Mexican-Lebanese billionaire Carlos Slim controls the NY Times. Everyone pretends he has nothing but a financial stake in the company, but that’s nonsense. Slim became a billionaire because he knows how to handle himself around powerful people and their servants. In Mexico, he got going the old fashioned way. He built some businesses, got rich and then bought some politicians. He got rich enough to go public and take up a position within the Mexican ruling elite. That allowed him to get control of the telecom system and the mobile phone market that was just taking off. That made him a billionaire and put him into the global elite.

To be in the global elites means having friends at the top of the American political system. The NY Times is the official propaganda organ of the ruling class. It also losses money by the truck load. Saving the Old Grey Lady bought Slim a lot of friends in Washington. Now the good folks at the Times are returning the favor by letting the GOP know they better not get too aggressive on the immigration issue.

New Hampshire has one of the smallest populations of illegal immigrants in the country. Only about 5 percent of its 1.3 million residents are foreign-born, and 3 percent are Hispanic.

But tune into the Senate race between Scott P. Brown, the Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic incumbent, and you might think the state shares a border with Mexico, not Canada.

When someone called a talk radio show to ask Mr. Brown about global warming the other day, Mr. Brown immediately started talking about border security. “Let me tell you what I believe is a clear and present danger right now,” he said, brushing aside the caller’s concerns about the environment. “I believe that our border is porous.”

Footage of agents patrolling the rocky, arid Southwestern landscape is featured in Mr. Brown’s ads — not quite the piney highlands of New Hampshire.

A political group led by prominent conservatives like John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, attacked Ms. Shaheen last week with a video that juxtaposed two alarming images: a horde of people rushing a fence, presumably along the Mexican border, and a clip of Islamic militants right before they beheaded the journalist James Foley, a New Hampshire native. The ad was pulled after the Foley family complained.

Republicans have long relied on illegal immigration to rally the conservative base, even if the threat seemed more theoretical than tangible in most of the country. But in several of this year’s midterm Senate campaigns — including Arkansas and Kansas, as well as New Hampshire — Republicans’ stance on immigration is posing difficult questions about what the party wants to be in the longer term.

Some Republicans are questioning the cost of their focus on immigration. Campaigning on possible threats from undocumented immigrants — similar to claims that President Obama and the Democrats have left the country vulnerable to attacks from Islamic terrorists and the Ebola virus — may backfire after November. At that point, the party will have to start worrying about its appeal beyond the conservative voters it needs to turn out in midterm elections.

I always love the use of “some people question…” I once worked with a woman, a nasty shrew, who loved this device. She would deliver her insults via this imaginary third party. When someone objected, she would retreat into “I’m not the one saying this. I’m just relaying it.” The lefty media loves this tactic.

The other thing you see here is how the Cult sees the people on the other side as monolithic. They just assume the undifferentiated “other” they call “Republicans” are supposed to be in lockstep like the people in the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Therefore even one dissident means there are huge fissures within the GOP. The reality is the GOP is just the less insane side of the ruling class. The real divide on immigration is between the small ruling elite based in trendy cities and the vast majority of the American people, including recent immigrants.

That said, the point is to send the message. Immigration may be a nice sales pitch for this election, but don’t get any ideas about acting on it. The GOP knows better than to make Carlos Slim an enemy.

Fake Indian was in Minnesota, ironically enough, testing the waters for a presidential run.

Sen. Fake Indian (D-Mass.) brought her populist message Saturday to this small college town to rev up the final weeks of Sen. Al Franken’s reelection campaign, but also to claim the mantle of the modern liberal movement’s political godfather.

Speaking before more than 400 people at Carleton College, Fake Indian repeatedly invoked the spirit of the late Paul Wellstone, the fiery liberal senator who died 12 years ago this month in a plane crash during his reelection campaign. Wellstone remains a revered figure in Minnesota politics, and his brand of populism — out of step in the Clintonian Democratic Party of the 1990s — is now mainstream among leading liberal activists. Fake Indian has become the most prominent public face of that movement, and the Wellstone disciples in this town 40 miles south of Minneapolis gave their approval Saturday.

“The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it,” Fake Indian said to loud cheers.

From 2006 through 2008, the Left controlled the legislature. From 2008 through 2010 they controlled all of the Federal government. Since 2010, they have held the presidency and the Senate. That’s in addition to running the federal bureaucracy and the national media. They’ve had the means and the opportunity to fix whatever they think is rigged. But, imaginary bogeymen is what keeps the Left going.

It’s part of a three-state tour of Senate campaigns for Fake Indian, who later Saturday headed to St. Paul for a get-out-the-vote rally on behalf of Franken, Gov. Mark Dayton (D) and other candidates. Franken and Dayton are strong favorites to win reelection next month.

On Friday Fake Indian stopped in the Denver suburbs to help Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) in his tough reelection campaign. And on Sunday, Fake Indian will be on the stump in Iowa for Rep. Bruce Braley (D), who is in a neck-and-neck race for the seat of retiring Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). It’s Fake Indian’s first visit in this election season to the battleground state, home to the first-in-the-nation caucus in early 2016 for the presidential campaign.

The crowd at Carleton — where Wellstone served as a professor before launching his long-shot 1990 Senate bid — gave its loudest cheers to Fake Indian, whose fights against big banks have made her a hero to liberal activists.

“She’s amazing. She shows that politics is a good thing,” said Rachel Palermo, 21, a senior at neighboring St. Olaf College. Some of her friends said they attended the rally just to see Fake Indian.

Palermo and her friends said they want Warren to run for president, but Alyssa Berg, 21, also a St. Olaf senior, noted it would be “counterproductive” for Fake Indian to run against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I’ve been saying for a couple of year now that Fake Indian will be the Left’s choice to run for president. Cankles is old and ugly. The CML is like any other cult in that they need a “gifted individual” that is “born to rule”, so to speak, as their movement’s leader. That requires a degree of charisma that Cankles has never possessed. Plus, they have never forgiven her for her apostasy in the 1990’s. Fake Indian tickles the fancy of liberal women as their Jack Kennedy, except Fake Indian most likely does not have a dick.

The problem is she is an old white woman who lives is a maximally gentrified neighborhood that is hostile to black people. The fact that she scammed the quota system to score tenure at Harvard is not going to go over well with blacks either. There’s also a lot of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in Fake Indian. KKT was the great white hope of liberal women once too. Then she was unmasked as being a dunce and her career evaporated. Fake Indian is a hot house flower with the IQ of a goldfish.

Still, I hope to get a lot of mileage out of her campaign.

I’m a Second Amendment absolutist. By that I mean the courts should apply strict scrutiny when it comes to all gun laws, just as they do speech laws. There’s simply no compelling state interest to ban or license firearms. Stripping felons of their rights is acceptable and people declared mentally unfit has always been an acceptable reason for the state to deny citizens their rights. There’s nothing wrong with that as we apply that standard to all rights, not just guns. Otherwise, it is none of the state’s business if I own a gun or carry it around with me.

Even if you don’t care that much about the issue, the perversions that naturally arise from gun control efforts infect all aspect of life. Here’s a good example from the Cult Times.

A newly created database of New Yorkers deemed too mentally unstable to carry firearms has grown to roughly 34,500 names, a previously undisclosed figure that has raised concerns among some mental health advocates that too many people have been categorized as dangerous.

The database, established in the aftermath of the mass shooting in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and maintained by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, is the result of the Safe Act. It is an expansive package of gun control measures pushed through by the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The law, better known for its ban on assault weapons, compels licensed mental health professionals in New York to report to the authorities any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.”

But the number of entries in the database highlights the difficulty of America’s complicated balancing act between public safety and the right to bear arms when it comes to people with mental health issues. “That seems extraordinarily high to me,” said Sam Tsemberis, a former director of New York City’s involuntary hospitalization program for homeless and dangerous people, now the chief executive of Pathways to Housing, which provides housing to the mentally ill. “Assumed dangerousness is a far cry from actual dangerousness.”

Since there is no such thing as “mentally unstable” this gives the fascists in the bureaucracy carte blanche to put anyone they don’t like in the system, thus stripping them of their rights. Humans can be deemed a danger to themselves or others. They can be deemed to be incapable of caring for themselves. These are all things with objective definitions. Mental stability is purely subjective and ripe for abuse.

Back in the 70’s and 80’s, street hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would claim to speak for all nonwhites. Hispanics have never considered themselves black and they don’t seek to join hands with blacks in political matters. In the 90’s and 2000’s that became even more clear, but black leaders held onto the fantasy. Maybe it is just comforting in some way. The NY Times has a story on the coming election which has more magical thinking.

The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats. Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.

“African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”

Mr. Belcher’s assessment points to an urgent imperative for Democrats: To keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate, as many are predicting, they need black voters in at least four key states. Yet the one politician guaranteed to generate enthusiasm among African Americans is the same man many Democratic candidates want to avoid: Mr. Obama.

Now, Democrats are deploying other prominent black elected officials and other surrogates, buttressed by sophisticated voter targeting efforts, to stoke black turnout. At the White House, the president is waging an under-the-radar campaign, recording video advertisements, radio interviews and telephone calls specifically targeting his loyal African-American base.

“Anybody who looks at the data realizes that if the black vote, and the brown vote, doesn’t turn out, we can’t win. It’s just that simple,” said Representative Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, referring to African-American and Latino voters. “If we don’t turn out, we cannot hold the Senate.”

One of the dirty little secrets that no one wants to admit is Hispanics are not particularly fond of blacks. They don’t look at someone like Ms. Fudge as anything other than a voice of American blacks. Further, there’s no such thing as Hispanic. Puerto Ricans don’t like Dominicans. Central Americans don’t identify with Mexicans. Brazilians and South Americans don’t buy into the whole brown business at all.

A century ago WASP’s saw all Catholics as the same. Italians were even counted as black, along with Jews. My mid-century it was fairly obvious that Italians were not Irish and both were leaving the ghetto and joining middle-class America. Many Mexicans will take the same road as Italians. Amerindians. on the other hand, will fall somewhere between blacks at the bottom and whites in the middle.

That’s likely the path for most Hispanics. Cubans have done that in Miami. Mexicans will be a mixed bag as Mexico is a mixed culture. Central Americans are a tougher call, but we seem to be getting the more hardy and adventurous ones. I’m not saying they are natural conservatives or any of that nonsense. It’s just that brown ain’t black. Hispanics will splinter into the class structure of America, while blacks seem destined to remain in the Liberal Democratic ghetto.

Since forever, the children of successful men have often taken up positions in the ruling class once they reached adulthood. Some would argue that it is genetic. The able male finds a high quality mate and the result is a child with the genetic stuff to follow in the father’s footsteps. Others would argue that it is slipstreaming. The successful male blazes a path for his children. The unencumbered route to the ruling class is easy to traverse, even for the average, compared to blazing your own path. The dull-witted child of a billionaire is going to have a better shot at attending Harvard than the smart kid from the projects.

Maybe it is a combination of things, as is always the case. I don’t know, but I do know Americans have been cursed by a few dynastic families. The Roosevelt’s did a lot to damage the country. The Kennedy clan may be the biggest blight on a nation since Agrippina found a husband. We’ve been lucky too. Some of our worst politicians like Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon did not have kids interested in politics. At least they never made a go of it.

It looks like we dodged another bullet. Our semi-retarded vice president’s oldest kid is probably going to be the next governor of Delaware. Luckily, that’s a ticket to nowhere, but he’ll surely end up inn the Senate one day, taking up the seat held by his father as the dumbest man in the Senate. Biden’s other kid was hoping to run the same game with joining the National Guard as a lawyer so he could put “war hero” on his campaign website. Luckily, he was thrown out for drug abuse.

Vice President Joe Biden ’s son Hunter was discharged from the Navy Reserve this year after testing positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the matter.

Hunter Biden, a lawyer by training who is now a managing partner at an investment company, had been commissioned as an ensign in the Navy Reserve, a part-time position. But after failing a drug test last year, his brief military career ended.

Mr. Biden, 44 years old, decided to pursue military service relatively late, beginning the direct-commission process to become a public-affairs officer in the Navy Reserve in 2012. Because of his age—43 when he was to be commissioned—he needed a waiver to join the Navy. He received a second Navy waiver because of a drug-related incident when he was a young man, according to people familiar with the matter. Military officials say such drug waivers aren’t uncommon.

Mr. Biden was commissioned as an ensign on May 7, 2013, and assigned to Navy Public Affairs Support Element East in Norfolk, Va., a reserve unit, according to the Navy. In June 2013, after reporting to his unit in Norfolk, he was given a drug test, which turned up positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Biden was discharged in February, the Navy said.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that it was “the honor of my life to serve in the U.S. Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge. I respect the Navy’s decision. With the love and support of my family, I’m moving forward.”

We still have one hapless nitwit from the Biden clan in the pipe, but at least we avoided having a second putz from that deformed family tree.

Most cable channels can’t exist without mandatory cable fees. Without the buck per month or so they get from your cable bill, they go out of business. ESPN, for example, is on everyone’s cable service and the fee is something like $5 a month. They get close to seven billion a year from those fees, despite the fact only 20% of homes watch ESPN. If we ever went to a la carte pricing or pure pay per view, ESPN folds up shop. They only generate about two billion in ad revenue. If they survived, it would be a much different format. They would not be paying the NBA those enormous rights fees either.

A better example is MSNBC. This sob story in the NY Times reports that their best shows draw fewer eyes than late night informercials.

Rachel Maddow, the biggest star on the MSNBC cable network, just posted her lowest quarterly ratings results ever.

“Morning Joe,” MSNBC’s signature morning program, scored its second-lowest quarterly ratings, reaching an average of just 87,000 viewers in the key news demographic group.

And “Ronan Farrow Daily,” the network’s heavily promoted new afternoon show, which stars a 26-year-old Rhodes Scholar with a high-profile Hollywood lineage, has been largely a dud.

Though it has mostly happened quietly, which may be a comment on the cable network’s larger status in the media landscape, MSNBC has seen its ratings hit one of the deepest skids in its history, with the recently completed third quarter of 2014 generating some record lows.

Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, acknowledged that his network had been struggling, but put it in the context of the overall drop in cable news. “This has been a tough year all around,” he said. “All three cable news channels are drawing a smaller combined audience than they were five years ago.” He also emphasized that despite the plunge that caused it to trail CNN in the last quarter, the network remained ahead of CNN for the full year.

In the past, MSNBC’s ratings have typically fallen during times of intensely followed major news events. The current period is awash in them, with stories like ISIS and Ebola commanding a high degree of international reporting. This plays well to CNN’s strengths.

MSNBC consciously established its brand as politics-centric, approaching stories from a left-of-center viewpoint, in deliberate contrast to the right-of-center approach of Fox News, which continues to dominate the news channel ratings. At the same time, MSNBC moved away from a close relationship with NBC News that it had during the early years of the network. Today, fewer NBC News correspondents appear on MSNBC.

Mr. Griffin said that a general apathy about American politics has also hurt the network. “You can look at the dysfunction in Washington, the wariness about politics, the low approval ratings,” he said. “That’s had an impact. But we’ve got to adjust; we’ve got to evolve.”

MSNBC’s recent results have not been encouraging. During the third quarter, Ms. Maddow reached an average of 183,000 viewers in the audience component that most matters to MSNBC’s advertisers, viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, her lowest total since she started her show in 2008.

Note how the Times tries to equate Fox News with MSNBC, like they are mirrors. That’s insane, of course. Fox is pretty much straight news with a prime time of infotainment shows. O’Reilly, Hannity and the others are entertainers. They generate the big ratings and that’s how you pay the bills, usually. MSNBC is just a parade of screaming lunatics. Rachel Madow looks and sounds like a woman struggling with her sanity. A generation ago, these people would never been allowed to be on television.

It is just another example of how socializing costs boils off the normal and rational, leaving the weird and the extreme. The proliferation of cable channels relies on every home having cable (or satellite) and paying roughly the same for the service. The 20% who love sports get ESPN at a far cheaper rate than under a pay-per-view scenario. Billions are shifted from people with no interest in sports to these sports teams, via the socialism of the cable bill. Instead of catering to a broad audience, ESPN can focus on fanatics and indulge in their crackpot politics.

CNN and then MSNBC followed a similar path. CNN got on everyone’s basic service, thus guaranteeing them a buck a month from every home, whether anyone watched or not. With a guaranteed revenue stream, they were free to indulge in whatever nonsense that was current at the time. Now, the only place people watch CNN is at airports. Similarly, MSNBC piggybacked on NBC to get on basic cable. They drifted into insanity and now the only place people watch is at the day room of the local asylum.

This happens whenever the link between the paying customer and the service provider is unclear, as is always the case with third party payments. Medical services get increasingly worse at the retail end because the patients are not the customers. It is the insurance company and government paying the bills. The schools are another example. The people running the schools care more about the unions and pressure groups than the students. People respond to incentives and when you funnel those incentives through third parties, it is natural to assume the needs of those third parties are supreme. In the case of the cable news channels, the money is there no matter what they do, so the weird tastes of the people running the channel dominate.

It is why I think a smart politician on the Right would be wise to champion a la carte cable. No one likes dealing with the cable monopolies. No one likes the fact they are paying for a bunch of channels they never watch. The cable monopoly is a perfect target for a populist politician. It’s why the lunatics chirp about “net neutrality” They know making the ISP’s into bad guys is easy money. The benefit to the Right is forcing a la carte pricing on the evil cable companies would go a long way toward de-funding the Left’s propaganda organs.

Jim Geraghty is one of the many grifters who posts at NRO. He has a special place on the site, which suggests a quid pro quo of some sort. His blog is lightly read and rarely commented upon so I can’t believe they are paying him. But, someone is paying him, unless he married a rich women. He has been banging the drum for conservatives to stop “sulking” and come out to support the various bowls of mush GOP Inc. is offering up this November. He’s been peddling the old lines from the 70’s like the “Buckley Rule” which dates back to the 60’s.

William F. Buckley was asked, in 1967, whom he would support in 1968 for U.S. president. Buckley responded with what would late be called the ‘Buckley Rule” for primary voting: “The wisest choice would be the one who would win. No sense running Mona Lisa in a beauty contest. I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. If you could convince me that Barry Goldwater could win, I’d vote for him.”

You’ll note his aphorism is about the primaries. I’ll note that no one bothered to quote this line until the Bush years. That’s when GOP Inc started labeling their bowls of mush “Bill Buckley Approved” and repeating this line, omitting the bit about the primary. Buckley never advocated merely voting for the least liberal option in the general. I have no recollection of him addressing it. If one party offered up a rapist who is a communist and the other party offered up a child molester who was a libertarian, I doubt Bill Buckley would have argued you had a duty to support the child molester.

Anyway, Jim seems to have figured out these old lines about voting for the least awful option were not convincing anyone. He has been given new instructions. Now, not voting means the terrorists have won.

Take your pick; there’s no shortage of things to be outraged about. Hundreds of millions wasted on state insurance exchanges that don’t work. The IRS abuses. Lois Lerner, refusing to answer questions from Congress. No one at the State Department getting fired over the security decisions leading up to Benghazi. Assurances about Ebola that don’t pan out.

Republicans are ‘blah’ about the midterms because they’ve lost faith that winning them will make a difference. Obama’s contempt for Congress, and lack of interest in working with it on his true priorities, is obvious. He’s pledged to unilaterally rewrite immigration enforcement to suit his needs. Large chunks of Obamacare are adjusted, nullified, improvised, and revised on the fly with no change to the written law. The president begins wars without waiting for any authorization for the use of military force. The U.S. attorney general is held in contempt of Congress with no real consequence.

No one can blame conservatives for being frustrated to the point of fury. But if American rank-and-file conservatives and Republicans conclude that the game is rigged, that it’s not worth playing, and withdraw from political life . . . then that will be the ultimate triumph of this president.

Got that? if you accept reality for what it is, the bad guys win. Therefore, the only moral choice is to keep marching off to support a political party that despises you and wants you dead. The only thing missing in these missives is “or else” thrown in to make the point.

I’ll grant that Jim is never going to bite the hand that feeds him. He makes his living carrying water for the GOP. But, there comes a point when the sales pitch is not working and further attempts crass into insult. This post is insulting. The GOP’s troubles are the fault of the GOP, not Obama or the system. Even Mike Huckleberry has lost patience with his party and he is probably going to run for the nomination.

Meanwhile over in England UKIP keeps gaining ground…