Ihave some older stuff to post but with the Cuba trip starting I wanna lead with this:

Some days I really do wonder whether President Barack Obama is paying attention.

Shot:

President Obama Verified account ‏@POTUS

¿Que bolá Cuba? Just touched down here, looking forward to meeting and hearing directly from the Cuban people.

Chaser:

Rory Cooper ‏@rorycooper

Rory Cooper Retweeted President Obama

They're not allowed to use Twitter or the internet, Mr. President.

 

Ouch.

and since Obamacare is about insurance and NOT about healthcare ... a little roundup:

WHEN IT COMES TO THE MSM, TRUMP IS JUST FOLLOWING THE PLAYBOOK THE LEFT ESTABLISHED LONG AGO:

Shot: “Trump Campaign Continues Heavy-Handed Approach to Critical Media.”

— Stephen Kruiser, PJ Media.

Chaser: “How can it be unprecedented Hillary already did the same thing?”

— Sean Davis, The Federalist, tweeting a link to a June 2015 Boston Globe article titled, “Clinton campaign bans national pool reporter from N.H. events.”

BIAS BY OMISSION: ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision Censor El Chapo Weapon Being Linked to Fast and Furious.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? MSNBC Turns Intolerably White? 

‘OUTRAGEOUS ATTACK’!: MSNBC’S CHRIS MATTHEWS CLUTCHES PEARLS OVER ‘SEXISM’ OF TRUMP’S BARKING-HILLARY AD.

Reminder: This is the network whose anchors demanded that when the Democrat primary was going on too long in their estimation in the spring of 2008, that one of  “superdelegates” needed to level the boom on Hillary, “Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.” And in November of 2013 that someone defecate and urinate down Sarah Palin’s throat. Comcast-owned NBC and its affiliated networks laid the ground rules for political discourse and employed Trump as a host for nearly a decade; his current ad seems positively mild by MSNBC’s standards.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Iran nuke deal now found to prohibit nuclear watchdog org from reporting on possible violations.

THAT WAS NEVER A CONDITION OF OUR AGREEMENT: Iran fires missiles marked with “Israel should be wiped out.”

I HAD BEEN ASSURED JOHN KERRY HAD NEGOTIATED A CEASEFIRE: Syria opposition to go to peace talks, says Assad escalating war.

Obama Says European distraction led to Libya “mess.”

In a profile published Thursday in The Atlantic, the President told author Jeffrey Goldberg that British Prime Minister David Cameron became “distracted by a range of other things” after the operation. Cameron, along with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, took the brunt of Obama’s criticism.

Although Obama thinks the intervention went as well as it could, he views Libya today as a “mess.” Privately, according to the article, he refers to the troubled state as a “sh*t show.”

It’s always anybody’s sh*t show but his.

a new catagory

In a classic leftwing Fox Butterfield moment SF Weekly noted in 2009, “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco's] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.”

“Detroit is a dramatic example, but every time you write a too-large check to a terrible utility monopoly, the same dynamic is at work. All those people standing in line at the DMV or seeing potentially productive days wasted because our airport authorities are so completely incompetent, all those millions of man-hours wasted during any given work week by the traffic in Houston or Los Angeles — every one of these represents a theft from the future. Every instance of overregulation and political favoritism that keeps capital in the hands of less-able users and away from its best use makes us all — all of us — poorer, even if it is in ways that are not always plainly visible to us. What’s the plan for Detroit? Politicians and their plans did this to Detroit — and they’ll do it to the rest of us, too, if we let them.”

Read the whole thing.

THE CHICAGO WAY: More Crime, Less Justice.

For a bit historical perspective, Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office before Al Capone entered federal prison in 1932.

Have I jumped the shark here?  Too much info?  But I find this stuff fascinating.

[Jonathan H. Adler] The erroneous argument the Senate has a ‘constitutional duty’ to consider a Supreme Court nominee

and

Fact-Checking the White House SCOTUS Nomination Twitter Feed

You didn't really EXPCt them to be right, did you?

The myth of the previous vote: Previous Senate Vote

[David Bernstein] Re: Merrick Garland, it’s a bit late for the Obama administration and its supporters to appeal to constitutional norms requiring Senate consideration

Money graph: ...the Obama administration, with its aggressive assertions of executive power, is in a poor position to appeal to constitutional norms. The administration showed a severe lack of respect for constitutional norms when, for example, contrary to decades of precedent that the Justice Department will defend any federal law with a plausible defense, it refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act; when the administration forced Common Core standards on local education without anything resembling explicit congressional approval or even debate, based on an aggressive reading of vague existing law; when the administration unilaterally changed immigration policy via executive order, after Congress failed to pass legislation that would have accomplished similar ends; when the president has simply refused to enforce provisions of Obamacare that proved politically problematic; and, for that matter, when the president advocated for and signed perhaps the only major piece of American social legislation (Obamacare) that not only failed to win widespread bipartisan support, but also attracted not a single vote in either house of Congress from the other party. More generally, President Obama has repeatedly promised to try to circumvent Congress using any arguably legal means available, on the rather extra-constitutional grounds, contrary to the norms attendant to the separation of powers, that “we can’t wait” for Congress to pass legislation that the president favors.

 More from the Crossball Factor: THE GRAFT AWAKENS: “Hardball host Chris Matthews twice promoted Star Wars on his show two months after The Force Awakens director J. J. Abrams and his wife, Katie McGrath, donated to Kathleen Matthews’ congressional campaign, something Chris Matthews never disclosed. The MSNBC anchor is currently facing calls to suspend his show after it was revealed that 48 of Matthews’ guests on Hardball had donated $79,050 to his wife’s campaign, sometimes just before or after appearing on the show.”

Back in January of 2011, “CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term ‘crosshairs’ during a segment: ‘We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language,’” as NewsBusters noted during that brief period of magical thinking when the DNC-MSM convinced themselves of the awesome talismanic powers of Sarah Palin’s clip-art and the media’s own gun-related metaphors.

But whatever dalliances with that form of politically correct Orwellian self-censorship, CNN has since thrown all caution to the wind: “CNN gives platform to maniac who tried to rush Trump; what were they thinking?”

“Trump is awful,” Iowahawk tweets, “but not nearly as awful as a media that is now almost literally encouraging his assassination.”

Funny, when Paddy Chayefsky wrote the script for Network in the mid-1970s, I don’t think he had intended it to be a how-to guide for programming 24-hour cable news in the 21st century.

with Merrick Garland stuff to follow, perhaps later this afternoon?

1. 

Late last month Stephen Bainbridge quoted from pieces explaining Trump’s supporters by Ben Domenech at Commentary and by Peggy Noonan, along with a quote from the late Christopher Lasch’s 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, in a post titled “Donald Trump is the beta test of a cure for The Revolt of the Elites.” Domenech wrote:

The post-Cold War left-right politics of the nation have been breaking down in slow motion for two decades. They are now being replaced by a different type of inside-outside politics.

The Trump phenomenon is neither a disease nor a symptom – he is instead the beta-test of a cure that the American people are trying out. It won’t work. But this is where our politics are going: working and middle class Americans are reasserting themselves against a political and cultural establishment that has become completely discredited over time and due to their own actions.

And on both coasts, it’s a bipartisan political and cultural establishment that absolutely loathes what it’s dubbed “flyover country.” As Glenn has written, “When you have a ruling class that doesn’t believe in — or even much like — the fundamental values of the nations it rules, things tend to work out poorly.” And to return to Berlinki’s query above, wondering why “none of these arguments work,” why would everyday American support or respect notions its elites have so clearly discarded?

2.  Duuude, it SHOULD be!  Obama Says It’ s Easier to Order Pizza than to Vote in the U.S.

3.  Authenticity and Ancient Virtue 

As children, we are taught the American founding and the Constitution as though they were sacred documents and sacramental events crafted by demigods. If so, our own Twilight of the Gods must have occurred sometime between 1787 and today: Loki has re-emerged and seemingly rules all. Whether murdered or banished, Odin, Thor, and Heimdahl long ago departed our realm.

Did Mr. Smith actually ever make it out of Washington? Maybe Loki got him as well.

Read the whole thing

4.  BETSY NEWMARK ON ALIENATION, THEN AND NOW:  RTWT.

5.  I have a love/hate relationship with Nassim Taleb.  Then there's this important bit that Taleb posted to his Facebook page that's worth quoting in its entirety:

What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for.

RTWT