clinton or politics in general. This wasn’t due to apathy or lack of engagement. It was because there are more interesting topics of conversation, such as, well, just about everything. Work. Family. Sport. Music. Weather. Cars. Food. The semi-trailer carrying a few tons of bourbon that crashed and caught fire on the interstate. You know, topics people care about outside of election years.
Sounds like fun.

Chill about Trump

Reading the news, it sounds like President Trump's press conference with Putin was the worst thing ever.
Critics going to criticize, that's for sure.
What did they want Trump to do?
Stab Putin in the chest and pull out his still-beating heart?
If Russians were involved in the 2016 election, it was weakness from the Democratic side that allowed it in.
A campaign that can't protect its computer network can't protect the country.
Especially if they don't admit the problem.
So Trump has to do it for them.

Their hopes are dying too

Another unhappy liberal has advice for Democrats - fight.
You mean they haven't been fighting since November 9, 2016?
The inability of Democratic leadership to come up with a coherent message to engage and battle Trumpism and the Republican Party is unconscionable: Trump’s daily chaos and his policy upheaval should frame every utterance from the Democratic Party. There is, after all, so much from which to choose, from immigrant children kept in cages to the judiciary being stacked for the next 50 years. While Sen. Schumer has said that he will fight Kavanaugh’s appointment, no clear unified message has come from Senate Democrats on how, exactly, they plan to either push back against the nomination or lay his decisions directly at the White House's door. And when activists take matters into their own hands, the timidity that characterized so much of the Democratic response to Trump in 2016 is on full display: Don't irk the vast center, they seem to say, no matter how much it fires up the left.
Only four more months, then they can whine about losing against in 2018.

Facebook quote of the week

I have come to the conclusion that Donald Trump is both the most loved and most hated man on the planet.

Saturday song

Bryan Adams lets us return to the summer of 69.

Gohmert's goal

The highlight of Thursday's Strzok hearing probably was Rep. Louie Gohmert's comment.
The Democrats trust Strzok, but did he make the same face with the same type when his wife asked about his girlfriend?
Is it hypocritical for Republicans to use personal information against Strzok?
Much complaining about President Trump includes attacking his personal behavior.
If you attack Trump, his team can punch back - twice as hard.

MuellerGate

The Other McCain renamed the Russian collusion investigation that hasn't found any collusion involving Trump.
Mueller has not yet produced any evidence of the “collusion” that he was expected to find, and why? Because this was a phony conspiracy theory created by Clinton operatives, using Fusion GPS in an attempt to fabricate an illusion of “collusion” that did not actually exist.

Supreme fail

Kurt Schlichter has enjoyed the liberal protests about the Supreme Court.
Probably too much.
He points out that liberals and Normals have different visions.
Everything they want a Supreme Court to do is entirely devoted to showing us who’s boss, but everything we want the Court to do is entirely devoted to making them leave us alone.

Forget the blue wave

To take control of the Senate, Democrats basically have to draw an inside straight - win all 10 states they currently hold where Donald Trump won in 2016 plus take two Republican seats.
Looking less likely by the day.
Your Democratic leaning Supreme Court justices will have to hang on longer.

Let the fun continue

Only a few minutes until President Trump unveils his pick to sit on the Supreme Court.
Oh, the agony for Democrats.
It should have been Garland Merrick.
Or someone else Hillary liked.
But she lost.
Trump won.
And the fun that began November 8, 2016 continues.

No pipeline, all the time

Blue Virginia usually has several posts a week about the protests against natural gas pipelines being built.
Yet, the work goes on.
There's gas in the ground that people need to do things - either here or in Europe.
No pipeline is not an option.
You can carry the natural gas through existing transportation systems - which go through populated areas - or go through rural areas.
Blue Virginia will continue posting and continue watching work done.

Recycling update

I made a trip to the aluminum can recycling center, getting 50 cents a pound.
Same price as last time.
But there was a difference.
The worker who weighed my cans for years had moved on to better opportunities.
Time to train a new worker.

Facebook quote of the week

I saved a beer tonight.
It was stuck in a bottle.
 it’s ok now.

Saturday song

Who's the lover for Chicago? They're not telling.

He's a black lesbian and he's okay

Now Monty Python is on the firing line from the diversity police.
Just ask Terry Gilliam.
"I no longer want to be a white male, I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world: I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian… My name is Loretta and I’m a BLT, a black lesbian in transition.”
And that's okay.

Talk of the summer

Alan Dershowitz has headed to Martha's Vineyard for some summer relaxation.
Some of his former friends aren't in the mood to see him.
The politically charged missive didn’t pull any punches. Teller, whose wife is director Claudia Weill, said Dershowitz had embarrassed himself by so often appearing on television to strenuously oppose the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.
 "You thereby gave Trump an opportunity to use you and your positions in his own defense, to wave you like his pom-pom. How unfortunate for all of us,” wrote Teller, a partner in a Beverly Hills law firm. “You defended and gave cover to this president who relentlessly disrupts and destroys all that we value and causes massive and lasting damage to our political system, our courts, our standing in the world, the environment and more. In all of that you are complicit.”
The waters of New England aren't the only thing that's chilly this year.

Gotta have my Pops

It's Boston Pops Fourth of July time, with Stars and Stripes Forever.

Supply and demand lesson

The cost of a gallon of liberal tears keeps dropping.
Too much supply.

Bring on Willett

ABC looks at some of Justice Don Willett's tweets.
They should have gone back a week to catch this.

pic.twitter.com/RTIplxTxCY

— Judge Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) December 25, 2017

Looks like the difference between Republicans and Democrats.