No comments on Presty the DJ for May 4
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Facebook Friend Michael Smith:
I tend to think in corny analogies, so be forewarned. Here comes another one.
Those of us of a certain age have a mental image of the Ford Mustang.Indeed. Here was mine, and it went as fast as my legs could drive it.
What began as a fun little car, a sporty little coupe and convertible, launched an entire landscape of American muscle cars that included the Camaro and Firebird from General Motors, the Challenger from Dodge, and the Javelin from American Motors.
We had a Javelin, though it never looked this nice.
The original Mustang was co-designed by John Najjar, who was a huge fan of the P-51 Mustang fighter plane. Najjar and Robert J. Eggert, Ford Division market research manager (who also bred quarterhorses) suggested the name. Ford management decided the combination of these images, the power, muscle and lethality of the P-51 combined with image of a wild mustang running wild and free across the plains, was the very essence of America.
When I think about the Mustang, I see two cars in my mind — a 1965 maroon convertible that is, to this day, in just about every parade held in my hometown and the ’69 GT 390 Fastback from the Steve McQueen movie “Bullitt”.
What I don’t see is a 4-door, all-electric sedan with child safety seats in the rear.
When you change what makes a Mustang a Mustang, it isn’t a Mustang, I don’t care what the badge and the marketing materials call it.
Ford tried that once already with the Mustang II (second generation) and to some extent, the third and fourth generations. The Mustang didn’t begin to look and drive like a Mustang until the fifth generation was introduced in 2005.
It’s not that there weren’t some iterations that were decent cars, it was just that none of them were real Mustangs.
Ford went back to what worked, what made a Mustang a Mustang.
It is the same with America.
Over the past 60 years, America has had its guts slowly ripped out over and replaced with parts called “not America”. Hopefully, we will follow the Mustang evolution and get back to what makes America America.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.
I believe there are far more Democrats than Republicans who hate America for what it is, not what it has been. They have such a jaundiced view of how America has dealt with significant and difficult moral and civilizational issues, that nothing they see satisfies them.
These folks tend to compare America to some theoretical standard of perfection that has never existed outside the Kingdom of Heaven, believing that it is appropriate for their enemies to bear the sins of their ancestors while denying the sins of their own.
There are Republicans who are just like these Democrats, they are just too cowardly to admit it.
The libertarians can’t decide if they are John Birch or Karl Marx, authoritarians or anarchists. There is a lot to like about their ideas of freedom and liberty until you get to the schizophrenic parts.
Look, there is a lot that Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan, Peter Theil, Elon Musk and I will disagree upon. To a lesser extent, I have disagreements with many of our “conservative thought leaders” — Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck — each for different reasons — but where I disagree with Democrats 80% of the time, I agree with the latter folks 80% of the time.
If you love America and believe in Justice Scalia’s perspective of our Constitution — that it says what it says and it doesn’t say what it doesn’t say — we can be members of the same tribe.
If you are ready to get back to basics, to MABA – Make America Bullitt Again — I’m ready to work with you, regardless of your party affiliation.
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Tim Nerenz:
LendEDU lists the 50 states ranked by the number of years is takes to pay off the average student loan in that state. …
Utah’s top rank is an average repayment period of 8.14 years of average monthly payments of $202 to pay off the average loan of $19,742
New Hampshire ranks last with an average repayment period of 14.4 years of $213 monthly payments and an average loan of $36,754.
The median of state averages is 11.68 years with monthly payments of $208.47. This is for a degree that the Department of Education says will increase lifetime earnings by more than $1 million.
WIsconsin ranks 33rd with an average of $30,600 per student borrower and 72 percent of 2019 college graduates graduating with education debt.
Any credit counselor or financial advisor will tell you that doubling up the monthly payment will reduce a 30- year mortgage to an 11-year repayment, and the same is true of car payments and student loans. Doubling the average $200 payment reduces the average payoff period to less than six years.
According to NerdWallet the average new car loan is paid over six years with $684 in monthly payments. The average used car payment is $488 for five years.
That difference alone could provide the money to double up the average student loan payments and cut the repayment time by half or more. It is one of the many ways that responsible degree holders have paid down their debt.
And here is another. The 2017 Tax Reforms reduced taxes on households making $15-50k by 16-20%; for those making $51-100k, taxes were lowered by 15-17%; for those making $100-500k, taxes were reduced by 11-13%; for those making $500k to $1 million, taxes dropped 9%; for those making over $1 million, taxes were reduced by 6%.
The standard deduction was increased by $6k for single filers and $12k for married couples and heads of households. How many student loan payers used that extra money to accelerate their loan payments and retire their debt sooner? Most of the accounting majors, I would guess.
Three rounds of covid stimmy checks provided $3000 per adult with adders for dependents in the household – that is 15 months of average student loan payments for the degree-holding laptop class that largely evaded the income loss imposed by covid lockdowns. Did they use the windfall to bring their accounts current?
This is an election year and Democrats should make student loan forgiveness THE issue of the campaign. All 435 Members of Congress should hold a special town hall in their districts on this one question.
They can explain to their constituents who chose affordable colleges and worth-it degrees or trades, earned scholarships and Pell grants ($2 billion unused each year), worked their way through school, used employer benefits, chose military service, saved for their children’s tuition, and honored their loan contracts are now morally obligated to pay off the debts of those who did not. Use plain English and look your folks in the eye.
If you are curious, the percentage of adults with federal student loans in arrears is 4%. This latest marginalized community is one tenth of the adults with college degrees, which has grown to 37% of the adult population.
The proportion among naturalized citizens is higher (42%) and the percentage of loans in arrears is far lower than native-born Americans. If you come here from somewhere else, your appreciation for our marvelous country is much greater – same as it ever was.
Our tax dollars fund colleges and universities; our tax dollars fund Pell Grants, the GI bill, and education reimbursement benefits for government workers; our tax dollars front the money for students who could otherwise not afford it – those loan proceeds go directly to college administrators each term to spend as they wish.
The argument that we do not do enough to support higher education is absurd; the people who make it are not serious.
The costs of college have increased because government money going to higher education has increased. Financial aid that follows the student provides the obvious incentive for colleges and universities to let in more students. Most colleges and universities are tuition-dependent, meaning their endowments are nowhere near as large as the Harvards and Yales of the world, and that provides another incentive to let in students, and since the feds are paying most of the cost of the student, there is no incentive for a college or university, even one with tight finances, to limit what it charges students.
A comment on Nerenz’s Facebook post passes on this from MoneyWise:
Experts often say a college degree vastly increases lifetime earnings and job prospects. But not necessarily for all majors.
Using earnings and employment information from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Bankrate recently ranked 162 majors for career success after graduation. These are the majors on the bottom — counting down to the most worthless.
The list:10. Library Science.9. Interdisciplinary studies (“smaller, specialty majors spanning everything from ancient language studies to archaeology to neuroscience”).8. Drama and theater arts.7. Educational psychology.6. Human services and community organization. (As community organizer Baravk Obama could attest, the money is much better in politics.)5. Visual arts.4. Cosmetology services and culinary arts.3. Psychology.2. Composition and speech. (“This major lends itself to a wide variety of different career tracks. Grads may find work in fields such as journalism, writing, political campaigning, public relations or marketing. Nearly every industry needs writers; the trick to being employed is gaining experience in a specific field.” Average income $44,211; average unemployment 4.9 percent.)1. Fine arts. (Average income $40,855; average unemployment 9.1 percent.)The poster then asks:
Why should we have to foot the bill for all of Americas philosophers, journalists, creative artists, general studies, and other nearly useless college degrees as ranked by MoneyWise? Go to tech school, learn a trade, pick up a tool belt and make yourself useful – that is the advice most of these college bums needed to hear. -
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The Wall Street Journal:
Michael Gableman isn’t a secret Democratic double agent, but he’s sure acting like one. Mr. Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, was hired by the GOP Assembly to investigate the 2020 election. Last week he wrangled an extension. At this rate, Wisconsin Republicans might keep trying to undo the 2020 presidential result all the way to Election Day 2022, or 2024.
Their priority ought to be beating Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Six months from November, his GOP challengers should be hammering Covid lockdowns and inflation. “Do I think that the election was rigged from the very beginning against Donald Trump ?” former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch told a radio show last week. “Yes, absolutely.” Mr. Gableman has called on lawmakers to “look at the option of decertification of the 2020 Wisconsin presidential election.”
What option? Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes for President Biden were counted on Jan. 6, 2021. There is no mechanism to nullify them. A resolution to “decertify” is akin to a voter shouting at the end of the bar at 2 a.m. that his 2020 ballot is hereby rescinded.
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Mr. Gableman has already issued his report, which includes both points of concern and also red herrings. He cites a handful of examples of residents in nursing homes who cast ballots despite being allegedly incapable. In one case, family “provided copies of that resident’s signature against the signature on the absentee envelope, and they do not match.”
Manipulation of the elderly happens. In February a nursing-home worker in Michigan received 45 days in jail, plus probation. She allegedly forged signatures on ballot applications for residents who hadn’t asked to vote. If that took place in Wisconsin, it should be prosecuted. Yet it’s tricky: Only a judge can strip a Wisconsinite’s franchise. Even people under guardianship can be eligible to vote.
Wisconsin’s approach to this fraught problem is to have Special Voting Deputies (SVDs) who supervise absentee ballots in nursing homes. But when Covid hit in 2020, such facilities barred visitors. The bipartisan state elections commission voted to suspend sending SVDs into nursing homes. Mr. Gableman says this was illegal and enabled abuse. Possibly, though commissioners have defended it as an open public decision to avoid disenfranchising the elderly.
Mr. Gableman’s report claims that at many unnamed nursing homes, including in Milwaukee County, 100% of registered voters cast ballots. Is it true? He doesn’t show his work. The city of Milwaukee’s elections chief says the real figure for her area is 79%, with some facilities as low as 36%. Kenosha says it had 458 registered voters with addresses in residential facilities, and 388 cast ballots.
The Racine sheriff investigated a nursing home with 200 beds and 42 votes, eight from people allegedly incapable. But it doesn’t sound like a coordinated scheme to help Mr. Biden. “If a resident could only point at the ballot,” an investigator said, “that’s what the employee of the facility would mark.” To give a sense of scale, the state election commission says in 2016 there were 17,176 total SVD votes. Mr. Trump lost in 2020 by 20,682.
Mr. Gableman recapitulates GOP complaints about private funds sent to local election offices in 2020 from a nonprofit tied to Mark Zuckerberg. In Wisconsin most of the cash went to five cities. This practice should be banned, because official voter education can easily bleed into get-out-the-vote drives for select constituencies. But courts have said it wasn’t illegal. Mr. Gableman’s assertion that the nonprofit grants constituted “election bribery” is a stretch.
He takes aim at voting equipment from ES&S, which can include wireless modems. “One municipality,” the report alleges, “admitted that these machines had these modems and were connected to the internet on election night. The reason given was to ‘transmit data’ about votes to the county clerks.” In Green Bay, Mr. Gableman claims, ES&S machines “were connected to a secret, hidden Wi-Fi access point.”
ES&S disputes almost every syllable. “Green Bay voting machines have no wireless connection capability,” the company says. Elsewhere in Wisconsin, ES&S scanners use modems to transmit unofficial results on election night. Yet they “do not connect to the public internet, but instead use private network configurations specifically designed for high-security applications.” The final, official tallies later “are physically uploaded at election headquarters.”
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Republicans have valid gripes about how the 2020 election was run. But it isn’t hard to figure out what flipped Wisconsin. Many voters, Republicans included, didn’t want four more years of Mr. Trump’s antics. In some suburban wards, 10.5% of Mr. Biden’s voters picked the GOP for Congress. This beats the evidence of vote fraud detected by everyone who has looked.
Mr. Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 on his own, and if Republicans keep chasing ghosts, he will also help them lose in 2022.
If Trump didn’t routinely antagonize voters who would otherwise vote for Republicans, vote fraud wouldn’t matter. This is why, regardless of what you think of Trump’s work as president (certainly more positives than negatives, especially compared to the anti-American disaster that is Senile Joe Biden), Trump should not run again. For one thing, by Trump’s own definition he’s a loser, since he lost the 2020 election. For another, in the highly unlikely event Trump were to win in 2024, he would become an instant lame duck, and the 2028 presidential election campaign would start the day after Election Day. -
The Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security is establishing a Disinformation Governance Board and placing Nina Jankowicz at its head, DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed earlier this week.
Jankowicz, who will serve as executive director of the new agency, is a fellow at the Wilson Center, where she studies “the intersection of democracy and technology in Central and Eastern Europe,” and the author of two books: How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict and How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back.
In her first book, published in 2020, Jankowicz, who has also served as an adviser to the Ukrainian government, “journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run, and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them.” At stake in this fight, she submits, are “the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.”
In her second book, published this year, Jankowicz concludes that “all women in politics, journalism and academia now face untold levels of harassment and abuse in online spaces,” and purports to have written “one of the definitive reports on this troubling phenomenon.”
“Drawing on rigorous research into the treatment of Kamala Harris — the first woman vice-president — and other political and public figures, Nina also uses her own experiences to provide a step-by-step plan for dealing with harassment, abuse, doxing and disinformation in online spaces,” reads the Amazon description of How to Be a Woman.
In her introduction to the book, Jankowicz imagines a situation, among other scenarios, in which a stranger on the subway mentions to her that he went to a bachelor party in Ukraine, before offering, “It’s a shame about the civil war, but this is probably the first time a young, pretty thing like you is hearing about it, I guess.”
In the ensuing pages, Jankowicz suggests that, if the aforementioned scenario played out in real life rather than online, the police might have been called and arrests might have been made.
Both Jankowicz’s record and online behavior have come under scrutiny since the announcement of her new post, as she’s made plain both her disbelief in the since-confirmed Hunter Biden laptop story and her affection for Christopher Steele, the author of the discredited dossier on former president Donald Trump that helped launch the Mueller probe into his 2016 campaign.
In a series of 2020 tweets, Jankowicz sought to discredit the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop, promoting an article that she said cast “doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story” and arguing: “The emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a [fairy] tale about a laptop repair shop.” She also referenced the “laptop from hell” during one of the 2020 presidential debates and appeared to endorse an open letter, written by former intelligence officials, making the case that the contents of the laptop were part of a Russian disinformation campaign, despite the fact that the signatories acknowledge they had no evidence to support the claim.
Jankowicz told the Associated Press that the story should have been considered “a Trump campaign product.”
She also tweeted, about a podcast featuring the dossier’s author: “listened to this last night – Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen.”
On Thursday, the new member of the Biden administration defended her record, arguing that at least one of her tweets was taken out of context.
For those who believe this tweet is a key to all my views, it is simply a direct quote from both candidates during the final presidential debate. If you look at my timeline, you will see I was livetweeting that evening. https://t.co/nI7ZgBtTLC https://t.co/4DjBl9bzt0
— Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) April 27, 2022
In one video, Jankowicz takes on the role of “Moaning Myrtle,” a ghost featured in the Harry Potter series, and sings a sexualized song about the titular character:
Went looking for some prefects in the bathroom one day
But instead I found Harry and so I said “hey!”
I helped him solve the mystery of the egg
But I’d like to solve the mystery between his legs!
I hope that Harry drowns tomorrow in the lake
So that our honeymoon we can take
You know that ghosts have working ’natomies
What’s better than that – we don’t get STDs!Jankowicz has also integrated her day job into her singing hobby.
Asked about Jankowicz on Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki professed not to “have any information about this individual.”
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson unloaded on Joe Biden’s plan to create a taxpayer-funded thought police that so happens will be deployed ahead of the 2022 midterms. The timing isn’t lost on anyone. Elon Musk buys Twitter—and now the Department of Homeland Security announced this “disinformation” hit squad that will combat narrative Democrats don’t like. We’re not Oceania. We’re not a banana republic. Liberals are afraid they can’t control the flow of information anymore. The days of Twitter censoring conservatives are over. A simple Google search often torpedoes most woke talking points with simple facts and figures that have existed for years. With the Left losing control of a major social media platform and Joe Biden’s increasing the frequency of his dementia moments, clamping down on the access is key. There is no good news associated with this administration. None. So, deploy DHS. Carlson was having none of it (via Real Clear Politics):
When Elon Musk first announced that he was buying Twitter, it was pretty obvious the Democratic Party would soon become unhinged, not just angry or annoyed in the way you’re very used to, but instead legitimately terrified and hysterical. Imagine how you’d feel if an armed intruder broke into your home at 3 in the morning. You couldn’t exactly know where things were going, but you’d be dead certain that everything was at stake. That’s how Democrats feel right now, because, in fact, everything is at stake.
Joe Biden cannot continue to control this country if you have free access to information. It’s that simple. Biden certainly is not improving your life. He’s not even trying to improve your life. So, the best he can do is lie to you and demand that you believe it, but to do that, he needs to make certain that nobody else can talk because if you were to hear the truth, you might not obey. How is Biden going to pull that off? It’s not easy. Well, one option would be to get men with guns to tell you to shut up. Most Americans probably haven’t thought of that because this isn’t Africa or Eastern Europe. This is America and we don’t do things like that here and never have. More precisely, we haven’t until now, but now Joe Biden is president and everything is different.
So today, to herald the coming of the new Soviet America, the administration announced its own Ministry of Truth. This will be called the Disinformation Governance Board. Laugh if you want, but just to show you, they’re not kidding around here. This board is not part of the State Department or any other agency focused on foreign threats from abroad. No, the Disinformation Governance Board is part of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is a law enforcement agency designed to police the United States and that, by the way, has a famously large stockpile of ammunition. So, it’s not a joke at all. Here’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
[…]
So Mayorkas told us that disinformation is a threat to homeland security. Now he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security, so presumably he would know since assessing threats to Homeland Security is his job, but what he didn’t tell us is how he’s defining disinformation.
So here we have this new and terrifying thing that the Biden administration is so concerned about that it’s created a new agency to fight it, but Mayorkas never said or even hinted as to what it might be. So, the man in charge of the disinformation governing board never defined disinformation.
[…]
…one of our biggest law enforcement agencies has men with guns around the country doing so many things to stop disinformation and false narratives. Those aren’t even lies. They’re just deviations from the approved script. Mayorkas told us again that men with guns planned to “identify individuals who could be descending into violence.” Could be descending. Not people who’ve committed violence or even been accused of any crime at all. DHS is instead using law enforcement powers to identify and punish people who think the wrong things.
We used to joke that the United States didn’t need the SS because the IRS existed. We’ve entered a new and disturbing stage here because it’s no longer a joke. The test run for using these institutions began under Obama. The Department of Justice went after ex-Fox News reporter James Rosen for reporting a story on North Korea that contained classified information. The leak hunt named Rosen as a possible co-conspirator for simply doing his job. The Obama DOJ also obtained phone records of a dozen or so AP reporters. Then, there was the whole Russian collusion hoax. The IRS targeted conservative non-profits. And the FBI doctoring paperwork to obtain FISA spy warrants on Trump campaign officials. They also spied on Trump’s campaign as well. The Left’s long march towards weaponizing the state against its own people can be traced to the man who won the 2008 election. And now, in 2022, they’re going to deputize the DHS to go after conservatives for not thinking the right way. We all know this committee is going to go off the rails. We all know it will be staffed by people who are certifiably insane.
All you need to know about this latest Biden outrage is that Democrats would be screaming bloody murder from the rooftops had the Trump administration come up with this fascist idea.
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Today is the 62nd anniversary of what I used to consider the greatest radio station on the planet in its best format:
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The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the first of its 13-show U.S. tour at the Milwaukee Auditorium:
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The number one single today in 1960:
The number one British album today in 1966 was the Rolling Stones’ “Aftermath”:
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Today in 1976, after a concert in Memphis, Bruce Springsteen scaled the walls of Graceland … where he was arrested by a security guard.
Today in 2003, a $5 million lawsuit filed by a personal injury lawyer against John Fogerty was dismissed.
The lawyer claimed he suffered hearing loss at a 1997 Fogerty concert.
The judge ruled the lawyer assumed the risk of hearing loss by attending the concert. The lawyer replied, “What?”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 